My Year of Flops

The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

Nathan Rabin

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439160312
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In 2007, Nathan Rabin set out to provide a revisionist look at the history of cinematic failure on a weekly basis. What began as a solitary ramble through the nooks and crannies of pop culture evolved into a way of life. My Year Of Flops collects dozens of the best-loved entries from the A.V. Club column along with bonus interviews and fifteen brand-new entries covering everything from notorious flops like The Cable Guy and Last Action Hero to bizarre obscurities like Glory Road, Johnny Cash's poignantly homemade tribute to Jesus. Driven by a unique combination of sympathy and Schadenfreude, My Year Of Flops is an unforgettable tribute to cinematic losers, beautiful and otherwise.

Chapter 1

Disastrous Dramas

Bataan Death March Of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown

Originally Posted January 25, 2007

As somebody once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folktale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.

—Drew Baylor, Elizabethtown

After that opening piece of voice-over narration, Cameron Crowe’s 2005 flop Elizabethtown goes on to illustrate by example just what a fiasco looks and feels like. Elizabethtown was cursed from its inception. Crowe cast, then uncast, Ashton Kutcher (in the role eventually played by Orlando Bloom) and Jane Fonda (in the role Susan Sarandon ultimately played) in the lead roles: Kutcher as a soulful superstar-shoe-designer-turned-suicidal-pariah who travels to Kentucky to bury his dead father, and Fonda as his mother, an eccentric who spirals into impish lunacy once she’s widowed. Like Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, Elizabethtown is a populist morality play about a cocky young man humanized by failure who becomes a success in life only after failing spectacularly in business. After a disastrous early screening at the Toronto Film Festival, the film was drastically shortened and its ending altered.

So by the time Elizabethtown arrived in theaters, it was already a wounded duck. Going into the film, I thought, “How bad can a Cameron Crowe movie be?” Before Elizabethtown, I could say without reservation that Crowe was one of my favorite filmmakers. I don’t just love his movies, I want to live in his world. The universe of Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, and Say Anything is an infinitely humane realm ruled by an endlessly benevolent deity: Crowe himself. It’s a world where no existential quandary is so great that it can’t be solved by the perfect combination of classic rock song and dream girl. It’s a world of happy pop epiphanies and gentle humanism, bravely devoid of protective irony or sneering cynicism.

In Elizabethtown, all Crowe’s formidable virtues as a filmmaker betray him. His palpable affection for his characters devolves into pathological emotional neediness. Every frame and character screams, “Love me, love me, love me!” Elizabethtown feels like an X-ray of Crowe’s soul set to the soundtrack of his life.

Crowe has never been afraid to go for big, pop-operatic moments that bound past realism in their quest for immortality. There’s nothing naturalistic about lines like Jerry Maguire’s “You complete me,” “You had me at hello,” and “Show me the money,” or John Cusack playing “In Your Eyes” on a boombox outside Ione Skye’s window in Say Anything. Yet they spoke to moviegoers’ deep, unfulfilled hunger for grand theatrical gestures and outsized declarations of love.

With Elizabethtown, Crowe subscribes to the logic that it’s never enough merely to try; no, one must try way too fucking hard. It isn’t enough that Drew is the corporate pariah behind a failed shoe; no, he has to be the man behind the greatest athletic-shoe debacle of all time, a nearly billion-dollar fuckup. Similarly, Crowe can’t just have Drew contemplate suicide; he has to have his sad-sack protagonist create a homemade suicide machine with knives affixed to the handlebars that’s 90 percent exercise bike, 10 percent gimmicky instrument of permanent self-negation. It’s like the secret love child of Dr. Kevorkian and Rube Goldberg. In Elizabethtown’s universe, even suicide can be oppressively whimsical.

And he can’t just have Drew’s mom go a little loopy following her beloved husband’s death. No, Crowe has Drew’s mom use her late husband’s memorial to introduce the world’s first You-might-be-a-widow-manic-and-raw-with-grief-if … stand-up comedy routine. For example:

If the bank teller looks at you funny because you forgot to rinse off a green facial mask before leaving home … You might be a manic widow raw with grief!

If you think a memorial for your dead husband is the appropriate place to launch your stand-up comedy and tap-dancing careers … You might be a manic widow raw with grief!

If you think it’s appropriate to tell the audience at your husband’s memorial that your next-door neighbor got a massive boner while trying to console you, then repeat the word “boner” over and over as the crowd of mourners goes into red-faced hysterics … You might be a manic widow raw with grief!

In writing and directing Elizabethtown, Crowe somehow managed to silence his inner censor and cynic, the naysayer in each of us that implores, “Don’t write that. People will make fun of you. Do you really expect a line like, ‘This loss will be met by a hurricane of love,’ to be met with anything other than a tornado of derisive snickers?” That’s both admirable and insane. Crowe never lets audiences forget that they’re watching not just a Cameron Crowe film but the Cameron Croweiest film in existence, a movie so poignantly personal it makes even the autobiographical Almost Famous look like cynical work-for-hire.

But the purest manifestation of Crowe’s need to afflict audiences with a two-hour-long hurricane of self-love lies in the unbearably twee conception of Drew’s love interest, Claire (Kirsten Dunst). Claire embodies a character type I call the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (See Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example.) The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors, who use them to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl serves as a means to an end, not a flesh-and-blood human being. Once life lessons have been imparted, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl might as well disappear in a poof! for her life’s work is done.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing proposition. Audiences either want to marry her, or commit grievous bodily harm upon her and her immediate family. Claire, for all her overly caffeinated joie de vivre, falls on the wrong side of that divide. She is a prolific disseminator of Crowe’s patented big pop-operatic moments, whether she’s keeping Drew awake and giddy during an all-night cell-phone verbal duet, or sending him on an intricately mapped-out road trip that ends the film on a note of delirious excess.

I once had a Manic Pixie Dream Girlfriend who induced terrifying Elizabethtown flashbacks. We even bonded over a marathon phone call that left us exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure. Not long after we started dating, she began asking if I was falling in love with her, over and over. At the risk of waxing hyperbolic, it was the single most annoying thing in the history of the universe. It was as if she was trying to bully me into falling in love. That’s the essence of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She doesn’t ask for our love, she demands it. But love isn’t enough. She also needs to be romanticized, idealized, fetishized, worshipped, and adored. You know, all the stupid shit young men do. She glares impishly in our direction menacingly with a look that says, “You better fall in love with me, fuckface, or I will open up a big can of joy on that ass.”

Elizabethtown shows what happens when a gifted writer-director lets his heart do his brain’s work for him. Yet the film stuck with me in ways genuinely successful films haven’t. I still talk and think about it all the time. The origins of My Year Of Flops began with Elizabethtown. By the time Drew embarked on a Claire-orchestrated road trip set to a mixtape of Crowe’s favorite songs, Elizabethtown was starting to barrel through my formidable defenses. [So I vowed to rewatch it later in the project, to see if another viewing would win me over. Did it? Find out later, when I revisit Elizabethtown as the very last Case File in this here book.]

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

Book-Exclusive Savage In Its Barbaric Intensity Case File: The Conqueror

In his book Citizen Hughes: The Power, The Money, And The Madness, Michael Drosnin quotes extensively from a memo the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes fired off to top aide Robert Maheu, chronicling a glimpse of hell he’d spied on television. Claiming the sight “litterally and actually physically made me nauseated,” Hughes goes on to describe the nightmare vision of “the biggest, ugliest negro you ever saw in your life … covered—litterally [sic] covered from head to foot with Vaseline almost ¼ of an inch thick.”

That image alone was enough to fuel Hughes’ nightmares, but what happened next sent him into a rage. The Vaseline-smeared man-beast lurched savagely over to what Hughes describes as “an immaculately dressed white woman—sort of an English noblewoman type” and subjected her to an obscene, endless open-mouthed kiss with the power to single-handedly destroy civilization and usher in a hellscape of raging, open miscegenation.

The “biggest, ugliest negro you ever saw in your life” in question was James Earl Jones. The “English noblewoman type” was Jane Alexander. And the film was 1970’s The Great White Hope. It wasn’t the only time the terrifying prospect of miscegenation threw the easily excited tycoon into a tizzy. Hughes was so horrified at what he saw as a “sinful interracial assignation” (it was actually a light-skinned black woman dating a darker-skinned black man) on The Dating Game that he fired off another enraged memo to Maheu and put the kibosh on plans to spend $200 million to buy ABC, the network that ran The Dating Game.

What does Howard Hughes’ profound discomfort at a young James Earl Jones fiendishly rubbing his Vaseline-coated body all over the delicate ladyparts of proper white women have to do with My Year Of Flops? Judging by 1956’s The Conqueror, which Hughes produced through his RKO studio, miscegenation obsessed him well before he traded in the high life for television, solitude, and insanity.

One of the biggest, ugliest epics you never saw in your life, The Conqueror is only slightly less obsessed with the carnal possibilities of folks from different ethnicities getting it on than Interracial Gang Bang Sluts Volume 7. The Conqueror offers a mind-bending act of interracial minstrelry, as supercracker John Wayne fused DNA with the great Asian conqueror eventually known as Genghis Khan but known as Temujin here to become an odd creature known, to me at least, as John Wayneghis Khan. Marvel at this strange beast, neither Caucasian nor Asian! Gawk at the unconvincing makeup and silly Fu Manchu designed to transform a top American movie star into the living personification of what old-time folks called the Yellow Peril!

While Wayneghis Khan is not quite white and not quite Asian, the object of his intense erotic fascination, Bortai (Susan Hayward), a goddess with skin the color of bone china, is ostensibly the daughter of a Tatar leader. Yet she’s codified unmistakably as a cross between an icy Southern belle and what Hughes would describe approvingly as an “English noblewoman type.”

Hayward plays her haughty empress of the desert as the Scarlett O’Hara of Central Asia, an ice queen who must be tamed by the calloused hands and hot breath of the right savage. The film’s first half is one long intimation of sexual violence, as Wayneghis Khan violates Bortai with his eyes and defiles her with his crude words before bludgeoning his way into her heart and loins through sheer force.

In that respect, the philosophy of Wayneghis Khan echoes the personal ethos of Hughes, who didn’t court women so much as conquer them. Hughes undoubtedly saw an awful lot of himself in Genghis. Hughes was a fascinating contradiction: He was simultaneously a superhero and a supervillain, Tony Stark as Iron Man and the Mandarin, a comic-book nemesis descended, appropriately enough, from Genghis Khan. Hughes seduced movie stars and crashed experimental planes for fun and profit. It makes sense that he would be drawn to figures as outsized as Wayne and Genghis.

What did Hughes see when he looked at Wayneghis Khan in The Conqueror? Did he see a surrogate for his own boundless ambition and unrelenting determination? Or did he see a terrifying Other that would not rest until it transformed the raging hatred of an idealized White Woman into sweaty, uncontrollable lust? Did he see Genghis as a threat, or as a figure of wish fulfillment? That ambiguity is a big part of what makes The Conqueror equal parts compelling and repellent.

Actor-turned-director William Powell makes the regressive racial politics of his Far East Western apparent in an opening crawl that ushers audiences into a 12th-century Gobi desert that “seethed with unrest,” as “petty chieftains pursued their small ambitions with cunning and wanton cruelty. Plunder and rapine were a way of life, and no man trusted his brother.” Other than that, though, it was pretty chill.

The filmmakers weren’t kidding about rapine and plunder being a way of life. From the moment Wayneghis Khan spies Bortai—who’s reclining languidly atop a yak-pulled caravan with a bored look that says, “Calgon or a fiery yellow brute, take me away!”—he’s intent on having her, preferably by force.

Thus begins one of cinema’s most rapecentric romances. The purple dialogue is riddled with references to sexual assault. When Wayneghis Khan brings Bortai to meet his hunched-over crone of a mother, she counsels, “Let your slaves have their sport with her!” When Wayneghis Khan checks his internal moral compass/circulatory system to decide whether rape is the right choice for him, he reports back, “My blood says ‘take her.’” He threatens Bortai’s father by vowing, “Your treacherous head is not safe on your shoulders, nor [Bortai] in her bed!” He also warns, “While I live, while my blood burns hot, your daughter is not safe in her tent.”

“He took what he wanted, when he wanted it!” screams the film’s trailer before tastefully promising “Barbaric passions!” and “Savage conquests!” Sure enough, Wayneghis Khan expresses his fondness for Bortai by ripping off her dressing gown and vowing to soil her lady virtue.

The Conqueror’s violence isn’t limited to constant references to rape. At one point, a chieftain describes, with altogether too much relish, what is referred to as the “slow death”: “Joint by joint, from the toe and fingertip upwards, shall you be cut to pieces, and each carrion piece, hour by hour and day by day, shall be cast to the dogs before your very eyes, until they, too, shall be plucked out as morsels for the vultures!” This is seriously nasty stuff, an ungodly cross between a lurid paperback novel (Her Savage Love!) and a porn film with the sex removed.

Powell and Hughes’ film feels dirty and borderline pornographic, and not just because of its loathsome racial politics, its rape-happy hero in yellowface, and its looming threat of sexual violence. Hughes’ millions could buy big stars and big production values, but it couldn’t buy taste or professionalism. Accordingly, an air of amateurishness hangs heavy over the film. Some of the dialogue is so unwieldy it appears to be poorly translated from Cantonese. You have to really ponder a line like, “You know ill the son of Yessugai!” (which is Wayneghis Khan’s convoluted way of saying, “Y’all don’t know me, dog!”), and you have to keep the right punctuation in mind just for it to make sense. Otherwise, it could easily be mistaken for, “You know Ill, the son of Yessugai? He just purch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• My Year Of Flops: An Introduction
• Chapter 1: Disastrous Dramas
• Chapter 2: Calamitous Comedies
• Chapter 3: Musical Misfires And Misunderstood Masterpieces
• Chapter 4: It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s A Flop! Superheroes, Science Fiction, And Action
• Chapter 5: Unsexy Sexy Films
• Chapter 6: My Year Of Flops Jr.: “You Know, For Kids!”
• Chapter 7: The Floppiest Flops
• Chapter 8: A Fairy-Tale Ending; Or, Manic Pixie Dream Girls I Have Known
• Death Is Not The End: An Afterword
• Appendix: Waterworld: Director’s Cut, Minute-By-Minute
• Acknowledgments