by Karl Shaw
He turned to one of his old Mississippi showboat partners, William Lillienthal, for help, although Lillienthal knew nothing about running a museum either. Together they financed the new Banvard Museum by floating a stock offering with $300,000, which was bought by some of Manhattan’s wealthiest families, many of them Banvard’s personal friends. In lieu of cash, Banvard paid his suppliers and building workers with shares of this stock. Unfortunately, unbeknown to the backers, Banvard did not register his business, or the stock, with the state of New York. So no actual share certificates existed for the stock, rendering it worthless.
Banvard’s Museum opened on 17 June 1867 in Manhattan. It was vast – a 40,000-square-foot building, housing a series of lecture rooms and displays. At the heart of the museum, in front of a 2,000-seater central auditorium, was Banvard’s original Mississippi panorama. Surrounding it, in several smaller rooms, was his collection of Egyptian antiquities. In his promotional material, Banvard was very keen to stress the educational qualities of his museum, as opposed to the cheap sensationalism on offer from P. T. Barnum.
But Barnum was more than up to the challenge. Anything Banvard offered that did well with the paying public, Barnum would quickly copy, then promote with superior advertising. Banvard had his original Mississippi panting; Barnum countered with his own Nile panorama – almost certainly copied from Banvard’s original. One of Banvard’s most popular artefacts was The Cardiff Giant, a ten-foot-tall stone man, discovered by some workers digging a well behind the barn in Cardiff, New York.
Speculation was rife over what the giant might be. Some thought it was a petrified man, others believed it to be an ancient statue. The “petrifactionists” theorized that it was one of the giants mentioned in the Bible, from Genesis 6:4, where we are told, “There were giants in the Earth in those days.” Those who promoted the statue theory followed the lead of Dr John F. Boynton, who speculated that a Jesuit missionary had carved it sometime during the seventeenth century to impress the local Indians.
The truth was more prosaic – it was actually the work of an enterprising New York tobacconist named George Hull. The idea of burying a stone giant in the ground occurred to him after he got into an argument with a Methodist Reverend about whether the Bible should be taken literally. He figured he could not only use the fake giant to poke fun at the religious establishment but also make some money. Eventually, a paleontologist from Yale paid it a visit and declared it to be a clumsy fake, but the public didn’t seem to care and kept coming to see it anyway. Barnum offered Hull $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When his offer was rejected, Barnum paid an artist to build an exact plaster replica of it, which he then put on display in his museum. Soon, the fake was drawing larger crowds than the original fake.
Throughout the summer, Banvard and Barnum battled with increasingly expensive advertising, locked in a struggle that, for one of them, would soon end in commercial death. And to add to the artist’s woes, within a few weeks of Banvard’s museum opening, shareholders were furious at the discovery that their stock was worthless. Creditors, meanwhile, were harassing Banvard for payment.
With falling ticket sales, Banvard was desperate to try something new. On 1 September, he shut down his museum and had it completely refurbished, then relaunched it a month later as Banvard’s Grand Opera House and Museum. Now it was offering dance productions and plays, such as adaptations of Our Mutual Friend and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was a commercial disaster. With nothing working, Banvard threw in the towel.
He retreated, humiliated, to his rambling sixty-acre property, where he and his wife were now alone, except for a single servant. He tried his hand at various other enterprises, but after his terrible treatment of his museum backers no investor would touch a Banvard project.
In 1875, he turned his hand to writing a history book, The Court and Times of George IV, King of England. Embarrassingly, it turned out that he had plagiarized a book written forty years earlier. He didn’t learn from this lesson. The following year, he wrote a play, Corrina, A Tale of Sicily, and performed it in his old museum, now renamed the New Broadway Theatre. The play was not only a copy of someone else’s work, it was stolen from a very much alive and very angry playwright.
His business and creative integrity now in tatters, and surrounded by increasingly angry creditors, Banvard tried to sell his museum to his old enemy P. T. Barnum. The reply was swift: “No, sir. I would not take the Broadway Theatre as a gift if I had to run it.” He did eventually sell it and, to his dismay, it operated under new ownership to great commercial success.
In 1883, bankruptcy forced Banvard to sell his castle. It was demolished and the contents sold off to pay creditors. The Mississippi painting alone was spared. Badly worn from forty years of use, it was considered worthless.20 Broke and forgotten by the public, he and his wife, now in their sixties, left New York for South Dakota, where they lived in a spare room in their son’s house.
In 1886, desperate for income and with failing eyesight, Banvard attempted to produce one final panoramic masterpiece, The Burning of Columbia. It depicted the partial destruction of the capital city of South Carolina by General Sharman’s troops on 17 February 1865. According to contemporary accounts, Banvard had lost none of his skills as an artist and it was a magnificent effort, but panoramas had long since had their day. The public of South Dakota stayed away.
Banvard’s wife died in 1889 and he followed soon afterwards. Unable to pay either of their funeral bills, his family fled town.
Most Embarrassing Oscar Nomination
The US film director Frank Capra’s 1933 comedy Lady for a Day won him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director and was the bookies’ hot favourite to win Best Picture. He was so confident of winning an Oscar that he rented a mansion in Beverly Hills, wrote thank-you notes, rehearsed his speech and bought an expensive tuxedo for the evening.
When Oscar night arrived, the host Will Rogers got to the Best Director category and opened the envelope. “Well, well, well . . .” remarked Rogers, “What do you know! I’ve watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” Finally, he got to the bit Capra was anticipating, when he said, “Come on up and get it, Frank!”
Capra stood up and made his way to the podium, but when he got there he realized, to his horror, that he wasn’t alone. The winner was, in fact, another Frank – Cavalcade director Frank Lloyd. Capra made his way back to his seat, describing it as “the longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life”.
“Reagan doesn’t have that presidential look.”
United Artists Executive, rejecting Reagan as lead in 1964 film The Best Man
Biggest Box-Office Bomb
By the time you read this it is possible that another multimillion-dollar turkey has taken pole position but, at the time of writing, 1995’s Cutthroat Island is the biggest financial disaster in film history, a fact confirmed by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Cutthroat Island was a swashbuckling action adventure film about the efforts of a lady pirate and her slave on a quest to recover three portions of a treasure map. The director Renny Harlin cast his wife Geena Davis as the lead after Michelle Pfeiffer pulled out. Harlin looked around for a male star and found Michael Douglas. He agreed to come on board with two conditions – first, his part had to be at least as big as that of Geena Davis; second, they had to start shooting straight away to fit in with Douglas’s busy schedule. Harlin agreed and went scouting for locations, finally settling on Malta and Thailand, some 5,000 miles apart, and built two life-sized galleons.
With the budget already bloated from the scramble to get the sets ready and the logistics of co-coordinating shooting on two continents, Douglas decided he’d had enough and baled out. When Davis heard about her co-star’s desertion, she, too, started having second thoughts but was bound to the project by a watertight contract, not to mention the fact that she was married to the dire
ctor. Harlin searched desperately for a new male lead but had the door slammed by every available A-list actor in Hollywood. Working his way through the B-list, he settled on the young Matthew Modine.
When shooting eventually got under way, a cameraman fell off a crane and broke his leg, then some pipes burst and raw sewage spewed into the tank where the actors were supposed to be working. Harlin fired a camera operator after an argument and twelve crew walked out in support. By the time of release, the $65 million budget had leapt to $115 million. Harlin’s spectacular screen effects were overshadowed by bad acting, a clichéd script and appalling continuity errors. The New York Times noted: “The film is too stupidly smutty for children and too cartoonish for any sane adult.”
In fact, film critics everywhere agreed that everyone involved in making it should walk the plank. Cutthroat Island was pulled from the cinemas after a month, having cashed in $10 million in worldwide box-office gross. That was a net loss of $105 million in 1995 but, when adjusted for inflation, a net loss of $147 million, sinking the studio that made it, Carolco Pictures.
Least Successful TV Show
The American actor Tim Conway starred in more failed TV shows than anyone in history, a fact he playfully acknowledged in his car number plate “13 WEEKS” – the length of time it took to cancel all of his solo TV projects.
He was also part of one of the most infamous network TV flops ever. On 5 February 1969, Conway hosted the first of eighteen planned episodes of a new ABC series, Turn On, touted as a “boundary-pushing” rival to the popular comedy Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
To offer a flavour of the sort of quality the American TV audience were treated to, among the sketches aired on the programme:
• Two policemen say, “Let us spray”, before spraying cans of mace at the camera.
• A nun asks a priest, “Father, can I have the car tonight?” The priest replies, “Just as long as you don’t get in the habit.”
• Several gay-themed messages scrolling across the screen include “God Save the Queens”, “Free Oscar Wilde” and “The Amsterdam Levee Is a Dike”.
• An anxious young woman feeds coins into a broken vending machine dispensing birth control pills then shakes it.
• A puppet snake says, “Remember, folks, I could have given Eve the apple and the Pill!”
Before the show was halfway through, an estimated seventeen million shocked Americans had turned off and ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate WFIL were forced to pull the plug on their switchboards because they couldn’t handle the number of complaints.
It received such a negative reaction that several TV stations, including one in Conway’s home town of Cleveland, refused to return to the programme after the first commercial break.
ABC cancelled the series on the same day it went out. Afterwards, the cast and crew held a party, simultaneously marking the show’s première and cancellation.
Worst Film Director
“Plan 9 is my pride and joy.
We used Cadillac hubcaps for flying saucers in that.”
Edward D. Wood Jr
During his fifty-four years, Ed Wood produced a series of low-budget B-movies described as “among the most compelling fiascos ever committed to celluloid”, including Glen or Glenda (1952), Bride of the Monster (1953), Jail Bait (1954), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Night of the Ghouls (1960) and Necromancy (1972).
Wood’s work was informed by a complicated private life. While happily married to the same woman until his death, he was also a transvestite. His mother, apparently disappointed that she didn’t have a daughter, dressed him in skirts until he was twelve years old.
Technically, Wood was, in fact, a transvestite war hero. Six months after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marines where he earned several medals, including the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. He took part in the invasion of Tarawa, where of over 4,000 Marines only one man in ten survived. Wood was injured, losing his front teeth to a rifle butt and taking several bullets in the leg. After the battle, he confessed to a fellow Marine, “I wanted to be killed, Joe . . . I didn’t want to be wounded because I could never explain my pink panties and pink bra.”
Following his discharge from the Marines, Wood joined a circus freak show and played a bearded lady wearing women’s clothing and prosthetic breasts. By 1948, he had written, produced, directed and performed in his first big failure, a stage play called The Casual Company. The play’s subject matter was close to Wood’s heart: a handsome man falls for a pretty woman wearing a fluffy angora sweater.
Wood tried to break into the film industry, initially without success, but finally landed the chance to direct a film based on the famous Christine Jorgensen sex-change. The result, Glen or Glenda, was a semi-autobiographical tribute to Wood’s angora fetishism.
Wood plays the title role, while the blonde actress Dolores Fuller is his fiancée, described by the narrator as “a lovely, intelligent girl”. She says things such as, “Here we are, two perfectly normal people about to be married and lead a normal life together!” not long before finding out that her husband-to-be is lusting to wear her white angora sweater. Presented as an educational documentary on the subject, Glen or Glenda is interrupted, from time to time, by a ranting and raving Bela Lugosi, who irrelevantly declaims: “Bevare . . . bevare . . . beva re of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys, puppy dog tails and big fat snails. Bevare . . . take care . . . bevare.” The happy ending of the film was not repeated in life. According to Fuller, “Ed begged me to marry him. I loved him in a way, but I couldn’t handle the transvestism.”
The highlight of Wood’s career was his space vampire movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), regularly voted the worst film ever, in which aliens try to take over the world by resurrecting the dead. The acting was terrible and the dialogue ludicrous, but the sets were even worse. The haunted cemetery was obviously built inside a studio, the floor clearly visible around the “grass” and studio floodlights remain in shot. At one point, an actor is seen tripping over a cardboard tombstone, causing it to bend.
The sudden actual death of the leading man, elderly horror star Bela Lugosi, only three days into filming might have defeated a lesser man than Wood. Enlisting his wife’s chiropractor, the director had Lugosi’s stand-in wear the actor’s trademark Dracula cape and cover his face with it, a cunning ploy that he might have pulled off successfully had Lugosi not been a good foot shorter than his replacement.
Continuity was not one of Wood’s strengths. In Bride of the Monster, for example, a secretary picks up a phone and answers it, then carries on a conversation, although it hasn’t yet rung. The ring tone of the phone was supposed to be dubbed in afterwards, but the veteran director simply forgot to do it. Lugosi, playing a crazed scientist, delivers the line, “Don’t be afraid of Lobo, he’s as harmless as kitchen.” The original line in the script had read, “Don’t be afraid of Lobo, he’s as harmless as a kitten,” but Lugosi was suffering from severe drug-addiction at the time and refused to do a retake, so the line stayed in.
Wood went into alcoholic decline, directing soft and later hardcore pornography before his premature death aged fifty-four. He suffered a fatal heart attack while watching a televised football game in his bedroom. The stricken film director yelled out to his wife in the next room, “Kathy, I can’t breathe!” a plea she ignored for ninety minutes before finally going in to find him dead. Apparently, he often feigned heart attacks and screamed for help as a joke. At one point, she shouted at him to shut up.
One of his movies, Bride of the Monster, actually made money, but not for Wood; he had already sold all his rights to it. But sixteen years after his death, a film was made about his terrible films starring Johnny Depp, called Ed Wood. And that film made a lot of money.
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1 On one such occasion, he spontaneously generated the couplet:
“Gentlemen, please,
Refrain from throwing peas!”
2 His rival, the Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, had died in the month of the McGonagalls’ exodus and William hoped that he would replace him. He wrote a poem about Tennyson’s death and sent a copy to the Marquis of Lorne who replied: “Sir, I thank you for your enclosure, and as a friend would advise you to keep strictly to prose for the future.”
3 When the Laureateship fell vacant in 1892, Queen Victoria expressed a preference for Algernon Charles Swinburne – “the best of my poets”. It is reasonable to assume that she was unaware at the time of his reputation for cross-dressing and flagellation, not to mention the verses Swinburne had penned about Her Majesty’s presumed sex life, especially the one about how she had been shagged by Wordsworth.
4 “The London of the west” according to Keeler.
5 One of Keeler’s finest was a 135,000-word novel written in the first person whose narrator chases an escaped lunatic millionaire. The narrator uses a variety of disguises and personalities, but turns out to be the lunatic himself.
6 In which a rival Chicago newsman searches for a publisher’s missing daughter and encounters Ng Chuen Li Yat, a Chinese millionaire who bet a fortune that he could walk across South America in a year and a half and Peter Zeller, a shipwreck survivor who mails 14,257 identical two-of-spades cards in order to trap one man.
7 Conan Doyle was a firm believer in contact with the spirit world to the day he died, convinced that one day he would be vindicated. Although, to be fair, we haven’t heard much from him since.
8 According to Wikipedia, “The theosophist seeks to understand the mysteries of the universe and the bonds that unite the universe, humanity and the divine. The goal of theosophy is to explore the origin of divinity and humanity, and the end of world, life and humanity.” They also believe in fairies.