Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops

by James Robert Parish

A Hollywood insider answers, once and for all, the eternal question: “How in the world did that picture ever get made?” One thing we movie lovers enjoy almost as much as fireworks on the silver screen is watching a movie go up in flames.  And while each season brings its fresh batch of stinkers, it takes years and a rare confluence of forces to give birth to an “Iconic Flop” like Showgirls. While movies such as Gigli are just plain dumb, a bunker-buster like Battlefield Earth can be absolutely dumbfounding in its big-budget awfulness.  In Fiasco, longtime industry insider and acclaimed Hollywood historian James Robert Parish goes behind the scenes to tell the stories of fifteen of the most spectacular megaflops of the past fifty years. No mere financial disappointments these, each of the artistic and financial failures covered was of a magnitude to bankrupt studios, demolish reputations, and, in some cases, totally reconfigure the Hollywood power structure. With verve and no small measure of edgy wit, Parish dishes up the gossip, the grosses, and the egregious battles connected with these disasters. He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Sam Spiegel, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, Robert Evans, Francis Ford Coppola, Madonna, Kevin Costner, and Warren Beatty conspired to engender some of the worst films ever. And he vividly recreates the behind-the-scenes melodramas connected with the making of Cleopatra, Paint Your Wagon, Popeye, The Cotton Club, Shanghai Surprise, Ishtar, Waterworld, Town & Country, and other unforgettable Hollywood megaflops of the past fifty years.   “ Fiasco is a know-it-all backstory of infamous film flops, wittily reminding us how often, and in so many ways, Hollywood can screw up the best laid plans.”  —Patrick McGilligan, author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, History, Media Tie In, Biography, Pop Culture

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

About the author

James Robert Parish, a former entertainment reporter, publicist, and book series editor, is the author of many published major biographies and reference books on the entertainment industry including Whitney Houston: We Will Always Love You; The Hollywood Book of Extravagance; It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks; The Hollywood Book of Breakups; Fiascos: Hollywood’s Iconic Flops; The Hollywood Book of Love; Jet Li; The Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups in Hollywood; The Hollywood Book of Death; Gus Van Sant; Whoopi Goldberg; Rosie O’Donnell’s Story; The Unofficial “Murder, She Wrote” Casebook; Today’s Black Hollywood; Let’s Talk! America’s Favorite TV Talk Show Hosts; Prison Pictures from Hollywood; Prostitution in Hollywood Films; The Great Cop Pictures; Ghosts and Angels in Hollywood Films; Pirates and Seafaring Swashbucklers on the Hollywood Screen; Gays and Lesbians in Mainstream Cinema; Hollywood’s Great Love Teams; and The Fox Girls. Mr. Parish is a frequent oncamera interviewee on cable and network TV for documentaries on the performing arts. The author resides in Studio City, California.

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I keep forgetting to post this review. I think my brain is trying to block out my having read this book on purpose to protect from either, a) dropping dead of a rage aneurysm, or b) dropping dead from the poisonous word salad the author spews on every page.

I would not have read this book or even had it on my radar but Cannonball Read's BINGO board this year had a 'FIASCO' square, and when I found this book I thought it would be perfect. I love hearing about film production, good or bad, and the schadenfreude of reading about some of the biggest box office bombs in Hollywood history was too good to pass up. But I should have.

The book is twenty years out of date, but that's the least of its problems. The author is hyped on his own supply, he's nasty and mean and misogynist (ironically, slamming the cult classic movie Showgirls for misogyny at the same time), and definitely brings a very biased lens to everything that he's writing about. Not to mention when he's not being judgmental, he's dull as hell. Somehow he manages to make the scandals going on behind the scenes absolutely snoozeworthy, and spends about 75% of each chapter droning on and on about studio and executive stuff that could have easily been glossed over.

I mean, imagine making a chapter about the making of Battlefield Earth boring.

If you want to learn about the disastrous processes of making these movies, there are better resources and articles on many film websites, and I would definitely recommend that over this.

[1.5 stars for all the research he clearly did]

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has been driving me crazy and now I am finally done with it! It's been on my bed stand for almost a year. I hated the writing; I've never seen such abuse of parantheses in my life! Who edited this thing?? And there was no salacious gossip about all these films, and what little was there was glossed over (some producer was involved in a murder, and that was explained in literally one sentence). I don't doubt that this book was well researched, but the writing was so stilted that I couldn't enjoy what I was reading.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read on some really major film flops - esp. interesting since a friend is one (of a number) of screenwriters on one of them. (I'd be curious if he thinks the book portrays what happened to the film well.)

Some lessons from the book for life & leadership (though it's not a leadership book):

1. You've got to be willing to pull the plug on something that's not working.
2. Ego is a lousy decision-making tool; the more egos, the lousier the decision.
3. Substance is more important than style.
4. There's no such thing as a "sure thing" - and thinking there is can get you in over your head VERY quickly.
5. Organizations need strong leaders; organizations need someone with the guts to say "no".

Yeah, I know - pretty standard stuff. Doesn't make it any less true...

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 2006, this book can certainly be updated but as a movie buff, I had seen many of the movies in the book as the author breaks down the reasons each movie failed. There are a couple of movies in the book that I did enjoyed. I liked Paint Your Wagon and Last Action Hero but I definitely agree that Showgirls, Robin William’s Popeye and Ishtar were completely terrible. This book is definitely for movie fans.

[EuroHackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's nothing quite like watching people with outsized egos and more money than sense fall flat on their faces in a very public way as they suffer the consequences of their selfishness. And if the account is written like a bitchy gossip column? All the better for those lovely feelings of schadenfreude.

Unfortunately, there are long passages in this book that are clumsily written (including referring to the same person by both their first and last names in the same paragraph) and cringeworthy (referring to Black-directed films made in the 1990s as "ethnic"). It gets a bit too inside-baseballish, especially when blaming stars for not reacting well to being hounded by paparazzi (can you blame them??). And the author mentions Heaven's Gate (1980) so much that it's a wonder he didn't devote an entire chapter to it - or even mention that Heaven's Gate had a different connotation, even in 2004.

[A. Bowdoin Van Riper · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a certain satisfaction to watching the best-laid plans of self-important people dissolve into messy chaos. If there wasn’t, there’d be a lot fewer movie scenes involving pie fights at fancy-dress banquets or dogs running amuck at snooty garden parties. Even if you like that kind of thing, though, a little of it goes a long way. A movie consisting of nothing but pie fights would get boring fast. Fiasco -- a series of stories about big-budget Hollywood films that went disastrously awry, losing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the process – is, basically, that movie. The first chapter is fascinating, the second interesting, the third diverting . . . and then they all start to feel the same.

Part of the problem is the way that Parish chooses his stories. All kinds of Hollywood movies fail, and they fail for all kinds of reasons, but – as he outlines in his introduction – he’s interested in big-budget pictures that went off the rails. All of his case studies, therefore, tend to involve similar kinds of failures: egotistical stars, finicky directors, producers who can’t say no, executives whose reach exceeds their grasp. The details change, but the underlying patterns don’t, and so repetition sets in. Films that failed because of artistic overreach (David Lynch’s Dune), a fatal misreading of the zeitgeist (Blake Edwards’ Darling Lili), or egregious executive meddling (Terry Gilliam’s almost anything) don’t make the cut.

Parish’s narrative “voice” makes matters worse: His insistence on referring to his subjects by their first names makes the whole enterprise read like a gossip column or tell-all memoir, rather than a history – even an informal one – of troubled Hollywood productions. It’s an annoying, distracting choice, and – given that most of the people he’s implying first-name closeness to are being portrayed as egotistical jerks or clueless buffoons – a baffling one.

[Amar Pai · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess you can count "Hollywood fiascos" among my interests, cuz lately I seem to be reading a lot of books about movie flops, studio snafus, Disney corporate clusterfucks, and things of that sort.

I think the combination of absurd amounts of money, famous stars with huge egos, cutthroat executives with equally huge egos, and the collision of art and commerce makes this topic inherently fascinating.

Anyway I enjoyed reading about the disastrous makings-of Ishtar, Dick Tracy, Waterworld, whatever that random Madonna/Sean Penn movie set in Shanghai was... I mostly skipped the earlier films (pre 1970).

It's gotten so expensive to make movies, but meanwhile we live in a golden age of television and that's arguably where the action is these days. Arguably TV is "the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth, and Mailer had been to the 1960s."
Or so sayeth Difficult Men.

Why does Kevin Costner still get work?

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This one should’ve been a lot more fun to read. “Fiasco” looks at how some movies became box office failures, including “Cleopatra” (1963), “Ishtar” (1987), “Last Action Hero” (1993), “Showgirls” (1995), “Waterworld” (1995), “The Postman” (1997) and “Battlefield Earth” (2000), among others.

The book looks at a single movie in each chapter; unsurprisingly, findings suggest some combination of an out-of-control budget, overblown marketing hype, egomaniacal actors and filming without a completed script are the main culprits of inevitable disaster.

Culled from secondhand sources, the book offers no original insight of the movies it discusses — so the reader most inclined to read it (i.e., someone who knows some details of these films) will learn little.

It’s ironic that the author shames movies (and/or their makers) by seemingly exhausting the thesaurus, repeating extraneous information and annoyingly using reference points throughout (e.g., movies referred interchangeably as “pictures,” “properties,” “vehicles,” “bonanzas,” “extravaganzas,” etc.).

Simpler writing would’ve said the same thing, to the benefit of a better pace.

[Mike Moore · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little too serious tone, combined with bad movies I didn't care about anyway, soured me.

[Matthew Finlayson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another Hollywood exposé that reads as though the author has a serious chip on his shoulder about Tinseltown. It's still an amusing read, but questions linger such as why does this list of movies include the profitable (as acknowledged in the book) Popeye, but not the mother of all flops Heaven's Gate? Why is almost none of what is written sourced? Apart from the actual box office data, we largely appear to be expected to trust the author when it comes to the many seedy narratives contained within. Then there are numerous outright mistakes like describing Tia Carrere as an exotic film star - I suspect he means Asia. Or saying that Stallone making the first Rocky or Damon and Affleck making Good Will Hunting are examples of powerful movie stars getting passion projects made, when most people are aware they became stars after writing the scripts for those movies and getting them produced. When sorting through stuff like this you get the feeling that the author simply doesn't like movies, not to mention the people who make them.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this workmanlike history of some of Hollywood's most notorious box office disasters is a reminder that the rich and famous - especially big film stars such as Warren Beatty, Kevin Costner, John Travolta, & Madonna - sometimes let their huge egos allow for grossly miscalculating the viability of their projects and/or their own importance, and produce failures of EPIC proportions, to the delight and/or disgust of the public. Among the big screen disasters profiled here are Cleopatra, Ishtar, Town and Country, Waterworld, The Postman, Battlefield Earth, and Shanghai Surprise. Schadenfreude can be fun! 3 stars outta 5.

[Malcolm Frawley · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there is an argument that the cinematic atrocities contained within these pages do not deserve the serious appraisal/vilification devoted to them by this author, a reminder of the unbridled hubris of Hollywood is always welcome. Parish deliberately does not include 2 of the most notoriously overblown mega-flops of cinema history - Heaven's Gate & Bonfire Of The Vanities - because entire books have been devoted to both of these turkeys (Final Cut & The Devil's Candy). I preferred those to this one but still found it entertaining, & illuminating.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of Hollywood's biggest disasters are covered in great detail in this book. From Cleopatra to Ishtar and Waterworld, they're all here. Author James Robert Parish shares every aspect on the making of each picture, and goes to great lengths to explain just how these movies went south. Some were gauranteed to be a hit, but with studio interferance, conflicting egos, and budgets skyrocketing out of control, they quickly went from "must see" to "must avoid". Film buffs and history buffs alike will like this book.

[Adam Windsor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The individual stories of these misfiring movies are interesting, but there's a certain sameness to many of them that definitely makes the book best absorbed over a longer period - read one entry, then go read another book before coming back to the next. The style can sometimes be a bit grating as well, and taking breaks should also help with that.

[Devin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book works best if you’re looking for the next step up from the wikipedia/IMDB entry for one of the films this book covers. Each chapter’s general form and writing style are a little repetitive, making it kind of a slog as a through-read. I put it down after reading a handful of entries.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of these stories I’ve read versions of before but those I hadn’t, like Popeye, The Cotton Club and Town & Country, made the redundancies worthwhile. That said, there was a noticeable stain of sexism to the writing that undermined the entire project for me.

[Tim Shanahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too "wash, rinse, repeat" for me. Also, it's dated (published 20 years ago). That being said, enjoyed the more recent movies discussed as I recall the bad press and reputation those had. Despite all that, still a worth read for film buffs.

[Mikey K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and interesting while also fun to read. Loved it.

[Brendan Letizia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super informative and well told. Overall a really great behind the curtain look at Hollywood greed and ego

[Graham Clayton · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Fiasco” is a good read. All of the movies included were disasters, and a good disaster is hard to ignore.

[Nathan Magalhaes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a miracle that any movie ever turns out to be decent, much less amazing, what a ridiculous way to make art.

[Cabral D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty mediocre account of some (but not all, or even the worst) Hollywood misfires in history. For a book about excess, ego, sex and greed, the author somehow manages to tell each tale in a drab, clinical prose that has all the excitement of a medical textbook.

The actual content is at times thrilling, at times confounding - the story of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s tryst on Cleopatra? Engaging. Warren Beatty being too old to be a sex symbol on Town and Country? Boring. The author attempts to lay out a complex criteria by which the included films were chosen. But the ultimate selections feel haphazard, leading to a very uneven read.

The book ends around 2004, so there are 20+ years of additional filmic disasters that could be included in an updated volume. I hope that someone else with a more discerning selector and a more engaging writing style picks up the mantel to write that update.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book should have been more fun.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm willing to bet the films featured in this book are not on anyone's top ten favorites list. Waterworld? Absolute fiasco. Ishtar? The butt of jokes. Popeye? An embarrassing blotch on otherwise promising careers. Mr. Parish has collected the stories behind the making of fourteen films that bombed – big time. All released between 1963 and 2001, these films provide cautionary tales that illustrate just how not to make a movie, especially a successful one.

So what qualifies a film as a “flop” rather than just a box-office disappointment? According to Mr. Parish, it has to do with not only the amount of money the film makes in relation to how much was spent bringing it to the big screen, but also the raised expectations that critics and the public have for the film. These expectations can rocket sky-high due to star power (either in front of or behind the camera) or enthusiastic, over-saturating promotional efforts from the marketing team. Overly-hyped movies only have that much further to fall.

Every film has its own story and the mistakes and problems during production are unique to each of them, but there are some common threads. For example, many of these films suffered as a result of the ego or self-centeredness of the stars involved. On the set of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's love affair became more important to the two actors than the film they were making. John Travolta was single-mindedly determined to make Battlefield Earth as a tribute honoring L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology (of which Travolta is a member), despite the many signs that it was a losing venture. Arnold Schwarzenegger insisted on multiple massive rewrites to the screenplay of Last Action Hero and, in addition to starring in it, negotiated production responsibilities, including handling all marketing and promotional matters. Perhaps the best-known example of this hubris is a pair of films from Kevin Costner: Waterworld and The Postman. “Waterworld demonstrated—and The Postman reconfirmed very dramatically—that when a major star/producer with a tremendous ego has far too much control over a large film project, a real-life disaster is frequently the final result for the movie studio and its backers.”

For several of these movies, a lack of planning during pre-production, or a lack of time reserved for planning before shooting started, resulted in exorbitant costs as costumes and sets had to be rebuilt – sometimes several times – to reflect the current version of the script. This was the case with Cutthroat Island. The director, Renny Harlin, was stuck in Los Angeles, trying to cast the leading man for the film and fine-tuning the screenplay, while the crew, already on location in Malta, was instructed to start work on constructing sets, gathering seventeenth-century paraphernalia and making period costumes. When Harlin finally arrived in Malta, he found that the crew's efforts didn't match his “vision,” so expensive adjustments had to be made.

No one sets out to make – or finance – a bad movie, but as Mr. Parish outlines in Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops, it's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of details, miss the big picture, and end up with a laughable flop instead of an enduring hit. While fascinating in a can't-look-away-from-the-train-wreck kind of way, these films represent the worst Hollywood has to offer, and what can happen when all the warning signs are ignored.

For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.

[El_kiablo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Writing about pop culture is a lot trickier than it looks: you don't want to treat it too seriously because it is, after all, a pretty goofy affair for the most part, but it's also something that can really touch people and affect real change in society. When you balance those two tones correctly you can say something really enlightening about something that's mostly ephemeral but occasionally amazing.

This book never once hits the right tone.

For the most part Parish sounds like a scold, constantly referencing whether or people involved "took responsibility" for these movies as if the movie makers owed him an apology personally. He tries to sound knowledgeable about Hollywood while coming across like a doofus - several times he mentions bringing in script doctors to try to improve a script as a sign that the project is in trouble when from everything else I've read about big budget movies that's standard practice and almost always the norm. He alternates between saying "they never worried about the art of this movie and just treated it as a commercial venture" and "these spendthrifts were never worried about the commercial success of this movie" which tells me that with him you're probably damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Furthermore, since you can't write about every movie that lost money (and since it's not always clear what did and did not lose money because of crazy Hollywood math) all of the movies in this book were cherrypicked by the author. What amazes me is that he has no respect for any of them: none of them are noble failures, or fiascos who might be interesting if not entertaining, or films that just didn't manage to live up to the hype. Every single one of them is not just unprofitable (a criterion that has no interest to me) but they are also apparently worthless pieces of art. The negativity of this book begins to feel sour after awhile in a way that say, Nathan Rabin's My Year Of Flops did not, in part because Rabin is capable of giving credit where credit is due.

The biggest frustration I had, however, has to be with the repetitiveness of the book. There are a lot of ways that a movie can misfire but these movies tend to fail for the same reasons over and over again, in part because he's only interested in a certain type of high profile project. This repetitiveness would be better if it actually meant something, but the truth is that all of the problems he pontificates about over and over aren't actually the sacred truths he makes them out to be, because there are just as many artistically or financially successful films which ran into these same hurdles and yet somehow succeeded. He mentions Jaws several times as an example of a movie that inspired a would-be blockbuster like Cutthroat Island - without ever bothering to mention that that film was faced with the same sort of technological problems and inexperienced helmers as some of the movies he's writing about, because that film was an international smash and would disprove his smarmy thesis.

Strong recommendation to avoid.

[Anthony Kozlowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

“How the hell did this happen… again?"

Fiasco is written for a certain type of person. If you come to it expecting dishy gossip of Hollywood’s heyday or other supermarket tabloid triviality, you’ll be let down. Parish’s finger-wagging record is meant primarily for stat-philes, people like me who have Box Office Mojo in their top five most visited websites.

The cogs that turn the Hollywood movie factory have changed over the years. At one time, the entire process was orchestrated by big wigs like Lewis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, controlling everything from stars, to writers, to theater distribution. With changing times came changing business practices. Today, major studios are subsidiaries of corporations (you can thank Gulf & Western for that) and huge blockbusters are made with Chinese distribution in mind. Throughout this shifting in power, one thing has remained constant, people are prone to make vast miscalculations.

Fiasco is a goldmine in documenting the results of hubris, frivolous spending, clashing egos, and how that has historically affected cinematic disasters. From Cleopatra to more than one Warren Beatty ego trip, Parish presents every dollar amount, every power shift, every star relationship that contributed to the toppling of fifteen notorious box office bombs. His writing is very technical (some may even call it dry), but his attention to detail has to be admired. For someone like me who lives on information gorges especially about filmmaking, it doesn’t get much better than this.

One would hope that with this kind of thorough documentation, studios would think twice before sinking their coffers into a doomed flagship. Every John Carter and 47 Ronin that lumbers into theaters and dies would beg to differ though. As Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman would put it, “No one knows anything. No one learns anything.” Hollywood may forever produce one flaming trainwreck after another, but damn is it fun to watch them burn. 4.0/5

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine. Each chapter provides an overview of what went wrong for one of Hollywood's biggest flops (some more famous than others. The last movie covered, Town & Country, came out in 2001. Does anyone remember that movie? Even as a "big" flop?). It becomes clear pretty early in the book that many of these movies ran in to the same problems. There are mistakes made over and over again by big studios that seem so obvious: maybe don’t start crafting, much less shooting, your enormous movie without a finished script? Outdoor locations should be (1) relatively dry and (2) accessible to a film crew? Don’t blow your initially small budget all on one actor? Etc.

Now, in addition to being financial failures, these films were also generally given critical drubbings. My primary complaint with the way the author tells these stories is the way he affirms the contemporary critics throughout each chapter – the book doesn’t leave a lot of room for any debate about whether or not these films were truly “bad” (and maybe it doesn’t need to. That’s not really its point). Still, what's funny about almost all of these films is that if you visit their wikipedia entries, there's a section dedicated to discussing the critical reevaluation that has occurred since they were released. I’ve only seen one of the pictures covered in the book – 1993’s The Last Action Hero - and I found myself pretty consistently disagreeing with Parish’s (and the critic’s) description of the film. So, you know, grains of salt.

Similarly, the book ends with an appendix that lists every movie for a given year that didn’t make back its budget (which is pretty fun to browse) and it’s pretty apparent that flop=bad movie (I mean, who doesn’t like Gattaca?). But we knew that, right?

[Clinton · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting, if somewhat dry, look into the decisions that resulted in some of the biggest movie flops in history. It's amazing how often people can see a major disaster coming, and for whatever reason choose not to cut their losses while they can. Of course, this is a problem not relegated to the movie industry and I found myself trying to apply the lessons-learned from this book to my own projects. What am I working on today that I might someday look back on as being an obviously bad idea? Am I being blinded by pride or overcommitment or desire, so much so that I walk off a very evident cliff?

Parish's writing style tends to be a little dry with several sections of the book feeling like filler. He also has a very strange tendency to (over)use parentheticals - just like I did there. I can't tell whether it's a bad technique, but it tends to be distracting. And it'll be even MORE distracting now that I've pointed it out.

Also, Warren Beatty sounds like a real jerk. I'm just saying.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lightweight examination that follows Hollywood's history by tracing the flops, this book starts with Cleopatra up through (fairly modern) bombs like Battlefield Earth. Parish always keeps the book moving, so you never go too in-depth on any of the movies, but I like how you get a sense of the business changing as you go from movie to movie. Parish steers clear of movies that already have extensive post-mortems, so there's no Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists or The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco on here; Instead, this is a nice, breezy starting place if you're interested in this genre (or want to see if you're interested in this genre, I guess).

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every film analysis followed the same formula: 1) provide irrelevant biographies of all characters associated with a film, 2) piece together actions based on previously published interviews, and 3) re-print a sampling of reviews from various trade publications. I had hoped for some management insight as to how certain powers were snowed or how certain parties may have suffered specific repercussions but every example did nothing but demonstrate ways to spend money without restraints. The list of the "fiascos" of any given year in the appendix was also useless, as it did not even provide budgeted amounts to establish the scale (much less the amount spent). And finally, I hated the way the author would constantly switch from referring to characters by their first name or by their last name, often within the same paragraph.