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This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

Troubled Production

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"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."

"The enemy is a prop that doesn't work. A guest star who can't say the word "soup". Another who can't say the word "phenomenon". Writing the stage direction "Beach in Paradise", and finding yourself on a wet winter day in Rhyl. The enemy is reality, and reality is, unfortunately, everywhere."
— Grant Naylor, Red Dwarf: The Least Worst Scripts

Sometimes, no matter the quality of the work itself, it just takes the creators so much effort and heartbreak to make it that at the end of it all, they can be forgiven for wondering to themselves "Was It Really Worth It?"

These sort of productions tend to range from complete disasters to the slightly more benign ones, but what they always have in common is frayed tempers, patience, screw-ups, delays and breakdowns. Reality Subtext may happen too. Both Protection from Editors and Executive Meddling can exacerbate this phenomenon. Epic Movies are particularly vulnerable to this. This trope always applies to small or start-up studios, due to how little experience the show runners or head businessmen have in running a new one.

Troubled Productions frequently will end up with a final product that:

It should be noted that most works involve some degree of chaos, the natural result of trying to accomplish a creative output with the support staff the size of an army. Some of these productions required some outside leader to push through the insanity and get the work done. Knowing more of how it turned out tends to make people admire the creators even more - hey, look, they went through all this bullshit that would make a normal dude probably give up and still created something great! However you look at it, the insanity behind it tends to contribute to the quality of the finished product, in one way or another. It's exceedingly rare for a troubled production to result in a So Okay, It's Average product.

A few of those overlap with, and may often lead to, Development Hell and Vaporware, which is having trouble on starting the project. Others enter The Shelf of Movie Languishment after being finished. When concerning the music industry this can overlap with Music Is Politics, where the politics of the industry leads to this trope. If a Fortean or allegedly supernatural dimension creeps in, a Troubled Production may escalate into a case of The Production Curse.

See also Movie-Making Mess, the smaller-scale, amateur version of this.

As mentioned, a lot of the examples here tend to be famous for their quality, good or bad.

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