At the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards once stood a monument to one of the greatest movie flops of all time. A 300ft-high plasterboard Babylon, with walls wide enough to shoot chariot races on, it was flanked by giant white elephants (oh the symbolism!). Intolerance (1916), a three-and-a-half-hour silent movie, performed so catastrophically at the box office that its megalomaniac creator DW Griffiths couldn’t afford to demolish the set. For years it remained, crumbling, as a warning to Hollywood – “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Thankfully Hollywood didn’t give two hoots, because otherwise we’d have missed out on Tim Robey’s erudite and brilliantly entertaining chronicle of movie excess.
A film writer for more than 20 years, Robey knows all too well that “failure fascinates”. This, after all, is a critic who awarded the infamous, eye-clawing abomination that is Cats (2019) an unheard-of zero stars in the Daily Telegraph, yet confesses to then booking a ticket to a “singalong” screening as a guilty pleasure.
Few things are such a gift to write about as big, gobbling turkeys, yet Robey doesn’t let his selection of 26 juicy flops (one per chapter) baste themselves. He avoids obvious choices such as John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth, “an infamous bid to get Scientology out to the masses through the medium of a panto-shonky space opera”. Instead, he hunts out lesser-known clunkers such as A Sound of Thunder (2005), a barely seen, “below-the-radar bellyflop” featuring rampaging baboon-lizard hybrids that was bankrolled by Battlefield Earth’s producer, Elie Samaha, a former bouncer at Studio 54 turned “schmoozer extraordinaire” – one of the many larger than life characters that populate this alternative history of the industry.
Because that is what Box Office Poison is. Yes, it’s a colourful catalogue of disaster, chock-full of clashing egos, runaway budgets and acts of God. But what makes this a five-star book is the way Robey weaves in the wider context so deftly that you barely notice. A chapter on nautical thriller Speed 2: Cruise Control, for example, (a “clattering shambles” that its own star, Sandra Bullock, disowned as making “no sense. Slow boat. Slowly going towards an island”) illustrates the bruising process of blockbusters transitioning to CGI during the late 1990s. (Comparing it with rival water-logged production Titanic, widely predicted to be a $200m flop, is a reminder how close a hit can sail to disaster.)
Yet for all the cogent analysis, wry observation and playful delight in dysfunction, more compelling is how deeply Robey cares about his misfit canon. You’d expect a cineaste to agonise over the lost 132-minute director’s cut of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, which was reshot, recut and released in a butchered 88-minute version by RKO, before it burned the negatives (then standard industry practice). But he’s just as impassioned about the misunderstood merits of Babe: Pig in the City, a family-unfriendly sequel about a talking pig directed by Mad Max auteur George Miller, notable for its spine-tingling savagery. It unleashes some of Robey’s finest and funniest writing: I was laughing so hard at his description of a pink poodle I had to put the book down.
Like a film-nerd Indiana Jones, Robey generously excavates treasure from the trash. He even attempts to rehabilitate Gigli (2003), the unpronounceable, smug, Bennifer love-in, claiming it hosts one of Jennifer Lopez’s “most appealing performances”. Yet some films are so bad they’re simply bad.
Box Office Poison’s “stinkiest binbag” is reserved for The Adventures of Pluto Nash, the Eddie Murphy moon-based action comedy so depressingly dire that even Robey can’t make it amusing or illuminating. In fact, you wonder why he bothered including it; perhaps for its staggering financial loss. It cost more than $100m and grossed only $7.1m, which was barely a third of Murphy’s own $20m fee.
Robey’s heroes are those who face up to their failures, such as Halle Berry, who gamely turned up in person to accept her worst actress Golden Raspberry for Catwoman, rightly calling it “a piece of shit godawful movie”. Or the Coen Brothers, who found that “the strained maximalism” of The Hudsucker Proxy, a flashy, hollow $40m flop about a hula hoop salesman “taught them unignorable lessons, which were absorbed right away”. They went on to make the bleak and authentic Fargo for just $7m, winning two Oscars.
As to the villains, Robey’s judgment falls heaviest on the “out of control white male genius” directors who bullishly steered their movies towards their icebergs. And they are all men, because historically Hollywood never allowed women to play with big-boy budgets.
Robey is more forgiving of his artistic favourites: Welles is indulgently dubbed a “runaway maestro”, while William Friedkin’s self-confessed “callous, self-involved” behaviour on Sorcerer doesn’t stop him from declaring the 1977 flop a “deadly masterwork”. But we are encouraged to shed no tears for Erich von Stroheim, a bully “who had a reputation for assaulting his actresses”, or Tod Browning, a “bastard” and a “sadist” who never recovered from the reception given to Freaks (1932) and died an alcoholic recluse.
What other lessons can be gleaned from these cautionary tales? Well, the old adage “never work with animals” still applies, be it the hormonal elephants that reduced the battle scenes of Intolerance to bedlam, the kittens that clawed a naked Seena Owen in Queen Kelly (1929), the sheep that repeatedly peed on Rex Harrison in 1967’s Doctor Dolittle (whose shoot was halted for days after a giraffe stepped on its own penis) and of course, those creepy, digitally contoured, butthole‑less Cats.
We also learn that many films we consider legendary financial failures actually weren’t: for example Waterworld, Kevin Costner’s soggy $175m sci-fi ultimately turned a profit; that, for all the wisdom of hindsight, flops can’t be predicted – as Robey points out, back in 1997 it was Sorcerer, not Star Wars, that looked like a sure thing, while in 2008, you’d have tipped Speed Racer over Iron Man to be a box office smash; that we ultimately learn more about how Hollywood works from its humungous losers than we do from its Oscar winners.
Yet having persuaded us that the medium of film is richer for its missteps, Robey’s celebration strikes an elegiac note. Studios, already reduced to “nervous unoriginality” following the 2008 financial crash, are ever more risk-averse in the wake of Covid. The rise of streaming provides a “convenient burial ground” whose lack of measurable box office means a potential flop will go unrecorded. Soulless digital backlots have all but replaced the old-school way of building blockbusters using “practical magic” (real stunts, real locations, everything done in-camera). Today the white elephants of Intolerance would only exist as pixels on a server marked for deletion. The era of the flop is fading to black and Robey mourns the loss.
“They already don’t make ’em like Cats any more,” he concludes. His book is so wildly enjoyable, it almost makes me wish they did.
• Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey is published by Faber & Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
