The poster child for this has to be Casino Royale (1967). Producer Charles K. Feldman had acquired the film rights to the James Bond book before Broccoli and Saltzman had started their successful run with the franchise. When that team refused to work with him, Feldman decided to make the film as a satire. He was in a rush to get it out before B&S released their fifth installment, You Only Live Twice, but writers, directors, and actors kept quitting on him. Instead of just scrapping everything and starting from scratch with a new crew, the film is just all of what was filmed cobbled together. Which is why it is such a cinematic train wreck.
But here’s something few people know. Even though the budget skyrocketed to $12 million ($3 million more than any previous 007 film), Casino Royale raked in four times its production cost.
I love MST3K, but I hesitate to criticize the movies there because of the “garbage in, garbage out” rule. You have an incompetent director, a lousy script, acting that’s one step above a coat rack, and no money for decent equipment or competent people to run them, of course the movie’s gonna be horrible. But if you have professionals doing everything, the studio spent a decent amount of money and you still up with garbage, that needs to be acknowledged.
What are you talking about? Being John Malkovich is one of the best films of the 1990s and is very highly regarded. It’s nothing like any of the other films mentioned in this thread.
These may not qualify as having been “greenlit” since they’re mostly low-budget shorts, but a good half of the films presented under the “Omeleto” label make me wonder how someone managed to convince a team to bother. There are some gems, however, enough that I keep giving them a shot.
On the other hand, the percentage of dogs among the deluge of feature films is much, much worse, so I find the risks in checking out shorts to be preferable.
Call me crazy but without “Being John Malkovich”, we do not have “The Studio”.
It’s the whole “Princess Bride” conceit: You microdose Egomaniacalflex daily for years just like the Iocaine buildup in “Bride”. Egomaniacalflex is what got “Being John Malkovich” green-lit and in fact, without it “The Studio” would not exist.
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich I agree is not the shitshow of some of these others, but by gum it is one weird ass film. “Where do you get your crazy ideas?!” does apply to this film, and asking “who greenlit this cinematic bizarroworld film?” is a fair question. Imagine the pitch meeting,
But I will not say it is a masterpiece. I hate the ending. A lot.
Before pitching Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman pitched a film with Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield as a washed-up, murderous comedy duo and an R-rated version of Gilligan’s Island. When he pitched Being John Malkovich it sounded pretty reasonable by comparison.
With a movie rating, I assume film. He cooked it up with James Gunn and they even sold Warner Bros on it. Cannibalism featured prominantly. It was Sherwood Schwartz who put the kibosh on the project.
Liam Neeson seems to have signed on to whatever has been offered over the years, regardless of merit and possibly without even reading the script. There are a number of clunkers in his filmography, but I’ll single out “The Grey” as one that should never have gotten past the concept stage.
But some prestigious critics praised it (Roger Ebert gave it 3.5/4 stars, although even he seemed ambivalent, saying, “I admired it, although I cannot say I “liked” it.” And it made $23 million on a budget of $8-10 million.
I admit that I personally loathed it, not because of any prudishness about the subject matter (I’m a lifelong polyamorist). I thought it was ridiculously pretentious, and I found the characters utterly unlikeable.
It seemed like a repressed person’s idea of what libertines lived like.