< Troubled Production

Troubled Production/Film

"People question me, like you're questioning me now, say 'Must've been fun making The Wizard of Oz.'
 It was not fun. Like hell it was fun. It was a lot of hard work. It was not fun at all."

—Jack Haley

Multiple Offenders

  • This was a hallmark of most of the films of Orson Welles after Citizen Kane, mostly due to his difficulties in raising funds and sometimes simple crappy luck (a film called The Deep was shelved after star Laurence Harvey died).
    • The Deep would later be remade (and completed) as Dead Calm (which didn't suffer through a troubled production).
  • James Cameron seems to be a lightning rod for this trope.
    • He ended up directing Piranha II: The Spawning after the original director abandoned the project. While filming in Rome, Grand Cayman, and Jamaica, Cameron had to struggle with a crew made up of Italians who didn't speak English and overbearing producer Ovidio Assonitis. At one point he reportedly broke into the Rome editing room to cut his own version of the film, but Assonitis re-cut it again. Still, the two good things were that he got the idea for The Terminator during production and reused some of the models for Aliens later. Lesson learned: if the producer's name is Assonitis, the filming may hit a few snags.
    • Aliens was one of his worse productions and one of the few times when his Jerkass demeanour is kind of understandable. To wit: the English crew thought Cameron was a tyrannical and incompetent substitute for Ridley Scott, and Cameron's workaholism clashed with their regular tea breaks and relaxed attitude towards production. The crew insulted his wife Gale Anne Hurd, implying that she was only getting producer's credit because she was married to him, and he had to contend with a walkout after firing original cinematographer Dick Bush who wouldn't light the alien nest the way he wanted (Bush was a very old school DP, who lit the scenes to his content, while Cameron was a very visually involved director) and was then replaced by Adrian Biddle (who had never DP'ed a feature before). Michael Biehn ended up replacing James Remar as Hicks shortly into production. Unsurprisingly, production wound up behind schedule and the crew had to work at breakneck pace to finish the film in time for its July 1986 release date. This fell particularly hard on James Horner, who had to write the score without access to the film (that was still being filmed and edited) and record it in four days in an outdated studio. In turn, Cameron and editor Ray Lovejoy had to hack it in places to match the film without his input. Horner swore off working with Cameron for the next 11 years.
      • While we're on the topic of Aliens, Alien³ was just as troubled. Before production even started, several scripts were written and several directors were hired (including Renny Harlin and Vincent Ward), but all of them ran into resistance from FOX executives who were unwilling to have a film that didn't feature the Ellen Ripley character. Filming begun with $7 million already spent on sets (including a monastery set built before the setting was changed to a prison - but still kept, as a church inside the facility), and no finished script. David Fincher was brought in late in production, and he was stymied at every turn by executives who attempted to stop him from shooting important scenes. After a disastrous industry screening and test screenings in California (featuring, according to actor Ralph Brown, young teenagers who didn't understand the film at all), scenes had to be filmed months after filming wrapped. And after all that, executives rode in again and recut the film without asking Fincher. Though Fincher never took his name off the film, he's otherwise disowned it and doesn't list it on his resume.
    • The Abyss had 40% of live-action photography take place underwater. It was filmed in two specially constructed tanks in an abandoned nuclear plant in South Carolina, requiring experimental technology and equipment to allow the underwater scenes to be filmed right. Over six months of 6-day 70-hour work weeks ensued, and the production had to be delayed when on the first day the main water tank sprung a leak, requiring dam-repair experts to fix it. And later, the crew were forced to only film at night after a lightning storm tore up the tarpaulin covering the main tank. It's significant that Cameron himself declared this the worst production he was ever involved in. It's the only production where he had to spend most of his time hanging upside down in decompression tanks from filming underwater - he even said he had to review the footage in this position. He also almost drowned Ed Harris through Enforced Method Acting, which resulted in the one and only time an actor has ever actually punched him. Cameron himself nearly drowned during production, too, when his diving suit malfunctionedd while he was weighed down at the bottom of the giant water tank during filming.
    • And It Got Worse for Titanic, the film that cemented his reputation as Hollywood's biggest Jerkass, so much so that the crew claimed he had a psychotic alter ego named "Mij". Apart from terrorizing the film's two lead actors (Kate Winslet suffered bruises so impressive that the makeup artists took photos to use for reference later), driving it insanely over budget and schedule and having to deal with cast members who came down sick from a shitload of hours spent in cold water, Cameron and about 50 other guys fell victim to an almost Deadly Prank when a crew member put PCP in their soup, forcing them to spend a night in hospital. The movie stands as possibly his last completely Off the Rails Production, as he's mellowed out quite a bit since.
      • One of the benefits of shooting Avatar digitally and with a lot of motion-capture and CGI was that it effectively reduced the number of things that could go wrong during the shoot to natural disasters and oversleeping.
  • Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote faced this problem, without anyone in the cast or crew being difficult at all - the production was faced by nothing but disasters, from the weather (as in the Star Wars example, it freakishly rained in a desert location, ruining several days of filming). The actor who played Don Quixote faced several health problems, and was told by doctors to stop filming. In the end, the film stopped production completely, ruining Gilliam's dream project.
    • Gilliam has attempted unsuccessfully to relaunch production several times since 2005. He restarted preliminary work in 2008 with Robert Duvall as Quixote. Depp was still attached to play Grisoni, but because of his tight schedule he had to leave the project and was replaced by Ewan McGregor. In 2010, Gilliam announced that the funding had collapsed.
    • In November 2014, it was reported that Don Quixote was in full pre-production once again, with John Hurt as Quixote and Jack O'Connell as Grisoni. Filming was set to begin in 2016, however it was announced in September 2015 that the film had been suspended again, due to Hurt being diagnosed with cancer shortly before filming.[1] He died in 2017.

By Decade

1920s

1930s

  • The Wizard of Oz. First, changes in both cast (Margaret Hamilton replaced the original Wicked Witch three days before production begun, Tin Man performer Buddy Ebsen quit due to allergic reactions to the make-up) and director (five were used, with credit only to the fourth and responsible for most of the film, Victor Fleming). Then, both filming - which took extended six months and many budget overruns, with incidents such as Hamilton getting burned, and the cast having to work six days a week arriving as early as four or five in the morning to be fitted with makeup and costumes (which were impractical - Hamilton could not eat! - and nearly intolerable due to the heavy lighting required for the Technicolor), not leaving until seven or eight at night - and post-production - three months with many reshoots and complicated effects work, as well as last-minute cuts following a test screening - were chaotic.

1950s

  • The African Queen was shot on location in Africa, a rarity in those days. The results weren't pretty: handling the heavy Technicolor cameras was hard, the cast and crew got sick (Katherine Hepburn had to keep a bucket beside her while filming the piano scene that opens the film so she could vomit between takes; only Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston escaped illness, due to consuming nothing but canned goods and whiskey) and had several close brushes with wild animals and poisonous snakes (specially because Bogart got interested in hunting - which even became a Clint Eastwood movie), the title boat sunk and had to be raised twice, the ship's boiler nearly fell on Hepburn, army ants infestated the set...

1960s

  • Casino Royale 1967. Casino Royale was the only Ian Fleming novel EON Productions failed to secure the rights to due to a bunch of legal issues, and it ended up with Charles Feldman. Unable to get EON onboard and do a straight movie, he turned it into an insane, psychedelic parody of spy films with an All-Star Cast. There were multiple directors, none of them working with a finished script but all working independently, and there were also numerous screenwriters. Peter Sellers argued with Orson Welles, and the former was eventually fired despite playing the lead character. Many of the other actors were brought in to make up for this, many of whom assume the 007 moniker at some point. The editor seemed to be instructed to put the film together in the most disjointed, nonsensical fashion possible. And The Agony Booth has recapped it here.
  • A few movies in the James Bond series had minor cases of it: From Russia with Love had to undergo a Ridiculously-Fast Construction because the producers had already set a release date, and they had to face problems such a boat of cameras sinking into the Bosphorus and a helicopter falling into a lake (with the director inside!) while location scouting; and On Her Majesty's Secret Service had a few stuntmen accidents, and leading man George Lazenby had conflicts with the director and the producers.
  • Jacques Tati envisioned Playtime as his Magnum Opus, and for that the film had to be somewhat more than ordinary. This grand social satire and ode to classic slapstick could not be done on any ordinary set. Rather, it required a set for which two full-size modernistic buildings had to be constructed on the outskirts of Paris, along with several smaller models, a full-size road, and its own working electrical system powered by a small plant. The development of the film would then necessitate numerous script rewrites and continuous maintenance of the set. Filming in itself lasted three years, during which Tati had to take out numerous loans in order to continue production. In order to further accommodate his immense vision, the film was shot on 70mm film and edited for a stereophonic sound setup. These decisions would eventually cause difficulties in finding theatres that could properly screen the film. When the project was finally completed and released in 1967, it flopped pitifully. The official budget has gone unreported, but the failure of Playtime led Tati to file for bankruptcy and pay off the film's debts for the rest of his life. Fortunately the film's reputation has improved since its release and is now considered Tati's masterpiece.
  • Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were constantly at odds with each other, the bikes were stolen (Fonda's declared motivation for his delivery of "We blew it") and Hopper proved to be a Prima Donna Director, eventually leading to the studio sending him on a paid vacation while they recut the film in his absence to a more manageable length (Hopper's original cut was 220 minutes long).
  • Doctor Dolittle. Fox's 1967 family musical was envisioned as a Follow the Leader title in the steps of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music following years of legal battles with Hugh Lofting's family and writing difficulties. Hundreds of animals were trained for the film... in California, making them essentially unusable for location shooting in England and St. Lucia. Said location shoots were disasters, forcing additional studio lot reshoots. Rex Harrison frequently made a nuisance of himself by dismissing the screenwriter, his younger co-stars and the songs, all while suffering with personal issues. Despite initial optimism from producer Arthur Jacobs (who had a heart attack during production), the final budget was considered to be in the then-outrageously high $18 million area. Often cited as a Genre Killer for the family musical, Warner Brothers's Camelot was actually released first. Both opened to a negative critical reception and general lack of interest.
  • Oh, Cleopatra. Where to even begin?
    • After Joan Collins bowed out of the lead role in 1958, Elizabeth Taylor sarcastically offered to take it for a million dollars - and to her surprise, Fox agreed. The weekly costs regarding Taylor ballooned out of control when she became gravely ill with pneumonia during initial shooting at Pinewood Studios in England in 1960, putting a halt to filming for many months, and leading her to be paid over $2 million before any usable footage had been shot. Taylor's illness and the resulting delays led to the resignation of the original director (Rouben Mamoulian) and the actors cast as Caesar (Peter Finch) and Antony (Stephen Boyd).
    • Even leaving aside Taylor's extended sick leave, few things went as planned during the abortive Pinewood shoot. The producers had frequent clashes with the studio's labour unions, the film crew did not realise until after settling on Pinewood as the venue for indoor filming that the ceilings at the studio complex were too low to accommodate the sets as originally planned, and the unexpected number of availables soundstages led to delays in the shoot. The footage shot at Pinewood ended up being discarded as the filming moved to Cinecittà Studios in Rome so the English weather would not impair Taylor's recovery. (The sets were still used by the producers of the Carry On films in 1964's Carry On Cleo.)
    • Production in Italy was just as problematic. The costumes and sets had to be completely re-designed and re-built, leading to a shortage of lumber and other building materials throughout Italy. Millions of dollars' worth of props and other equipment were stolen by studio employees, while a group of female extras went on strike as a result of being constantly groped by lecherous male extras. The constant delays and reshoots in filming the epic-scale scene of Cleopatra's entrance on a barge into Rome (started in October 1961, only ended on March!) required the recasting of Cleopatra's son as the original child actor had grown significantly taller during the delay.
    • When Joseph L. Mankiewicz was brought on board to direct at Taylor's insistence, the film was already nearly a year behind schedule, $5 million over budget, and had not a single frame of usable footage to show for it. The script was only half completed, and Mankiewicz had to write the rest as filming went along, shooting the script as new scenes were written and editing the resulting footage later rather than editing the script first and then shooting the resulting scenes. The demands were so heavy that Mankiewicz required injections to both get through each day and sleep at night.
    • To complicate matters, the film marked the beginning of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's tempestuous relationship and eventual marriage (and subsequent divorce, re-marriage, and re-divorce); as both were still married, the resulting scandal and moral outrage added bad publicity to the already toxic combination of massive delays and cost inflation. However, the affair created enough fascination with the public that Fox decided to assemble a publicity campaign that focused almost entirely on Taylor and Burton, with scant attention at best devoted to Rex Harrison as Caesar.[2]
    • Things didn't improve during post production. Mankiewicz initially planned to assemble two three-hour films, Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, but Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck believed that the public interest in seeing Taylor and Burton on screen together might fade if the second film were released later, while interest in the first film (in which Burton would only appear in a few scenes) would be minimal, so he ordered the films edited into a single four-hour film - requiring more reshoots! Mankiewicz was eventually fired during editing, but had to be re-hired when it became obvious that he was the only person who could make sense of the raw footage.[3]
    • The film finally staggered into cinemas in June 1963, with a final production cost of $44 million (in 2011 dollars, this would be over $300 million) - something Fox knew it would hardly be recovered. Despite critics and audiences reacting badly, the film still had the highest box office take of 1963 and was nominated for ten Oscars (including Best Picture), winning four, but it would not break even until ABC paid $5 million for two television screenings in 1966 (at the time, a record fee for film broadcasting rights). The already financially troubled 20th Century Fox almost went bankrupt, selling parts of its studio lot and needing the successes of films such as The Longest Day[4] in 1962 and The Sound of Music in 1965 to alleviate. Cleopatra also killed interest in the sword and sandal epic genre for nearly a generation, and was a key factor in the disintegration of the old "studio system", as studios passed responsibility for production costs to independent production companies instead of handling said costs themselves.
  • Manos: The Hands of Fate - The movie was made when fertilizer salesman Hal Warren befriended and later made a bet with famous screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a horror film with a low budget. And it shows. The problems included:
    • The camera they used was a 16mm Bell and Howell that not only didn't record sound, but only could record 32 seconds of film. The sound was later dubbed in in post-production by four members of the crew, Hal included. This explains a number of things, including the bad editing, the long pauses and why a few characters, such as Torgo and the little girl, sound horrible.
    • The crew found themselves bemused by how amateur Hal was that they mocked the title of the movie (which was once called "Lodge of Sins") as Mangos: The Cans of Fruit.
    • Tom Neyman created a special rigging to give Torgo the illusion that he was a saytr. However, the actor, John Reynolds, set it up wrong and it damaged his knees so badly that he was reportedly taking medication that would lead to an addiction and later suicide.
    • Instead of the technique of shooting "day for night", Hal opted to film night scenes at night. Thanks to poor lighting, it gave the accidental illusion of the cops getting out of their car to investigate a gunshot, but decide otherwise.
    • The modeling agency that loaned Hal the women to be the Master's wives proved to be a bit of a prima donna, refusing to let the women to be "too skimpy" (that red sash they wear? They were supposed to be tails) and when one of the women broke her leg, Hal was forced to recast her as the other half of the makeout couple that has no real effect to the plot!

1970s

  • Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss basically summed it up as follows: "We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark." The full model mechanical shark sank to the bottom of the ocean on its first day, forcing a team of divers to retrieve it, and all three models frequently malfunctioned due to exposure to salt water. Add to that the occasionally soaked cameras, ruined takes because unwanted sailboats drifted into frame, and that one time the ship began sinking with the actors aboard. While these disasters did force Steven Spielberg to be creative and contributed to the film's success (famously, he only hinted at the shark's presence for most of the film), Jaws still wound up $5 million over budget (that was a lot back in 1974) and behind schedule - what was initially meant to be a 55-day shoot ended up at 159 days. Spielberg even thought he would never work again because of how screwed the thing was!
  • Star Wars (AKA: "Episode IV: A New Hope"). They had the bad luck of starting filming in the Tunisian desert just as it rained. The props and equipment had their obligatory malfunctions and breakdowns. The crew didn't really care about or understand the movie. Lucas clashed with cinematographer Gilbert Taylor and the movie ended up so badly behind schedule the crew had to split into three units and meet deadlines or else face shutdown. Post-production fared little better despite a delayed release date, as Lucas had to call in two editors (including his then-wife, Marcia Lucas) to salvage the movie after his first cut was a complete disaster and ILM was forced to complete a year's work in six months. And did we mention how ILM initially spent half their budget on four shots that turned out to be completely worthless? When the studio asked for a teaser trailer, this was basically slammed together from the footage available at the time.
  • Before the Star Wars films, George Lucas already had troubled production experience after American Graffiti - although the shoot finished on time and on budget, it was no small miracle that it managed to do so:
    • The day before shooting was due to begin, a key crew member was arrested for growing marijuana, and setting the cameras up for location shooting on the first day took so long that they did not start shooting until 2am, putting them half a night behind before a single scene had been shot.
    • After a single night of outdoor filming in San Rafael, the city revoked their filming permit after a local bar owner complained that the road closures were costing him business, forcing them to move filming twenty miles away to Petaluma. On the second night, a local restaurant caught fire, and the noise of the fire engine sirens and the resulting traffic jams made filming impossible.
    • Inevitably for a film featuring so many driving scenes, the cars and equipment required to film them in motion seldom behaved as planned. An assistant cameraman was run over after he fell off the back of the camera truck during filming of a road scene, while filming of the climactic drag race was hampered when one of the cars broke an axle, then broke the replacement axle, and then nearly ran over two cameramen lying in the road to film its approach.
    • Among non-technical problems, Paul LeMat (who played John Milner) had to be rushed to hospital after suffering a walnut allergy flare-up, and Richard Dreyfuss had his forehead gashed after LeMat threw him into a swimming pool the day before his closeups were to be filmed.
    • And when the film was screened for a test audience, Universal Studios representative Ned Tanen told Lucas the film was unreleaseable, prompting an outraged Francis Ford Coppola (the film's producer) to offer to buy the film from Universal and release it himself while Lucas, burned out from the chaotic film shoot, could only watch in shock. Instead, Universal offered a compromise whereby they could suggest modifications to the film before release. It was not until 1978, after the success of Star Wars, that Lucas was able to re-edit and release the film as he originally intended.
  • Superman had a few problems, mainly producer-director clashes (which generally involved the director rejecting the campy, slapstick parts the producers wanted), special effects problems (not that many breakdowns, but a lot of money to make them work), and getting way behind schedule - they filmed both Superman and its sequel simultaneously without much of a clear schedule in the first place. The film was a hit, but the lost profits to the producers over this led to Richard Donner being fired before the second movie was completed and replaced by Richard Lester.
  • The Godfather. On set wasn't as troubled (apart from a delay due to Al Pacino twisting his ankle, and Coppola arguing with the cinematographer). But Coppola's relationship with the Paramount executives was really chaotic - they hated the casting, the lighting, the writing, the music, the length...
  • Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a case so famous that it has its own documentary dedicated to it, Hearts of Darkness. Coppola himself summed it up by saying "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam" and famously explaining that "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." Let's see, where do we start? Filmed in the Philippines and took four years to finish. Marlon Brando was cast as Colonel Kurtz, being his usual prima donna self. President Marcos disrupted production by recalling the military equipment he lent to Coppola to fight against the Communist insurgents in the South; the reason he had to use Philippine military equipment in the first place is because the United States military refused to lend him anything, due to the order to "Kill Colonel Kurtz" (Coppola refused to change it to a Deadly Euphemism). A typhoon in May 1976 combined with constant raining totally ground production to a halt for six weeks. The ending had to be re-written on the fly and the script was frequently discarded for improvisation. Martin Sheen drunkenly cut his hand open shattering a mirror and, in an unrelated incident, later suffered a heart attack. A scene that cost hundreds of thousands to film was thrown out. After a year of actual filming, Coppola took two further years in post-production to deliver the final product. To sum up: Laurence Fishburne lied about his age to get cast as a 17-year old in the movie when he was actually 14. By the time the movie was released, he was actually 17 years old. As if all of the above was not enough, the Philippines had no professional film laboratories at the time, meaning the raw camera negatives had to be shipped to the U.S. to be processed. Coppola never saw a shot on film until after returning to California. The entire movie was shot blind.
  • A whole load of this led to the utter disaster that was Caligula. More info here.
  • 1976's The Blue Bird was a much-ballyhooed family musical, in part because it was the first ever cinematic co-production between the United States and the U.S.S.R. An All-Star Cast of mostly-American actors had the lead roles while respected director George Cukor helmed the project, shooting in Russia. Alas, the Russian studio and crew was far behind the curve of the American talent (they had to replace the cinematographer because he'd never shot a film in color), and leading ladies Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Cicely Tyson all caused unique sets of problems: Taylor fell ill, Fonda wouldn't stop chatting up the crew about politics, and Tyson warred with the director (in part because she couldn't get proper lighting, due to a Caucasian woman serving as her stand-in). Miscellaneous clashes between the Americans and Russians cropped up, James Coco had to drop out of the film when he suffered a gallbladder attack, and it all went well over schedule and budget. The resultant film was so bad that it not only tanked instantly, but has never had an official home video release in the U.S.
    • George Cukor told the Soviet studio head how honored he was to be filming in the same studio where Sergei Eisenstein had filmed The Battleship Potemkin in 1925. "Yes," said the studio head, "and with the very same equipment."
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail. No Budget, the directors clashing with each other, Graham Chapman either getting drunk or suffering from withdrawal on set, getting a location veto shortly before filming began, actors rushing back to the hotel after wrapping for the day in order to bathe...
  • Pretty much any collaboration between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski was guaranteed to be this; most notably Fitzcarraldo, which took the problems of Apocalypse Now and turned them Up to Eleven. Among the many problems with the production was that, instead of using special effects to replicate the feat of towing a huge boat up and over the side of a mountain, Herzog insisted in doing it for real. Numerous serious injuries and at least one death resulted. Aguirre, the Wrath of God was almost as troubled; though not as fatal.
    • Herzog and Kinski's highly tempestuous relationship was chronicled in Herzog's documentary on Kinski -- My Best Fiend (yes, that's spelled correctly). Although the story of Werner forcing Klaus to perform his scenes at the point of a gun is apocryphal, he freely admits they both threatened on numerous occasions to kill each other; and actually attempted it at least once each.
    • And, like Apocalyspe, Fitzcarraldo's trouble production is the subject of its own documentary film, Burden of Dreams. Near the end, Herzog speculates that he should give up filmmaking and go into a mental asylum.
  • Dersu Uzala, due to Akira Kurosawa having to work in the USSR as no Japanese studio wanted to fund him at the time. The resulting studio, Mosfilm, clashed with Kurosawa as his perfectionism did not fit the "deliver a certain amount of shot film per day" the company wanted. Union fights were recurrent, and cameramen were changed every week. There was only one interpreter - to a crew of mostly Russians! To make the tiger attack more realistic, a wild one was used instead of a domesticated animal - and needless to say, it wasn't collaborative. No wonder the film took 3 years to get ready.
  • The Exorcist went over budget and schedule ($4,5 million and 105 days to $12 million and over 200 days plus 6 months of post-production!), and William Friedkin proved to be a Prima Donna Director who didn't care much for the cast and crew (for instance, Ellen Burstyn complained that for the scene Chris is telekinetically thrown against a wall, the stuntmen were pulling her too hard... and Friedkin's response was a take so strong Burstyn injured herself!).To make it worse, there were strange events (such as the interior sets of the MacNeil residence getting burned) that lead people to consider the film cursed.
  • Eraserhead suffered from this - no studio would fund it due to its unusual plot and David Lynch's lack of experience, so he had to rely on funds from the AFI, as well as friends and family. Because of these financial troubles, filming was intermittent - it took five years, and sets had to be repeatedly assembled and disassembled. While its critical reception was initially mixed, the film was praised by several other filmmakers (including, but not limited to Mel Brooks, Stanley Kubrick and John Waters), which kickstarted Lynch's career.
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Paramount knew it had to let Gene Roddenberry produce, because of the godlike Cult of Personality he'd built up among the fans, but it had reservations as he'd never produced a feature film before. Robert Wise hadn't directed a sci-fi film of this scope and was getting old (he refused to shoot for more than 12 hours a day, resulting in the film being behind schedule after just two days). The original special effects house blew the job and had to be replaced by Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra late in the production. Long before principal photography was even finished the production was way over budget, to the point that Paramount executives were keeping a running tab every day. According to Jeff Katzenberg, then the Paramount executive in charge of the production, what finally went out to the theaters the weekend of release was a rough cut—no one at the studio had seen it in its entirety.

1980s

  • The Empire Strikes Back, while having a less brutal production than the first installment, did run into troubles too. New director Irvin Kershner spent a lot more time for takes, which had the film lag behind and producer Gary Kurtz allowed production to go way over budget (triple that of the original in fact). Lucas wanted to keep the film out of any studios hands and financed it himself, but he was forced to take out a loan with 20th Century Fox as his security. The crew arrived in Norway to film the Hoth scenes to be greeted by the worst winter storm in years. And the various locations used, knowing it was a Star Wars film, overcharged the production for their services. This was the reason Kurtz was changed for Return of the Jedi which had the least angsty production of all the original movies, in fact.
    • It can be inferred (and George Lucas has suggested it) that the difficulty with making the movies largely explains his affinity towards Special Editions and ReCuts of his films, as well as his disposition to filming with blue screens. Sound stage work generally makes it easier to control the variables. Also Lucas, despite being one of the most financially successful men in entertainment, finances his movies on his own money and bank loans ever since Empire and it is a big gamble every time.
  • Infamous flop Hudson Hawk gathered bad reaction before its release due to a disastrous production - egos running rampant, constant rewrites, clashes between director and star, you name it.
    • Richard E. Grant dedicated a chapter about the nighmare that was making Hudson Hawk in his book With Nails.
  • Predator had every member of the cast and crew but Arnold Schwarzenegger and director John McTiernan getting Montezuma's Revenge due to unclean hotel water. The shoot was further delayed due to the creature's original design not working well enough and having to be scrapped and replaced.
  • Blade Runner. Ridley Scott's drive for perfection often led to double-digit takes of a single scene, eating up film in the process. This, coupled with his confrontational relationship with the film crew (which at one point had them wearing anti-Scott T-shirts on set), time constraints caused by filming at night and expensive, time-consuming effects shots quickly caused the shoot to run behind schedule and over budget. The final scene was shot literally hours before the producers were due to take creative control away from Scott.
  • Albert Pyun's 1989 Cyborg was actually born out of it rather than suffering from this. The extremely troubled production of Cannon Film's Spider-Man and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe film projects eventually caused both to collapse under their own weight. With $2 million invested already on pre-production and very early production, Pyun was brought to, literally, make something out of both (now) failed projects. After coming up with the story for Cyborg in a single weekend, $500,000, and 24 days of hectic and rushed filming and editing, Cyborg was released and made a little more than $10,0000,000 on the box office, becoming one of Pyun's most commercially successful films and indeed saving Cannon Films from imminent bankruptcy, although they later did go bankrupt.
  • One from the Heart by Francis Ford Coppola was initially meant to be a small $2 million movie after the sheer hell of Apocalypse Now. It wound up ballooning to $25 million due to his insistence on shooting on sound stages exclusively, and failed so badly it led him to declare bankruptcy and spend the rest of his career in The Eighties and The Nineties making movies just to recover the debts he incurred from this.
  • Heavens Gate. Planned budget: $11.6 million. Actually spent money at the end: More than $44 million. To top it all off, it also tanked at the box office, ruining director Michael Cimino's career.
    • The production is the subject of an entire book, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate, by Stephen Bach, one of the former studio executives involved.
  • RoboCop was shot during a very hot summer in Dallas, and when Peter Weller's costume came in late, he could barely move in it, rendering his previous mime training useless. In addition, it ran behind schedule and over budget, actors Kurtwood Smith and Ray Wise stole the crew's golf carts during the shooting of one scene and executives kept trying to interfere with the production while it was still going on.
    • A fair portion of the scheduling delays were caused by difficulties in lighting the Robocop suit properly - originally, they tried to light it as actors were normally lit, which didn't work because the suit reflected too much light. Eventually, they hit on the solution of lighting it like a car.
  • Ishtar. Where to begin? They decided to shoot the desert scenes in Morocco instead of the Southwest because the studio had money in banks there it couldn't repatriate. Filming began in the midst of unrest across the Middle East, adding security costs to the movie (they actually had to have some locations checked for land mines). And no one in Morocco had experience supporting a big-budget studio production, so logistics got really screwy.
    • The lore from this one is great. There was the production assistant who went looking for a blue-eyed camel in the market. Not realizing how rare they were, and that he should have just bought it right then and there, he went looking for another one so he'd have a price to bargain with the first guy. By the time he figured that out, the first guy had eaten the camel. Then, of course, there was the time Elaine May, the director, supposedly suddenly changed her mind about wanting dunes in a scene and instead the production had to spend $75,000 and ten days having a square mile of desert bulldozed flat.
    • May was sick with toothaches most of the time, and spent a lot of time arguing with Warren Beatty, her producer and star. She got pissed at him for constantly taking the side of Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in disputes, and didn't get along much with Isabelle Adjani, the female lead, who also happened to be Beatty's girlfriend at the time. Dustin Hoffman says there were periods when Beatty and May wouldn't talk to each other. Some of the crew said that any other director would have been fired for pulling the attitude she pulled on him. Eventually they compromised by shooting every scene twice, one her way and one his. "This was the kind of film where nobody would say 'Sorry, we can't afford that,'" said the guy in charge of the budget.
    • May liked to shoot lots of film. She supposedly demanded 50 retakes of a scene where some vultures landed next to Beatty and Hoffman. Ultimately she shot 108 hours of raw footage.
    • When they returned from Morocoo to shoot scenes in New York, under union rules, an American cinematographer and crew had to sit around on paid standby for Storaro and his crew. During postproduction, May and Beatty fought frequently in the editing room, and May often left it to Beatty to direct the actors during looping sessions. The joke was (and some people say it was not a joke) that Bert Fields, their mutual agent, was the one with the real final cut on the film.
  • Altered States: Arthur Penn, the original director, quit early on after a dispute with Paddy Chayefsky, who was upset with some of the changes he'd wanted to make. John Dykstra quit as well, and Bran Ferren had to do the special effects on a lower budget (it shows). Once Ken Russell was hired to actually finish the film, he was in a situation where, if he changed so much as one word of the script, he'd've been sued, so he resolved it by having the actors deliver some of the more pretentious dialogue very rapid fire. Chayefsky didn't sue, but was still pissed enough to petition the Writers' Guild to use his given name, Sidney Aaron, in the credits as his pseudonym. The experience of shooting some of the scenes was very trying physically for the actors. Columbia, who had started the film, washed their hands of it and Warner Brothers picked it up. The producer was nonetheless upset that they decided to shove it into the Christmas season rush rather than wait until the spring when he there would be less competition for that kind of film.
  • Tootsie was frequently referred to this way during shooting. Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack feuded so intensely that Hoffman finally resolved it by suggesting Pollack play his agent and get that tension into the actual film. The script was still being rewritten as filming began, and it took Elaine May to come up with Bill Murray's character as a much-needed foil for Michael. In the end, it actually worked out well, becoming one of the best comedies of the 1980s.

1990s

  • The production of the fifth Superman movie definitely qualifies, especially if one considers all the different versions it went through on the road to becoming Superman Returns (which actually had a calm production). The Other Wiki has a very exhaustive listing, but the best-known facet is that later stages were essentially a battle between two sides. On one hand we had writers like Kevin Smith (who wittily recounts his experiences on the project here) who wanted to produce a faithful, respectful treatment of Superman's mythos. On the other we had producer Jon Peters, who said Supes' red-and-blues looked "too faggy", wanted to give Brainiac a robot sidekick described as "a gay R2-D2 with attitude", and demanded that Superman battle a giant robot spider.
  • The 1996 The Island of Doctor Moreau had two directors because dealing with prima donnas Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando (who were both going through bad days: the former, a divorce; the latter, a daughter killing herself) proved too much for Richard Stanley, who left for John Frankenheimer to take over (he faced the two on the same coin: apparently once he replied Kilmer with "I don't give a fuck. Get off my set!"). Co-star David Thewlis had such a terrible time making the film that he skipped the premiere and has vowed to never watch it. The final result shows how bad it was.
  • Waterworld. Budget overrun (from $100 million to the then-record $175 million), director Kevin Reynolds leaving and leading Kevin Costner to further take over the film, a hurricane destroying the sets, stuntmen getting lost or drowned... and Executive Meddling kicked in to order cuts and reshoots.
  • Power Rangers already suffered badly with their series, as an entry below shows... but the movies were worse! Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie was directed by guys who had the pleasure of watching the entire series up until that point "with the wonders of the fast forward button". Amongst many of the movie's problems were the insistence of having the teens' faces exposed in morphed state (which was later vetoed after they realized they they really shouldn't), having to scrap a major training montage with Dulcea due to problems with her actress and having a small time window to film. When that was passed up, Saban was forced to film a few episodes in Australia, where the movie was being made!
    • Turbo a Power Rangers Movie was just as bad. Initially envisioned as a reunion of the original MMPR cast teaming up with the new Turbo team, it fell apart when Walter Jones and Thuy Trang refused to give up their Guild membership cards to film. The explanation of the Turbo powers was dropped when David Yost left near the end of Power Rangers Zeo. The original cut was actually over three hours long and they were forced to trim it down to under two. Beyond all of that, it was no wonder the movie flopped!
  • The movie version of Mystery Science Theater 3000 was rife with problems. The original plan was for them to reveal how Joel got tossed onto the Satellite of Love and built his robot friends - Crow, Tom, Gypsy and Cambot. The executive liked it, but he didn't want the series' main catch - the riffing - to be prominent. This, along with a few other problems, lead to Joel Hodgson to leave the series halfway through Season 5. When the movie idea was picked back up, more problems came about - Universal would only let them use movies that they chose and they were stuck with This Island Earth. They were forced to not only cut out movie scenes - which meant the entirety of the movie was shorter than your normal Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode - but lop one host segment and modify the last one, killing a Brick Joke set up from the very beginning. And the killing blow? The company producing this had the option of fully backing either this or Barb Wire. Guess what they chose? (and considering how high the theater averages were, who knows how much it would have grossed without Invisible Advertising?)

2000s

  • The Pirates of the Caribbean sequels - more specifically, the second. Writing wasn't finished by the time it started, ships had to be built, the small island where it was filmed wasn't ready to receive the huge crew, and Hurricane Wilma devastated the Bahamas set.
  • The 2004 parody remake of The Stepford Wives underwent massive reshoots, script rewrites that created gaping plot holes, John and Joan Cusack pulling out of the film (and Nicole Kidman, who played the main character, considering it after she saw the changes to the script), and fighting on set between director Frank Oz and his stars. It all built to an utterly incoherent final product that bombed at the box office and was savaged by critics.

2010s

  • John Carter: There were reservations at Disney about letting Andrew Stanton direct the film, despite his strong sentimental attachment to the material, because he'd never directed a live-action feature before. But, since he'd made WALL-E and Finding Nemo into hits, they let him do it even though he warned them, "I'm not gonna get it right the first time, I'll tell you that right now." Indeed, the film required extensive double reshoots. Throughout production, he ignored the advice of the crewmembers who were live-action veterans in favor of his Pixar friends, back in their offices. Rich Ross (fired over this) and the other studio executives at Disney likewise had little experience with feature films, since most had come from television.
    • Then, it came time to market the film, which was already handicapped in that department by having no big stars in the cast. A trailer shown at a Disney con did not go over well, and Stanton refused to take any advice from the studio's marketing department. He insisted on using Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in the trailer even after it was pointed out to him that a 30-year-old classic-rock song was not likely to resonate with the younger male audience the film was intended for. The movie also went through last-minute retitling, dropping "Princess" and "Mars" from the title because those were thought to turn off the male and female segments of the youth audience respectively.
  • The 2015 Fantastic Four film, aka Fant4stic, is not only one of the worst films of the decade so far, but also infamous for a tumultuous production on par with the likes of Ishtar. Be it the crass Executive Meddling, the conflicts between director Josh Trask, the cast and the producers, studio executives not having a lot of trust in the movie save for keeping the license in their hands (rather than handing it back to Marvel and Disney), hastily arranged reshoots or a host of various other backroom drama and politics, the film seemed doomed to fail from the start.
  1. ↑ From the Wikipedia article.
  2. ↑ Harrison arguably got the last laugh when he became the only one of the film's three stars to receive an Oscar nomination for his performance.
  3. ↑ Some of the cut footage has been recovered in recent years; the film's fans continue to harbour hope that all of the cut footage may someday be restored and the film released as Mankiewicz originally intended.
  4. ↑ in which Roddy McDowall (who played Octavian in Cleopatra) requested, and received, a small role to alleviate boredom during the endless delays to Cleopatra
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