12 Things That Were Really To Blame For Hollywood's Biggest F*ck Ups

2. The Palestine Liberation Front Hijacked Ishtar

Heaven's Gate is synonymous with the huge Hollywood f*ck up, but at least time has been relatively kind to Michael Cimino's flawed historical Western, with modern critics re-evaluating it and discovering a near-classic when removed from the gossip and hearsay of the time. Ishtar is another one of those films that acts as a stand-in for €œmovie disaster€, albeit one that nobody has ever gone back to and tried to hold up as a lost classic. Nobody likes Ishtar. Nobody liked it at the time, and nobody likes it now. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where this big-budget comedy first went wrong €“ was it casting Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty against type, with the former as the straight man and the latter as the comic relief? Was is the premise, with the pair playing hapless lounge singers who somehow stumble into a four-party Cold War standoff? Is it just that the script was dreadfully unfunny? Was it director Elaine May's Cimino-esque demands? Once again, conventional wisdom states it was D €“ all of the above. The film is, in the words of Roger Ebert, €œtruly dreadful€. May frequently clashed on-set with Beatty, who was also the film's producer, over creative differences. Then a change in studio management during post-production messed things up more. The real culprit for why Ishtar turned out as such a dreadful mess is actually a little less obvious €“ it's the Palestine Liberation Front. May had insisted Ishtar actually be filmed on location in Morocco which, considering the high political tensions in North Africa at the time, was a terrible idea. The week shooting began Israeli warplanes had bombed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters and, seven days later, the Palestine Liberation Front responded by hijacking a cruise ship, executing an elderly Jewish-American man. There were rumours that Hoffman might be in the PLF's sights, too, which €“ along with the Moroccan military ongoing fights against guerrillas at the time meaning locations had to be checked for land mines before shooting €“ probably didn't make for the best set. Certainly not the most relaxed. Everyone involved was probably more concerned with not dying than making a decent film. Understandably.