When I was a kid, I always loved reading the behind-the-scenes articles TIME and Newsweek would publish after Election Day, and to that end, the losing campaigns were always the most interesting. All of the gossip and embargoed stories told on background would surface, with the knives coming out in order for individuals to pin the blame in any direction except their own.
The nature of life is, no matter how hard one may try to avoid it, at some point all of us have blundered royally. Hardly anyone in life really sets out to screw something up. Some are more skilled than others. Some care about the work more than others. And some have different, more selfish goals than others. But time and chance happeneth to us all, and most mistakes are usually the result of people honestly believing their choices were the right ones, no matter how misguided they may have been. And when those mistakes happen in the business world, the result is groups of people sitting in boardrooms thinking New Coke or the Edsel were great ideas. Sometimes the bad movies, TV shows, albums, etc., can be really interesting to analyze, since it's fascinating to wonder how a group of supposedly talented people with lots and lots of resources can mess it up so badly.
In this respect, it's almost analogous to how the wheels come off a bad political campaign, where advisers, consultants, and media professionals sit in many many meetings wasting money and time shaping a message and "story" that will galvanize the public's interest, and fail spectacularly. Maybe their failure is the result of choices that alienate the fans in their base. Maybe all of the focus grouping and notes become a mess that totally misunderstands the situation. Or maybe everything about both the process and product is flawed and just doesn't work.
So what is the nature of a fiasco or flop? Which are the most memorable? And what is the most common reason things go off the rails?
Below is a list of films, albums, television shows, and other aspects of pop culture that were either critical or financial disappointments—and in some cases, ended up being criminal fraud.
- Wikipedia describes the Fyre Festival as a “failed luxury musical festival.” The brainchild of 25-year-old founder Billy McFarland, the festival paid social network celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski, and produced a commercial featuring attractive female models in skimpy clothing and performers like Ja Rule to promote the idea the festival would be full of celebrities and luxury villas in the Bahamian island of Great Exuma. Scheduled for two weekends in April and May 2017, the event sold tickets from $500 to $1,500, with VIP packages—including airfare and luxury tent accommodation—for $12,000. Customers were promised accommodation in "modern, eco-friendly, geodesic domes" and meals from celebrity chefs. The final advertised lineup was for more than 30 groups, including Pusha T, Tyga, Desiigner, Blink-182, Major Lazer, and more. NONE of these acts were at the festival. The people who paid $12,000 found their luxury accommodations consisted of pre-packaged sandwiches and a FEMA tent. McFarland was ultimately sentenced to six years in prisons on multiple counts of fraud for his role in running the scam.
One month before thousands of well-heeled millennials were set to descend on a remote island in the Bahamas for the Fyre Festival to frolic on yachts, rub elbows with models, and hear acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer, the organizers had a big problem.
They were running low on cash and the festival lacked fundamental necessities — toilets and showers, for example — and they were running out of time. One supplier told VICE News that when they were contacted by the festival in April, they told the organizers that all the money in the world wouldn’t get trailers for toilets and showers past customs in time, because that takes weeks to process. The festival was scheduled over two weekends in late April and early May.
“There was no infrastructure to even support the equipment. They didn’t even have a loading dock, they had no understanding of what vehicles were on the island to even move the stuff off the ship once it got there,” said the supplier. “They said stuff like, ‘Don’t worry about customs; it’s only for a weekend, you don’t have to worry about customs.”
- John Landis is lucky to not have seen the inside of a prison cell for his actions in directing a segment for Twilight Zone: The Movie. Landis wrote and directed a very memorable segment involving Dan Akroyd, Albert Brooks, and music from Leadbelly and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but became infamous for a segment in the film which resulted in the death of actor Vic Morrow and two children. Violating California child labor laws, Landis had the two kids on set at night for a dangerous sequence involving Morrow’s character saving the children, as explosions were set off and a helicopter hovered 25 ft. overhead. Reportedly, Landis paid the children’s parents under the table in cash in order to do this. During the shoot, the explosions for the scene caused the helicopter to spin out of control and crash, killing Morrow and the two children instantly. Morrow and one of the kids were decapitated by the spinning rotor blades. Landis, as well as an associate producer, the production manager, the helicopter pilot, and explosives manager for the film, were charged with involuntary manslaughter, but were ultimately acquitted.
- Featuring 18 songs from composer and song writer Cole Porter, Peter Bogdonavich’s At Long Last Love is supposed to be an ode to Top Hat and Swing Time. Except Bogdonavich decided to cast his girlfriend at the time, Cybill Shepherd, and was “talked into” Burt Reynolds as his leading man. The result is a movie with people who can’t sing and dance very well, going through the motions of a story that isn’t very interesting, while the director did not exactly know what the hell he was trying to accomplish.
Bogdonavich: Nobody quite understood what I was trying to do, and I'm not sure I understood what I was trying to do at the time. I see now quite clearly what I was doing. I was making a movie about people who couldn't talk to each other. It was about people who couldn't communicate, so they talked in greeting cards. They bought greeting cards in the form of songs, and they sang songs 'cause they didn't know what to say to each other. It wasn't really a musical in the conventional sense, which is why we did everything live. I didn't care so much about the musical part of it. I wanted it to seem like people talking, only they were singing.
- 1963's Cleopatra, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox. The situation was so bad the studio had to shut down and pull people off payroll for a time in order to deal with things being so out of control. The production was lavish, with massive sets and thousands of extras. It also saw the original director replaced before Makiewicz took over, delays caused the sets to deteriorate and have to be rebuilt, and the script was in constant state of flux. Mankiewicz's original cut of the movie was six hours long. Expenses ultimately ballooned to $44 million, which in 2019 dollars is a budget of more than $364 million. To put this in perspective, last year’s Avengers: Infinity War had a budget of $318 million. Fox was able to recoup some of the costs when audiences turned out for the film, after fascination with the on-set affair between Taylor and Burton—who were married to other people at the time—caught the public's attention.
- With a lot of these projects, one of the usual questions is whether the people involved know they're making a horrible product. If you're saying shitty lines, reacting to silly effects, and there are constant delays and bickering, wouldn't you know things are bad? But a lot of the time, the answer is no, since a sort of groupthink sets in. Julie Salamon's book, The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, describes that very situation on the set of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Based on Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name and directed by Brian de Palma, the film adaptation takes huge liberties with the source material which is centered around a satire of the racial and class politics in New York City during the 1980s, where almost everyone is using the situation to advance their own ambition. The movie softens the characterizations, changes the very nature of others, pulls punches, and inserts a character to righteously tell off everyone in order to give the audience a smidgen of hope. The result is a mess that believes it's profound social commentary. According to Salamon's book, casting the film was plagued by disputes over pay and credit, with F. Murray Abraham ultimately refusing to even have his name on the picture. Also, Salamon paints Bruce Willis, who's totally miscast as Peter Fallow, as an egotistical prick that "was generally disliked by most of the cast and crew."
- Disney's John Carter is one of the biggest flops in film history, losing around a quarter of a billion dollars. Just to break even, Disney would have needed John Carter to make more than $600 million globally. It only grossed $284 million. According to various reports, the reason Disney sank so much money into this movie was to appease Andrew Stanton, one of the creative forces at Pixar. John Carter was Stanton's first live-action film and a "passion project" for him. The film had no big name stars, and was a mash-up of three genres (i.e., Civil War, Old West and Science-Fiction) just like the Edgar Rice Burroughs' story it's based on. But that made it a difficult task to market. The failure of this and Battleship during the same summer is thought to have seriously damaged actor Taylor Kitsch's career prospects, which at that point were being positioned to potentially make him a major action star.
- No one expected it to be the most commercial thing in the world, but I don't think either Lou Reed or Metallica expected the intensity of negative reviews and backlash which accompanied the album Lulu. Based on the rather bleak plays of German playwright Frank Wedekind, the album is nearly 90 minutes of spoken word lyrics by Reed over instrumentals composed by Metallica. It was almost universally mocked, with some critics calling it "unlistenable." For his part, Reed responded to the criticism by stating the album "is for people who are literate. This isn’t ‘I cry in my beer cause you f—ed him and ran your truck through my bar.”
- Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin almost brought about the demise of Batman movies. To grasp how truly bad this movie is, keep in mind that it put the Batman movie franchise on hold for eight years, and when it did kick in again, it was a complete reboot. After the box office success of 1995's Batman Forever, a sequel was inevitable. Audience backlash against the edge of Batman Returns found the lighter, more comedic tone of Forever more conducive. So come 1997, what does Warner Bros. do? Secure an all-star cast, turned the camp up to 11, and threw $125 million into the production of the film. What came out is a movie many people love to hate, even to this day. Arguably, Batman & Robin probably did neither George Clooney, Uma Thurman, or Alicia Silverstone any favors, since all three were trying to ride the success of ER, Pulp Fiction, and Clueless to a big movie paycheck. Arnold Schwarzenegger got a $25 million paycheck out of it, but this film came at a time when his summer action movie magic started to wear off. Also, this along with the Star Wars prequels are big examples where the movie is but one facet of the product line, since selling toys, the soundtrack, etc., is part of the calculus beyond whether or not the movie itself is any good.
There were early warning signs that Batman & Robin might be in trouble. Schumacher had resisted sequel overtures from Columbia Pictures on 1985's St. Elmo's Fire ("I couldn't see a sequel"), but went against that policy in this case. He and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman went straight from Batman Forever to A Time to Kill right back to Batman & Robin.
"Akiva was very leery about Batman & Robin. We had a couple of very serious discussions about it, and he was right about it in the long run," says Schumacher.
And while toy companies and other corporate partners had wanted nothing to do with Batman Forever, everyone wanted in for the sequel. Schumacher learned what it means to make a movie toy-etic: "when you have something in the movie they can make toys out of." Perhaps the production went too heavy in that direction.
- Paramount spent more than $300 million making and marketing M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender. Based on a well-regarded and epic-in-scope Nickelodeon animated series, the film was castigated by critics and fans, became controversial for "whitewashing" the characters, and added to the continued troubles in Shyamalan's career.
- Ishtar, made in 1987 and directed by Elaine May, was envisioned as a sort of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope road movie, with Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as songwriters who dream of breaking it big, only to get caught up in a CIA operation in the Middle East. The film was shot on location in Morocco, and suffered production delays, ballooning costs, and infighting between the cast and crew, leading to the budget for the movie doubling. When the press ran with the stories coming out of the production, the movie became a joke even before it was released, and its failure was seen as a foregone conclusion.
- The George Lucas produced Howard the Duck is an infamous bomb. It's a really expensive film where the people behind it had no idea which audience they were appealing to, so the movie has a really schizophrenic tone. On the one hand it tries to be a big-budget science fiction film that appeals to families, and uses Lucas's name to market to the Star Wars audience. But it's also centered around a duck having sex with Lea Thompson, and features "duck tits" and a giant alien penis/tongue going into a cigarette lighter. And to show you how far the MPAA ratings have moved in the last 30 or so years, this was a movie that was rated PG in 1986. Howard the Duck is also indirectly responsible for the creation of Pixar. The company was originally a computer graphics division of Lucasfilm/ILM. However, because George Lucas was experiencing money problems from his divorce and the failure of Howard the Duck, Lucas sold off that division to Steve Jobs for $5 million and it became Pixar. In 2006, Pixar was sold to Disney for $7.4 billion.
Thompson wasn’t a fan of movie when it came out: “I was the number one star of it. It was painful." She had turned down John Hughes’ film Some Kind of Wonderful, but the week of Howard’s release, with the word “turkey” hanging over the duck, she relented and took the part.
“I had to get on another movie,” she admits. “I wouldn’t have done the movie if Howard wasn’t such as bomb.”
- In 2010, the brainiacs at NBC decided to give Jay Leno five hours of prime-time real estate with The Jay Leno Show. As part of their plan to produce a network schedule on the cheap, Leno turned The Tonight Show over to Conan O'Brien and hosted a nightly interview-variety show at 10 PM EST. The idea was centered around the fact that a talk show is much cheaper to produce than new episodes of a drama or sitcom, and if Leno could produce decent ratings everyone would profit. However, the result was viewership so low local affiliates complained about the effect on the local news rating because of Leno's poor lead-in. And since NBC schedule had been cleared to make room for Leno's nightly show, the network's schedule became a mess when it blew up in their faces. The resulting aftermath led to Leno returning to The Tonight Show and forcing O'Brien out, which created lots of controversy and further tarnished Leno's legacy.
- Maybe it's because my first exposure to the story was the film, but whenever someone mentions Dune, the aesthetics of David Lynch's film is what comes to mind. The movie was a financial failure and the execution of the story leaves a lot to be desired. The scale of Herbert's book is immense, and would be difficult for any writer or director to condense. Imagine if you had to mold the source material for Game of Thrones down into a two-hour movie. It would be a mess at best, and a ridiculous waste of time at worst. But it's interesting that the powers that be chose Lynch, a director known for films with unorthodox narrative, to shepherd a film that needed to desperately find a way to streamline it. Any Dune film, just as exposition, has to set up the "houses" (i.e., Atreides, Harkonnen, Corrino, etc.). The relationship of the houses to one another and the role of the Emperor of the Known Universe. What the "Spice" is, where it's located, and what it does. The use of the Spice by the Spacing Guild and Bene Gesserit, their motivations, and their relationships and connections to the Houses and the Emperor. And that's all before ya even get into the main story with Paul. The 1984 film attempted to do this with a three minute prologue in which Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) breaks the fourth wall, and I believe some theaters passed out guides which provided backstory. However, audiences were still lost. The intro to the special edition cut of the movie is seven minutes long, and has the feel of a history course just to bring the audience up to speed.
Bringing Frank Herbert’s novel to life was a Herculean task that had already defeated such formidable directors as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott. Jodorowsky was set to adapt the film in the mid-1970s, with design assistance from H.R. Giger and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, music by Pink Floyd, and a prospective cast that included Salvador Dalí (who agreed to play the emperor for $100,000 an hour), David Carradine, Orson Welles, and Gloria Swanson. It is a testament to just how mammoth an undertaking Dune had become that Jodorowsky’s adaptation, which burned up $2 million in mid-1970s pre-production costs before dying, was to run 10 to 14 hours.
Next, Ridley Scott took a crack at the project, but left to direct Blade Runner, a film that seems to have drawn heavily on his and Jodorowsky’s plans for Dune.(Jodorowsky also felt, perhaps not unfairly, that Star Wars “borrowed” from his Dune storyboards.) The project then somehow fell into the hands of an eccentric young filmmaker with two strange, small projects under his belt: a weird little AFI-funded arthouse oddity called Eraserhead, and The Elephant Man, a gorgeous biopic of Victorian medical oddity Joseph Merrick.
Heaven knows what attracted David Lynch to the project, since according to Cinefantastique, he hadn’t read the novel, and didn’t even know the story. Yet he signed on anyway, and committed roughly three years of his life to directing a movie whose daily outlay for bottled water was probably more than Eraserhead’s entire budget. It consequently fell upon a filmmaker not particularly interested in linear stories to make sense of a mammoth, insanely complicated tome for a mass audience. He did not succeed, to put it mildly.
- Billed by Fox as a "social experiment," 2014's Utopia ended up being a huge financial loser for the network. Fourteen strangers were deposited on five acres of California land with nothing and told to develop their own society. Hidden cameras were placed all around the property to watch their every movement, with Fox having charged $4.99 per month for 24/7 access. However, despite claims of experimentation, the reality series wasn't that deep and viewers could have cared less about the new Utopian society. Fox ended up losing more than $50 million on the project.
- Adjusting for inflation, the Geena Davis film Cutthroat Island lost nearly $150 million in 1995 and put Carolco Pictures out of business. The movie was the result of the then-husband and wife team of Davis and director Renny Harlin trying to advance Davis as an action star. The production was troubled by delays, rewrites, and construction and destruction of the film's sets as indecision and delays plagued the film.
- It only aired for four months, but NBC's Supertrain is notable for being such a money loser, that combined with the 1980 Olympics boycott, it almost bankrupted the network. Conceived by then-NBC president Fred Silverman as sort of a light science-fiction version of ABC's The Love Boat, the show was the most expensive television creation ever attempted at the time, and was centered around a nuclear powered intercontinental bullet train, with the stories being about loves and troubles of the passenger's lives. NBC threw money at the show hand over fist, with the set costing at least $5 million to construct. But big ratings never appeared for watching the problems of D-list celebrities traveling on a train track. The network attempted to retool the series, even becoming so desperate they added a laugh track, but it was all for naught.
- Heaven's Gate, made in 1980, is an infamous debacle which contributed to the collapse of United Artists and ruined director Michael Cimino's career. Cimino was coming off the success of The Deer Hunter, and had won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1979, decided on a western epic based on the Johnson County War. What was originally a film budgeted for $12 million eventually ended up costing $42 million—which if adjusted for inflation, would be nearly $129 million in 2019 dollars—because of blown schedules and production delays. Studio executives forced Cimino to trim the film from its initial run time of over five hours to around three hours, forty-five minutes. The theatrical cut ran about two-and-a-half-hours. If you cut almost 50 percent of the narrative out of anything, it's going to be a poorly paced, disjointed mess. As an example of his fanatical attention to detail, Cimino tore down an entire street set because it "didn't look right." Cimino wanted the street to be six feet wider. When the set construction boss pointed out that it would be cheaper and faster to tear down one side and move it back six feet, Cimino insisted that both sides be dismantled and moved back three feet, then reassembled. Heaven's Gate is also the reason why the American Humane Association (AHA) monitors animal activities on all movie sets. In Cimino's pursuit of authenticity, four horses were reportedly killed and others seriously injured while shooting the battle scene, as well as allegations that other animals were slaughtered for various scenes. The AHA picketed the film and asked the public to boycott it. The uproar led to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) authorizing the AHA to monitor the use of animals in film production. All in all, Cimino shot more than 1.3 million feet (nearly 220 hours) of footage, costing approximately $200,000 per day. Heaven's Gate earned less than $3 million domestically when it was released.
Roger Ebert: We begin with a fundamental question: Why is “Heaven’s Gate” so painful and unpleasant to look at? I’m not referring to its content, but to its actual visual texture: This is one of the ugliest films I have ever seen. Its director, Michael Cimino, opens his story at Harvard, continues it in Montana, and closes it abroad a ship. And yet a grim industrial pall hangs low over everything … I know, I know: He’s trying to demystify the West, and all those other things hotshot directors try to do when they don’t really want to make a Western. But this movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.
But Cimino’s in deeper trouble still. “Heaven’s Gate” has, of course, become a notorious picture, a boondoggle that cost something like $36 million and was yanked out of its New York opening run after the critics ran gagging from the theater. Its running time, at that point, was more than four hours. Perhaps length was the problem? Cimino went back to the editing room, while a United Artists executive complained that the film had been “destroyed” by an unfairly negative review by New York Times critic Vincent Canby. Brother Canby was only doing his job. If the film was formless at four hors, it is insipid at 140 minutes. At either length it is so incompletely photographed and edited that there are times when we are not even sure which character we are looking at. Christopher Walken is in several of the Western scenes before he finally gets a close-up and we see who he is. John Hurt wanders through various scenes to no avail. Kris Kristofferson is the star of the movie, and is never allowed to generate enough character for us to miss, should he disappear.
- Fleetwood Mac is an interesting band in that their most successful point came at a time when everything was falling apart. It was a situation where, out of the five members, there were two failing relationships and the band leader/drummer was about to begin occasionally sleeping with the lead singer, whose ex-boyfriend is the lead guitarist. From that, you get Rumours, which is considered one of the best albums of all-time, which has the relationship fuck you songs like Go Your Own Way, written by Lindsey Buckingham about the breakup of his relationship with Stevie Nicks. In some of their reunion concerts, it was interesting to watch the looks both shoot at each other when it was performed in concert. Rumours has sold over 40 million copies, and considered by critics to be one of the greatest albums ever. However, opinions about the follow-up to Rumours in 1979, Tusk, was a bit more divisive. The band’s bickering didn’t help things. By the time of Tusk, drummer Mick Fleetwood and Nicks had begun sleeping with each other, which didn’t sit well with Buckingham, who had demanded to produce the album. At the time of its production, Tusk was one of the most expensive albums to create, and was a double album which made it more expensive to buy with a retail price of $16 (or about $56 in today’s dollars). Selling 4 million copies, in comparison to Rumours, the reception to Tusk was labeled a failure by Fleetwood Mac’s record label, who blamed Buckingham for not living up to the reception of Rumours.
- Imagine the worst elements of Law & Order and Glee, then merge them together, and the result would be very close to Cop Rock. When the Steven Bochco produced series premiered in 1990, audiences recoiled from it and found the entire concept of a cop show where characters would break into song to express their feelings about a child murder bizarre. However, after series like Viva Blackpool and more musical episodes of dramas where characters displayed their singing abilities than I can count, if the show premiered today it might not have been written off as easily. Bochco was near the height of his powers as a TV producer, after the success of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, which explains how he convinced ABC to put Cop Rock on the air. But the series’ biggest problem, beyond the incongruity of the show's nature, was the songs weren't entertaining and the cop stories were bland and generic. The fat lady sang her song, and the series was cancelled after 11 episodes.
- Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is an interesting example of excess. The series premiered in 2006 to a lot of hype, since it was Sorkin returning to television after the critical and popular success of The West Wing, but would only last for one season. The pilot for Studio 60 was reportedly the most expensive drama pilot ever produced for a network at that time. Similar to 30 Rock (which premiered the same year), the show revolved around the behind-the-scenes relationships of a Saturday Night Live-like sketch show, and was largely based on Sorkin's life. However, as much as much as the characters were drawn from real-life experiences, almost all of them come off as stereotypes. Harriet (Sarah Paulson) is almost entirely defined as love interest and resident Christian. Simon (D.L. Hughley) is the "black guy" on the sketch show with every story involving him being about how he doesn't want to be the black guy on Studio 60, which ironically makes every story involving him about that very thing. And then there was the fact it was about a comedy show that was supposed to be the most hilarious thing ever, but every time we were shown the sketches for Studio 60, they were absolutely horrible, which raised the question of why they even showed the "show within the show" at all?
The answer has a lot to do with arrogance. In premise and execution, Studio 60 was a work of unbearable, overweening arrogance. It began with making the lead character of Matt Albie both a clear Sorkin surrogate and a writer so ridiculously romanticized even M. Night Shyamalan might say, “Get over yourself, dude. You’re a fucking writer, not Jesus’ younger brother, the one God really likes.” Albie isn’t just a principled, gifted writer; he’s a man who gets out of bed every morning aching to making a stand. He’s admired by men and irresistible to women who run the gamut from a Maureen Dowd surrogate played by Christine Lahti to the high-end skanks of the Rockettes. Even with a head full of bad chemicals and a belly full of pills, he’s able to single-handedly write a peerless work of transcendent social and political satire everyone in the known universe will be talking about around the water cooler Monday morning. Writing 90 minutes of new comedy every week is a Herculean endeavor for even the most gifted writing staff; now imagine 90 minutes of brilliant comedy emerging anew weekly from the mind of but a single man! On pills, even! And with the kind of problems you would not believe! As I write this, I realize that that this is not a man I’m writing about. This is a God. Oh sure, this man-God has an ego. Wouldn’t you? … Studio 60 is so self-congratulatory I’m half-surprised it doesn’t open with an Academy Of Television Arts & Sciences tribute to itself. That’s a byproduct of the show’s overbearing arrogance: It thinks it’s won the game before the game has even begun. For Sorkin, however, the game stretches way back. In his mind, he wasn’t just launching a new television show with an unusually pronounced sense of history. No, he was carrying on the holy work of Paddy Chayefsky, Norman Lear, Edward R. Murrow, and Lorne Michaels (back when he still gave a damn). Sorkin wasn’t just trying to raise the level of discourse on television; he was fighting for the medium’s very soul.
- The film adaptation of Battlefield Earth was the pet project of John Travolta, who as a member of the Church of Scientology wanted to get L. Ron Hubbard's book to the screen. The result was a movie which made little to no sense, had awful visual effects and production design, and involved $31 million in fraud by the film's production company.
- Lastly, 1979's Caligula is primarily infamous for trying to straddle the line between being high art and a porn film, and failing miserably at both. The original script was written by Gore Vidal (who later disowned the film) and it was directed by Tinto Brass. However, the film was produced by Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, who had final cut. Unhappy with Brass's product, he brought in someone else to recut the film and added in hardcore sex scenes, with some of them not making any sense to what little plot the movie had. This led to many different versions of the film. There are reportedly nine different cuts of Caligula, and with each of them you're still left pondering how a movie with good actors (Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, and John Gielgud), and gratuitous amounts of sex and violence can be so damn boring.