Cutthroat Island (1995)
Written by Michael Frost Beckner & James Gorman and Raynold Gideon & Bruce Evans and Susan Shilliday (uncredited) and Robert King and Marc Norman
Directed by Renny Harlin
Produced by Carolco Pictures/ Forge/ Laurence Mark Productions
Running time: 119 minutes

Synopsis
In the waters surrounding Jamaica of 1668, pirate Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) - daughter of buccaneer Black Harry Adams (Harris Yulin) - escapes the latest attempt by authorities to capture her. Rowing out to rejoin her father aboard his ship the Morning Star, Morgan discovers her uncle, the nefarious Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), has commandeered the vessel and forced Black Harry onto the edge of the plank. Dawg seeks Black Harry’s fragment of a treasure map their father divided and left each of his three sons. Morgan’s efforts to rescue her father come up short, but before he dies, Black Harry reveals to her the location of his piece of the map: his scalp.

Morgan assumes command of the Morning Star and sails to Port Royal, where she seeks a Latin translator to decipher the clues on her dead father’s scalp. Meanwhile, pickpocket William Shaw (Matthew Modine) is arrested trying to lift jewels from polite society and is sold into slavery. Morgan rescues him from the auction block as naval authorities led by Governor Ainless (Patrick Malahide) fire on them. The crew of the Morning Star locates Morgan’s other uncle and obtaining the second map fragment – which Shaw discovers inside a barrel of moray eels – narrow the location of the family fortune to Cutthroat Island. A typhoon, double crosses, sword duels, a naval battle and a monkey complete the tale.

Production history
In the late 1980s, producer Jon Peters optioned a book by John Carlova titled Mistress of the Seas. It was based on the incredible true life adventures of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, 18th century women who disguised themselves as pirates to take to the high seas, where they became intimate with their captain, “Calico” Jack Rackham. By the summer of 1993, Peters had enlisted Paul Verhoeven to direct the torrid tale. Entertainment Weekly quoted an unnamed source as saying, “What he had in mind was a sex film that, oh, by the way, had a couple of ships in it.” Geena Davis and Harrison Ford were interested, but Columbia Pictures – wary of a big budget sex film – pressed Verhoeven to focus on a conventional love triangle between two male buccaneers and Anne Bonny. Davis reluctantly dropped out and Mistress of the Seas never made it out of the harbor.

In the estimation of Mario Kassar – owner of Carolco Pictures - Columbia’s interest in pirates legitimized a rival swashbuckling script he had in his pocket titled Cutthroat Island. Written by Michael Frost Beckner & James Gorman, the project was one of two lavish period action pictures Kassar intended to produce. The other was the highly anticipated Crusade, with Arnold Schwarzenegger signed to play a knight carrying Christ’s cross back to Rome (with Paul Verhoeven navigating the journey). Carolco had spared no expense producing lavish fare from Total Recall to Chaplin, The Doors to Basic Instinct, many of them hits, but by the end of 1994, the company was $43 million in debt. Kassar made the decision to cancel Crusade – writing off $13 million in pre-production costs – and bet the fate of Carolco on Cutthroat Island.

Renny Harlin – director of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger – committed to Carolco’s pirate movie, and after a rewrite by Raynold Gideon & Bruce Evans, Michael Douglas accepted a $13 million offer to star as William Shaw, a gambler who falls into servitude to pay off a debt. Geena Davis – who had recently married Harlin – was not a fan of the script, but once Douglas came aboard, she agreed to play Morgan Adams, a bookkeeper who seduces Shaw into the company of her fellow pirates. While Douglas was finishing Disclosure in Seattle, Harlin and Davis brought in screenwriter Susan Shilliday to bolster the female lead. Douglas got a look at the changes and was not happy with what he saw. “They had a hard time searching for who Shaw was. I just was not comfortable with the part. The combination of not seeing it on the page and not knowing where it would go. I was feeling uncomfortable, and I wanted out.”

Geena Davis would later refute the notion that Michael Douglas got cold feet because a leading lady was upstaging him, but admitted that once the star dropped out, Cutthroat Island should have folded. “I, of course, assumed the whole project would be canceled. It was all based on Michael Douglas’s being in it. To my horror, I learned not only would they not cancel, but that I had a legal obligation to go ahead, unlike Michael. I tried desperately to get out of this movie.” A senior executive at Carolco later told the New York Times, “We knew that if we shut it down it was certain Chapter 11. If we made the film, there was at least some chance we could survive. It was a classic case of going forward when you have no other choice.”

Budgeted at $65 million, Cutthroat Island was set to film on the Mediterranean isle of Malta. A crew had been assembled and as of the spring of 1994 was on location building sets. As of July, Harlin was still in Los Angeles searching for someone to replace Michael Douglas. Jeff Bridges, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Keanu Reeves, Ralph Fiennes, Kurt Russell, Michael Keaton and even Charlie Sheen were offered the part. All passed. In a memo intended to pump up his crew, Harlin wrote, “When the casting concerns have been resolved and I arrive in Malta, I want to see the most spectacular and eye-popping sets, the most interesting and unusual props, and especially weapons and special effects that leave the audience gasping in awe and stunts that no one thought possible before. No sequence or setting that you’ve seen in movies before is good enough. Any idea that has been previously used has to be reinvented and cranked up 10 times.”

The casting merry go round stopped at Matthew Modine when the wholesome actor accepted the role of Shaw. Though Modine’s fee was a $12 million savings over Michael Douglas, screenwriter Robert King had to be brought in to reconfigure Cutthroat Island in one month as a vehicle for Geena Davis. Six weeks before principal photography was to begin, Harlin arrived on location. Production delays had spiked the budget to $80 million and the script was still considered unworkable. Script doctor Marc Norman was added to the payroll at a cost of $800,000. His job entailed being rousted at 1 am, driven to the set and using a legal pad to write whatever scene was being filmed that morning. Norman recalled, “I was the guy in Malta stuck with trying to make that work. I did get paid well. But it was really hell.”

By the time Cutthroat Island commenced filming October 1994, the film’s balance sheet included some 2,000 costumes, 309 firearms, 620 swords, 250 daggers and at least 100 axes. Several dozen horses needed for a carriage chase had to be flown from Hungary with their grooms at double the cost due to EU regulations that prohibited the transport of animals in boats. Two full sized pirate ships were constructed at a cost of $1 million each, one of which caught fire during filming, forcing production to shut down for three days. Wrapping second unit photography off the coast of Thailand in March 1995, Harlin was confident he could meet a release date of July 4. The director confided to Variety’s Army Archerd: “The smartest thing I ever did was to go to the tank in Malta. All the complicated stuff was controlled. I can’t image doing it on the ocean where you can’t control waves, winds, currents. It would have been impossible.”

Deciding the film was not ready, Carolco pushed Cutthroat Island back to December. MGM/UA – intending to spend $30 million to distribute and market the picture – downgraded to $18 million as the release date neared. Once critics weighed in, word of mouth went from dismal to worse. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “So Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction.” Desson Thomson, the Washington Post: “It takes a two-hour act of will to keep facing the screen during this moribund movie. Every cliffhanger is enough to make you a cliff jumper.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Younger teen audiences might be carried away by the escapades up to a point, but there is little flair or grace on display, as the sheer effort of capturing the tumultuous doings on camera is all too apparent. No one in the film seems to be having much fun, and the effect is contagious.”

The cost of producing, marketing and distributing the film totaled $115 million. Its box office take was $10 million in the United States, $4 million overseas, grosses which officially made Cutthroat Island the biggest commercial disaster in movie history, the first film to lose $100 million. Carolco – which filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection a month before the film was even in theaters - lost about $47 million in the debacle. The rest of the loss was divided among the overseas distributors Kassar had pre-sold the film to: Pioneer Electronic Corporation of Japan, Canal Plus of France and Rizzoli Editore of Italy. The I.R.S. was at the front of the line to collect $15 million in unpaid taxes, claiming that Carolco concealed profits through its tangled deals with overseas corporations.

In an interview with IGN FilmForce in 2001 - three years after he had filed for divorce from Geena Davis - Renny Harlin offered his post mortem on Cutthroat Island. “We had an essential flaw, which maybe wouldn’t be such a problem today, but in those days, a female heroine in sort-of a young boy’s fantasy action movie just didn’t gel. Certainly the movie has flaws, but on the other hand, it has some pretty big production values and pretty fun action sequences that I think - in the right atmosphere with the right marketing and so on - could have turned out much better. At the same time, you have to realize that you can’t succeed every time and - even with the best intentions - we make mistakes and things don’t work out so great.”

Opinion
While Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World would engage audiences with its character pathos and historical detail – and the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks would at least offer up buckets of intense audience appreciation – Cutthroat Island is like a Mad Lib filled out by a mental defect who can’t get enough pirates in his life. Every single cliché of the swashbuckling genre is on display here – a monkey, a plank, a peg leg and a treasure map appear within the first 10 minutes – but what’s missing is even one scene that rises to the spectacular edict laid down by director Renny Harlin to his crew. Instead of reinventing and cranking up the genre by ten times, it doesn’t even feel like anybody bothered to wake up and hit the fucking snooze bar.

The only aspect of Cutthroat Island handled with any feeling of conviction are the explosions, which is what the movie lives and dies by. Though Geena Davis would go on to be a semifinalist for the women’s Olympic archery team in 1999, it’s painful to watch how disinterested she is at being an action hero. The wry, brainy and at times very sexy ingénue is just about laughable as a pirate. Her chemistry with Matthew Modine is non-existent, the action choreography clumsy and the seven writers who drew a paycheck seem to relish their work like it was slave labor. The location scouts and visual effects technicians earned their lunch money at least, while the high throttled musical score by John Debney probably has more fans than this wreck of a movie does.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Debacle on the High Seas”. By James Sternhold. The New York Times, March 31, 1996.
Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops. By James Robert Parish (2006).

Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Written by Michael Cimino
Directed by Michael Cimino
Produced by United Artists
Running time: 219 minutes (original cut)

Synopsis
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of the year 1870 - which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) - assembles in a massive auditorium to hear a speech by their class orator, Billy Irvine (John Hurt). Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals mapped out by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. Twenty years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is now sheriff of Johnson County, mountainous and pristine territory in which more settlers – mostly Polish, German or Ukrainian immigrants – are pouring into every day.

Averill can’t help but notice Casper is teeming with mercenaries. By the time he drops by a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, Averill has learned that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient of the assassins is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County hunting down and executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who manages a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall – Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating - Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion – who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is in love with her – offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay. Three of the killers make their way to Ella’s bordello and rape her. Averill arrives in time to dispatch the men with his pistols, while Champion rides to Canton’s camp and kills the mercenary who planned the raid. After debating the matter, the town chooses to stand their ground and repel the invasion.

Production history
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of – putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines - wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists. “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter – I don’t know how many weeks before it was released – and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film – The Johnson County War – to United Artists. UA’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and was cool to it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the U.S. government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard twenty years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park at Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After twelve days, Heaven’s Gate was ten days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, former United Artists head of worldwide production Steven Bach recounted the expenses that accumulated: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking – and retaking – time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting many, many, many takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing 57 takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of 32 takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current rate, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

United Artists got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about thirty minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges recalls, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalls, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was 5 hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now – which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through – was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered to see his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalls “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate … fails so completely you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalls, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s – I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing – I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate took in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the U.S. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, it hadn’t saved it either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times – whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters - Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino – who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus – had this to say in 1990: “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Opinion
Some still accuse Heaven’s Gate of vaporizing the Golden Age of the director and putting the controls of Hollywood back in the hands of the studio, a process that was under way long before Michael Cimino ever got to Montana. What ultimately matters here is what’s on screen and what isn’t. On that basis, it’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. It has nothing to live up to anymore - making a fresh eyed and open minded reappraisal a win-win situation - but Heaven’s Gate is really that good. For all its excesses, what Cimino does is capture a lyrical beauty virtually missing in filmmaking since the days of David Lean. His film is all at once one of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, terrific performances and haunting grandeur.

The screenplay not only visualizes the Old West in a way I imagine it really was - crowded and sparse, violent and peaceful, ugly and beautiful – but features dialogue of surprising depth and pathos. The cast featured no stars, but Kristofferson, Walken, Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Sam Waterston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Mazur all do outstanding work. Few films recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, assisted by majestic cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a gorgeous musical score by David Mansfield. Unlike so many cinematic turkeys of the last thirty years that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, for all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, for the film lovers in the crowd, there’s never any question of where it was spent.

@ Joe Valdez

Sources
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)
Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

Throughout the month of January, I’ll be opening the books on ten of the biggest box office disasters in Hollywood history. I’m calling this series VIVA DESASTRE!

Which of these turkeys deserved a taxpayer bailout? Which deserved a blindfold, a cigarette and a drum roll? Tune in beginning Thursday, January 1 at 7pm PST to get my take, in that exhaustive, This Distracted Globe style the kids can’t get enough of.

© Joe Valdez

DVD is not for sale. Artwork by Aaron Valdez.

Patricia Clarkson was born December 29, 1959 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father was an administrator for Louisiana State University School of Medicine, her mother Jackie Clarkson a New Orleans city councilwoman and later, state legislator. The youngest of five girls all less than eighteen months apart, Clarkson was thirteen years old when her fuse for performing arts was lit. “I gave a speech in speech class, and my teacher said ‘You know, I think you’re an actress. You should join the drama department.’ And I did! And that was it. I did a play called F.L.I.P.P.E.D.: Feminist Liberation Idealist Party for Permanent Equality and Democracy. The drama teacher was a major feminist. It was 1974 or ’75 and we did this rockin’ play!”

Clarkson attended O. Perry Walker High School, where her classmates included future New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. After spending two years as a speech pathology major at LSU, Clarkson talked her parents into letting her transfer to Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. “They agreed to let me go to New York if I finished my bachelor’s degree. So it was a real stretch for my parents, putting their fifth child through school, and they weren’t rich by any means. We were middle, or upper-middle class, but New York has always been incredibly expensive. So the sacrifices they made to send me there were enormous.” Clarkson graduated summa cum laude with a degree in theater arts in 1982 and was accepted into the graduate program at Yale School of Drama.

In 1985, Clarkson had her Master of Fine Arts and made her New York stage debut in Oliver Oliver. The following year, she was tapped to take over for Julie Haggerty in the Broadway revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. Clarkson found time to audition for a movie role, that of Eliot Ness’ wife in a film version of The Untouchables to be directed by Brian DePalma. “I went in and read for a great old casting director and he said, ‘I think you might be right for this but that dress you have on is too sexy. Come back in something plainer and read for Brian.’ And I did and that was it.” While The Untouchables became a summer blockbuster, roles opposite Clint Eastwood in The Dead Pool and Timothy Hutton in Everybody’s All American did anything but rocket Clarkson to stardom.

Clarkson spent most of the next decade in TV, appearing in Movies of the Week with titles like Legacy of Lies or Caught In The Act. Joining the cast of Steven Bochco’s legal drama Murder One in 1996 was a step up in prestige, even though she played another loyal wife. It took an audition for Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art for Clarkson’s film career to take off. The actress recalls, “I almost didn’t go in. I was like, ‘Oh my God, a German lesbian heroin addict: who would ever buy me as that?’ But I loved the part. High Art changed things because it was such a dramatic departure. Sometimes, you need to shake people up, and High Art definitely, dramatically shook things up.”

At the Sundance Film Festival in January 2003, three movies Clarkson had finished - All the Real Girls, Pieces of April and The Station Agent – were featured in competition, while a fourth (The Baroness and the Pig) screened in World Cinema. The title “Queen of the Indies” – previously held by Parker Posey – was bestowed on Clarkson in the press. Sundance awarded her the Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance, while Clarkson’s work as a terminally ill, acid tongued mom in the comedy Pieces of April garnered nominations for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Broadcast Film Critics Award, SAG Award and Independent Spirit Award. Pieces of April director Peter Hedges stated, “There is a difference between celebrity actress and being a great actress, and Patty is a great actress. There are a couple of directors, and we have made a pact to do whatever it takes to make the world know about her. She is incredible, and I can’t think of anyone more deserving.”

Clarkson has since won an Emmy Award for her recurring role as Lauren Ambrose’s bohemian Aunt Sarah on Six Feet Under, played Blanche DuBois in the 2004 Kennedy Center production of A Streetcar Named Desire and appeared in moves ranging from Good Night and Good Luck to Lars and the Real Girl to Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Asked by Hollywood Interview in March 2008 about blossoming late, Clarkson stated, “There were some movies I passed on early on, and some movies I didn’t get, some big studio films. But now I look back and I realize that I really came later in life to a kind of career. I was somewhat typecast as suburban ‘mom’ type roles early on. But I’ve always had this deep voice, so I think it was tough sometimes for directors to cast me as the ingénue. Because I’d walk in and look a certain way, then open my mouth and have this … voice! So I think I sort of grew into my voice, my face, my body as I got older.”

© Joe Valdez