The Hollywood Hall of Shame

by Harry Medved

HOLLYWOOD'S MOST FABULOUS FIASCOS

Welcome to the first titillating tour of a new museum, devoted to the most expensive mistakes in movie history, guided by those world-renowned bad-film aficionados -- the Brothers Medved.

Lavishly illustrated in glorious black and white, The Hollywood Hall of Shame celebrates motion pictures that have failed on so grand a scale that they have earned their own sort of immortality. In addition to such flops as Cleopatra, Darling Lili, and Heaven's Gate, visitors to the Hollywood Hall of Shame will discover bizarre losers like:

* Hello Everybody, a lavish musical featuring the romantic exploits of the singing, dancing, 212-pound Kate Smith;

* Kolberg, a 1944 Nazi extravaganza about the Napoleonic Wars starring 187,000 Wehrmacht soldiers as battlefield extras, and personally supervised by Dr. Joseph Goebbels;

* Doctor Doolittle, the dilemma-ridden Rex Harrison disaster in which even the ducks almost drowned;

* Underwater!, a Howard Hughes-Jane Russell seagoing stinker that premiered at the bottom of a swimming pool to a group of skeptical critics wearing diving equipment.

These and other "overstuffed" turkeys are displayed in exhibition areas, which include fascinating information on how the films were made, the inside story of what went wrong during production, and explanations of why they failed at the box office. In the colorful corridors of this museum you will meet such dreamers and schemers as William Randolph Hearst, Marlene Dietrich, D.W. Griffith, Liberace, Elizabeth Taylor, Benito Mussolini, Julie Andrews, Warren Beatty, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and many, many others. There is also a basement collection describing over two hundred bona fide bomberinos for the confirmed connoisseur of cinemediocrity.

So come find your way through Harry and Michael's hilarious Hall of Shame, and fondly remember those grand, doomed gestures Hollywood would prefer to forget.

Genres: Film, Media Tie In, Nonfiction, Humor

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Lee Battersby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good clean fun for the most part, this semi-affectionate skewering of some of film history's most pompous, pampered and deluded film projects makes for delightful reading for the dedicated fan of schadenfreude. With sections devoted to children's movies, musicals, obsessive tycoons, dictators, and a place of honour for serial turkey Goddess Elizabeth Taylor, there's something here to tickle the palate of all comers.

The only sour note is struck by the occasional bout of comedy racism of the "so solly" variety, which mars the general tone of popcorn superiority. Get past it, and you'll thrill to the sound of money being torn up and flushed, over and over again.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sibling critics Harry and Michael Medved, innovaters of the famed Golden Turkey awards, have culled together some of the most colossal stinkers the film industry has ever seen. I say 'the film industry' because not all of these monsters came from Hollywood. From D. W. Griffith's legendary mish-mash 'Intolerance' to Michael Cimino's snore-fest 'Heaven's Gate', you're constantly enthralled by the amount of money poured in and the lack of cohesion and substance that comes out. Chapters include a nod to WWII dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who tried to show off their countries' pride and wound up undermining their own war efforts. There's even a section devoted to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder what the hell they were thinking.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the subject matter is interesting, the Medved brothers are loathsome lowlifes who at their best talk down to their material like a couple of adolescent creeps. At their worst, when talking about foreigners or homosexuals, they are condescending bullies. Avoid their garbage.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice overview of the travails of film making. I always find it interesting to see if how many of these type of so-called disaters I actual like...

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read this last instalment in the Medved 'bad film' series not long after its release in 1984, and it was a great addition to that body of work. However it may be argued that it is not as meritorious as either of the first two entries in the series ('The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time' and 'The Golden Turkey Awards') as the Medved schtick and their exploitation of bad film history is getting a little tired.

When reading this book perhaps the most important consideration to take into account is the Medveds were researching and writing at a time that was still barely into the video age, let alone our current YouTube/Netflix/Blu-Ray era, where bad movies can be accessed in all forms at any time. Also, this specific book with its focus on big budget flops was written in an era when $50 million epics were rare. Movies with $200-$300 million budgets were unthought of. Thus when one reads about films such as 'Heaven's Gate' or 'Inchon' the failures don't sound so bad in today's context. It's hard to extrapolate disasters like 'Cleopatra' or 'Intolerance' in today's money.

Also, due to the age of the book some significant stinkers are missing (e.g. 'Ishtar', 'Waterworld') which does limit the value of the work. On the other hand, because the Medveds have greater proximity to and interest in older films they do a brilliant job of giving attention to some movies that would be almost totally unknown to modern audiences. Cases in point include the Italian 'Quo Vadis' and the Nazi epic 'Kolberg'.

There are some minor problems with the facts recorded in the book, and at times the writing embodies some rather crude humour, however these are minor quibbles. However 'The Hollywood Hall of Shame' is a valuable contribution to film history literature, and especially to the rotten movie sub-genre.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've recounted my one encounter with Michael Medved elsewhere. Here he and his brother Harry walk us through the Three Mile Island type bad movies that make us wretch, by way of nominations. Category: Worst Movie Financed by a Fascist Dictator: The nominees are 1. KOLBERG, by Adolf Hitler, script approval, Joseph Goebbels. 2. SCIPIO AFRICANUS by Benito Mussolini and 3. CARAVANS by the Shah of Iran. Or, how about, The Worst Bee Movie of All Time: 1. INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS. 2.THE SWARM. Stick around for the last big Golden Turkey Contest, Worst Actor of All Time (the winner is not who you'd think it would be) and Worst Actress of All Time (It's who you think it would be).

[Muzzlehatch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before Michael Medved matured into a right-wing idealogue and his brother Harry into obscurity, they wrote a series of books on "bad" films and "flops", of which this was the last. A listing of the contents can easily be found so I won't bother repeating them; suffice it to say that the book concentrates on mostly large-scale spectacles that cost significant amounts of money but failed to recoup at the box-office. The films are almost entirely Hollywood products, though there are a couple of "Fascist follies" made by Italy and Germany during the WWII era, and some of the later films might better be characterized as international co-productions. The style is breezy in its recounting of the various mishaps, poor luck, incompetence and hubris that overtook all of these films in some way or other, typically ensuring poor box office before they ever reached the screen - as an example, PAINT YOUR WAGON (1969) suffered from being made at a time when the American movie musical was really in eclipse, being shot on location and having elaborate sets that all had to be built from scratch as they would all be destroyed at the film's climax, and starring three leads (Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin and Jean Seberg) who couldn't sing! How the film, and many of the others described herein ever got off the ground is mindboggling to consider.

One aspect of the book that I find irritating is the equation here of "flop" with "bad film". D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1916) was by the time this book was published (1984) widely considered a masterpiece - though you'd never know it from the Medveds' snarky text; and Michael Cimino's HEAVEN'S GATE (1981) had it's share of admirers as well. Sure, the majority of these films aren't any great shakes cinematically, but neither are they all deserving of the scorn they get from these quarters - call them flops if you must, but don't deny that sometimes good films just aren't successful. The brothers' take on conflating flop and crap has unfortunately become all too commonplace 25 years later, when box office is touted ever more loudly and even blockbusters that make large amounts of money and get many award nominations are considered "disasters" if they underperform their highly-calculated expectations even slightly.

Still all in all this is a fun book, and it doesn't have a huge amount of competition. Nicely illustrated (in black and white), it's worth having for the hard-core movie buff simply for the many truly obscure films which the brothers cover.

[FranklinTV · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant - - could read it forever - - wonderfully written, Probably the best of the Golden Turkey books in terms of reading, as each movie is looked at in some detail.

[janie love · Rating 3 out of 5]

not bad