Let's Talk Turkey

In a 1784 letter to his daughter, Benjamin Franklin praised the virtues of the wild turkey over the bald eagle, writing, "I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree near the river, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish...the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him."

According to Franklin, "the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird...a true original native of America...a bird of courage..." And thus the turkey became a victim for the main dish at the annual harvest celebration of Thanksgiving.

Now, as to exactly how, when, and where "turkey" came to denote a bomb, a dud, a failure, sources vary. One account posits that the association originated from the practice of producers hiring unemployed actors to open non-royalty plays on Thanksgiving Day in hope of cashing in on the holiday, when healthier than average attendance could be expected. The down-and-out actors became known as "turkey actors."

Others assert the phrase came from 19th century playwright-stage manager-director-actor Dion Boucicault, whose melodramas were a sensation in the 1890s. He had a lousy play that opened on Thanksgiving Day which he described as his "turkey."

According to Tony Award-winning producer Ken Davenport, the description of a flop as a turkey comes down to IQ. He commented, "Apparently, a turkey is a pretty damn dumb bird." Davenport recalled reading a web post by someone who worked at a turkey farm and breeding facility, asserting that water bowls contained minimal amounts, and the water had to be shut off while the turkeys were drinking. "Why?" Davenport asked. "Because on occasion, a turkey would 'forget' to lift its head while drinking...and drown. And this guy saw it happen." There is, however, no truth to the myth that turkeys will drown in rainfall by looking up, beaks agape, to see what's hitting them on the head.

Davenport continued, "Large scale turkey farms regularly use artificial insemination...Because if they didn't, the turkeys just might not get around to it on their own." He concluded, "So the birds are stupid. And in 1927 (coincidentally, the year 'Show Boat' opened), someone decided flops were stupid too. (Probably because everything looked stupid compared to 'Show Boat.') And thus, a dud became a turkey."

That being said, no one, as a rule, sets out to make a bad movie. But turkeys happen. Even to the best filmmakers. Which brings us to the topic of motion pictures made by top directors that turn out to be, for whatever reason, turkeys.

Early in his career as the undisputed "Master of Suspense," Sir Alfred Hitchcock cranked out an unlikely musical or, correctly, operetta film, 1934's "Strauss' Great Waltz" (originally titled "Waltzes from Vienna"). On the face of it the story of how Johann "Schani" Strauss Jr. was inspired to compose and conduct his most popular waltz, "The Blue Danube" (famously used as the soundtrack for the spectacular scene of a Pan Am spaceplane approaching and docking with a space station in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"), the film dramatizes the rivalry between Johann and Strauss Sr. Throw in some sexual tension provided by a cafe owner's daughter and a countess who sponsors Schani, and you end up with what Hitchcock called "the lowest ebb of my career." He claimed he took the job because he had no other movies on his plate for the year and wanted to stay working. He never made another "musical."

Johann Strauss Jr. (Esmond Knight) tries to share a tender moment
with restaurateur's daughter Resi (Jessi Matthews) under the critical
eye of Johann Sr. (Edmund Gwenn) in "Strauss' Great Waltz." Gwenn,
of course, is best known for his Oscar-winning performance as Kris
Kringle in 1947's "Miracle on 34th Street."

"Rope" (1948) started out as one of Alfred Hitchcock's most ambitious experiment in filmmaking as he wanted to present the picture as if it was one continuous take (thanks to some subtle camera trickery and editing), played out in real time. Inspired by the 1924 "perfect murder" of an adolescent boy by two wealthy University of Chicago students, the thrill killers in the movie are Harvard students who strangle an "inferior" classmate and shove his body in an antique chest, which serves as the buffet table for a macabre dinner party in their Manhattan penthouse. Among the invited guests are the victim's father, his fiancée, along with the students' prep-school housemaster (James Stewart).

Alfred Hitchcock joins actors Farley Granger, John Dall,
and James Stewart on the set of "Rope."

On a budget of $1.5 million, the film's box office was $2.2 million; not a financial disaster but still disappointing. Hitchcock would look back at the production as a stunt, an "experiment that didn't work out," admitting in an extensive interview with French filmmaker François Truffaut, "I really don't know how I came to indulge in" the movie. Hitchcock was pleased that the picture was kept out of release for almost three decades. James Stewart, who later worked with the director in "Rear Window," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," and "Vertigo," singled out "Rope" as the only movie he made with Hitchcock that he didn't like, feeling he was miscast as the students' former mentor.

"My name's John Ford. I make westerns." So said the venerated filmmaker at a meeting of the Directors Guild of America. Well, he also made a movie with America's favorite dimpled moppet, Shirley Temple in 1937. The year before that, he directed his sole picture with Katharine Hepburn, "Mary of Scotland," a loosely historical drama based on the widowed Mary Stuart's return home to reclaim her throne as Queen of the Scots, much to the dismay of Queen Elizabeth I, who eyed her cousin as a dangerous threat.

A publicity photo for "Mary of Scotland" shows Katharine Hepburn
as Mary and Frederic March as James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell.
Katharine Hepburn was, in fact, distantly related to the earl.

"Mary of Scotland" was a box-office flop with a loss of $160,000. It was Katharine Hepburn's second turkey in a row, following the disastrous romantic comedy "Sylvia Scarlett" (which both Hepburn and director George Cukor begged the producer to shelve if they agreed to make their next picture for free), earning her the label "box office poison."

John Ford had lost interest in the film early in production, disliking the dialogue delivered in blank verse. A few years later, during the filming of "Stagecoach," Ford was indulging in his usual pastime of harassing actors, including the star, his protégé, John Wayne. When Ford started tearing into Thomas Mitchell, cast as tipsy Doc Boone, Mitchell quickly shut the director up by saying, "Just remember, I saw 'Mary of Scotland.'" The actor was not harangued for the remainder of the shoot.

If he were still alive, perfectionist Stanley Kubrick, if pressed to come up with his least favorite movie, might mention his first theatrical feature, 1953's "Fear and Desire." Set during an unnamed conflict on an unidentified island, the supposedly antiwar statement was shot with a bare-bones crew of five, three Mexican laborers, and a cast of five, including familiar character Frank Silvera and Paul Mazursky, the future director of "Harry and Tonto," "An Unmarried Woman," and "Down and Out in Beverly Hills." A few of the actors had to double-up by portraying enemy soldiers.

Four soldiers who survived a plane crash behind enemy lines
encounter a peasant girl in "Fear and Desire."

Kubrick, who apparently got into trouble blocking scenes and had difficulty maintaining continuity, later dismissed "Fear and Desire" as "a bumbling amateur film exercise," comparing it to a child's drawing on a refrigerator. He disowned the picture after its release and wanted to ensure it was never seen again by not re-releasing the print. He even tried to destroy the negative. Unbeknownst to him, Kodak had a policy of making an extra print for its archives, and it was from that print which video bootlegs were made. According to Kubrick's assistant, Leon Vitali, "Stanley really, really hated that movie. He absolutely loathed it."

Another picture Stanley Kubrick summarily disowned was 1960's "Spartacus," a lavishly produced epic starring Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Tony Curtis, and Peter Ustinov, in an Oscar-winning performance. Douglas, who was the film's executive producer, recruited onetime blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo for the screenplay and brought in Kubrick on the basis of their work together as director and actor on 1957's powerful antiwar drama "Paths of Glory."

Stanley Kubrick directs an arena battle between Woody Strode
and Kirk Douglas.

Production on "Spartacus" was beset by the conflicting viewpoints of Kubrick and Trumbo. Kubrick, who felt the script was full of stupid moralizing, complained that Trumbo hadn't given Spartacus any faults or quirks. Disputes also arose between Kubrick and director of photography Russell Metty, who grumbled about Kubrick's meticulously detailed instructions for camerawork and lighting. Kubrick, whose contract didn't give him complete control over filming, ultimately rejected the movie and refused to include it in his oeuvre. Kirk Douglas averred he would never work with Kubrick again.

John Wayne was exempted from military service during World War II because of his age, 34 at the time Pearl Harbor was attacked. Older actors such as Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, and Eddie Albert enlisted. Republic Pictures was dead set against losing their only A-list star under contract, and  the president of the studio threatened Wayne with a lawsuit if he walked away from that contract. Some assert that his failure to serve his country was one of the biggest regrets of his life. His widow, Pilar, believed his patriotism in later years came from that guilt. She noted, "He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home."

One overt act of "superpatriotism" was his decision to direct and star in 1968's pro-war "The Green Berets" as a response to growing anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. At first, Warner Bros. was concerned about letting him direct because his directorial debut, 1960's "The Alamo," was a costly flop, forcing Wayne to lose his personal investment and to sell his rights to the studio. Warner Bros. assigned Wayne an "experienced" co-director, Ray Kellogg, who had worked with John Ford as a visual effects artist and associate director on a handful of pictures, including "Cheyenne Autumn." Kellogg's experience as a director included the schlocky horror flicks "The Killer Shrews" and "The Giant Gila Monster," along with a low-budget family film, "My Dog, Buddy," all three produced by Ken Curtis, Festus Haggen on "Gunsmoke" and John Ford's onetime son-in-law.

Wayne wanted the screenplay to have more character development, but Warner Bros. desired more action than talk and didn't want the gab-fest that "The Alamo" became. Released after the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre, "The Green Berets" ended up as the 13th highest grossing film of 1968, despite devastating criticism from the likes of Roger Ebert, who gave the movie zero stars, accused it of depicting the war as "cowboys and Indians," and included it on his "Most Hated" list.

Many found fault with the cast being much older than their actual counterparts. As colonels, John Wayne was 60 years old, Bruce Cabot was 63. Most real-life colonels were in their 30s. Actors in their mid-30s to early 40s portrayed infantrymen whose average age, in fact, was really 22.

Bruce Cabot (right), who played Jack Driscoll in the original 1933
"King Kong," appeared in 11 movies with his buddy, John Wayne.

A number of veterans who served in Vietnam found the film offensive. In the novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, himself a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, two of the characters find their squad in a movie theater, watching "The Green Berets": "The audience of Marines roars with laughter. This is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time." The book, incidentally, served as the basis for Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film "Full Metal Jacket."

One would be hard pressed to find a turkey in Clint Eastwood's body of work as a director, although one of his earliest efforts is probably a film you've never heard of. "Breezy" (1973) limned a May-December romance between a free-spirited, homeless, orphaned hippy (the counterculture) and a square, wealthy real estate agent (the establishment). Publicists touted the picture as a "now romance."

Kay Lenz, best known for her Emmy Award-nominated role as
Kate Jordache in the 1976 miniseries "Rich Man, Poor Man,"
plays opposite William Holden in "Breezy." Holden pretty much
made a career of portraying jaded, world-weary individuals.

Early reviews of "Breezy" were not kind, convincing Universal Pictures to shelve it for almost a year, then releasing it with minimal marketing. Eastwood was convinced Universal had decided the picture would be a failure long before it was released. Film critic and author Richard Schickel, who wrote two books and produced at least three documentaries about Eastwood, said the movie "confounded expectations and alienated many of Eastwood's fans," as was the case two years earlier when the actor was cast against type as a manipulative Union soldier in the Gothic melodrama "The Beguiled." Schickel noted that "Breezy" "came and went virtually without notice." According to Eastwood, "The public stayed away from it because it wasn't promoted enough, and it was sold in an uninteresting fashion."

Film historian-turned-filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich followed his breakout motion picture, 1971's "The Last Picture Show," with two more popular hits, "Paper Moon" and "What's Up, Doc?" Then he fashioned a couple of productions around his inamorata at the time, Cybill Shepherd, who had made her movie debut in "The Last Picture Show." One, "Daisy Miller," a period drama based on an 1878 novella by Henry James, was a box office disappointment, and the other, 1975's "At Long Last Love," was a critical and financial disaster, pretty well putting the kibosh on Shepherd's hopes for screen stardom.

"At Long Last Love" was, in the words of British film critic Leslie Halliwell, "an attempt to recapture the simple pleasures of an Astaire-Rogers musical." The movie, starring Shepherd, Burt Reynolds, Madeline Kahn, and Eileen Brennan, featured 18 songs with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. "What I was trying to do," Peter Bogdanovich said, "was to try to recreate the kind of sad, funny, melancholy, silly feeling of those early musicals and do it live and make it feel spontaneous." Unlike most movie musicals, the cast performed their songs live in front of the cameras, which caused a number of delays as some actors had problems singing, including Shepherd (even though she had released an album of Cole Porter tunes), Reynolds, and costar Dulio Del Prete, a handsome Italian import who Bogdanovich thought was going to be big stateside star.

Madeline Kahn, Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, and that Italian
guy hoof it in "At Long Last Love."

"At Long Last Love" opened to poor box office numbers and scathing reviews. Jay Cocks, from  Time magazine. said it was "one of those grand catastrophes that make audiences either hoot in derisive surprise or look away in embarrassment." Pauline Kael called it "stillborn," while TV Guide remarked, "It goes down like a stricken elephant." John Simon, of The National Review, noted the film "may be the worst movie musical of this or any decade." In Los Angeles magazine, John Barbour quipped, "If this...fiasco were any more of a dog, it would shed."

Jay Cocks commented, "When dancing, the stars look as if they're
extinguishing a camp fire." Singling out Cybill Shepherd, New Times
magazine critic Frank Rich remarked, "When this horsey ex-model
starts prancing around, she tends to look as if she's fighting off
a chronic case of the trots."

Burt Reynolds wryly observed, "I think we bombed." After the movie was yanked out of theaters because of poor ticket sales, Bogdanovich wrote an open letter to newspapers, apologizing for the quality of the picture. He followed "At Long Last Love" with "Nickelodeon," a nostalgic homage to the early days of filmmaking, featuring Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds, Tatum O'Neal, Brian Keith, and John Ritter. It was the director's third flop in a row. "I was dumb," Bogdanovich said. "I made a lot of mistakes."

Although not as financially successful or critically popular as Steven Spielberg's previous films, "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," his 1979 wartime comedy "1941" couldn't really be called a turkey. In fact, video reissues helped boost the picture to cult status. Inspired by such World War II events as the false-alarm air raid in what became known as the Battle of Los Angeles and the actual bombardment of the Ellwood oil refinery near Bakersfield, California, by a Japanese submarine, the film represents not just Spielberg's first comedy, but, to date, his only comedy, and a blockbuster comedy at that.

Calling the picture "a good-hearted, cheerfully disorganized mess," Roger Ebert noted, "The movie relentlessly throws gags at us until we're dizzy...it tries so hard to dazzle us that we want a break." One critic from The A.V. Club described the film's approach to humor as "the crash- and explosion-as-punchline school of comedy." Another reviewer for the same online newspaper said the movie "feels like a glorified Three Stooges skit blown up to epic size...In fact it's brutally, brutally unfunny and after a while its size and ear-splitting volume become assaultive and dispiriting."

Dan Aykroyd and his M3 Lee tank crew consisting of Mickey Rourke,
John Candy, Treat Williams, and Walter Olkewicz let you know what
they think of "1941."

Not even John Belushi's shameless mugging as a rogue Curtiss P-40
Warhawk pilot can salvage this cacophonous comedy.

In a 1990 interview, Spielberg confessed that the mixed reception to "1941" was one of the biggest lessons in his career, admitting that his own arrogance blinded him following the meteoric successes of "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." "I don't dislike the movie at all," he said of "1941." "I'm not embarrassed by it - I think that it just wasn't funny enough." "It is down in the history books as a big flop, but it wasn't a flop," co-screenwriter Bob Gale insisted, "both Universal and Colombia have come out of it just fine." Stanley Kubrick allegedly told Spielberg that "1941" was "great, but not funny."

Just how John Huston, the acclaimed director of such timeless screen classics as "The Maltese Falcon" (his directorial debut), "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "The African Queen," "The Misfits," "The Man Who Would Be King," and "Prizzi's Honor" came to direct such a dismissible picture as 1980's "Phobia," remains a mystery in itself. Supposedly a horror thriller produced in Canada, the film's plot involves a psychiatrist who practices a radical new therapy and comes under suspicion when his phobic patients start dying from what they most fear. At one stage in the development of the film's story, on which the screenplay was based, Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who collaborated on the story for "Alien," were involved.

Paul Michael Glaser and John Colicos don't appear to be pleased
to be in "Phobia."

The picture played like a TV movie of the week, especially with the casting of Paul Michael Glaser, fresh from a four-season run on the series "Starsky & Hutch," as the revolutionary doctor and John Colicos, a Canadian actor familiar as the evil Count Baltor in the original "Battlestar Galactica" series, as the frustrated, hard-nosed police inspector. The film's leading lady, Canadian actress Susan Hogan, had a recurring role in the popular transborder Canadian series "Night Heat."

The travails and tribulations surrounding the production of 1980's "Heaven's Gate" are the stuff of Hollywood legend. Written and directed by Michael Cimino, fresh off garnering Oscars for "The Deer Hunter" as Best Picture and Best Director, "Heaven's Gate" was a wannabe-epic, loosely based on Wyoming's historical Johnson County War of 1889-1893, depicting, in an overblown, fictitious fashion, the showdown over range access between immigrant settlers and rich cattle barons.

The impressive cast featured Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken (who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "The Deer Hunter"), John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Brad Dourif, award-winning French actress Isabelle Huppert, Joseph Cotten, Jeff Bridges, and Geoffrey Lewis. Willem Dafoe made his film debut in a supporting cast that included Mickey Rourke. Cimino pushed the production nearly four times over its initial budget, ending up spending an estimated $44 million. Persuaded by vitriolic reviews, people shunned the movie, which earned an embarrassing $37 million. Before it could be released worldwide, the film was pulled from theaters after one week by its distributing studio, United Artists, which ended up taking a loss of $37 million. Notable as one of the biggest, all-time bombs, "Heaven's Gate" not only ruined Cimino's reputation as a cinematic wunderkind but, as well, brought on the collapse of United Artists, ushering in a move back to studio-controlled productions instead of the 1970s-born era of director-driven projects.

Much like the movie itself, Christopher Walken, as gunfighter Nate
Champion, goes down in flames in "Heaven's Gate."

Comparing "Heaven's Gate" to "a forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room," The New York Times' Vincent Canby called it "an unqualified disaster." Reviewers piled on the film in an attempt, according to one British critic, to outdo one another "with sarcasm and contempt." In 1981, Cimino recut the picture from three-and-a half hours-plus down to two-and-a-half hours for its re-release. This time, Roger Ebert chimed in, deeming the new version the "most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I've seen 'Paint Your Wagon.'"

Later re-edited versions, including a 2012 "Director's Cut," resulted in more positive evaluations. The BBC ranked "Heaven's Gate" 98th in its 100 greatest American films list in 2015. Martin Scorsese maintained the movie had many overlooked virtues, while British film critic Robin Wood called it "one of the few authentically innovative Hollywood films" and believed it to be "among the supreme achievements of the Hollywood cinema." Michael Cimino, who remained a biographically enigmatic figure throughout his career, died in July 2016, age 77.

At first, Francis Ford Coppola envisioned his 1982 romantic musical "One from the Heart" as a small picture, after the elephantine excesses of "Apocalypse Now." Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raúl Juliá, and Nastassja Kinski would star in a cast that included Harry Dean Stanton and Lainie Kazan. MGM offered him a record $2 million to direct. Instead, Coppola bought the rights through his own Zoetrope Studios, with MGM staying on as the distributor for North America. Coppola raised financing through overseas pre-sales and a bank loan. When the budget ballooned to $15 million and then to $23 million, MGM pulled out the same time tax shelter investors bailed. Canadian real estate developer Jack Singer stepped in with a loan of $3-8 million (sources vary), and Paramount Pictures took over as distributor.

What bloated the budget, which ended up at $26 million, was Coppola's insistence on the construction of studio sets, lavish backgrounds, and miniatures. The movie was shot almost entirely on Zoetrope sound stages, giving Coppola the artificial luster he desired. During production, Coppola pioneered the use of a live from-the-camera video feed with instant playback, using that video to make rough cuts of the scenes by the next morning. In fact, Coppola directed most of the movie from inside a mobile headquarters called The Silver Fish. When he wasn't using the onboard kitchenette, espresso maker, or hot tub, he would direct the cast through a loudspeaker system.

Playing a tightrope-walking Vegas showgirl, Nastassja  Kinski puts
on a show for Hank (Frederic Forrest) in "One from the Heart."

"One from the Heart" grossed just under $636,800 against its $26 million budget. Coppola said the film was still a work in progress after disappointing screenings, calling the unfinished version "a mess." He added that "it was clear that it wasn't going to get a fair shot." Paramount, which already had an exasperating relationship with Coppola throughout the production, finally backed out of distributing the picture in the wake of a poor screening in San Francisco. Coppola managed to make a deal with Columbia Pictures.

The box-office failure of the film set off a decade of financial woes for Coppola and his production companies. Ironically, once Coppola went into receivership, Jack Singer, the Canadian businessman who had loaned Coppola a few million dollars, bid $12.3 million at an auction for the Zoetrope Studio, and won, souring his relationship with the filmmaker. Singer renamed his new acquisition Hollywood Center Studios, while Coppola was convinced that the Singer family was trying to ruin him. The pictures he directed in the late 1980s into the '90s - "The Outsiders," "The Cotton Club," "The Godfather Part III," "Jack," and "The Rainmaker" - were made to pay off debts incurred by the production of "One from the Heart."

What original "The Planet of the Apes" producer Arthur P. Jacobs, "El Topo" director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and "Alien" director Ridley Scott couldn't accomplish over a decade fell into the hands of David Lynch when he assumed the job of scripting and directing 1984's "Dune," based on the best-selling science fiction novel of all time by Frank Herbert, although the filmmaker was not pleased with the outcome. Admittedly, whittling down Herbert's 412-page epic saga of the conflict between rivaling noble families for control of a desert planet down to a two-hour feature film seemed like an insurmountable task from the start, and the result confused audiences, ticked off critics, and disconcerted fans of the book.

Max von Sydow, Jurgen Prochnow, Patrick Stewart, and Kyle
MacLachlan (in his film debut) cut a handsome figure in their
"stillsuits," a bodysuit concocted by Dune author Frank Herbert.

Naming it "the worst movie of the year," Roger Ebert noted, "This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time." Ebert's "At the Movies" cohost at the time, Gene Siskel, said, "It's physically ugly...and its story is confusing beyond belief...I hated watching this film." On an estimated $40 million budget, "Dune" grossed $30.9 million, qualifying it as a box office disappointment.

...But honestly, we prefer Sean Young's stillsuit.

Even upon its release, David Lynch, who sandwiched "Dune" between 1980's "The Elephant Man" and 1986's "Blue Velvet," tried to distance himself from the film, maintaining that pressure from producers and financiers restrained his artistic control and denied him final cut privileges. He once said he considers "Dune" the only failure of his career. "I started selling out on 'Dune,'" he stated. "Looking back, it's no one's fault but my own. I probably shouldn't have done that picture..." He recalled it as "a slow dying-the-death and a terrible, terrible experience." Refusing to discuss details of the production, he claimed revisiting the movie would be unendurably painful.

When one thinks of director Brian De Palma, comedy movies do not immediately come to mind. Besides his breakout film, 1976's "Carrie," De Palma made his name with Hitchcockian suspense pictures like "Sisters," featuring Margot Kidder, "Dressed to Kill," starring Michael Caine, and "Body Double," with Melanie Griffith. By the time he directed 2002's "Femme Fatale," starring Rebecca Romijn and Antonio Banderas, he was touted as the "Master of the Erotic Thriller," which is odd considering that his most successful movies up to that time - "Scarface," "The Untouchables," "Carlito's Way," and "Mission: Impossible" - were anything but "erotic."

Anyway, in 1986, De Palma tried his hand at comedy with "Wise Guys," which paired Danny DeVito with Joe Piscopo as a couple of schmos who begrudgingly work as put-upon errand boys for New Jersey mobsters while dreaming of opening the world's first Jewish-Italian delicatessen. With a screenplay co-written by George Gallo ("Midnight Run"), the film did offer a colorful cast of characters, among them Harvey Keitel, the late Ray Sharkey (who would go on to play a Mafia kingpin in the 1987 series "Wiseguy," unrelated to this movie), Dan Hedaya, "Captain" Lou Albano, and Tony Award-winning Patti Lupone ("Evita"), but it received mixed to negative reviews and only returned $8.4 million on a $13 million budget.

Joe Piscopo and Danny DeVito share an emotional moment
in "Wise Guys."

Could Joe Piscopo be to blame? Both he and Eddie Murphy were thrust into the spotlight as two of "Saturday Night Live's" explosive stars in the early 1980s, but while Murphy's subsequent movie career skyrocketed, Piscopo never caught on as an attractive film draw. Other than a distinctive turn as thug Danny Vermin in the Michael Keaton gangster movie parody "Johnny Dangerously," who remembers seeing "Dead Heat," with Treat Williams and Vincent Price, "Sidekicks," in which he played third fiddle to Chuck Norris, "Captain Nuke and the Bomber Boys," starring Joe Mantegna, and Martin Sheen, or "Baby Bedlam," with "Airplane's" Julie Hagerty?

"Wise Guys" beat Scorsese's "Goodfellas" to the punch by four years. ("Goodfellas" was based on the Nicholas Pillegi book Wiseguy, which had nothing to do with the movie "Wise Guys" or the TV series "Wiseguy.") Besides the presence of Scorsese discovery Harvey Keitel, Frank Vincent, who had memorable roles in Scorsese's "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas," and "Casino," portrayed a gangster in "Wise Guys." As well, "Wise Guys" included cameos by Martin's parents, Catherine and Charles Scorsese. Brian De Palma never attempted to direct another comedy, although he did make another turkey, the 1990 flop "The Bonfire of the Vanities," starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and Melanie Griffith.

Until Johnny Depp set sail as Captain Jack Sparrow in the popular "Pirates of the Caribbean" series of films starting in 2003, pirate movies were a hard sell from the 1960s on. The last really good pirate movie had been Burt Lancaster's "The Crimson Pirate" in 1952, and that was a spoof of pirate movies. When Hollywood studios attempted to turn 50-year-old British actor Robert Shaw into an action hero in the wake of his scene-stealing turn as Quint the shark hunter in "Jaws," one of the ill-fitting roles they squeezed him into was a pirate captain called "Red" Ned Lynch in 1976's "Swashbuckler," which ended up an expensive flop, deemed a "BOMB" by reviewer Leonard Maltin.

So, after receiving acclaim for "Chinatown" and "Tess," one can only wonder what motivated director Roman Polanski to make 1986's "Pirates," starring Walter Matthau as a not-so-wily buccaneer named Captain Red. Roger Ebert aptly noted that the film "proves, if nothing else, that Matthau is not an action star and that Polanski is not an action director. Matthau is, however a very capable comedy actor, and there are times when Polanski seems to be trying for comedy, although search me if you can find a laugh in this movie."

Walter Matthau stars as Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red in
"Pirates." At least, three-time Oscar-winning costume designer
Anthony Powell was nominated for an Academy Award.

George Lucas comes under scrutiny, not as the director of "American Graffiti," the first "Star Wars" picture, or the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy, but as the executive producer of what was regarded as one of the worst movies of all time and one of the costliest turkeys ever, 1986's "Howard the Duck." Based on the existentialist comic books from Marvel, the screenplay was written by husband-and-wife writing team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who worked with Lucas on the script for "American Graffiti" and scripted "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" for Lucasfilm Ltd. Released a couple of decades before the creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, "Howard the Duck" has the dubious honor of being the first feature film based on a Marvel comic.

Caught in a compromising situation with Howard the Duck, Lea
Thompson (best known as Marty McFly's mother in the "Back to
the Future" trilogy) plays a pop singer in the band Cherry Bomb.

Universally panned by critics, the picture was described by Leonard Maltin as a "hopeless mess...a gargantuan production which produces a gargantuan headache." Reviewers and audiences alike criticized the filmmakers' decision to make the movie in live action, especially with the depiction of Howard as a person in a duck suit with an expressionless face and a malfunctioning mouth - er, bill. At the 1987 Golden Raspberry Awards, which honors the worst in cinema, Razzies went to "Howard the Duck" for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Visual Effects, and Worst New Star ("the six guys and gals in the duck suit"). Tim Robbins was nominated for Worst Supporting Actor. The film earned about $15 million domestically on a budget of $38 million.

For some reason a lot of people are fans of the bleak cinema of director David Fincher, from "Seven" to "The Game" and "Fight Club" to "Panic Room," although he did "lighten up" with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Social Network," and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Fincher, a veteran music video director (winner of three MTV Video Music Awards, including awards for Madonna's "Express Yourself" and "Vogue"), made his feature film debut with 1992's "Alien 3."

Besides a merry-go-round of writers who came and went, pre-production on "Alien 3" also involved a revolving door of directors, including Finnish Renny Harlin ("A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master") and New Zealand-born Vincent Ward ("The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey"), before Fincher came on board and started shooting without a finished script. "Alien 3" proved to be a downer of a sequel that nobody asked for and few appreciated. "Aliens" director James Cameron and costar Michael Biehn were particularly ticked off that, except for Sigourney Weaver's character of Ripley, the survivors from the end of the previous movie were unceremoniously killed off. Just for the use of his likeness in one scene in "Alien 3," Biehn demanded and got almost equal pay for his role in "Aliens."

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash-lands on a planetary penal colony
in "Alien 3." One of the original ideas for the film visualized a planet
constructed of wood inhabited by monks. The shaved heads prevent
lice infestation. In the center of the prisoners stands Dillon (Charles
S. Dutton), the spiritual leader of the inmates.

Even though it grossed $104.3 million internationally, "Aliens" was still considered a flop in North America, where it earned $55.4 million on a $55 million budget. Roger Ebert once called it "one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen." Fincher disowned the picture, blaming studio interference and deadlines. "No one hated it more than me," he said in a 2009 interview, "to this day, no one hates it more than me."

Remember what we said about pirate movies since "The Crimson Pirate" and before the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise? Evidently, Renny Harlin, who previously walked out on "Alien 3" to make the Andrew Dice Clay turkey "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane" (which won Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Actor), wasn't listening, as he envisioned transforming his wife, Geena Davis, an actress known for, more or less, light comedy fare, into an action star by top-lining her in 1995's "Cutthroat Island" as a pirate captain in a reversal of gender tropes. Michael Douglas, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, Jeff Bridges, Ralph Fiennes, Charlie Sheen, Michael Keaton, Tim Robbins, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Gabriel Byrne all turned down the role of a con man and thief Davis purchases at a slave auction, until it ultimately went to Matthew Modine, probably best known as Private "Joker" in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."

Critics complained about the lack of chemistry between Geena
Davis and Matthew Modine in "Cutthroat Island."

According to Modine, Renny Harlin utilized three cameras operating simultaneously for every scene, ending up with yards and yards of film for each shot. That, and Harlin's insistence on a massive destruction and reconstruction of expensive sets contributed to the film's $115 million budget. At some point, both Harlin and Davis, sensing disaster, pleaded to be released from the production, but the studio, Carolco Pictures, refused. To make a long story short, "Cutthroat Island" grossed $10 million at the box office, earning a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as history's biggest box-office turkey, with a net loss of $110-$147.2 million, contributing to the collapse of Carolco Pictures, although the studio and its logo would be resurrected in 2015.

Renny Harlin wasn't ready to quit trying to mold Geena Davis into an action star yet, casting her as an amnesiac small-town schoolteacher who was once a crack CIA assassin in 1996's "The Long Kiss Goodnight." The movie was not the financial disaster "Cutthroat Island" was, and it didn't bankrupt a studio, but Harlin and Davis did divorce in 1998.

In his career to date, Kevin Costner has directed three motion pictures. Even though his first film garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Original Score, there have been, in hindsight, second thoughts and doubts about the validity of "Dances with Wolves." However, there's no doubt in the Moviehouse that Costner's third at bat, 2003's "Open Range," was an instant western classic, much as Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales" was in 1976. The turkey in the straw is 1997's "The Postman," a post-apocalyptic adventure filmed on the heels of Costner's other post-apocalyptic adventure, 1995's "Waterworld" (dubbed "Kevin's Gate" by some wits).

In "The Postman," Costner played a drifter-on-horseback who dons the abandoned uniform of a United States Postal Service mail carrier and an undelivered bag of mail in an effort to panhandle a meal in a nearby town. He reluctantly becomes a symbol of hope for the residents, who start to remember what the United States stood for before society broke down and instilling in them the courage to defy a tyrannical warlord and his forces while inspiring young men far and wide to take up mailbags and carry on as postmen. It's no wonder that Roger Ebert found the film "goofy" and "pretentious," although he did admit it was "good-hearted." The New York Times found fault with the movie's "bogus sentimentality." Gene Siskel called it "Dances with Myself." A noteworthy box-office failure, "The Postman" delivered less than $18 million on an estimated budget of $80 million.

At the onset, it was said that nobody sets out to make a bad movie. Well, there might be an exception, and its title is "Zyzzyx Road," written, co-produced, and directed in 2006 by John Penney, who wrote the screenplay for 1993's "Return of the Living Dead 3." In Las Vegas, an accountant (played by the film's co-producer, Leo Grillo) gets seduced by a Lolita (portrayed by Katherine Heigel, best known for her roles in the comedies "Knocked Up," "27 Dresses," and "The Ugly Truth"), then meets her brutish ex-boyfriend (played blindfolded by movie tough guy Tom Sizemore). A violent confrontation sends the trio to the desert road of the title.

Katherine Heigl, director John Penney, Tom Sizemore, and Leo
Grillo pose on the titular Zyzzyx Road.

From February 25 to March 2, 2006, "Zyzzyx Road" was shown once a day at noon in the Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas, Texas. That was it. The limited release was an intentional move by co-producer Leo Grillo, who wasn't interested in releasing the film domestically until it underwent foreign distribution, which first required a United States release as dictated by the Screen Actors Guild regarding low-budget movies (pictures with budgets less than $2.5 million that aren't intended for direct-to-video sales). With ticket sales of only $29, "Zyzzyx Road" became the lowest grossing film in U.S. history. Unofficially, its six-day run earned $19; the $10 difference was due to Grillo refunding two tickets purchased by the film's makeup artist and a friend.