Should Directors Avoid Making Their Dream Films?
From Greed to Megalopolis: a look at four classic passion projects that went astray
Throughout the history of Hollywood, there have basically been three different kinds of film directors: those who are happy working within the studio system; those who work within the studio system but try to insert their own themes and concerns into commercial films; and those who refuse to work within the studio system and are totally independent.
A few of the major directors working in the last two categories have tried to nurture their long cherished passion projects from a concept to a completed film, only to witness their dream films fail in one way or another.
The latest examples of this are Kevin Costner’s western epic, Horizon, and more recently, Francis Ford Coppola’s decades in the making film, Megalopolis. After spending over 100 million dollars of their own money on each project, both directors saw their latest films open this year to mostly lukewarm/bad reviews and bomb at the box office.
In time, maybe Horizon and Megalopolis will be re-evaluated by critics and find their audience. Or, perhaps both of these movies will just remain fascinating curios; films that might have been great if only they had been made in a different way.
But what is it that makes a director spend years (or even decades) developing a passion project, often financing it themselves, only to see it fail both critically and commercially?
Obsession.
Once a director latches onto a story for a film that they believe is important or speaks to them in some way, they become obsessed with it and nothing will stop them from getting their film made.
Yet, it’s often what happens after their dream projects are finished that results in disaster for these passion projects.
An early example of this is what happened to the great silent movie director, Erich Von Stroheim, and his dream project, Greed.
In his early days as a struggling actor and director, Stroheim became obsessed with the Frank Norris’ novel, McTeague, after reading the book for the first time in a skid row boarding house.
The novel tells the story of McTeague, a slow-witted but strong dentist who meets a young woman named Trina one day in San Francisco. After they’re married, Trina wins the lottery. However, the money she won sets off a series of unfortunate events. First, McTeague and Trina’s marriage falls apart as she becomes more and more miserly with her money. Then McTeague begins to drink heavily and eventually murders Trina. He flees to Death Valley where he’s caught by his former friend, Marcus. They fight and McTeague kills Marcus only to discover that Marcus has handcuffed them together. Alone in the desert with no water, the story ends with McTeague handcuffed to Marcus’s corpse.
A few years after he first read McTeague, Stroheim established himself as a major film director and convinced the Goldwyn studio to buy the rights to the novel so he could film it.
By this time, Stroheim already had a reputation for going over budget, which was largely due to his obsession with realism and detail.
For the film version of McTeague, now retitled Greed, Stroheim’s obsessiveness took on new dimensions. Stroheim took his cast and crew to San Francisco and shot on many of the actual locations featured in the novel. This was of unheard of at the time.
For the climatic sequence in Death Valley, Stroheim forced his cast and crew to go to the actual Death Valley desert for two months and endure temperatures of over 161 degrees. Not surprisingly, many of the cast and crew became seriously ill.
However, while Greed was in production, Goldwyn Studios became part of a merger with two other studios in 1924 that created a new Hollywood studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The president of the new studio was Louis B. Mayer and his right hand man was the legendary producer, Irving Thalberg, who Stroheim had clashed with before on his earlier films, Foolish Wives and Merry Go Round.
While the merger was happening, Stroheim and his editors were locked inside an editing booth cutting Greed. The result was a nine hour film that has been hailed as a masterpiece by the few people who were able to see it.
Later, Stroheim reduced the running time to somewhere between four and five hours and wanted MGM to release it in two parts. Mayer refused. He eventually took the film away from Stroheim and had the film re-edited down to 140 minutes.
The studio’s version of Greed destroyed many of the elements of the original film, including entire subplots and characters. New title cards unrelated to the source novel were created to hide the gaps in the story.
Although the studio heads at MGM ruined Stroheim’s masterpiece, Greed received many great reviews by critics at the time. Despite the raves, Greed bombed at the box office and was pulled from theaters.
As for the original nine hour version of the film, Thalberg ordered the print burned since it was filmed on silver nitrate stock in order to recover the silver content from it.
For years, film scholars and fans have held hope that somehow, somewhere, a copy of the original nine hour version of Greed will be discovered.
Of course, this hasn’t happened (but we can still hope it may someday). In 1999, TCM financed a digital reconstruction of the original version of the movie, using still photos from the set to fill in the missing footage. This was broadcast on the channel to great acclaim in December of that year.
After it was televised on TCM, the reconstructed version of Greed was briefly available on VHS but quickly went out of print. Also, during the 1990s, the original unrestored version of Greed was available on VHS and laserdisc but both of those are now out of print too.
Stroheim never recovered from the ordeal of seeing his masterpiece ruined and was resentful of it for the rest of his life.
Today, Greed remains one of the most powerful dramatic silent films ever made.
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the release of Stroheim’s truncated masterpiece. Yet, there are no plans to reissue Greed to theaters, and no plans to release a 4k/blu-ray of the film on home video either.
Sadly, unless they are dedicated film aficionados, most people today don’t even know the film exists.
Another director obsessed by the opportunity to make his dream film was the French auteur, Jacques Tati. He was famous for the character he created and portrayed, Monsieur Hulot, in his films.
Yet, by 1964, Tati had grown tired of his well-known comic creation and wanted to stretch the boundaries of cinema by making a film that wouldn’t have a traditional story or script. Instead, Tati envisioned a film that would be about everybody. The film would be called Playtime.
In order to bring his cinematic vision to life, Tati built an entire city on the outskirts of Paris that included office buildings, paved roads, streetlights, and working water and electricity. The elaborate set even included an airport. Soon, the outdoor city set became known as “Tativille.”
Playtime is about Tati’s contempt for the urbanization of France at the time. It follows Monsieur Hulot as he visits a sleek, modernized Paris over the course of a day. In order to bring Playtime to the screen, Tati financed the entire production himself. Filming began in 1964 and took three years to complete. It was even shot in 70mm and stereophonic sound.
At the time of its release in 1967, Playtime was the most expensive French film ever made (and the most expensive French film ever entirely financed by its director).
Upon completion, Playtime received rave reviews from critics. However, the movie only received a limited release in France.
Totally original, Playtime isn’t like any other movie because it has no plot and only a handful of words are spoken over the film’s running time of 2 hours and 35 minutes. It challenges all of the established rules of cinema.
Similar to a silent film, Playtime is a movie you need to watch closely in order to get all of the sight gags; some of them are so subtle viewers may not notice them until a second or third viewing.
Unfortunately, in 1967, audiences stayed away and the few people who did see Playtime hated it.
Because of the poor box office receipts for his film, Tati was forced into bankruptcy. He lost his home, all of his money, and had to sign away the rights to all of his other movies.
Now, 50 years later, Playtime is still a remarkable film.
Although Dennis Hopper began his career in Hollywood as an actor in the late 1950s, his dream was to become a film director. Thanks to the youth movement of the 1960s, Hopper got his chance with Easy Rider, which was released in 1969 and became an unexpected hit. The movie cost less than $400,000 to make and grossed over 60 million dollars.
Almost overnight, Dennis Hopper became the hottest director in Hollywood.
For his follow-up film, Hopper wanted to make a revisionist western titled, The Last Movie. Hopper got the idea for the movie while filming his role in the John Wayne classic, The Sons of Katie Elder. That film was shot in Durango, Mexico. There, crews of carpenters built an entire western town for the movie. While filming his scenes, Hopper began to wonder what would happen to the elaborate sets after the movie wrapped and the sets were left behind. This was the genesis for The Last Movie.
According to Hopper, the film is about a stuntman named Kansas, who is part of a film crew in a lousy western being made in Mexico. After the production wraps, Kansas stays behind in the town because he wants to settle down in a little adobe hut. Soon, Kansas becomes taken over by phony dreams of building a big tourist hotel, an airport, and even a ski run, even though it never snows there. Kansas doesn’t realize he’s living out a myth, nailing himself to a cross of gold. But the Indians realize it. They build a camera out of junk and reenact the movie as a religious rite.
At the time, Hopper promised the ending would be “far-out.”
Financed by Universal Studios, who wanted to get into the youth market after seeing the cost/gross ratio of Easy Rider, Hopper’s film was originally going to be shot in Mexico. However, after the Mexican government made it clear that a censor would be placed on the set at all times and that the production would not be allowed to show depictions of poverty or shoeless Mexicans, Hopper chose to film The Last Movie in Peru instead.
Moving the production to South America ran up the costs of almost everything connected to the film. Soon, Hopper realized there was not enough money in the production budget to film the script as it was originally written. Rather than give up, Hopper decided to throw out the script and improvise the entire film instead.
Although the production was a somewhat chaotic drug and alcohol fueled experience, Hopper was still able to shoot the film on schedule and under budget.
Yet, after the production wrapped, Hopper and his producer were told by the Peruvian government that they had 24 hours to leave the country or they would be arrested. They immediately flew back to the states.
After returning home, Hopper decided to edit the 48 hours of raw footage he had shot in Peru at his ranch in New Mexico.
This was a major mistake because while Hopper was trying to edit, he became distracted by the constant stream of visitors to the ranch. Amidst the partying, everyone gave notes and Hopper took them all.
In October of 1970, Hopper promised to screen a cut of the film for the studio executives at Universal. That didn’t happen. Then Hopper married Michelle Phillips (one of the cast members of the movie). The marriage lasted 7 days.
Months went by and the film still wasn’t finished. In fact, Hopper didn’t finish editing the movie until 18 months later.
At some point during the year and a half of editing, Hopper made the fateful decision to recut the film so it wasn’t in linear order. This resulted in changes to the entire structure of the film: the end became the beginning, the middle became the ending, and so on.
Was this decision a major blunder? That depends on the viewer, but it did result in a finished product that was more experimental and difficult for audiences to understand.
The final cut of The Last Movie was 108 minutes long. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August of 1971. Although the film screened in a non-competitive section of the festival, it still won the critic’s award. In addition, there was so much interest in the film during the festival that an additional screening was added.
In its review, The New York Times gave The Last Movie a positive notice, calling it “a second film of marked originality and frequent brilliance.”
But after the festival ended, a screening for Universal executives, including studio president Jules Stein and production chief, Ned Tanen, resulted in catastrophe.
While The Last Movie unspooled for the studio execs, the projectionist in the booth began making disparaging comments about both the film and Hopper’s directing ability, by saying things like, “This will be his last movie for sure.” Things got so bad that Hopper eventually leapt up from his seat in the screening room, ran back to the projection booth, and attacked the man. Hopper and the projectionist had to be physically separated and the screening was stopped.
The studio execs only saw the first part of the film. They hated it.
The Last Movie opened on September 29th, 1971, at the same New York theater where Easy Rider had played a few years earlier. It’s opening broke box office records. Then the reviews came in - all of them negative.
Universal told Hopper to re-edit the movie in a linear manner. Hopper refused.
Afterwards, Hollywood blacklisted Hopper as a director.
In fact, Hopper’s directing career never recovered from The Last Movie. He didn’t direct another movie until nine years later in 1980 (Out Of The Blue) and would only direct four more commercially oriented films a decade later in the 1990s.
After its New York opening, The Last Movie played a few dates throughout the U.S. (mostly at drive-ins) and then disappeared. It remained unseen for almost half a century until the film was restored and re-released to theaters in 2018 (eight years after Hopper’s death in 2018).
Now, in 2024, while watching The Last Movie on blu-ray, the film no longer feels too abstract. The movie’s non-linear structure allows for an open interpretation of the story which appeals to many viewers like me who were raised on films like 2001 and Pulp Fiction.
In short, The Last Movie is a beautiful and compelling film that deserves to be seen.
When Orson Welles began writing the script for his dream project, The Other Side of The Wind, in the mid-1960s, he probably had no idea just how difficult it was going to be to get the film completed.
Welles intended this project to be his directing comeback after a haphazard career filled with battles with studio heads on films like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, MacBeth, and Touch of Evil.
Because he had difficulty getting financing from the studios and demanded complete control over his projects, Welles became the first true independent filmmaker in America. He partly financed his projects by providing voice over narration to movies and documentaries. In addition, Welles found additional ways to make money for his films by occasionally acting in movies and appearing in wine commercials.
The result was a mix of original movies that took years to complete but were still brilliant, such as Othello, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, and F for Fake.
The Other Side of the Wind came from an idea Welles had in 1961 after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. It eventually evolved into a story about an aging Hollywood director named Jake Hannaford as he hosts a screening party for his unfinished latest film.
By the end of the sixties, Welles had already written four different versions of the script. It was intended to be a satire of the end of classic Hollywood, avant-garde European filmmakers, and the rising young directors of “New Hollywood.” But once filming got underway, Welles decided to throw out the script and have all the actors improvise their lines instead (just like Dennis Hopper and The Last Movie).
The film began production in August of 1970 with second unit photography since Welles had not yet cast the lead role of Jake Hannaford. Eventually, that role went to veteran actor/director, John Huston. The rest of the cast included Welles’ partner and muse, Oja Kodar, director Peter Bogdanovich, and many famous Hollywood actors, journalists, and celebrities who portrayed the guests at Hannaford’s party.
It took six years of on-again off-again filming to complete the principal photography because Welles would frequently run out of money during the production. When this happened, Welles would have to halt filming in order to accept various acting and/or voice-over gigs to earn more money for the film.
Huston didn’t join the cast as the lead, Jake Hannaford, until 1974. For the scenes filmed before his involvement, Welles filmed the other side of the conversation. Huston’s side was filmed later and edited into the earlier footage.
By the time principal photography was completed in 1976, Welles had shot 96 hours of raw footage.
By 1979, he had edited 40 minutes of the film. But later that year, legal and financial complications developed that no one could have foreseen.
This was because the majority of financing for the film came from Mehdi Boushehri, the brother in law of the Shah of Iran. After the Shah was overthrown in 1979, the new Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeni, had the film impounded along with all the assets of the previous regime.
This meant that the original negative for The Other Side of The Wind was locked up in a vault in Paris. Eventually, the Iranian government determined the film negative was worthless, but legal battles over the film’s ownership went on for decades.
When Orson Welles died in 1985, The Other Side of The Wind remained unfinished.
Three years later, in 1988, everything looked like it was resolved and the cable network, Showtime, invested a significant amount of money into the project with the intention of broadcasting it on their cable channel once the movie was completed.
But then legal complications between the Welles estate and Welles’ surviving partner, Oja Kodar, resulted in the Showtime deal being suspended.
Because Welles’ daughter, Beatrice, who was in charge of her father’s estate, and Oja Kodar, Welles’ former partner, didn’t get along, legal battles and one-upmanship prevented other potential deals to finish the film from happening.
These legal battles weren’t resolved until 2014.
Then, two years later, in 2016, Netflix made a deal for the exclusive distribution rights to The Other Side of The Wind and invested five million dollars so the film could be completed.
Edited by a team led by director Peter Bogdanovich, The Other Side of The Wind premiered at the 75th Venice International Film Festival in 2018.
By that point, the film had been in production for 48 years.
In fact, The Other Side of the Wind still holds the record for the longest production period of any movie ever made.
Ironically, by the time of the film’s premiere, almost everyone involved in making The Other Side of the Wind had died, including writer/director, Orson Welles, leading man, John Huston, and most of the cast and crew.
The finished film received rave reviews from critics all over the world.
After a very brief theatrical run, The Other Side of The Wind debuted on Netflix in November of that year. Currently, the finished/reconstructed film of The Other Side of The Wind can only be seen on that streaming channel. The movie has never been released on home video or made available for digital downloads.
To me, The Other Side of The Wind is a fascinating but disjointed film.
But has it really been completed the way Orson Welles would have wanted it?
Perhaps Welles’ dream project should have been left unfinished, so it only existed today as a cinematic myth.
Of course, there are other more recent examples of directors’ dream films that encountered severe problems during their production and theatrical release. These include Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
And now, in 2024, we have Kevin Costner’s Horizon, the first part of an intended four film western epic, and Francis Ford Coppola’s decades in the making Megalopolis. As stated earlier, both of these films have received lukewarm/bad reviews (although recently The New York Times did give Megalopolis a positive review) and both films have bombed at the box office.
So, the question remains: should today’s filmmakers even attempt to make their dream films?
Yes, I believe they should. However, directors who are willing to go against the system and spend their own money in order to finance their films need to understand the risks involved before they take the plunge.
Yet, even after knowing the risks (and the past experiences of the directors discussed above), chances are once current (and future) directors become obsessed with their passion projects, they’ll never turn back. Like Costner and Coppola, these obsessed directors won’t hesitate to spend their life’s savings in order to get their films made.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
After all, films are like dreams. And if we don’t have directors willing to risk it all to put their dreams on celluloid for us, then what are we going to be left with?
…Sequels?
I would return to my suggestion from your note of the influence of the dream being suppressed when directors give up. I still think about Kubrick's "Napoleon." Would we ever have gotten "Barry Lyndon" had the film not been conceived to be made at some point . . . A dream film fuels the direction of the filmmaker/writer/director, in my view.
I wouldn't say "films are LIKE dreams," Jim, for films ARE exactly that: dreams we can all see and experience collectively.
And without dreamers, there wouldn't be art. And without art, we wouldn't—couldn't—be. Would be? Could be?
I think the real question here is, what would we be without dreamers and their dreams?