10 Genre Directors Who Stepped Out Of Their Field (And Failed)
3. Roland Emmerich Stopped Blowing Things Up To Focus On A Real Crisis
Prior to Roland Emmerich, disaster spectacles were handled under the guidance of producer Irwin Allen, who pumped out hits like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
Allen died in 1991, just one year before Emmerich made his first American film, Universal Soldier. But he wouldn't take Allen's place as the Master of Disaster until Independence Day in 1996.
And while Emmerich's films are the worst examples of Hollywood excess in the 90s, he has put the considerable resources he made to good use, donating $150,000 to the Legacy Project's campaign to preserve gay and lesbian films and working to get stunt performers to receive Academy Award recognition.
He even slips in mild propaganda in his mainstream work, like including a gay character in Independence Day: Resurgence without making it a plot point.
But his one deeply personal film turned out to be his biggest failure. In 2013, Emmerich talked about making a "little movie" about the Stonewall riots. The 1969 eruptions between police and members of New York's LGBT community is seen as one of the major breaking points in the movement.
So it's bizarre that a vocally out director would take such a monument and use it in such a trifling way. That was the general consensus walking out of Stonewall, Emmerich's fictional coming-of-age movie.
That it seemed to lack any focus on the event, the history or depict any minorities led to the film's ten percent Rotten Tomatoes rating.