Ishtar

Plot

Chuck Clarke and Lyle Rogers are inept songwriters who are down on their luck, but dream of becoming a popular singing duo like Simon and Garfunkel. Though they are poorly received at a local open mic night, agent Marty Freed offers to book them as lounge singers in a hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, explaining that the last act quit due to political unrest in the area. Nearly broke, both single, and without any better options, Lyle and Chuck decide to take the gig.

When they arrive in the fictional neighboring country of Ishtar, Chuck agrees to give his passport to a mysterious woman who claims her life is in danger. She promises to meet him in Marrakesh. Unfortunately, Chuck learns at the U.S. Embassy that it will take longer than expected to get a new passport. Lyle goes to Morocco in a bid to save their booking while Chuck stays behind. Alone in Ishtar, Chuck meets CIA agent Jim Harrison. Chuck agrees to be a mole for the CIA and, in return, Harrison gets Chuck to Morocco by the next evening.

Now together again, Chuck and Lyle unwittingly become involved in a plot to overthrow the Emir of Ishtar. The mysterious woman, Shirra Assel, sneaks into Lyle's room and tries to steal his luggage, mistaking it for Chuck's. At the airport, she had stuck some of her items into Chuck's luggage, because that was her only way of smuggling them out of Ishtar. She later breaks into their room and goes through Chuck's luggage, but she fails to find an ancient, prophetic map that her archaeologist brother Omar had found. Shirra needs this map in order to command the loyalties of the left-wing guerrillas who oppose the government of Ishtar.

Shirra later confronts Chuck and accuses him of working with the CIA, and Chuck accuses her of being a communist. Meanwhile, Lyle attempts to find a camel salesman named Mohamad and gives him the secret code of "I want to buy a blind camel," as per Shirra's instructions, but Lyle finds the wrong Mohamad and ends up actually buying a blind camel. Chuck and Lyle receive instructions from both the CIA and the leftist guerillas to go into the desert, and both parties actually intend for them to die there.

In the desert, Chuck pulls his jacket over his head to shield himself from the sun, and Lyle sees that the legendary map is sewn inside of the jacket. The jacket was originally Omar's, but Shirra took it, and then Chuck and Shirra traded jackets. The CIA sends helicopters to finish off Chuck and Lyle, but Shirra and a cab driver arrive in the desert and defend them.

Production

Development

Warren Beatty felt indebted to Elaine May, who, in addition to co-writing his 1978 hit Heaven Can Wait, had done a major uncredited rewrite on the script of his Academy Award-winning Reds and helped immensely with its post-production. He began looking for a project that she could write and direct. She never had a sufficiently protective producer, and by starring in and producing her next film he could give her the chance to make the film he believed her to be creatively and commercially capable of making.

At a dinner with Beatty and Bert Fields, their agent, May said she would like to do a variant on the Road to ... films of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, set in the Middle East. Her idea would feature Beatty and a co-star as a mediocre singer-songwriter duo who would go to Morocco and get caught in the crossfire between the Central Intelligence Agency and a local left-wing guerrilla group. She thought it would be funny to cast Beatty against type as the Hope part, the bumbler of the duo, while the co-star, possibly Dustin Hoffman, would play the self-assured ladies' man that Crosby usually portrayed.

Hoffman, who was also indebted to May for her extensive uncredited rewrite on Tootsie, initially turned it down due to "misgivings". At Beatty's request, the two met with May and Hoffman's creative confidant, playwright Murray Schisgal. The latter two felt that the plot in Morocco overwhelmed the rest of the film and that it "should not leave New York". Hoffman was finally persuaded by Beatty's assurances that he would provide May with the room she needed to work. When May finished the script, Beatty, Hoffman, and some other friends including Charles Grodin had a meeting and read-through at Beatty's house. All present agreed that the script needed work, but it was funny and could be a hit.

Beatty went to Columbia Pictures production head Guy McElwaine, who years before had been his publicist, instructing Fields, "Bert, anything she wants. Period. That's my negotiating position." Despite the prospect of having two major stars on the same project with a well-regarded writer, McElwaine did not immediately approve it. He worried about the effects of having Beatty, Hoffman and May on the same set because they were all known to be perfectionists. May, in particular, had a reputation for shooting as much raw footage as Beatty or Stanley Kubrick. However, McElwaine was also afraid the property could be a hit for another studio if Columbia passed, because Beatty had a solid record of commercial success in his four movies as producer and star.

Sexual assault allegations

On December 14, 2017, Variety published a report in which a woman named Melissa Kester, as well as an additional source who chose to remain anonymous, accused Dustin Hoffman of sexually assaulting them during the production of Ishtar. This report came in part as a response to a series of sexual misconduct allegations made against Hoffman earlier that year.

In the Variety article, Kester, whose boyfriend worked on the music for Ishtar, alleged that, while recording a vocal track for one of the film's songs, Hoffman invited her into an isolation booth and inserted his fingers into her genitalia. Kester estimated that this interaction lasted for 15 to 20 seconds. Kester later recounted the incident to a close friend, who confirmed her account for the Variety article. In the same article, an anonymous source, who worked as an unnamed extra in one of the film's nightclub sequences, claimed that Hoffman engaged in a similar action while riding home from a wrap party with her in a station wagon. She also alleged that he then directed her to the San Remo apartment complex, where he lived at the time, and engaged in oral sex and sexual intercourse with her, interactions that she claimed arose from dubious consent on her part. The source was 22 years old at the time of the alleged incidents.

Hoffman did not provide any comment for the Variety article, nor has he responded to the allegations publicly. However, in response to the article, Hoffman's attorney Mark A. Neubauer wrote a letter to the Penske Media Corporation, which owns Variety, in which he called the allegations "defamatory falsehoods".

Release

Box office

Negative buzz about Ishtar and its high budget was widespread in the press long before the film reached theaters. In an interview with May, Mike Nichols described the film as "the prime example that I know of in Hollywood of studio suicide", implying that Puttnam sandbagged the project by leaking negative anecdotes to the media because of his grudges against Beatty and Hoffman. Before release, market research led Columbia to believe the film would fail. Its head of marketing, Peter Sealey, advised the studio to minimize its losses by cutting the film's advertising budget. Instead, Columbia spent even more to promote the film, afraid of alienating Beatty and Hoffman. "Ego trumps logic in Hollywood," said Sealey.

Despite negative press, three previews went well, with Beatty describing one in Toronto as the best he had ever had, and he and the studio considered striking more prints. Those discussions ended following the opening weekend, wherein Ishtar, on more than 1,000 screens across the country, took in $4.2 million (equivalent to $11.9 million in 2025) in receipts, winning the weekend, being No. 1 at the box office. However, it outgrossed The Gate—a low-budget horror film with no stars—by a mere $100,000, and ultimately earned $14.3 million at the North American box office.

Against a $51 million production budget and up to another $20 million spent on prints and marketing costs, the film is estimated to have lost $40 million. Ishtar has become synonymous with the phrase "box office flop", and in 2014, the Los Angeles Times listed the film as one of the most expensive box-office flops of all time.

Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum surmised that the media were eager to torpedo Ishtar in retaliation for instances of Beatty's perceived "high-handed way with members of the press". The film had been completely closed to the media, with no reporters at all permitted on set during production, a restriction greater than Beatty's previous productions.

Critical reception

The film had a polarizing effect on critics upon release. The Washington Post's critics were split: Desson Thomson described the film as an "unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously", while Hal Hinson wrote that "it's piddling—a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs." Roger Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times that "Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy", and Gene Siskel called it "shockingly dull" and "dim-witted"; together, they selected it as the worst film of 1987 on At the Movies. Leonard Maltin gave the film 2-stars-out-of-4, writing "A blind camel and a flock of vultures steal the show, and Paul Williams' deliberately awful songs are funny too, but not funny enough to overcome the flatness of director May's script."

Janet Maslin of The New York Times was more forgiving, writing "The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired." Vincent Canby—also for the Times—listed it as a runner-up to his top films of 1987.

Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times was also positive, writing "It is a smart, generous, genuinely funny affair. Sometimes, like the camel who almost ambles away with the picture, it's longish in the tooth, but it is based on an extremely astute vision of life." A retrospective review from Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader stated: "This Elaine May comedy was the most underappreciated commercial movie of 1987. It isn't quite as good as May's previous features, but it's still a very funny work by one of this country's greatest comic talents."

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 40% of 60 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.6/10. The website's consensus reads: "Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and laughter itself get lost in the desert during a flawed spoof of classic road movies that proves ill-suited for its mismatched and miscast stars." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 51 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "C+" on scale of A+ to F.

Aftermath

As a result of the losses it suffered from the film and negative publicity, Coca-Cola re-evaluated its decision to enter the business. It spun off its entertainment holdings into a separate company named Columbia Pictures Entertainment (now Sony Pictures Entertainment), with Coca-Cola holding 49% of the stock. Two years later, it sold Columbia to Sony.

Ishtar was nominated for three Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay, with May winning Worst Director, tied with Norman Mailer for Tough Guys Don't Dance at the 8th Golden Raspberry Awards. Ishtar also was nominated for Worst Picture at the 1987 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. When the Stinkers unveiled their "100 Years, 100 Stinkers" list to present the 100 worst movies of the 20th century, Ishtar made the list and ranked at No. 20 in the listed bottom 20.

The film's failure did not affect the friendship between Beatty and Hoffman, who both liked the final cut; Beatty went on to cast his co-star in his more successful Dick Tracy. Beatty and May barely spoke for two years afterward, and friends of hers say she remains bitter about the experience. She would wait nine years before taking another screenwriting credit (for The Birdcage). She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Primary Colors, but has not directed another film since Ishtar.

On December 20, 2010, Hoffman appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman with Robert De Niro. When Letterman asked the actors if any of their films made them "wince a little bit", Hoffman joked, "Well, I'm sure Bob feels ambivalent about Ishtar." (Letterman looked at his notes and observed that De Niro was not in that film.)

Legacy

The McClatchy-Tribune News Service wrote in 2011 that "Time has not improved this film's reputation as being one of the worst ever made." Time Out suggested it was "so bad it could have been deliberate" and called it "one of the worst films ever made." It was included in Michael Sauter's The Worst Movies of All Time book and Richard Roeper included it on his list of the 40 worst films he had seen. In 1999, Time placed the film on a list of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century.

However, particularly since its 2013 Blu-ray release, Ishtar has received a wave of positive reviews and retrospectives from a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Slate, IndieWire, and The Dissolve. Richard Brody of The New Yorker called Ishtar a "wrongly maligned masterwork" and raved, "There's a level of invention, a depth of reflection, and a tangle of emotions in Ishtar which are reached by few films and few filmmakers." Charles Bramesco of The Guardian wrote upon the film's 30th anniversary, "While Ishtar has not appreciated into a stealth masterpiece in the mold of Showgirls' long road to reappraisal, its stature as the definitive cinematic failure has been outed as undeserved." Filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Lena Dunham, Joe Swanberg and Edgar Wright have all publicly praised Ishtar, and Martin Scorsese has further cited it as one of his favorite films of all time. The film received two votes, from critic Colin Beckett and filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber, on the 2022 list of the greatest films of all time as chosen by the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound decennial polls of critics and filmmakers.

In one of Gary Larson's The Far Side comic strips, captioned "Hell's Video Store", the entire store is stocked with nothing but copies of Ishtar. Larson later apologized, saying: "When I drew the above cartoon, I had not actually seen Ishtar. [...] Years later, I saw it on an airplane, and was stunned at what was happening to me: I was actually being entertained. Sure, maybe it's not the greatest film ever made, but my cartoon was way off the mark. There are so many cartoons for which I should probably write an apology, but this is the only one which compels me to do so."

The film's creators continue to defend it. Despite the trouble he endured while making it, Beatty has been quoted as saying, "There was almost no review that didn't in the first paragraph deal with the cost of the movie. That was an eye-opener—about the business, and the relationship of the entertainment press to business. Ishtar is a very good, not very big, comedy, made by a brilliant woman. And I think it's funny." Hoffman has also vouched for Ishtar, saying, "I liked that film. [...] Just about everyone I've ever met that makes a face when the name is brought up has not seen it. [...] I would do it again in a second." In 2006, May stated, "If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today."

Home media

Ishtar was issued on VHS globally in late 1987 (and once more in 1994), eventually generating more than seven million dollars in rental fees in the United States alone.

In 2004, the film was released on DVD on every continent but North America and Antarctica. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment had announced that the film would be released only on Blu-ray Disc (and finally in a digital format in North America) on January 4, 2011, but it was pulled from the studio's release schedule just before this date.

In an interview around the time, May said:

They tell me now—Sony—that they're going to release this on Blu-ray, and it will really look wonderful and sound wonderful. If they don't, you'll be the last 80 or 90 or however many people to see this movie in this particular version...If you all clap your hands and believe it! They say they want to and they'll do it soon, and I have great faith that they'll do it.

The Blu-ray was eventually released in North America on August 6, 2013.