My Year of Flops

My Year Of Flops: An Introduction

From an early age, I learned to stop worrying and love the bombs. I’ve always been a failure junkie. I get giddy over toxic buzz, noxious press, and scathing reviews. I’m fascinated by the art and sociology of flops. You can learn a lot about society by the pop culture it embraces, and just as much by what it angrily rejects. As parents are keen to remind their children, there’s no shame in failure, only in not trying. The biggest, most notorious flops generally fail because they try too hard, not because they lack ambition or audacity.

My solidarity with misfits, outsiders, and underachievers helped define my professional development. I began my film-reviewing career happily critiquing the dregs of cinema, forgotten ephemera like Chill Factor and Gone Fishing. As the first head writer of The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion, I’ve immersed myself in the dark, shadowy corners of the entertainment universe, where saner folks fear to tread: direct-to-video movies (for a column called Dispatches From Direct-To-DVD Purgatory), cheaply produced books by C-listers and hangers-on (for Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club), the NOW That’s What I Call Music! series (for THEN That’s What They Called Music!), and audio commentaries on terrible films (for Commentary Tracks Of The Damned).

In The A.V. Club, I found a home and an audience willing to indulge my pop-culture masochism. Ah, but maybe “masochism” isn’t the right word, because I love what I do; a trip to the multiplex to see the latest Tyler Perry movie or not-screened-for-critics dancesploitation cheapie fills me with anticipation rather than dread. Thirteen years on, I still sometimes can’t believe I make my living writing about pop culture.

So when I decided to embark on a twice-weekly yearlong blog project in early 2007, I naturally gravitated toward an in-depth exploration of the biggest failures in cinematic history. I called the column My Year Of Flops. To qualify for My Year Of Flops, a film had to meet three unyielding/slippery criteria. It had to be a critical and commercial failure upon its release (domestically, at least). It had to have, at best, a marginal cult following. And it had to facilitate an endless procession of facile observations and labored one-liners.

Along with providing a forum for jokes, japes, and jests, My Year Of Flops had a serious goal. I wanted to fight our cultural tendency to associate commercial failure with artistic bankruptcy. I wanted to give flops something everyone deserves but precious few ever receive: a second chance. When I look at failures, cinematic and otherwise, I see myself. I welcomed the opportunity to provide a sympathetic reappraisal of some of the most reviled films of all time.

During the first year of My Year Of Flops, I found acceptance and validation from readers who cheered me on throughout my quixotic quest. Internet commenters, those nattering nabobs of negativism, transformed into perspicacious proponents of positivity. An online community that all too often resembles an easily agitated lynch mob turned into a band of angels. For I had created not just a blog project but an entire weird world of failure, regret, and bad ideas: a floposphere for pop-culture rubberneckers and schadenfreude enthusiasts. Fulfilling my wildest dreams, My Year Of Flops steadily grew to become that rarest and most wondrous of creatures: a moderately popular ongoing online feature. It was such a surprising success that readers wouldn’t let go after the initial year was over, so I was “persuaded” to continue it indefinitely as a twice-monthly feature at avclub.com. At gunpoint.

Then My Year Of Flops became something even more rare and more wonderfultastic: a book. Not just any book—the book you currently hold in your hands! That you bought! With money you earned doing chores and robbing student nurses! And are going to read! Using your brain bone and imagination!

After much consideration, consultation with our pastors, and several rolls of the 12-sided die, we here at The A.V. Club have decided to augment 35 of what SCTV’s Guy Caballero would call My Year Of Flops’ “Golden Classics” (which is to say, columns, aka Case Files, that already ran online in some form) with 15 brand-spanking-new Case Files of films too explosively floptastical for the Internet. But that isn’t all! In a bid to break up the oppressive tyranny of my literary voice, we’ve included mini-interviews with some of the people involved in the flops I’ve covered. You angrily demanded Austin Pendleton’s wry recollections of the making of Skidoo. We happily acquiesced.

The flops have been grouped according to genre, beginning with the first Case File, on Elizabethtown, which also provided the series with a ratings system dividing all films into three nebulous categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success. As Orlando Bloom stiffly declaims at the start of Elizabethtown, anyone can achieve failure, but a fiasco requires mad-prophet ambition and woeful miscalculation. At the top of the scale lie Secret Successes, films that have been slandered by history yet remain worthy of critical rehabilitation.

After chapters devoted to drama, comedy, superhero/science fiction/action films, musicals, the unsexiest sex films ever made, and family films that qualify as child abuse under the Geneva Conventions, we have a murderer’s row of the most notorious flops ever made. Even a book about flops needs a happy ending and redemptive arc, so I conclude with the fairy-tale ending that fate wouldn’t grant the films I’ve documented. There’s an entry on Joe Versus The Volcano, a life-affirming fable about a miserable Failure who becomes a Secret Success because of a Fiasco. And I close with a reconsideration of the film that began it all—Elizabethtown—and then a blow-by-blow account of the three-hour-long director’s cut of Waterworld.

I never intended My Year Of Flops to be a book about the 50 biggest flops or worst films of all time. There are plenty of books like that. This is not one of them. Rather, it’s a deeply personal, deeply idiosyncratic journey through the history of cinematic failure populated both by the usual suspects (Gigli, Battlefield Earth, Ishtar) and intriguing semi-obscurities like Johnny Cash’s Gospel Road and Thomas Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love.

I chose many of these flops not because their failure casts a huge shadow over pop culture but because they reflect the mythology of their creators and the cultural epoch they inhabited in fascinating and revealing ways. With each Case File, I set out to write about much more than the film addressed, to use an entry to explore, for example, the curious communion of Otto Preminger and the free-love movement in Skidoo or the perils and limitations of literary adaptations epitomized by The Scarlet Letter, Breakfast of Champions, and Adrian Lyne’s Lolita.

Welcome to my wonderful world of flops. I’m psyched to explore the curious geography of celluloid bombs with you. It’s a colorful realm of pee-drinking man-fish, inexplicably floating Africans, psychedelic disco/biblical freak-outs, time-traveling action heroes, an effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone and Marlon Brando can see, and Rosie O’Donnell in leather bondage gear. Ignore all the road signs warning you to stay away. You’re in Failure Country now, with me as your disreputable guide. Enjoy the ride.

© 2010 Onion, Inc.