The John Carpenter movie “attacked” by the studio: “It was not a pleasant experience”
While it would undoubtedly be preferable from a fiscal standpoint for the movies to succeed at the first time of asking, John Carpenter has grown accustomed to seeing his films under-perform in cinemas before finding long-lasting life.
Not to say that he’s become box office poison, though, when Halloween was an immensely profitable exercise that put him on the map. The Fog recouped its budget 20 times over from cinemas, Escape from New York earned back its production costs four times over, and Christine more than doubled the studio’s investment.
Of course, that only tells one side of Carpenter’s story. The Thing famously flopped in the face of a critical evisceration before taking its place among the greatest horror movies ever made, Escape from L.A. was a commercial disaster that eventually won over the doubters who initially didn’t match the enthusiasm of the director, and not even Jeff Bridges’ Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’ could push Starman into the black.
Towards the end of his run, Carpenter’s output didn’t deserve to reap any financial rewards when Ghosts of Mars and The Ward were so irredeemably turgid, but it can’t be said that Big Trouble in Little China didn’t deserve the flowers it never got. Almost the living, breathing definition of a cult classic, the film has endured for generations despite facing the wrath of a vengeful studio and apathetic customers.
The genre-bending riot is part Western, part action flick, part mystery, part martial arts caper, and part supernatural fantasy, which really shouldn’t work anywhere near as well as it does. There’s an awful lot going on in the kitschy favourite, but it’s to Carpenter’s credit that it came off as well as it did, considering the obstacles he faced along the way.
The finished version of Big Trouble in Little China wasn’t a million miles away from the filmmaker’s original vision, but neither was it what his backers at 20th Century Fox were expecting. “Well, the studio was expecting Indiana Jones,” he admitted to Roel Haanen. “That’s what they wanted. But instead they got this goofy, weird movie. They wanted me to cut out all the funny stuff. They wanted it less funny.”
It must have been tense because Carpenter didn’t even want to talk about it. “Look, it was not a pleasant experience. We don’t need to revisit this,” he pleaded. “But I can say that when the movie came out it wasn’t a big hit.” He was especially indignant over the way “they attacked” star Kurt Russell, but he took it all in his stride: “Fuck ‘em. I don’t care. I love that movie.”
He’s not the only one, and while the studio may have been expecting an adventure in the vein of Steven Spielberg’s globetrotting saga, anyone with a soft spot for Big Trouble in Little China – which is a lot of people – are more than happy with what they got.
