So, I’m five paragraphs in and it’s finally time to stop assuming you know anything about the amazing and wonderful film entitled Ishtar. It was released in 1987 amid a fair degree of suspicion and unrealistic expectations. Everyone in the film business knew that this movie’s budget was over $40,000,000. That’s a lot of money. But in the late 1980s, that was an INSANE amount of money – especially for a silly comedy. Part of the reason the budget was so large was Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. There were other factors, like shooting in a foreign land while accommodating the whims of those same stars. The motivations that lead to Ishtar (in hindsight) make what happened with the film seem obvious. Beatty and Hoffman felt indebted to Elaine May for key work she had recently done on two incredibly successful films they had benefited from – Heaven Can Wait for Beatty and Tootsie for Hoffman. Fashioned after the classic “Road to…” films with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, set in the Middle East, Elaine May throws in the twist that Hoffman is the cool character of the duo, not Beatty. At the time, Beatty was the coolest of the cool out of Hollywood. This fundamental schtick baked into the DNA of the film is what I enjoy immensely; I believe that this ongoing joke works well.

The many stories of why each of these famous people bought into doing this film in the way they did are many and worth digging up via your own research. Just one example of the strange twists that created the Ishtar fabric is that Coca-Cola, which was Columbia’s parent company at the time, had money in Morocco that was stuck there. Because they had funding that they couldn’t legally repatriate, they greenlit shooting the film in the actual Sahara Desert – something that is super expensive and would regularly never be allowed. But they did.

Beyond the bizarre agendas and expectations that led to this film, the process of actually shooting the film led to a whole additional set of crazy stories that evolved into the lore surrounding Ishtar. Leveling a square mile of the desert to make it flat, dodging actual kidnapping plots of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), rare camels being eaten, Kubrick-level of takes, and the need to sweep sets for landmines before shooting are all things that sound crazy, but evidently happened while making the film.

By the time post-production began, there had been enough stories circulating behind-the-scenes within the industry that the project was referred to as The Road to Ruin. It wasn’t just the crazy stories associated with shooting in a tense foreign land. It was also the fundamental truths that seem pure clichè, like the lead female character was Beatty’s actual girlfriend at the time. Isabelle Adjani, a French singer and actress, pulled her weight, delivering a solid performance that helps set a “believable tone,” albeit within a farcical plot, but she still was there because of her boyfriend, Beatty. The “needs” of the principals definitely looked like overly-privileged egos demanding their ways that often butted heads with other egos and further inflated the costs.

Beyond the ugly side of producing Ishtar, what ends up on the screen is not too far from the original silly, buddy film comedy vision. Within this romp, there are two aspects that are worth highlighting. First, Charles Grodin does a fantastic job in his role of a U.S. government operative within a volatile ridiculous geopolitical scenario. What parts of this film that work best are glued together with how he plays this part. Second, possibly the best part of the film are the songs these two bumbling song-writers have written and performed throughout the film. Paul Williams is quoted as “The real task was to write songs that were believably bad. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve never had more fun on a picture, but I’ve never worked harder.” His hard work and award-winning skill of writing excellent songs paid off with fantastically horrible songs that are true earworms. Williams crafted 11 of the tunes, and with the help of May, Beatty, Hoffman, and others, there are close to 30 different songs in this movie’s truly uniquely awful and wonderful soundtrack.

Over the years, others have emerged as fans of this film in the face of ridicule. At some point, I realized that I was not alone in my general admiration of the film. After a number of years of false starts, a fan-funded documentary film, Waiting for Ishtar: A Love Letter to the Most Misunderstood Movie of All Time was released in 2017. Indicative of the torment the film received over the years, The Far Side once captioned a clip of a video store’s entire stock made up of copies of Ishtar with “Hell’s Video Store.” Gary Larson later confessed that once he actually watched the film years later, he was stunned to realize it was actually funny and entertaining. Probably the best glimpse into the phenomenon is summed up in the director’s quote when May stated, “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today.”

In the end, I will concede that Ishtar does not represent what makes a good movie; the number of ways it failed is not trivial. And yet, it happened; I’m grateful that it did. Watching Ishtar takes me to a fictional place, and tells a fantastic tale with actors I enjoy watching navigate the journey. The storyline of the film and the making of the film are both tragic and hilarious. The plot’s humor lampoons our ability to take ourselves way too seriously sometimes, while simultaneously documenting how absurd circumstances and oddly unaligned agendas can occasionally elevate lesser talented people into the spotlight. Likewise, in real life, there are systems in our world with inertia, power, and funding. Those systems produce things.

For most of the things we humans create, they at least sounded like a good idea at the time. And in those rare occasions when we find someone willing to pay for these “great ideas,” those ideas are forged into reality. History is full of creations that proved to be less awesome than originally thought. And so it goes. Personally, I love the fact that Hollywood produced Ishtar. I don’t really care that they “lost their shirt” while I got a laugh out of it in more ways than one. If you’ll join me in looking at this cinematic project from this macro perspective, maybe more people will agree with me and deem Ishtar a great film!