World Famous Comics: Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops
Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops
By: James Robert Parish Publisher: Wiley Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Wiley Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 368 Publication Date: February 09, 2007
Product Description: A longtime industry insider and acclaimed Hollywood historian goes behind the scenes to tell the stories of 15 of the most spectacular movie megaflops of the past 50 years, such as Cleopatra, The Cotton Club, and Waterworld. He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola, conspired to engender some of the worst films ever.
Fiasco, book or film? Oh, is this book flawed. There are a number of incorrect facts from the small (Madonna's confirmation name is Veronica, not one of her birth names as Parish states) to the large (General Bethlehem was a character in "The Postman" movie that was completely made up and did not exist in the novel the film was based on). There are some grammatical and spelling errors. The writing is a cross between Entertainment Weekly and Premiere, and one gets the distinct impression that each chapter was written as a separate article that was rejected by either rag (there's little chapter continuity). One has to wonder about several choices Parish made in what films he chose to discuss ("Town and Country"? "The Wild Party"?) while ignoring others he constantly mentions in passing ("Heaven's Gate" being the obvious choice).
Lightweight, Entertaining Look At Hollywood's Disasters Fiasco is a good overview of some of Hollywood's most notable failures. Parish spares no one in describing the unchecked egos, ulterior motives, and inability of anyone in charge to say no that made these failures as spectacular as they were. While it could get monotonous reading the same mistakes being repeated endlessly, Parish does his best to keep the stories interesting by making his writing unchallenging and light. In fact, if it weren't for his annoying habit of changing a person's possessive description from their first name to their last name and back (often within the same paragraph), Parish's writing style could be described as perfect for the topic.
Film and business students could probably gain additional insights for their fields of study by reading this book. But, for most of us, Fiasco is a gossipy, enjoyable read about very bad decision making.
Another solid book from the prolific Mr. Parish When I see James Robert Parish's name in the "by..." line on a book cover, I know that whatever else it is, it's going to be solidly researched and sharply written, with lots of clear-eyed and often pungent observation. It is even so with _Fiasco_, wherein Mr. Parish chronicles the history of many of the most notable multimillion-dollar bombs of the last four decades, from "Cleopatra" to "Town and Country". Parish is both sympathetic and unsparing in his analysis of the decisions and actions that led to these movies' failures, and he spices his reportage with loads of anecdotes.
My only quarrel - and really, it's more of a quibble than anything else - is that Mr. Parish didn't cover the flops of the pre-1960 years (of which, he notes, there were plenty). Then again, as he states in his foreword, those older movies are really outside the scope of his thesis, which is that the decline of the old studio system is one of the major factors that has led to so many out-of-control movie budgets over the last forty years (even when the movies in question are big hits). As such, he's chosen, quite reasonably, to limit his analysis to films made since 1960, and by golly, he's got plenty of material to work with! Incidentially, another reviewer questioned why "Heaven's Gate" and "Bonfire of the Vanities" weren't considered in this book. Mr. Parish explains why in his foreword; those stinkers are already the subject of books - which he highly recommends - and he wanted to cover movies that hadn't often been considered in the context of fiascoes (which is why he devoted a chapter to "The Wild Party", which he himself acknowledges is not really a _terrible_ movie but includes as an example of out-of-control filmmaking).
If Mr. Parish were in the habit of issuing online updates to his books, he could probably write a whole new chapter on the current movie "Evan Almighty" (as of early July 2007). That film is shaping up to be the big flop of 2007, and judging from the reported budget alone (as well as from other things I've heard about it), it's proof positive of the propositions he advances in this book. A must-have for anyone interested in why movies do or don't succeed. (And Mr. Parish even quotes one of my all-time favorite aphorisms about movies, William Goldman's "Nobody knows anything". :) ) He might also have pointed to the success of "Transformers", which, even though it had a $150 million budget, its makers also exercised close control over the spending (in fact, director Michael Bay reportedly cut his own portion of the budget by 30 percent in order to reallocate the money to improve other portions of the film), and has been rewarded with a smash first week.
Entertaining and informative FIASCO is certainly not for everyone, but it's a book that definitely and deftly illuminates some of the mishaps of "modern" (post 60's) cinema. The real joy of this tome of cinematic miscarriages is that Parish's style is so breezy and easy to read, that the reader can take in the vast historical, biographical, and economic data in a way that remains accessible and, dare I say, fun.
What really impressed me about the book is the fact that Parish so effortlessly condenses so much information into such concise vignettes. He breaks off into little modes of expository anecdotes about a particular star or producer or moment in history that he's brought up, gives you the gist of what you need to know (including various tidbits that I would imagine are difficult to drudge up elsewhere), and then goes back to the main point without a lurch.
Surely, most cineastes already know about the movies Parish discusses in his book, but there's a lot more there than you'd expect...
flopola in more ways than one An interesting concept semi-doomed by a few built-in flaws and not a few glaring typos.
Yes, you can hardly write a book about disastrously expensive films without including movies like Cleopatra, whose financial follies have already been covered ad nauseum for decades. But where are the chapters on such spectacular misfires as Myra Breckinridge, Hello Dolly, The Little Prince, Jonathon Livingston Seagull, Howard the Duck, Heaven's Gate and Bonfires of the Vanities?
Case in point: As interesting as its offscreen travails may have been, The Wild Party (a scarely-remembered Raquel Welch "art" picture budgeted at under $1 million) was simply an unsuccessful film, not even in the same ballpark as the monumental bombs that are supposedly the book's focus. (And can this picture really have been shooting, as the author claims, from May 1974 to July 1975?)
Typos aside, this book's biggest problem is that most of the material is old news to readers most likely to want to read it.
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