7. David Lynch
Goodwill Built On: Eraserhead, The Elephant ManGoodwill Squandered On: Dune After a long and storied career of bringing audiences off-kilter mind-bending fare, savvy moviegoers know to what to expect from the master of the macabre David Lynch. This was not the case in 1984. Lynch's cult oddity, Eraserhead, brought him to the attention of Mel Brooks' production company Brooksfilm, whose executive producer, Stuart Cornfeld, tapped Lynch to direct The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man won Lynch mainstream success, garnering 8 Academy Award Nominations including best director and screenplay nominations for the now-famous director. Without the benefit of seeing Lynch's later, more artistic films, in the wake of his success, Hollywood saw the breakout filmmaker as a potential commercial commodity. Even box office kingpin George Lucas thought Lynch had the talent to spin blockbuster gold and approached him to direct the third entry in the original Star Wars Trilogy, Return of the Jedi. Although Lynch declined, the opportunity to direct another big budget scifi epic soon presented itself: an adaptation of the beloved scifi novel Dune. Dune proved to be a legendary debacle and a blight on Lynch's filmography. Critics dogpiled on the bizarre feature and audiences gave it a chilly reception making Dune an underperformer at the box office. Lynch tried to distance himself from the disaster as much as possible, going so far as to replace his name with that of Alan Smithee (a pseudonym directors use when they wish not to receive onscreen credit for their work) on one of Dune's three cuts. The wily Lynch had an ace up his sleeve though; Lynch's contract for Dune also stipulated he would get to make another picture for producer Dino De Laurentiis, the 1986 triumph Blue Velvet.