This week we’ll take a look at mistakes in two separate, but related, fields: the entertainment industry’s biggest film flops and the news media’s approach to errors and corrections.
“If you want a textbook on how not to make a film, this is it!”
Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops
By James Robert Parish
I’m willing to bet the films featured in this book are not on anyone’s top ten favorites list. Waterworld? Absolute fiasco. Ishtar? The butt of jokes. Popeye? An embarrassing blotch on otherwise promising careers. Mr. Parish has collected the stories behind the making of fourteen films that bombed – big time. All released between 1963 and 2001, these films provide cautionary tales that illustrate just how not to make a movie, especially a successful one.
So what qualifies a film as a “flop” rather than just a box-office disappointment? According to Mr. Parish, it has to do with not only the amount of money the film makes in relation to how much was spent bringing it to the big screen, but also the raised expectations that critics and the public have for the film. These expectations can rocket sky-high due to star power (either in front of or behind the camera) or enthusiastic, over-saturating promotional efforts from the marketing team. Overly-hyped movies only have that much further to fall.
Every film has its own story and the mistakes and problems during production are unique to each of them, but there are some common threads. For example, many of these films suffered as a result of the ego or self-centeredness of the stars involved. On the set of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s love affair became more important to the two actors than the film they were making. John Travolta was single-mindedly determined to make Battlefield Earth as a tribute honoring L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology (of which Travolta is a member), despite the many signs that it was a losing venture. Arnold Schwarzenegger insisted on multiple massive rewrites to the screenplay of Last Action Hero and, in addition to starring in it, negotiated production responsibilities, including handling all marketing and promotional matters. Perhaps the best-known example of this hubris is a pair of films from Kevin Costner: Waterworld and The Postman. “Waterworld demonstrated-and The Postman reconfirmed very dramatically-that when a major star/producer with a tremendous ego has far too much control over a large film project, a real-life disaster is frequently the final result for the movie studio and its backers.”
For several of these movies, a lack of planning during pre-production, or a lack of time reserved for planning before shooting started, resulted in exorbitant costs as costumes and sets had to be rebuilt – sometimes several times – to reflect the current version of the script. This was the case with Cutthroat Island. The director, Renny Harlin, was stuck in Los Angeles, trying to cast the leading man for the film and fine-tuning the screenplay, while the crew, already on location in Malta, was instructed to start work on constructing sets, gathering seventeenth-century paraphernalia and making period costumes. When Harlin finally arrived in Malta, he found that the crew’s efforts didn’t match his “vision,” so expensive adjustments had to be made.
No one sets out to make – or finance – a bad movie, but as Mr. Parish outlines in Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of details, miss the big picture, and end up with a laughable flop instead of an enduring hit. While fascinating in a can’t-look-away-from-the-train-wreck kind of way, these films represent the worst Hollywood has to offer, and what can happen when all the warning signs are ignored.
“News should be not a product but a process.”
Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech
By Craig Silverman
Mr. Silverman is serious about mistakes. His website, www.regrettheerror.com, has been cataloging errors in the news media since 2004. His book, also titled Regret the Error, traces the history of flubs and corrections in the news from the earliest written accounts to modern times, highlights the challenges and pitfalls of accurate news reporting, and suggests adjustments to the industry’s approach and processes that would reduce the number of errors that are published and raise the public’s level of trust in the media. As Mr. Silverman states in his introduction, “In journalism, nothing is possible without trust.” Paradoxically, he claims the best way to earn that trust is to forthrightly acknowledge and correct mistakes: “the more corrections a paper prints, the more it deserves to be trusted.”
Differentiating between “slips,” or unintentional errors such as misspellings or typos, and “mistakes,” which result from “conscious action and thought,” Mr. Silverman nevertheless declares that there are simply too many preventable errors in the news disseminated by well-known and trusted sources. While “the public has a threshold for error” and “a capacity for forgiveness for an error,” consistent, egregious mistakes, especially without sufficient acknowledgment or expression of regret, undermine the public’s trust in the source. Ultimately, he says, “we are polluting the information stream and, as a result, free speech and democracy itself.” That’s a heavy charge, but one that Mr. Silverman doesn’t make lightly.
Background stories about some of the most famous news errors are included in Regret the Error, including the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, the mistakes made by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein while reporting on the Watergate scandal, and more recently, “Rather-gate.” Mr. Silverman also covers the damage which “malicious journalists” who deliberately plagiarize or fabricate sources, facts, and stories do, and the confusion that can result when pre-written obituaries of celebrities are published prematurely.
Embracing the change that technology and the Internet has brought to the new industry, Mr. Silverman lauds the “army of citizen journalists” – readers, bloggers, retirees, experts, average people – who fact-check, provide additional information and perspective, and hold the news media accountable for errors. As more news is disseminated online, it is vital that newspapers, broadcast media, and magazines incorporate the Internet into their corrections policy, if only to prevent incorrect information from being enshrined as “fact” indefinitely.
Of course, media errors and corrections are also a rich source of humor, too, and Mr. Silverman mines some delightful gems in Regret the Error. I’ll end with a few of my favorites:
From the Daily Mail (UK): “Mr Smith said in court, ‘I am terribly sorry. I have a dull life and I suddenly wanted to break away. He did not say, as we reported erroneously, ‘I have a dull wife and I suddenly wanted to break away.
“We apologise to Mr Smith, and to Mrs Smith.”
From the Sacramento Bee: “Sunday’s Metro Page B8 weather report may have led readers to believe global warming had assaulted Roseville with a high of 705 degrees. While it certainly was hot Saturday, that temperature was obviously incorrect. The correct high temperature was 104 degrees.”
From The Guardian (UK): “We spelt Morecambe, the town in Lancashire, wrong again on page 2, G2, yesterday. We often do.”
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On My Bedside Table…
Just finished: Emma by Jane Austen
Now reading: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
On deck: Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 by Jack L. Goldsmith
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One more installment of books about mistakes in the next column; this time we’ll look at some of the positive side effects of messing up! Come find me on goodreads.com or email me. I’d love to here your suggestions, comments, and feedback at egeddesbooks (at) gmail (dot) com.
