I’ve written before about the trick of producing an “all time top” list to generate publicity for a media outlet or organisation, and keeping track of both the silly and sensible examples of this phenomenon will be an ongoing pursuit of mine on this page. I therefore regret that in my month-long Star Wars hysteria the Richard Shickel / Richard Corliss Time list slipped through without comment. If you doubted my theory about these lists being done to boost circulation, consider the number of hits that the list produced for the Time web site: there were 7.8 million hits to the list in a week, including 3.5 million hits on a single day. Little wonder that Time have tried to keep the interest going: those stats are from a follow-up article by Corliss about how they produced the list that remains on the front page of the Time website as I write, some 20 days after the top 100 debuted. The sites’ coverage is a movie list-geeks paradise, bristling with little offshoot categories: guilty pleasures (including the underrated Joe Versus the Volcano, which I assumed everyone else in the world had forgotten); scores (which snobbishly fails to list a single John Williams score); performances; shorts; and the films that Schickel and Corliss had to cut from their lists.
Unlike most of the lists I mentioned in my last post on movie lists, the Time list is pretty good. It understands the first principle of making such a list: that there’s no point doing it if you’re not going to sneak in a few personal favorites. (As Jack Black’s character puts it in High Fidelity, “A sly declaration of new classic status slipped into a list of old safe ones.”) So, for example, they include Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master II, a move calculated to incite a spit-take from anyone still struggling to digest the perfectly reasonable exclusion of Gone with the Wind. I happen to think they’re right to include a Chan film, since I think his work will last the way Buster Keaton’s has (although I would acknowledge that there is no single Chan film as accomplished as Sherlock Jr, the Keaton film Schickel and Corliss list).
The mention of Keaton, however, raises one little oddity about the list: it isn’t an “all-time” list, as many took it for. It’s actually an “all-Time” list, meaning it only lists films released since March 1923, when Time was first published. This little gimmick might seem inconsequential, but the arbitrary starting date means that the consideration of silent movies has been curtailed. Sherlock Jr (released in 1924), for example, only just snuck in. It is true that most of the most often cited great silent movies do fall in the late silent period, after the Time date (Potemkin and The Gold Rush are 1925, The General, Metropolis and Sunrise are 1927, Man with the Movie Camera 1929, City Lights 1931), and Shickel and Corliss list several of these films. But the 1923 date precludes any consideration of the really pioneering silent films, and in particular, the thorny question of D.W. Griffith. His Birth of a Nation, from 1915, is one of the most influential ever made in terms of film technique. It is also one of the most racist, detailing the birth of the Ku Klux Klan (it builds to a stupefying climax in which the Klan race to rescue the American south from oppression under the tyrannical rule of its African-American population). It thus presents a thorny problem for any list-maker, and starting in 1923 looks a little too much like a contrivance to avoid having to list it.
Of course, if you think it’s difficult trying to list the best of anything, you could always try listing the worst. The site eFilmCritic recently gave this a go with their Bottom 100 Director’s List, which itself seemed an echo of Film Threat‘s longstanding Frigid 50, which each year lists the 50 coldest careers in Hollywood. Listing careers in trouble is actually more hazardous than listing those on top: while nobody’s reputation will be trounced overnight by a single flop (everyone has the occasional dud), success can make an assessment of career gloom ridiculous very quickly. In December 1992, for example, Film Threat listed Steven Spielberg (at the time, fresh off Always and Hook) in the number 1 most frigid position. Within a year of that listing Spielberg had released Jurassic Park, which despite its mediocrity was for a while the highest grossing ever, and Schindler’s List, which won Oscars for Best Picture and Director. (Film Threat should have expected this, since this was the same man who followed 1941 with Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T..)
But the Frigid 50 isn’t really about who’s career is most in the toilet: it’s about people who remain big stars but are in, or on the cusp of, a big career dive. If it were really about the lousiest career, it would be full of unknowns. And even well-known names have a use-by-date where their career is dead enough that they’re no longer worth listing. Number 3 on the 1992 list, for example, was Vanilla Ice. The fact that he does not make the 2004 list is not a sign of a career turnaround. Ditto Andrew Dice Clay (# 4 in 1992), or Dan Aykroyd (#15), Kathleen Turner (#23), Corey Feldman (who in 1992 had his own special “Frozen Stiff” category), and so on. (It’s also, obviously, a pretty tongue-in-cheek list: the current list includes Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman jointly at #45, and demands that they “Halt all cloning experiments immediately.”)
By contrast, the eFilmCritic list of bad directors does cover unknowns, but this has its own hazards. Their list is full of people who have been laboring away anonymously at mid-budget Hollywood comedies, like Tom Shadyac (Bruce Almighty), Peter Segal (Nutty Professor II), Andy Tennant (Sweet Home Alabama), and the like. Scanning the list is fun for the way it reveals mediocre career trajectories that you were never aware of previously (“Wow – the guy who made America’s Sweethearts was the same guy who made Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise!”) but mostly I felt that listing these obscure directors was a bit harsh. What can anyone do with projects like that? Could a better director than Alan Metter really have made anything more of Police Academy: Mission to Moscow? Can you really begrudge these guys for sticking it out in Hollywood and hoping that somehow a decent script will slip past the A-list and to them? Some like, the 79-year-old Joseph Sargent, are seasoned professionals who have been plugging away on both film and TV, with little reward, for decades. (Sargent is best known for the very good thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the laughable Jaws: The Revenge. The former is a minor classic, and if you actually go back and watch the latter you’ll see Sargent does try to imbue some life and local colour into the whole ill-advised enterprise.)
It only feels fair to identify true badness when the bad directors have achieved success beyond their abilities. There are a few prominent directors of action / adventure films on the eFilmCritic list who fall into this category. For example, Michael Bay (of Pearl Harbour, The Rock, and Armageddon fame), is a terrible director who deserves a higher (ie worse) listing than his #46 position. Likewise Renny Harlin (who gets #39 for his part in Deep Blue Sea, Die Hard 2, and Cutthroat Island). And Roland Emmerich probably deserves the #1 ranking, rather than #7, for being so single-minded in making crap (Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow) despite the enormous resources made available to him. But that’s just my view: there are plenty who love the work of these directors. In commercial terms Bay, in particular, is an exceptionally good director, with hardly an unsuccessful film on his resume.
Which is the whole tricky thing about listing “worsts.” For it to be any fun, the people you are listing have to be kind of good, which can quickly make the exercise nonsensical. It’s yet another reason why you should be sceptical of anybody – like those behind the Razzies – who takes too much pleasure in listing bad films or bad directors or bad actors. But my beefs with the Razzies are too long held to cover here: that’s a subject for another post, another day.