How Do Good People Make a Bad Movie

This should never happen, yet it does all the time. Talented, successful, writers, directors, and actors make bad movies all the time. Steven Spielberg made 1941 right before directing the first Indiana Jones movie. Academy Award winning actors Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty made Ishtar. The Marx Brothers made At the Circus. Yes, this is really an article about the Marx Brothers. Groucho, Harpo, and Chico remain recognizable icons more than 60 years after their last movie. Groucho's rapid fire wisecracks still sting, Harpo's mime still is a wonder, and even Chico's fake Italian dialect comedy still gets laughs. Writers are still mining the lives of the brothers, particularly, Groucho, for material. Their best films, including Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races, are considered some of the greatest comedies of all time. Yet just a couple of years after they made A Day at the Races, they appeared in At the Circus. I'm a huge fan of the Brothers, but even I had never seen all of At the Circus until today. The movie has virtues -- Groucho sings "Lydia, The Tatooed Lady," and there are some funny lines. But by and large, the film is an arid exercise devoid of wit and wisdom. Not even shooting Margaret Dumont out of a cannon can save it. Several things went wrong in the making of the movie. The Marx Brothers were under contract to MGM and so had nothing like the control modern actors have to pick their projects. Irving Thalberg, who signed the Brothers to MGM and supervised both A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, had died. His successors did not see the Brothers as a big asset, and didn't work as hard to supply them with first rate material. They did not allow the Brothers to try out their material in front of a live audience as they did with their last two films. That might have exposed some of the problems with the script. The result was a movie I can now say deserves its reputation as the worst film the Marxes made. At least their last film, Love Happy, had a cameo by Marilyn Monroe. A movie is a collaborative effort. No matter how talented the actor, and how sincerely he tries to make his role believable, an actor can't overcome a bad script. Even with a good script and actor, a bad directing job can kill a film. So can poor editing, cinematography, or musical scoring. All of a film's elements need to work together for a film to have a chance. In fact, the question shouldn't be how good people make bad movies, but how does anyone make a good one? Because it's so difficult to make good, popular films, the artists that do so consistently deserve the millions of dollars they get paid. If you're going to create content for a living, whether as a writer, director, actor, designer, musician, etc., you have to be ruthless about your material. Keep editing out the bad, and strive to make the good better. Challenge your collaborators to give you their best work, and hope that they demand the same from you. Expect this work to take time to complete. And after you've done everything you can to insure your work's excellence, let go. If it's a success, enjoy it. If it fails, forgive yourself, and move on to the next project. The Marx Brothers, Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, and Warren Beaty, didn't quit after their failures. Neither should you.