The movie Kevin Costner tried to delete from history: “He hoped to host a barbeque where he’d burn its negative”
Every actor and filmmaker will experience at least one high-profile failure throughout their career; such is the unforgiving nature of the industry. However, Kevin Costner has developed a habit of bringing it upon himself, which – in a strange way – deserves to be applauded.
After all, he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood by the end of the 1980s, less than a decade after he made his feature debut. Most people in his position would be content to continue taking on guaranteed money-making roles in projects destined to find the largest possible audience, but not Cosnter.
Instead, he ploughed millions of his own dollars into his directorial debut, which admittedly paid huge dividends when Dances with Wolves became the highest-grossing western in cinema history and won seven Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. That said, when he tried to make lightning strike twice with The Postman, it was so disastrous that he was booted off the A-list.
After clawing his way back to relevancy with Yellowstone, Costner opted to quit his lucrative and award-winning episodic role as John Dutton to bet on himself again, which went much more like The Postman than Dances with Wolves when Horizon flopped at the box office and curtailed plans for three sequels.
The Oscar winner has made it clear that he has no issues risking it all, and he doesn’t regret those catastrophic failures. However, there’s one film that Costner hated so much that he actively sought to buy back the original print and set it on fire, which is pretty drastic.
The only memorable thing about 1981’s Sizzle Beach, USA, a comedy following three women who rent a beach house and get up to all sorts of romantic hijinks annihilated by critics, is that it was Costner’s first film credit. Once he became a star, production company Troma re-released the movie to capitalise, which caught the actor’s attention.
Sizzle Beach wasn’t only Costner’s feature debut, but it also contained his first on-camera sex scene, a moment that left him as uncomfortable in the years to come as it did when he shot it. To try and prevent anyone from witnessing his dismal entry into the world of cinema, he decided to take matters into his own hands.
When Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables was gearing up to shoot, it was revealed that Costner had made an offer to purchase Sizzle Beach from Troma and “he hoped to host a barbecue where he’d burn its negative.” That didn’t go according to plan, but when another filmmaker attempted to reuse his sex scene for a completely different film called Silent Fury, the people who refused to sell him his first flick had his back.
“Kevin Costner did that scene for that particular movie,” Troma’s vice president Michael Herz told Daily News. “Out of deference to him, we’re not licencing that scene.” Producer Eric Louzil had a different take, which was probably more accurate. “They’re worried about Kevin suing them,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be hearing from him.”
In the end, Costner didn’t buy Sizzle Beach back and set it alight, Troma refused to sell him the negative, and Silent Fury didn’t incorporate a sex scene he’d shot more than a decade previously into its narrative. It wasn’t a resounding victory, but things could have gone worse.
