Warren Beatty

This blog will be a bit rough because it is three in the morning but I have been meaning to get off my large ass and start making some posts. I just finished reading Mike Medavoy's memoir You're Only As Good As Your Next One and he made an interesting observation about Warren Beatty. Actually, he danced around it because he still has a career and is not powerful enough to say that he would never work with Beatty again if you put a gun to his head but that is essentially the message. Between the years 1981 and 1991, Beatty made four films. Reds (1981), Ishtar (1987), Dick Tracy (1990) and Bugsy (1991). Istar has become infamous as one of the great disasters of modern movie history, while the other three movies were disappointments for their respective studios. In fact, they were such disappointments that both Michael Eisner, head of Paramount when it made Reds, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Disney when it made Dick Tracy, produiced lengthy memos lamenting the huge marketing resources devoted to satisfy Beatty and their pledges to avoid such a situation in the future. Actually, their problem was not as much the expense as the effort and anxiety involved in dealing with Beatty.
Medavoy's experience with Bugsy was similar to Eisner and Katzenberg. Bugsy's final budget was $43 million and the studio spent an additional $50 million on marketing, and not only did the movie lose money but Beatty felt that inadequate marketing was the real reason why a movie glorifying a psychotic gangster bombed at the box office. The point to this rambling is that even after that experience Medavoy refuses to say he would never work with Beatty again. Now that is power.
For those who wondering about the six year gap between Reds and Istar, Beatty was helping to run Gary Hart's campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president. Yes, that Gary Hart. In fact, since Beatty became involved in politics the only Democratic candidate who actually became president is also the only one who did not listen to Beatty-Bill Clinton.