Ishtar

We don't really need anybody else to cover Midnight Run if you have those two guys.

And for the Heartbreak Kid and whether it was Ishtar or anything else, it took a year and I was already editing and I got Elaine May, who is notorious for not doing these things.

And she was just wonderful in the film.

And when I get back to New York, I try and see her now and, you know, try and have lunch with her.

Bless you.

Former baggage handling Jesus says of Whale Fall, that movie made Ishtar look good.

Now, I haven't heard an Ishtar reference in a while.

That was...

One of the most common punchlines for stand-up comics for about five years After the movie was released, which was when? 84, 5, 6? I think I was in 7th grade.

That dude just brought us back to the mid-80s.

That's great.

Picking on Ishtar.

And yeah, so can you talk about the performance and sort of what she captures in these two particular actors and what they are doing in it?

Yeah, so she later made Ishtar, which was this famous fiasco financially and critically.

And I have kind of an alternate idea about why that movie didn't work as well as it could have.

I mean, it's apparently a fine movie, and it's been kind of resuscitated of late.

Those are descendants of Stanislavski.

And method actors aren't improvisers.

So she would do 15 takes the same way she did on Mikey and Nikki in Ishtar, and they would just do it the same way because that was the way they had prepared to do it.

Balk and Cassavetes worked under a different acting model, and they didn't make decisions ahead of time.

Yeah.

And Worst Picture that year went to Leonard Part Six, the Bill Cosby spy comedy over Ishtar, which is famously one of the biggest turkeys in Hollywood history.

Yeah, I'm a little surprised.

And frankly,

I can't speak to it.

Nobody

remembers Leonard Part Six, but people still use Ishtar as like code for big out of control flop.

It's pithier to say Ishtar than most other things.

a movie that is in rights limbo now for years.

And, you know, Elaine May, I think made or directed four movies, three masterpieces and Ishtar.

And it's really hard to pick a favorite Elaine May movie, but Heartbreak Kid, I think is the one that I keep coming back to.

I actually, it's not really reflected much in my choices today, but I, I really like romantic comedies and I guess I also like what would later become kind of cringe comedies and Heartbreak Kid is a very good example of an early version of this.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

And she got, you know, really one, you know, with Ishtar.

But like this is a case where I would say look at all of her films.

Exactly.

The breaking point arrived in 1987 with the release of the film Ishtar, starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman.

Oh, Ishtar.

Legendary flop.

It was a massive, highly publicized critical and commercial disaster.

No, they couldn't.

They realized their core competency was consistency, not gambling on art.

So in 1989, two years after the Ishtar debacle, Coca-Cola spun off the entertainment division and sold Columbia Pictures to the Tokyo-based Sony Corporation for $3 billion.