Hollywood was in a bind. It appeared that the big studios had lost touch with their audience and they were desperate to figure out how to get people back in to theaters. While this may sound like a description of Hollywood today, we’re actually referring to the late 1960′s, when big budget epic pictures and musicals no longer packed in the crowds.
At a time of much unrest, it appeared that Hollywood was totally out of touch with what the young people wanted to watch. With millions of dollars at stake, the bigger studios couldn’t take too many risks. However, they needed to do something to remain relevant and to show others that they were ‘with it’. Enter the independent filmmakers. They were taking advantage of their smaller budgets and lower overhead to produce movies that took risks. These movies were made by and for the counter culture generation and were wild successes. Hollywood saw this and realized that content they had previously deemed too risky could actually make money.
Enter the era of big budget counter culture films. Keeping in mind how out of it the big Hollywood execs were to begin with, you can imagine what these films were like. And one of the worst of the bunch was Myra Breckinridge.
Myra Breckinridge followed the formula that the big studios used when making the types of films that they thought would appeal to the young people-
1. Round up and hire any Hollywood legend willing to sacrifice his or her dignity for a paycheck.
2. Put together a script that is supposed to be ‘hip’ and ‘today’, but more closely resembles something an out of touch middle aged screenwriter thinks is ‘hip’ and ‘today’.
3. Run out and find a hip director who knows what the kids find so popular these days. You know you’ve found him if he’s got a shaggy head of hair and looks like a hippie.
4. Make the Hollywood legends further denigrate themselves by giving them embarrassing things to do.
5. Watch a couple of those independent films and make a note of the outrageous things you see happening. Then, ignore the larger context of what the filmmaker was trying to say and just insert these things into your film because they’re outrageous.
There are two classic examples of this formula being used by clueless Hollywood execs. One of which was the forgotten disaster Skidoo, a film that featured the likes of Carol Channing and Jackie Gleason dropping acid and end credits that were sung instead of just printed. (You read that right, they were sung.) This embarrassment was so bad that the film has rarely seen the light of day and (as far as I know) was never even given a legitimate videocassette release. It finally received a DVD release, but it probably had more to do with the economic downturn and its effects on the producer's heirs than a desire to release it due to popular demand.
The other classic example came from the Twentieth Century Fox lot. Still stung by the massive disaster that was Cleopatra and other expensive missteps, Fox was in desperate need of a relatively low cost hit. (The company had already had to sell off vast parts of its storied backlot in order to stay afloat.) They decided that they needed a picture that would bring in the young people, so they instantly set about putting together a ‘today’ picture. First, they bought the movie rights for a book that seemed ‘today’ and ‘with it’, the counter-culture transvestite Gore Vidal novel, Myra Breckinridge.
Fox then went out and found themselves a shaggy haired director by the name of Michael Sarne to direct their ‘today’ picture and coaxed Hollywood legends Mae West and John Huston to take part in the travesty. Falling pinup idol Raquel Welch played the titular Myra Breckinridge, while the relatively unknown Rex Reed played Myron Breckinridge, who was the pre-op Myra. (How they figured that anyone would believe that any plastic surgeon was skilled enough to turn this dog of a Myron into the supersexy Myra is anyone’s guess.)
Problems began literally from the beginning; Mae West and Raquel Welch did not get along and wouldn’t work together, (Scenes featuring the two had to be shot on separate days.) Michael Sarne was obviously in over his head, wasting large amounts of time and money to film even the smallest of scenes. Clueless Fox executives would visit the set to see where all the money they were spending was actually going, justifying the movie’s problems by assuring themselves that this was the ‘today’ picture they needed to pull themselves out of their slump. After the movie had gone completely over budget, Fox finally pulled its checkbook out of Mr. Sarne’s hand and ordered him to use whatever footage he already had to cut together the movie, and thus Myra Breckinridge was ready to be unleashed upon the world. <Click Here for a thorough recap of the movie at the excellent site “The Agony Booth”.>
So what was wrong with Myra Breckinridge? Well, let’s begin with the stars. While Mae West was indeed quite a sexy woman in her time, there is a difference between spouting filthy double entendres when one is young and when one is in one’s seventies. John Huston’s constant references to giving women “The Buck Loner Special” are even more icky. To paraphrase Mystery Science Theater 3000- Grandma and Grandpa, no! Even worse was the decision to cast Rex Reed as the male alter ego of Raquel Welch, for obvious reasons. Raquel herself allegedly commented that she thought they planned to have her dress like a man when “Myra” was “Myron”. Unfortunately, nobody left this production with their dignity intact.
Another obvious problem with Myra Breckinridge was that it seems that the film’s producers and director equated “tastelessness” with “hipness”. While I’ve never read the book, I must say that this film seems like it might have just pulled the tawdry parts out of the novel and plopped them into the film with little or no context and merely to be ‘hip’ and ‘today’.
As might be expected, Myra Breckinridge was a colossal failure, putting Fox deeper in debt. The failure of this film was proof positive that merely throwing together controversial elements to make money rather than a coherent statement won’t result in a guaranteed hit.
