The Box-Office Flop Is Becoming a Thing of the Past
In Box Office Poison, Tim Robey looks for lessons in a century of Hollywood failures.
Illustration: Ohni Lisle
It is undeniably humanizing, even satisfying, to read about Hollywood executives and household-name directors screwing up. Why did D.W. Griffith think eight hours was the right length for a feature film? Who decided it was a good idea for a $75 million romcom to have a title no one could pronounce (“Gigli”)? Why did David Lynch need 20,000 extras for the Mexico City shoot of Dune (and why were they paid in shoes)?
But British film critic Tim Robey insists that his new book, Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops (HarperCollins, Nov. 5), is motivated by more than just rubbernecking or schadenfreude. Flops, he argues, are “durably interesting artefacts” that can tell us something about the eras in which they were made — about early conflicts between art and commerce, about our relationship with new technologies and our shifting appetites for reality and escapism.