The 2006 movie Emilio Estevez got “slaughtered” for making: “The press was not kind”
It’s been a difficult career for Emilio Estevez, who intentionally turned his back on mainstream Hollywood to avoid being stuffed into a box he wouldn’t be able to escape from, only to discover that when he did, the glass ceiling had already been placed directly above his head.
Like several other members, he’s never been fond of the ‘Brat Pack’ designation that followed him and his cohorts around in the 1980s. It was much easier to accept at the time, though, since he’d been pegged as one of his era’s fastest-rising stars, and the hits were happening a lot more often than the misses.
However, it says a lot about just how much the wheels fell off that he hasn’t been cast in a high-profile production since Mission: Impossible, which was released 30 years ago, and even at that, he was killed off almost immediately. Still, he doesn’t seem too cut up about it, with smaller-scale, independent films and passion projects having been the priority ever since.
Estevez has helmed six features and a documentary as a director, and while not all of them have been rapturously received by critics or audiences, he’s doing the work that he wants to do. Of course, getting funding is always a problem for filmmakers who don’t have friends in high places, even if you’re Martin Sheen’s son with a career that stretches back over 40 years.
In 1968, a young Emilio woke up his father in the early hours of the morning to tell him that Robert F Kennedy had been assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and it was an incident he’d never forget, with Estevez subsequently describing it as “one of the most important events of the 20th century,” one that led to “the death of decency, hope, manners, grace, and formality” in America.
Decades later, he decided to make a movie about it. The problem was that he couldn’t get the money together, so he sold his art collection, cashed in his pension, started shilling autographs for a price, and, in his own words, “did everything short of selling my house” to get the $14 million film off the ground.
Despite a star-studded cast that included Estevez, Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Sharon Stone, Anthony Hopkins, Elijah Wood, Demi Moore, and countless others, Bobby was a bit of a bust. It turned a minor profit at the box office, but the reaction was tepid at best, leaving him to admit that his confidence in the picture had set him up to fail.
“When I was doing press for Bobby, a lot of people said I was aping Robert Altman,” he admitted, which wasn’t too wide of the mark, in all honesty. “I said, ‘No, it’s Irwin Allen, this is The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure‘, and I got slaughtered. They said, ‘It’s more like The Love Boat‘! The press was not kind, if I’m honest.”
Estevez believed he’d made a heavyweight ensemble piece comparable to the best that 1970s disaster cinema had to offer, when in reality, the critical consensus was that he’d made something closer to a sitcom instead. That’s not a comparison he wanted to hear after his long-gestating labour of love had finally made it to the screen, and to further the nautical analogy, it knocked the wind right out of his sails.
