That’s it, all right. I remember the red gi and that the hero was blonde. Up in the stands, we didn’t get close ups of his face, of course. Interesting the director is “Eric Sherman.” Perhaps we were seeing the second unit.
I actually saw “Ishtar” a few years ago, one weekend afternoon. It’s really not that bad, but I do remember the hype when it was released, and as movies go, it was middling-good and that’s about it.
Ishtar got a lot of bad publicity before its release. This was about the fact that it was obvious that it cost too much to make and that there was a lot of infighting among the people who made and financed the film. This affected the critics who reviewed the movie when it was released. They should have been more objective about it. It’s just an average film, I think.
I’ll add a little more information to my earlier comment, while staying vague enough on the details to make identification impossible.
There were a couple of movies that could be described as being in “legal limbo,” but only a couple. By far the largest category was early pre-release screenings. These would be movies whose official premiere had been arranged somewhere else at a later date, generally at other, higher-profile festivals (SIFF happens in May/June, while Toronto happens in the fall, for example). In some cases the filmmaker wanted to see how the movie would play in front of an actual audience, which would be prohibited by legal agreement from mentioning the movie or discussing it outside the screening (in these cases, the filmmaker was often in attendance). In other cases SIFF had a relationship with the distributor and was able to wrangle a print, but they had to keep it in the Secret Fest because otherwise it would violate the distributor’s agreement to debut the movie elsewhere, and the other venue couldn’t advertise their showing as a world premiere.
During the years I attended SIFF, the Secret series was always four movies (every Sunday morning). Two would generally be one of these ahead-of-release previews, which means Secret attendees regularly got a look at a couple of prestige flicks weeks or months before the rest of the world. One would be an archival print of some sort (e.g. we had a Famous Person visit with his/her personal copy of a semi-lost movie that he/she had agreed not to exhibit in public because it was only one of a handful of surviving copies and running it through a projector is always risky, but he/she wanted to indulge the opportunity to watch a favorite movie with a crowd). And one would be a wild card (e.g. at one screening, they claimed they had an inside source at a film archive center who had removed the print without the archive’s knowledge and brought it to the festival, and would be sneaking it back onto the shelf afterward).
I was sometimes skeptical of these introductory stories, where they’d always explain why this showing had to be kept secret. It occasionally felt like the justification was weak, and they were drumming up the drama to make it feel more special than it really was. But every now and then, there was a genuine treat, something where the selection and/or the circumstances were inarguably special, and those made the whole thing worthwhile.
Istar was also sabotaged by the studio. There had been a change at the top, and the new guy didn’t like paying actors millions of dollars for a role. Beatty and Hoffman were well paid and it was an obvious target. Add that to the fact that it was the most expensive Hollywood film of the time, it was directed by a woman, and Elaine May was a perfectionist who spent months editing it, and the studio cut their losses. Most reviewers reviewed the price tag (especially since the result didn’t look expensive – no lavish sets, for example).
There were some exceptions. Vincent Canby of the Times gave it an honorable mention on his ten best list at the end of the year, and the critic from Newsday was generally favorable.
I think it’s a pretty good movie overall. The opening 20 minutes is comedy gold. It plods along after that until the get the camel. (The arms auction scene is great.) But the ending is badly rushed.
The movie did get a general release, though, and was on VCR and now on Blu-Ray, so it doesn’t really fit the criteria.
“Heaven’s Gate” is another okay movie that was plagued by cost overruns. I did eventually see it, and the best word to describe it is grandiose, from start to finish.