Apocalypse on the Set: Nine Disastrous Film Productions

by Ben Taylor

James Cameron made demands of his actors during the shooting of The Abyss that resulted in near-breakdowns, but his actors were at least free to walk off set, unlike Shin Sang-Ok who was kidnapped by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and ordered to make movies, one of which was the giant-monster film Pulgasari. This book tells the story of nine notorious productions from the jinxed filming of Apocalypse Now to the infamous box office flop Heaven's Gate.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Media Tie In

Hardcover

First published April 14, 2011

Reviews

[Dan]

fine

[Terry Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overview of nine films that suffered through disastrous production and/or directing schedules(as well as proving to be financial money pits). If you are a film fan, there won't be a lot of new information here for you - nor does Taylor go into great depths such as books like OUTRAGEOUS CONDUCT (on the "Twilight Zone: The Movie" tragedy) or THE DEVIL'S CANDY ("The Bonfire of the Vanities" fiasco). I did find it to be an entertaining read, and learned things about Kim Jong il's attempts to become a movie producer that are almost impossible to believe. To wit, he kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok and actress Choi Eun-Hee and held them in North Korea for almost a decade before they finally escaped. Now THERE'S a movie about the late dictator I'd be interested in seeing ....

[El_kiablo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is probably perfect for a middle schooler who is just starting to get into movies because it picks some of the most infamous examples of out-of-control productions, then details their problems in short chapters written in straight forward prose. But for actual cinephiles this is a waste of time because so much of the material Taylor covers is very basic -does anyone need a refresher course on why Heaven's Gate was a disaster? - and his bloodless narration doesn't really do much to convey the insanity and intensity of the stories he's telling. You'd be better off just watching Hearts of Darkness and the Burden of Dreams because those recap those stories in much greater detail and have the added benefit of being films, which is always a plus for a cinephile.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Continuing my further investigation of the perils of filmmaking, thus book articulates some of the worst situations to ever befall a film set. A lot of these stories were familiar to me but neither The Twilight Zone or Baron Munchausen disasters had ever been quite so elucidated. How John Landis ever got work after Twilight Zone is astounding in retrospect. Revisiting the story of The Crow filled me with a similar sadness to that I felt at the time of the accident.

Unfortunately, this book is poorly written and organized and could’ve used both a re-write and a severe edit.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

It might be niche but it's entertaining as all hell. For other lovers of gigantic movie making fuck-ups, I highly recommend the documentaries:
Lost in La Mancha, 2002, about Terry Gilliam's failed dream to bring Don Quixote to life.
And
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau, 2014, about a movie that got made but not without it's trials and tribulations (which, trust me, get pretty crazy).

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just gonna toss a big word in here to fancy it up now and then

[Brendan Carr · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's like reading a bunch of Wikipedia pages. I would suggest skipping this one.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely worth readings if only for the Fitzcarraldo and the Pulgasari chapters.

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm fascinated by how projects turn into disasters. It's even more fascinating when creativity is involved, as creativity is one of the ultimate wildcards. It's interesting when a disastrous project results in a disastrous movie, but even more so when the movie turns out to be a cinema classic. For most of the films featured here, however, that was not their destiny.

Taylor obviously researched this well, and he is a copious footnoter, which I appreciate. The prose can be a bit dry, and occasionally overwrought ("The process of making movies continues to exact an enormous toll on the health, finances and psyche of all involved." I mean, yes it can but also as a co-worker once told me, "Calm down, man! You need to drink some cool water!") He does also make a few, small factual flubs here and there--the story about The Conqueror cast and crew developing cancer en masse because of the location shooting near nuclear test grounds is disputed, Bruce Lee did not literally die on the set of Game of Death. His chapter intros are occasionally strained. For instance, I don't think it's really fair to compare Michael Cimino's laborious attention to set detail on Heaven's Gate with the building projects of assassinated Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu! Finally, while there aren't that many, there are some noticeable grammatical flubs. My favorite: "Michael and his father- armed with a gun-repelled from the helicopter." It appears this book was published by a small press which probably had a limited budget for the editing and polish a larger house could have provided.

Having said all that, this was a fun read. If you are into film history, I do recommend this. Even though I had heard some of these stories, I hadn't heard all of the details. The chapter on Apocalypse Now owes an obvious debt to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, but it was still fresh and interesting. I recently listened to an episode of the very excellent podcast You Must Remember This about the making of The Crow, one of the more tragic stories in this book, but the detail about the capricious ballistics of prop bullets was new.

The nine productions featured are as follows:

1.) Twilight Zone: The Movie
2.) Heaven's Gate (inevitable)
3.) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
4.) Apocalypse Now
5.) Fitzcarraldo
6.)Pulgasari (this true story about Kim Jong Il's bizarre kidnapping and essential enslavement of a South Korean director and star will almost definitely be the most unfamiliar to readers. By the way, you can find this insane flick, the North Korean version of Godzilla--seriously-- on the YouTubes, with English subtitles even.)
7.) The Crow
8.) The Abyss
9.) Waterworld (also inevitable)

[Stephen Lavington · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great idea, but the execution is somewhat unsatisfying. The concept is attractive, in avoiding mundane hatchet jobs on bad movies, in favour of a study of those films whose productions were more... troubled.

This is applied in a gratifyingly expansive way, sweeping up famed bombs (Heaven's Gate, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Waterworld), accounts of tragic accidents on set (Twilight Zone: The Movie, The Crow), and accounts of directorial hubris (Apocalypse Now, The Abyss, Waterworld and Heaven's Gate(again)).

There are also a couple of wildcards, the chapter on Pulgasari discusses North Korean tiny tinpot Kim Il Sung's contribution to the monster movie genre (including the alleged kidnap of South Korean director Shin Sang-ok) while one on Fitzcarraldo is less about the Sisyphean vision of Werner Herzog and more about his volcanic relationship with Klaus Kinski.

There is good stuff in here - The Twilight Zone chapter is a chilling and uncompromising indictment of John Landis' megalomania and the story of the making of Apocalypse Now never gets boring (though this chapter mainly prompted me to add Eleanor Coppola's contemporaneous diary to my Amazon wishlist).

However, there are weak spots - there isn't much more to say about the death of Brandon Lee than it was a tragic mix-up (and, in fairness, Taylor is quick to shoot down suggestions of a curse on Lee and/or the film itself) while the Fitzcarraldo chapter seemed included more as an excuse for some some, admittedly good, material on the, admittedly fascinating, Herzog / Kinski love/hate affair - I came away with the nagging feeling that the author had not seen the film.

The biggest challenge faced by this book is length. The chapters are a selection of short vignettes, and while these keep the book breezy and attention focused, this means that the reader can never fully appreciate what, in most of these cases, sound like exhausting tests of endurance. Aside from the sudden, terrible tragedies of the Crow and Twilight Zone the majority of these apocalypses were slow burn. We never really feel what it was like to be trapped in a production - in the Philippines, the South American rainforest, or Hawaii - while problems and costs spiral out of control.

Perhaps as a result as this, the end result is a little underwhelming: there is no sense of a common theme, save perhaps that sometimes there is bad luck, sometimes there are bad (or misguided) people and that one (or both) of these factors can (perhaps unsurprisingly) wreak havoc with the finely balanced conjunction of commercial capitalism, technical and technological feat, and collaborative art-form that is modern filmmaking.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Nice, quick read. Not particularly well-written, and lacking any editorialising or dry observational humour which could have made it fun. Told very straight, almost thesis-like.

The best thing Taylor does with this book, however, is to preface each chapter with a real-world example of the type of ambition, ego, and hubris exhibited by each the film productions featured within. I loved reading about La Theatre Grand Guignol, Sealand, the Ryugyong Hotel, and especially Nicolae Ceausescu's Grand Palace.

This stuff actually stood out for me MORE than many of the stories of the disastrous film productions.

But the film stuff - the CORE of the book - IS fascinating for film fans, particularly anyone interested in the challenges or balancing the creative and production processes.

Many of the anecdotes I was aware of, but most of the detail I was not.

My favourite was the Pulgasari chapter - the story about the making of a movie is so fascinating in itself that it is surely due for a "true story" treatment, a-la Argo, one day.

Trust me, it will happen.

I only hope it is more successful than some of these apocalyptic productions...

[David Ward · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apocalypse on the Set: Nine Disastrous Film Productions by Ben Taylor (Overlook Duckworth 2012)(791.4309) is a series of stories about the making of several films that resulted in tragedy or were completed only with great difficulty. Two of the choices were completely predicable based on actors' deaths while filming ("Twilight Zone: The Movie" and "The Crow"). The author won points from me for including "Apocalypse Now" as one choice, but the rest of the movies chosen were just problematic for one reason or another in the filming and production. I found only one of the author's nine movie choices interesting. My rating: 3/10, finished 5/13/12.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I had already read about quite of the few films in this book, Taylor still brought some fresh insight into his examination. It seemed fair and balanced. He went out of his way to stress the immense complexity of filmmaking and didn't play the blame game. Most of the productions were plagued by a series of misfortunes--some self-generated, many external, most with bad timing. This wasn't dry at all. Taylor's voice is engaging and I really liked how he wove other stories (of vanity, of neglect, of bad luck, of passionate dreamers and inventors and madmen) into each chapter. It was a good read.

[Doran Barton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Taylor's tome summarizing the disasters that plagued the production of nine films that eventually went on to completion is well written and fascinating. Each chapter plucks a similar story from human history, whether it be the famous falsifying escapades of Stephen Glass who plagerized for The New Republic as a prelude to the spectacular mess that was the making of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen or executed Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu's building of what would become known as the Palace of the Parliament, a sprawling thousand-room palace as an introduction to Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate film.

[Roland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a nice, quick read on nine famous troubled film productions. I was surprised by how the book starts, as each chapter describes unrelated historical stories that have similar themes to each production. If you're impatient these can be easily skipped, as none of them shed any light on the productions themselves. Not surprisingly, the author of this book is a contributer to the DamnInteresting website, which explains these diversions.

[Christopher Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable behind-the-scenes views of 9, mostly familiar movies. Reading through this exposee of the reasons behind disastrous financial overruns; hugely extended timelines; disregard for safety; the clash of personalities; strange actors, producers, directors and studio executives, we get a comprehensive view of the "art" (read: business) o modern movie making. Of the 9 films here, the most interesting chapter had to do with the North Korean film "Pulgasari" (it's on YouTube in its entirety).

[Drew Raley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Web-sourced rehash of many oft-retold production stories. Author fails to draw out deeper themes about the films, despite opening each chapter with very strained analogies. Reads as nine very long blog posts bound together without much thought, and author's desultory style is disheartening. A missed opportunity.

[m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting examination of nine films that suffered from either on-set tragedies or tough shoots and is definitely worth a read if you are interested in films and the process of film making.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's gossip and hearsay but it's a fine sunday afternoon read with a beer and nuts. Twilight Zone and The Crow remain tragic, the other chapters have less emotional heft but are fascinating nonetheless. if anything, the chapters could have been longer and more peopled

[Laura]

Just an FYI: this books ISBN is really for a book entitled
"Apocalypse on the Set: Nine Disastrous Film Productions" by Ben Taylor

[Sean Kavanagh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of 9 mini stories about 9 difficult films. Some of this is new info, most is familiar, but it's a breezy - if shallow - read for film buffs.

[Franco · Rating 3 out of 5]

For movie people.

[Narzack · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few too many editing errors, but a neat read.

[Yvis Cannavale]

Really enjoyed reading all the behind scenes mayhem.