It has been 4 1/2 years since moviegoers have had a chance to see Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman on the big screen. Each won an Oscar that year:
Hoffman as best actor, for ”Tootsie,” Beatty as best director, for ”Reds.” That`s why the teaming of these two rarely seen, $6-million-base-salary superstars is such an event.
Their new movie, their first together, is ”Ishtar,” opening Friday. It was written and directed by the often-brilliant Elaine May, and it features Beatty and Hoffman as a couple of third-rate singer-songwriters so desperate to perform their own rotten material that they are willing to go to Morocco for a cheap club date.
In the airport in Morocco they quickly become involved in a rebellion in the tiny, mythical nation of Ishtar, which Libya and the United States are trying to use as a political pawn.
Beatty and Hoffman play pawns, too, torn between the vastly different persuasive powers of a clever CIA agent (Charles Grodin) and a revolutionary
(Isabelle Adjani) who wants to overthrow Ishtar`s despotic ruler.
Beginning in small-time New York nightclubs and focusing most of its action in the desert, ”Ishtar” is an ambitious if unsuccessful comedy that gives its best lines to a clumsy, blind camel that goes bump in the night and day. The camel also staggers in circles much to the consternation of the two singers, as well as the CIA operatives assigned to kill Beatty and Hoffman.
Their wanderings in the desert are punctuated by a (lifeless) encounter with gunrunners, the search for a secret map and continued singing even after they run out of water.
If this sounds like a 1980s version of a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby
”Road” picture, well, according to the stars themselves, their picture is completely different from, say, ”Road to Morocco.”
”Hope and Crosby essentially played themselves, commenting on the action,” Dustin Hoffman said in Los Angeles last weekend.
”Our film has a completely different style,” said Beatty, also in L.A.
”They shot in Hollywood; we actually shot in the desert. You`re comparing apples and oranges.”
”The movie grew out of what actors call a `what if?` situation,”
Hoffman said. ”Elaine May, who worked with Warren on the script of `Heaven Can Wait,` and with me on the script of `Tootsie,` knew that both Warren and I had an early interest in music. He was doing club dates before he became an actor; I`m a trained pianist and wanted to be a singer.
”So Elaine imagined `what if` we had both pursued musical careers instead of acting, and the conclusion she arrived at is that we wouldn`t be very good but that we would still try very hard. That`s the part of the film that I find kind of touching–we`re so earnest.”
Can we accept two such strongly defined, successful personalities as struggling performers? ”I don`t think the average moviegoer thinks about us that way,” Beatty said.
”But we did have to address that problem,” Hoffman added. ”Elaine had us try to write and play the best songs we could. What you see and hear is really Warren and me. Paul Williams did help with some of the lyrics.
”And so what you see is the best we can do, which isn`t very good, but it`s funny. At least some preview audiences have thought so.
”I went through the same kind of character problem with `Tootsie,`
” Hoffman continued. ”I had to play convincingly an actor who nobody would hire. The way we solved that was to make me not a bad actor but rather a good actor who was very difficult. That way you accept that I can`t get work and yet that I can convincingly play a woman.”
A problem with the movie is that, as in ”The Fortune” (1975), which oddly enough was directed by May`s former partner Mike Nichols, Beatty is not very convincing at physical comedy. He`s so good-looking and so well known as a ladies` man that his bumbling manner here as a clod who can`t pick up women in a bar seems manufactured.
Beatty disagrees. ”I don`t think the average moviegoer looks at movies that way. I don`t think they walk into the theater thinking, `Okay, prove to me you`re somebody else than a star.` ”
Another thing Beatty disagrees with is that the average movie fan cares about the production cost of a film. He`s right, of course, but this is a particularly sensitive subject to Beatty, who produced ”Ishtar.” He`s still smarting from a very negative article about the film in a recent issue of New York magazine.
Writer David Blum, who a couple years ago skewered a bunch of young actors with his ”Brat Pack” article in the same magazine, portrayed
”Ishtar” as a film of excess and ego costing at least $40 million, protraying director May, and to a lesser degree Beatty, as wasteful perfectionists.
”I think all that people care about is the price of the ticket,” Beatty said, bristling at the mention of the production-cost issue.
”I think this whole emphasis (in the press) on what a film costs and what a film makes is just another demonstration of the declining value system in the country.
”What (journalists) don`t realize is that pictures such as `Gone with the Wind` or `Lawrence of Arabia,` if shot today, would cost somewhere between $70 million and $90 million.”
”I just read somewhere,” Hoffman added, ”that if you have one actor in the $6 million league starring in a movie today, the film almost has to cost a minimum of $30 million. We knew that the budget of the film might become an issue, and we did try to defer our salaries.”
This would have had the effect of making the film appear to have cost less than it did, thus lessening the opportunity for journalists to compare
”Ishtar” with such runaway-budget films as ”Heaven`s Gate” or ”Howard the Duck.” But apparently Columbia Pictures, for its own reasons, wanted to give Hoffman and Beatty the money up front.
”Ishtar” aside, a bigger curiosity with the careers of Hoffman and Beatty is that they make so few movies.
”If I made six or seven more movies in my career that would be a lot,”
Beatty said.
”I`d like to work every day,” Hoffman said, ”but the scripts simply aren`t there. You know how few good movies are made each year. It`s not that I don`t want to work.”
”A big problem,” Beatty said, ”is that the cost of production, distribution and promotion of films has become so great that you have to open your movie in more than 1,000 theaters at once. As a result, you have people making films that are designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience.” So in the last four years, both men say, they have constantly looked at and fiddled with scripts. Hoffman appears to be more interested in acting, having returned to the stage in 1984 to play Willy Loman in ”Death of a Salesman.”
Right now, Hoffman reportedly is having script problems with ”Rainman,” his next picture, scheduled to begin shooting in August. He stars opposite Tom Cruise in a comic battle over the inheritance of a huge estate.
Beatty, who has produced the last three movies he has starred in, said he continues to work on his biographical film about Howard Hughes and a film version of the Dick Tracy comic strip.
”I don`t particularly like acting,” Beatty said. ”I guess I act because it`s my profession. But originally I just wanted to be a director. I`m in `Ishtar` simply because I think it`s funny.”
Beatty, 50, and Hoffman, 49, were at the cutting edge of American movies two decades ago with ”Bonnie and Clyde” and ”The Graduate” (1967). They were both nominated as best actor that year. Along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, they paved the way for younger stars, younger producers, younger directors and younger writers, revitalizing American movies.
”Things are in pretty bad shape right now,” Beatty said. ”It`s so bad that I think it can only get better very soon. I wish we could shoot movies like they did in Chaplin`s era. He`d shoot all day for a year for one of his features, and then he`d reshoot some more.
”It was an unfair situation for the workers who supported him,” Beatty said, ”and because of changes in union regulations you simply can`t work that way anymore.”
”The worst thing,” Hoffman said, ”is that young people today don`t know the magic of seeing a movie on a big screen. They`re stuck with these shoe-box, shopping-mall screens.
”When we were kids,” Hoffman said, ”the movie screen was huge and overpowering. Today with home video, the kids are bigger than the movies. The magic is gone. Many of today`s kids probably have never seen a movie on a really big screen.”
To be sure ”Ishtar,” with its sweeping vistas of sand, was made for the big screen. Unfortunately, the film`s lack of sustained humor and reliance on weak physical comedy only prove another point made by Hoffman: That good scripts are hard to find . . . even for the very biggest stars.
