Thus when arch-liberal Brian DePalma (he had just made the rigidly indignant "Casualties of War") got the job, it seriously compromised the project. Most people understood that one of the secret attractions of the Wolfe novel was its political incorrectness: It looked at the great horde of "victims" of racism and poverty as a swarm of seething barbarians clamoring for its turn to become the oppressor class, and it loved to mock the spectacle of good-hearted liberals groveling before the new mandarins of New York. Something similar happened with the megaflop of the Christmas before, the Brian DePalma version of the Tom Wolfe novel, "Bonfire of the Vanities," a movie so conceptually crippled that its demise was widely anticipated before shooting even began. Alas, the emotional bathos all but swamped the movie's extremely persuasive and delightful musical subtext. Thus, late in the picture, a new writer was brought in and a whole new plot development was added: This was to give Midler a son so that the male-female/conservative-liberal issue could play out in the young man's life.
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But, in a series of "development" problems, Midler evidently decided that the piece needed more emotional resonance.
It also played off masculine-feminine and liberal-conservative attitudes toward war, by matching her against James Caan in a thinly fictionalized version of Bob Hope. It was a sort of cavalcade deal, covering 30 years in the life of a couple of USO troopers, with stops in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, giving Midler, who produced the thing herself, a chance to showcase herself in three different types of music. A perfect example of this is the dismal "For the Boys," the Bette Midler catastrophe of last Christmas. We're talking the least amusing kind of flop: boring flops. Only Spike Lee's "Autobiography of Malcolm X" looms as a potentially great movie and a potentially great flop in the near future of course, it could be both.Īlas, in recent years, movies have flopped not because they tried to do too much but because they tried not to do enough. Instead, we have reasonably safe product milled by big studio machine work for the widest possible audience with the most number of fail-safes built into the system.
Yet at the same time we have fewer and fewer truly great movies, for the same amount of creative energy and guts that can produce a flop can produce "TC great hit: It's the willingness to go to the edge that produces the truly great movies and the truly mythic flops. Thus, we have fewer and fewer of the megaflops, the legendary catastrophes. Rarely ("Batman" and "Batman Returns" are exceptions) do the big studios allow young directors to go way out on the limb fleets of drab boys from Harvard who've been to a screenwriting seminar and know the Five Building Blocks of Movie Storytelling hover through every moment of the process. Further, movies seem to be so corporate these days.