An interesting post over at Jaime Weinman's blog with his take on the failures of Vincente Minnelli's now-on-DVD adaptation of the Broadway musical Kismet. I agree with his overall conclusion, but not his specifics.
At this point, many regular readers may be thinking, "Wait a second. A Minnelli picture on DVD and he's not going on about how great it is? Whaaa--?" Well, no, I'm not going on about it because it's not very good. Kismet is a perfect example of what happens when a director gets stuck doing something he doesn't want to do. In this case, Minnelli hated the material (and resented the assignment), so he basically threw a movie-long snit. The premise and setting could have allowed him to create a fantastic Persia-of-the-mind, similar to his exotic, heavily stylized Caribbean in The Pirate, but he just didn't want to try, and the movie just sits there.
Way back when, studios treated directors as mere employees, assigned to whatever the bosses wanted them to do. Great filmmakers used to get stuck with material inappropriate to their talent all the time--no amount of auteurist justification can ever convince me John Ford had any business directing Wee Willie Winkie, Howard Hawks himself hated A Song Is Born, and seriously, who thought Anthony Mann was the right guy for The Glenn Miller Story? These guys were pros, and did their best--they clearly didn't connect with these projects, but at least you can't visualize them off-camera holding their noses. With Minnelli and Kismet, you can.
With the collapse of the studio system of old, more independent-minded directors seldom found themselves stuck with projects they obviously hated, but it still happened. Richard Lester's disinterest in his material in Superman III is palpable, and Brian DePalma has practically made a career out of this sort of thing--when you watch Wise Guys or Mission: Impossible or (shudder) Mission To Mars, you can see contempt drip from the screen.
Sometimes these projects are fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way(I don't think Sidney Lumet hated the project when he made The Wiz, but boy, that movie is like a step-by-step example of how not to make a musical), but mostly they're just depressing. When Wes Anderson makes a Tim Allen vehicle or Paul Thomas Anderson gets a gig on the Scary Movie franchise, you'll see what I mean.
