The story is modeled on the famous "Road" movies starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, seven hits (most of them) between 1940 and 1962 that found the hapless duo embroiled in comic adventures (usually based on wild misunderstandings and mistaken identity) in exotic lands. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play a couple of ambitious but remarkably untalented lounge singers/songwriters who think they're getting a big break when they're booked for a gig at a Moroccan hotel. Instead, they become pawns in international intrigue involving the CIA, the Emir of Ishtar, and a group of rebels trying to overthrow the Emir's regime. Ishtar even shares a location with one of the biggest hits of the earlier series, Road to Morocco (1942), and French actress Isabelle Adjani plays the equivalent of Hope and Crosby's romantic foil, Dorothy Lamour, but as a contemporary liberated woman.
Prior to this, Beatty had not made a movie in six years since his award-winning epic political biography Reds (1981). Shortly after the release of that picture, he took a trip to Costa Rica with two good friends and colleagues, writer-director Elaine May and writer Peter Feibleman, both of whom had contributed to the script for Reds. May had also written Beatty's previous producing-directing-acting effort, the comedy-fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978). The three came up with a vague idea for a political comedy set in Central America, but the original notion proved to be unworkable. Beatty then offered to produce any script May chose to write and direct. This act of friendship didn't come completely out of the blue. May got her start as an improv performer back in the 1950s and was part of the successful and influential comedy team Nichols and May (Nichols being writer-director Mike Nichols) before moving on to playwriting and film work. She had written several movie scripts and directed a few moderately successful small-scale comedies, 1971's A New Leaf (in which she also played a lead role), The Heartbreak Kid (1972, starring her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, and future Ishtar cast member Charles Grodin), and Mikey and Nicky (1976). Beatty greatly respected May's comic genius and was grateful for her important contributions to his earlier films, so in 1985 he put aside plans to make a biography of Howard Hughes and announced he would not only produce but appear in May's comedy, then called Blind Camel.
Beatty was also at least partly responsible for the story's basis, since he had once entertained May at a party with tales of his struggling years as a cocktail bar piano player. He was also attracted to the project by May's suggestion he play opposite Dustin Hoffman, who was also a trained pianist, and her idea to turn the casting on its head by placing Beatty, one of Hollywood's most famous playboys, in the role of the bumbling loser, and the diminutive Hoffman as the suave ladies man.
In July 1985, shortly before filming began, the Los Angeles Times reported Ishtar's budget to be $30-45 million (eventually ballooning to $55 million). The paper was already forecasting disaster, predicting it would have to make $100 million to break even and focusing on the two stars' salaries of $5 million-plus each, a huge figure for the time (and still rather large today). Beatty and Hoffman had offered to defer their salaries to keep costs down, but this went unreported, fueling Beatty's fear that the press was out to pan the movie even before the first shot was completed.
According to several people involved in the production, May was most likely in over her head and too indecisive to handle a production of this scale. And Beatty, who as producer would have been the one to rein her in a little, was too respectful of her brilliance to interfere with her creative freedom. Composer Paul Williams, who wrote many of the intentionally bad songs performed by Beatty and Hoffman, said that although May continually waffled about the music and other on-set decisions, the first half of the film, which was shot in New York, was hilarious, and that the two stars, particularly Beatty (who has a surprisingly good singing voice), pulled off the lounge act to perfection.
Things apparently began to go wrong when May insisted on shooting the second half of Ishtar in Morocco rather than on the Columbia backlot. She sent the crew on a six-week search for a blind camel; when she finally chose the very first one they had seen weeks earlier, the animal had already died. According to production designer Paul Sylbert, May had his team search everywhere for just the right desert dunes, and when she finally arrived to shoot scenes on the location they chose, she was astonished to find they were more like rolling hills than the flat terrain she wanted. "We raked out a mile and a half of dunes with bulldozers," Sylbert said. "She had no idea what to do with them...she just couldn't cope, and no one could help her."
As producer and star, Beatty bore the brunt of the criticism for the production going off course, and he took it hard, particularly in light of his gallant efforts to be nurturing toward May and his refusal to take the picture away from her when it became obvious, in the eyes of many involved, that she did not have the experience and skills for such a large production. In 1986, a series of articles began to appear in the trades reporting a further delay of six months while May held the picture up in editing. That's when it began to feel to most of the people working on it that the troubled project was being set up for failure even before its first previews. "There was almost a sense of revenge to the articles," Williams noted. Beatty put much of the blame on the new head of the studio, David Putnam, insisting Putnam wanted to see Ishtar fail. "He refused to see the movie, never called me or sent me a letter, attacked me in the press," Beatty said. "And here was one of the most eccentric, witty, gifted women in the country. She should be supported."
With such advance publicity, even the best movie is likely to have a hard time finding its audience. Nevertheless, Ishtar reportedly had three rather successful preview screenings, and in its first week of release it held the #1 box office position until Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) knocked it down to fourth place. Poor reviews quickly dragged it to the bottom. The Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called it "a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy." Hal Hinson in the Washington Post acknowledged the negative publicity surrounding the movie and declared it not the "floundering stinker of biblical proportions" but damned it as "something far less substantial...a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs." On the other hand, Janet Maslin of the New York Times, also noting the over-hyped pre-release "rumor-mongering," spotlighted the moments of Elaine May's comic genius and put forth this verdict: "It's a likable, good-humored hybrid, a mixture of small, funny moments and the pointless, oversized spectacle that these days is sine qua non for any hot-weather hit. The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful, and here and there, even genuinely inspired."
Beyond the principals, Ishtar certainly had some impressive talents behind it. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, the Oscar®-winning cinematographer of Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds, and The Last Emperor (1987). Costumes were created by acclaimed stage and screen designer Anthony Powell. The cast included such outstanding comic performers as Charles Grodin, Jack Weston, and Carol Kane. Alas, the only awards Ishtar would garner were a Razzie for Elaine May, tied for Worst Director with Norman Mailer (Tough Guys Don't Dance, 1987), and nominations to Beatty for producing the Worst Picture and May for writing it. Nevertheless, Beatty, Hoffman and Grodin have defended the picture for years, and many viewers in the years since its release have expressed their dismay that it was so undeservedly destroyed in the press.
Director: Elaine May
Producer: Warren Beatty
Screenplay: Elaine May
Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro
Editing: Richard P. Cirincione, William Reynolds, Stephen A. Rotter
Art Direction: Peter Childs
Production Design: Paul Sylbert
Original Music Score: Dave Grusin, Bahjawa
Original Songs: Paul Williams, Elaine May, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman
Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Chuck Clarke), Warren Beatty (Lyle Rogers), Isabelle Adjani (Shirra Assel), Charles Grodin (Jim Harrison), Jack Weston (Marty Freed), Tess Harper (Willa).
C-107m.
by Rob Nixon
Some background material and quotes about production taken from Warren Beatty: A Private Man by Suzanne Finstad (Harmony, 2005)
