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The movie Hollywood wants you to forget...
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'THE WALL STREET JOURNAL' Bruce Bennett's article,'Hope and Crosby They Were Not', featuring Grodin's thoughts on Ishtar.
May 16, 2011 • READ ALL HIS COMMENTS HERE
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BRUCE BENNETT: Did you have any inkling during production that "Ishtar" might be poorly received?
CHARLES GRODIN: No. Elaine May for me is the best director that I've ever worked with. She directed my first big role, "The Heartbreak Kid," and the movie she made before it, "A New Leaf," is really unique and special. Elaine May is not going to write something bad. I mean, it's Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. They're all just too talented.
BB: What did you think of "Ishtar" when you saw it?
CG: I like the movie very much. In my opinion it's quite a real observation of something that most people don't know about—this sort of underworld of comedy and music. I wouldn't suggest that you actually do this, but go and sit in a room at a club on an open-mic night in New York some time. You'll just go, "Oh my god, let me out of here. Anything, just let me out of here." That's the essence of what I remember of "Ishtar"—two less-than-mediocre New York songwriters booked someplace in the Middle East. That put a smile on my face. They're sincerely singing all this terrible material as if it's actually worth something. There is that truth to it.
BB: Then what went wrong?
CG: When the picture came out, $50 million was considered an exorbitant amount of money to spend on a movie. It actually became part of the title. You always saw it referenced as "the $50 million 'Ishtar.'" Why should the public be concerned what the budget of a movie is? Coca-Cola financed the movie. It's not as if Coca-Cola was going to give that money to the people of America rather than spend it. People are very reflexive. You can just say a name and people will laugh or chuckle or snicker or whatever they do. But if all the people who were snickering had seen "Ishtar", it would've been a big hit.
BB: Do you recall the shoot here at home in Astoria?
CG: I actually started out in Astoria like 50 years ago making movies at something called the Army Pictorial Center in what they later renamed Kaufman Astoria Studios. I don't really recall the New York shoot, but I do remember being in Morocco in a helicopter over a fortified castle with real armed guards staring at us. I remember telling the pilot, "Maybe we should fly somewhere else...?"
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All original content ©2006-2014 LDD. All Rights reserved.
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