‘As bad as any movie ever made’
Fifty years ago, one film made a mess of an all-star cast. Martin Chilton explains.
Myra Breckinridge, a scandalous odyssey about a sex-change sadist that was loosely based on Gore Vidal’s bestselling 1968 novel, has earned a place in history as one of the worst films ever made. Vidal called the adaptation “an awful joke,” director Michael Sarne admitted it was “a debacle” and star Raquel Welch described it as “a stinker.”
The expensive flop, which opened in the summer of 1970, had gone through 57 script revisions, with bitter infighting among Welch, an aging Mae West, a young Farrah Fawcett and cantankerous, impoverished actor-director John Huston, sufficiently needing money for poker debts that he took the part of an aging creep of a cowboy.
The origins of Vidal’s novel were odd. In 1967, drama critic Kenneth Tynan asked Vidal to write an erotic sketch about an orgy for a musical sex show to be called Oh! Calcutta!
Vidal conjured up a genderfluid sex addict who was into spanking. In a flash, he realized he “certainly wasn’t going to waste (the idea) on a review-sketch.” The opening sentence — “I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess” — popped into his head fully formed, and a comic novel “poured out in a few weeks.” His androgynous protagonist, who shares a surname with 19th-century U.S. vice-president John Breckinridge and
San Francisco drag queen Bunny Breckinridge, is subjected to a gender-shifting storyline laced with seduction, lesbianism and male rape.
U.K. bookseller W.H. Smith refused to stock it, even after cuts to satisfy the censors. In the U.S., the unexpurgated Myra Breckinridge was an instant bestseller, and went on to sell more than two million copies, helped by a publicity storm that saw it denounced as “filthy,” and conservatives on TV attacking Vidal as “a pornographer.” Studio 20th Century Fox paid a staggering $900,000 for the movie rights.
Vidal’s contract allowed him to write the screenplay. He had experience as a Hollywood script man, having worked on 11-time Oscar winner Ben-hur. Yet Fox president Richard Zanuck kept dismissing his scripts, claiming they “lacked that touch of craziness and zaniness” evident in the novel.
Enter bit-part actor and pop singer Sarne, who convinced the studio he could rescue the script by repositioning the sexchange narrative as “a dream.” His only previous film had been a soon-forgotten 1968 flop called Joanna, starring Donald Sutherland and Geneviève Waite. When Fox offered him $100,000 to direct the picture, he later recalled, he felt his “knees buckle.” An exasperated Vidal turned his back on the project.
It’s hard to exaggerate the chaos that ensued as the film limped into production. The screenplay, continually being rewritten by David Giler, seemed baffling. Myron Breckinridge — played by real-life film critic Rex Reed — undergoes sex-reassignment surgery in Copenhagen, at the hands of a chain-smoking surgeon played by John Carradine, and Reed’s character somehow metamorphosizes into Welch’s Myra.
Welch was desperate to pull off a performance to distance her from the clichéd sex kitten roles of One Million Years B.C. and Fantastic Voyage. At her lowest ebb on set, she was found sobbing in the bathroom. When Huston asked what the matter was, she said: “I’m just so scared. They keep rewriting this script, and I think it’s getting worse ... Couldn’t you help?”
“Darling, don’t you worry about a thing,” Huston replied. “It’s only a movie.”
West, enticed by a fee of $350,000, plus expenses, came out of a 26-year retirement to play Leticia Van Allen, a casting agent with a voracious sexual appetite. As well as insisting on top billing above Welch, West also won an agreement to write all her own scenes. She demanded that the final script had the words “Mae West — Written by Herself” on the cover. “It was clear Mae West had not read the book or the script,” Giler told Vanity Fair magazine.
Time magazine savaged the movie as “an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye.” Four decades later, critic Leonard Maltin, judged it to be “as bad as any movie ever made.”