Trivia / Ishtar

• Box Office Bomb: Famously so. Its budget was $55 million, it only scraped up $14,375,181.
• Creator Killer: The failure of Ishtar killed Elaine May's directing career, though she's still done well as a writer for such films as The Birdcage and Primary Colors, both directed by her former comedy partner Mike Nichols. The film's disappointing performance led to The Coca-Cola Company, who owned Columbia Pictures at the time, spinning off the studio, which would be acquired by Sony in 1989.
• The Danza: Carol Kane as Carol.
• Development Hell / Keep Circulating the Tapes: The closing credits mention a soundtrack album on Capitol Records, but it never got released, except for two songs issued as a 45 rpm single. This website has mp3's of most of the songs.
• Dueling Movies: With Spies Like Us.
• Dueling-Stars Movie: Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman.
• Executive Meddling: The production costs are substantially higher than they should have been, due to this. In addition to the location costs, Beatty and May had a conflict during the shoot over the way May was directing the film, and Columbia executive Fay Vincent insisted that each scene be shot twice according to how both saw each scene.
• Fake Nationality: Obviously not applicable since Ishtar isn't a real country, but Isabelle Adjani (Shirra) and Aharon Ipalé (The Emir) both had North African connections despite being citizens of other countries. Adjani is French but her father was Algerian, while Ipalé was Israeli but actually born in Morocco.
• Hostility on the Set: Director Elaine May spent a lot of time arguing with Warren Beatty, her producer and star, in both the set and the editing booth. 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. Beatty would later admit that he only didn't fire May (since he was the movie's sole producer, he was the only person with the authority to do so) was because he was afraid of hurting his image as an equal rights activist by firing one of the few working female film directors.
• No Export for You: Due to the movie's infamous ranking, Sony didn't release the film on digital disc in North America until 2013, when the Blu-ray came out.
• Playing Against Type: Dustin Hoffman is known for playing nerdy outcasts, and Beatty is known for playing good looking womanizers. Here, Warren Beatty plays a shy dope who's terrible with women, and Hoffman plays the womanizing character. Many fans of the movie see this as an intentional joke, and part of the film's humor style, but May claims that it wasn't a joke, and that the actors are not playing against type because Beatty really is from the South and Hoffman really is from New York.
• She Also Did: Besides directing and writing, Elaine May also penned lyrics for several of the songs.
• Troubled Production: Possibly the most infamous of the 1980s, in-between shooting in Morocco in the midst of unrest across the Middle East and with lacking logistics (thanks to Coca-Cola being involved in business deals in the area), Elaine May (who was sick with toothaches most of the time) clashing a lot with Warren Beatty while doing a lot of retakes (ultimately she shot 108 hours of raw footage), and a post-production where May only delivered a print of the film when the studio threatened legal action. Not helping was how Columbia's new president David Puttnam proceeded to leak information about the film's cost overruns and troubled shoot to the press, sparking a firestorm of bad publicity. (Puttnam himself was ejected from the studio only a few months after the release of this film, thanks to not only this flop and others, but also alienating much of the Hollywood community.)
• Working Title: Blind Camel

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