Co-writer of Battlefield Earth apologizes…

Updated on March 29, 2010 By Ken Begg 17 Comments

…although his editorial basically amounts to “It wasn’t my fault.”

BE winning worst film of the decade is sort of a no brainer, as its a real throwback to when studios used to produce really amazingly bad movies.  Modern studio homogenization of product has killed really horrible movies in much the same way that they have all but killed really great ones.  About the only thing that can really produce a genuinely epic awful movie anymore is a vanity flick–which BE is, along with On Deadly Ground and Star Trek V–and those are becoming increasingly rare since movies cost so much to make now, and rely so little on star power.

We can only hope for another BE in the decade ahead.  Let’s hope we get one.

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  • David Fullam

    We men, our “Willy Wonker’s” get us into all kinds of trouble!

  • I think Ken is overly negative about the prospects for bad movies in the foreseeable future, and I’ve told him so. Yes, Hollywood has, for the near future, managed to shovel everything into the sub-center bulge of the bell curve. But in an industry like film-making, there are no guarantees for the future. Disco didn’t last, and mediocrity has no guarantees either.

    Life is not so bad, Ken. We have had not only Battlefield Earth, but The Room by Tommy Wiseau, Evil (a Greek zombie film), Leprechaun In The Hood, and Jason X, (I realize my bias towards horror is showing).

    Maybe Hong Kong’s film industry will resurge, or Jean Rollin will spit out another Zombie Lake. Keep the faith, Ken.

  • Also, Ken, were you not blown away by the awesome might of SARS IV? That Siamese epic’s from 2004!

  • Terrahawk

    In defense of Ken’s position, I don’t think it is that there will be no more bad movies. I mean SciFi (I refuse to use their inane spelling) shows them every Saturday. Truly bad movies that have the full backing of the studios with budgets, directors, and star power to back them up are extremely rare anymore. Too much money is on the line and while the byzantine studio system kills a lot of exceptional films, it also weeds out much of the drek. The result is a technically competent, bland product. BE type films are going to be few and far between.

  • P Stroud

    Although BE was a truly bad movie it by no means was the worst movie of the decade. Has no one seen Gigli? Bloodrayne? House of the Dead? Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever? Master of disguise? The Spanish Apartment? L’ Humanite’?

    Ok. L’Humanite’ was released in 1999 but if you watch it it sure seems like it lasts 10 years.

    At least BE is chock full of MST3Kness.

    Bad movie? Yes.

    Worst movie? Hardly. not even close

  • I understand what Ken is trying to say – he is not bemoaning the dearth of bad movies per se, but the demise of interestingly bad movies. Snoozefests like Catwoman or The Love Guru are certainly abominable wastes or time and celluloid. And clearly Hollywood has made an attempt to crack down on the most insane projects.

    My counter argument is two-fold. First, we are still getting barking mad flicks in the hopper (though oft from abroad), and second, the century is still young. Even as Hollywood attempts to escape disaster by hooking its wagon to remakes and sequels, the future may be yet be Jabootu’s.

  • monoceros4

    Amusing! When Shapiro says that his original script was “darker”, I’m a little sceptical–especially since “dark” is possibly the most overused adjective of praise for stuff based on comic books and sci-fi and so forth–but I’m inclined to believe him if only because the final product is so thoroughly goofball that there is no way Shapiro’s original could have been as silly.

    It really does make me wonder what the hell Travolta was thinking, though, since it does seem he had ultimate editorial control over Battlefield Earth. The original book is a turgid mess but it, too, isn’t anywhere nearly as stupid as what made it onto the screen. Every single change made everything worse. In particular, I wonder if Travolta realized that he was making his own character the most titanically incompetent villain ever to appear in a major movie. Did Travolta intentionally sabotage the villain or (heaven help us) did he actually think that Terl was some sort of diabolical mastermind and a worthy adversary to the hero instead of a clown who doesn’t get one single thing right ever?

  • fish eye no miko

    @Sandy Petersen: Am I the only one who thinks Jason Takes Manhattan was way worse than Jason X? As much as I loathe cyberJason, I’ll take him any day over toxic waste filling the New York sewers and reverting Jason back to childhood and giving him the ability to talk… somehow.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Sandy Peterson makes a good point about disco; punk came and blew most of the rules out of the water untit it, too, got corporatized.

    Maybe cheaper production costs (one can buy HD camcorders for $200 or less) will give rise to a whole host of crap like “The Room.” (The only problem I see is in distribution. Although Blair Witch got distributed pretty well…)

  • BeckoningChasm

    BTW, I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I thought there were some interesting concepts in Battlefield Earth. I’m pretty sure they were put in accidentally, however.

  • I enjoyed Jason X immensely, and it sits on my bookshelf to this day. Frankly, I find it the second best of Jason’s outings (after Freddy vs. Jason). But Lord knows it’s not good by any rational measure. The producers and actors seemed happy to make a modern B-movie – it’s entertainingly bad. That’s all I ask for in a movie, and maybe that’s why blacksploitation films are always a hit at T-Fests.

    It’s easy to see some trend, like Italian and Hong Kong cinema going down the drain, and assume that’s the end of an era. Maybe it is – but a new era awaits us. Korean and Thai films are up-and-comers for lovers of action, romance, adventure, and horror. And Spanish movies seem like they’re right around the bend, with a growing presence and works like Tesis, [REC], or the upcoming Paintball. The future’s so bright we have to wear shades.

  • The producers and actors seemed happy to make a modern B-movie – it’s entertainingly bad. That’s all I ask for in a movie, and maybe that’s why blacksploitation films are always a hit at T-Fests.

    I have to demur from that statement. While there are, of course, bad blaxploitation films, the fact remains that many of them, and almost all the well known ones–Cotton Comes to Harlem, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Detroit 9000, Shaft, Blacula, Cleopatra Jones, Superfly, Black Caesar, Bucktown, among many others–are actually pretty good movies. Some of them are very good movies indeed. None of them fail at what they are trying to do, which must certainly be a cornerstone in any definition of what constitutes a bad movie.

    That’s why it’s almost impossible to make a ‘bad’ movie on purpose.

  • monoceros4

    BTW, I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I thought there were some interesting concepts in Battlefield Earth.

    Oh, surely that’s forgivable to say. The book’s rather a wobbly collection of bits and in its second half it goes completely mad but some of the bits aren’t bad on their own. Since it was published at a time when L. Ron Hubbard was probably most of his way to drug-addled imbecility, my guess is that it was cobbled together from various fragments and notes written at different times, including times when Hubbard was a reasonably competent, if second-rate, pulp writer.

    If there’s any one change from book to movie that does the most damage, it’s that in the book it’s clear that there are so few humans left that they’re completely off the Psychlo radar. Nobody aside from Terl even knows what a human looks like or has the least bit of curiosity about them, so when Terl proposes that they can be taught to mine it really is impossible for anyone to believe–as if I got up at a meeting one day and declared that possums had a surprising aptitude for electrical engineering. The movie wants to keep that attitude even though (greedy for Ten Commandment cliches) it now shows us that Psychlos are daily acquainted with humans and even live in their old cities.

  • Elizabeth

    I found JD Shapiro terminally obnoxious (“my Willy Wonker”? really? my brain refused to process that for a few minutes because it was so stupid) and I am always, always skeptical of screenwriters saying “well, my version was way better and compelling and rich and deep before they ruined it.”

    On the other hand, the terrible costumes and cinematography are definitely *not* his fault, so there’s that. Some of the dialogue may be, but Travolta’s choice to play Terl as Pee-Wee the Merciless is not.

    His story that Travolta & Co. made changes based on LRH’s notes and their own interpretation of the book makes perfect sense to me. LRH did have ideas on how he wanted the film made, and what he says goes. The finished product bears a pretty strong resemblance to the book, tone-wise.

    I’m guessing Shapiro wrote up a cookie-cutter “gritty” sci-fi/action flick — probably boring and homogenized, with a few decent set-pieces. Then the Scientologists fired him and brought in a ringer (Corey Mandell’s a cult member) to crazy it up real good.

    Now, I do wonder whether he had anything to do with the cavemen flying Harriers. Was that in his first draft? I can’t even remember if it was in the book. I’ve got a shooting script of BE around here someplace, but I never bothered reading through it… wonder if it’s got any of his material that didn’t make it into the film.

  • Petoht

    Yeah, they flew jets in the book. I think Johnny used the teaching machine thingie to teach everyone how to fly, but it was on one of his jaunts that he met up with the Scots (or whatever) in the book.

    However, I seem to recall the assault on the Psychlo stronghold to teleport the nuke was more of a stealth or a Kansas City Shuffle type idea as opposed to zooming in with hundreds year old jets.

  • I’m glad someone else thought that Shapiro sounded like an asshole. His high-minded dismissal of religion as “you shouldn’t exploit people with an afterlife” when at the same time he’s trying to exploit the scientologists with no greater goal than some nookie gave him some serious demerits in my book.

    I’m willing to believe that the movie went off the rails even without his input of course, but i wasn’t a fan of his Robin Hood either. He hasn’t done much, but everything he’s done I’ve disliked.

  • Yeah, I didn’t comment on his being a dick because it was so self-evident. And aside from seconding Sandy’s observation regarding his script for Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights, it should also be pointed out that most of the movie’s gags were recycled from the old Mel Brooks / Buck Henry TV show When Things Were Rotten, in much the same way that the Police Squad movies stole gags from that other short-lived TV show.

    Mr. Shapiro’s other writing ‘credits,’ meanwhile, consist of a single episode of Charles in Charge, co-authoring an indie film called We Married Margo (the dread script written from his own life), and something for TV entitled X-Treme Biography: Santa. That’s it in a nutshell, so the idea that his original script for BE was this brilliant winner strikes me as dubious at best.