Ishtar Lost $40 Million and Became a Punchline. It's Better Than You Think

In May 1987, Columbia Pictures released Ishtar, a comedy about two catastrophically untalented songwriters, played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, who take a gig in a fictional North African country and blunder into a CIA plot. It cost about $51 million, opened to $4.2 million and finished with roughly $14.3 million at the domestic box office. Estimates put the loss at around $40 million, which in 1987 was enough money to buy a small country, or at least the camel.

About that camel. The animal trainer had his eye on a particular blue-eyed camel, and before he could buy it, a trader ate it. I've read a great many Hollywood production stories, and that's the only one where the star was lost to lunch. The shoot ran long, the writer-director, Elaine May, clashed with Beatty and with the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, the crew leveled a square mile of desert for a single scene, and May came home with 108 hours of footage. That isn't a rough cut. That's a geological survey.

Roger Ebert called it a truly dreadful film, and for decades the title was simply shorthand. An executive would say a project was turning into Ishtar the way a doctor says a mole looks interesting. It sits at 40 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 51 on Metacritic. Plenty of movies have gotten worse reviews. Very few have become a noun.

Here's my case. The whole joke of Ishtar is that its heroes are terrible, and the songs, by Paul Williams, were written to be believably bad, which is the hardest assignment in show business. Anyone can write a bad song; the radio is full of people doing it for free. Writing one that's bad in exactly the way two deluded middle-aged men would be bad is craftsmanship, like a carpenter building a chair that wobbles on purpose. May, who came out of the comedy team Nichols and May, took two of the biggest stars of the 1970s and made them play a pair of sad saps who think they're Simon and Garfunkel. Beatty went along with it, which is the bravest thing that man ever did with his face.

The movie didn't change. Everybody else did. Since a director's cut reached Blu-ray in 2013, critics have been quietly refiling it under misunderstood. It picked up two votes in Sight and Sound's 2022 poll of the greatest films ever made, and Martin Scorsese has named it a favorite. When Scorsese likes your comedy, either it's very good or somebody gets shot in it, and nobody gets shot in Ishtar.

What sank it, as far as I can tell, was a press corps that spent a year writing about the budget and needed the ending to match. Hollywood loves a flop the way a small town loves a funeral: everybody comes, nobody liked the deceased, and the food is excellent. The executives who buried it went on to bury plenty of other pictures, and not one of those got a second look from Scorsese.

A failure is just a success that showed up before the critics were ready. The camel, sadly, never got a second chance.