Author James Robert Parish Takes a Hit at Hollywood Flops
by Andre Soares
"In selecting the 15 Hollywood box-office catastrophes presented within this volume, I was guided by several factors. First of all, I wanted to present the backstories of prodigiously expensive movies whose tortuous paths from start to finish and subsequent infamy were especially representative of the Hollywood system at the time of production. From among many likely entries I picked extremely colorful and contrasting candidates that well demonstrate how the combination of ill-matched personalities and tangled situations can result in chaos during the making of a must-succeed, extremely costly Hollywood feature. In each instance I sought to pick the most vivid example that explored the big question, ‘"How in the hell did this picture ever get made?"
That’s author James Robert Parish - a personal friend - in the introduction to his latest tome, Fiasco : A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops (Wiley, 2005). Among the mega-bombs dissected in the book are the 1963 version of Cleopatra, the 1986 Madonna-Sean Penn disaster Shanghai Surprise and Peter Chelsom’s 2001 comedy Town & Country, starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn, among others.
James Robert Parish answers five questions about Fiasco.
Chicago Film Critics Association 2005 nominations
Hollywood Foreign Press Association 2005 Golden Globe Award nominations
List of the Broadcast Film Critics Association Critics’ Choice Awards 2005 nominees
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