Yep, There’s a Precedent

In news that will no doubt sadden all of us, Warner Brothers has shelved the new Batgirl movie.  Despite having spent in excess of $90 million to finish shooting, the editing process has been dropped and the film permanently locked in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet stuck in a disused basement lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.

Personally, I’m a little tired of the endless recycling of comic book hero movies.  The genre was interesting for a while, but the idea was getting stale long before Hollywood started making its movies politically correct (complete with warning labels about harsh language and smoking).  For some reason, Hollywood seems to think viewers will go into shock at seeing someone lighting up a cigarette, but have no qualms about depicting a psychopath with a chainsaw working his way through a daycare center.  The John Wick movies leap to mind…. 

David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers refuses to go into specifics about why he axed Batgirl and the second Scooby-Doo movie (Was there really a first one?), but did use the word, “quality” a lot.  He didn’t specifically say that Batgirl was horrible, but declared that the movie would never be seen in theaters, on a streaming service, or released on DVD.  This was just weeks after he had shut down the fledgling CNN+ streaming service after spending $300 million on the startup.  While it will never be a movie, I’d buy a ticket to watch a video of Zaslav explaining to his board of directors why they just flushed half a billion dollars away.  What exactly does a CEO say under those circumstances?  “Sorry, I made a boo-boo?”

A rival studio exec, interviewed by Variety, claimed that axing a movie after spending such a large amount was unprecedented in Hollywood.

Well, no.  This is why Hollywood needs to hire more historians, and I don’t mean the current hacks who pretend to be consultants.  (I won’t mention any Tom Cruise movies by name, but no former Soviet bloc nations used the F-14, much less still have one functioning and sitting around fueled and ready to go sixteen years after they stopped making parts for them.) There is, indeed, a precedent to axing a movie like Batgirl.

In 1941, Howard Hughes was well on his way to establishing himself as a power in Hollywood and like everything else Hughes did, he started at the top, acting as both producer and director of movies.  Using the same publicists who had conducted a nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, Hughes conducted a similar search for a “busty” actress to star in a new movie about Billy the Kid, called The Outlaw.  Eventually signing Jane Russell, Hughes both produced and directed a western loosely based on the lives of Billy, Pat Garrett, and Doc Holliday.

In this case, loosely means they spelled the names correctly.  Though it is remotely possible that Doc Holliday and William Bonney both passed through Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1879, they were certainly not friends.  Other details, such as the years the men were alive or the dates they died, are wildly wrong.  My favorite scene in the movie is the closing scene, which shows Billy and his well-endowed girl sharing a horse as they ride off into a California sunset, complete with an automobile crossing in the background from left to right.

The movie, which you can watch above, is famous for Hughes’ obsession with filming Jane Russell.  He was particularly fixated on filming her in such a way that it would appear that the actress was not wearing a bra, even going so far as to design one that provided lift by using stiff underwire and stronger straps.  Though Russell assured her director she was wearing the custom bra for her scenes, in actuality she later revealed that she wore her own bra, but just tightened the straps and added a little tissue for padding.  Years later the bra designed by Hughes found a home in a museum, while Russell became a spokeswoman for Playtex.  Strangely, Hughes ignored the fact that, in the movie, Russell can be seen removing her nylon stockings 58 years before such a garment was invented.

Note.  If the movie above doesn't open on your device, click here.

When finished, the movie had some problems being approved by the Hollywood Production Code Administration, something that was hardly a surprise since Hughes had arranged that all of the publicity about the film emphasize Russell’s breasts.  Even the movie posters featuring sexy photos of Russell, such as the one at the right, depicted scenes not actually in the movie.  The media frenzy prompted one Hollywood writer to offer that the movie should be renamed, “The Sale of Two Titties”.

In reality, all Hughes had to do was cut 30 seconds from the movie to make the censors happy, and while those 30 seconds were milder than some of Russell’s later commercials for brassieres, Hughes promptly agreed and made the changes.  Then, Hughes announced that the Hollywood Production Code Administration would not allow the movie to be released.  No matter how loudly the Administration protested that they had not banned the movie, the press loved the bogus story and ran the Hughes version.

Hughes had his people contact newspapers, church leaders, and women’s organizations warning them about the “lewd movie”.  The resulting publicity created a demand for the public to see the movie, but Hughes kept the movie out of circulation for two years, only then allowing it to be shown in selected markets for a week before the movie was once again put into storage.  By the time the movie was finally released in 1946, the public could not wait to see it, making it a box office hit.

So a badly written movie, wildly inaccurate and directed by a man more obsessed with an unknown actress than with making a good movie, makes millions simply because the public is not allowed to see the film for years. 

If I’m correct, we will all be able to see exactly how horrible Batgirl is in about three years.  Right about the time Top Gun III comes out.