In part four of our four part series on Elaine May, it’s finally time to talk about her final directorial effort and what has become a cultural punching bag as the worst film of all time: Ishtar. The 1987 release saw May returning to her screwball roots with, as so much of her work centers on, a dysfunctional partnership pushed to its extremes. Unlike the darkness of Mikey and Nicky, though, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty play lovable idiots, men who are so desperate to become the next Simon and Garfunkel that they never stop to notice that they can neither sing nor write music.
But quickly the discourse around the movie had little to do with anything other than the movie’s high price tag and long production schedule, so when the movie eventually came out, audiences and critics alike seemed to be rooting against it. As for the reasons why and how the worst movie of all time can undergo a critical re-evaluation decades later, we’ll hear from Richard Brody, Elizabeth Alsop, Carrie Courogen, Matt Singer, and Lindsay Zoladz.
Check out Richard Brody’s New Yorker article “Better Late Than Never” on Ishtar here; Lindsay Zoladz’s writing on Elaine May, “Heaven Can Wait: The Hidden Genius of Elaine May,” at The Ringer; Elizabeth Alsop’s forthcoming book on Elaine May releases next year as part of the University of Illinois Press’s Contemporary Directors series; Matt Singer is the author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever; and Carrie Courogen is the author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, which hit bookstores this week.
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19. Ishtar: Money Well Spent