The two movies Robert Zemeckis called “complete disasters”
Having heavily contributed to some of the most memorable moments of cinema of the last four decades, Robert Zemeckis is rightfully considered a filmmaker of notable quality. His films admirably marry the comedy and drama genres, and his commitment to innovative visual effects has led to an excellent reputation amongst his peers.
After the romantic comedy Romancing the Stone, Zemeckis announced himself as a significant player in Hollywood with the Back to the Future movies and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In 1994, the Chicago-born director released the iconic Forrest Gump, for which he finally won the highly-coveted ‘Best Director’ Academy Award.
However, while Zemeckis has indeed enjoyed his well-earned reputation, it’s fair to say that his initial path to stardom was somewhat stony, to say the least. His first two movies, 1978’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars, were “absolute failures at the box office”, according to Zemeckis in an interview with DGA.
“Complete disasters,” he said of his first forays into the director’s chair. The problem for Zemeckis was that he thought that both films were actually fairly good in terms of their overall quality, but the way they were marketed by their studios left few audience members wanting to come and dispense with their cash to see them.
“I learned some sad news: it’s not an automatic thing that, if you make a good movie, everyone wants to see it,” he said. Zemeckis’ feature film debut, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, focuses on a group of teenagers in New York City who try to get into the Beatles’ first live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
According to Zemeckis, the film enjoyed “the most spectacular previews on I Wanna Hold Your Hand with really high numbers.” However, he later learned “the biggest lesson” as a filmmaker, noting, “The job isn’t done when you’re finished making the movie. You have to really get involved in the marketing.”
A studio is not necessarily “some big happy family where everybody was watching everybody else’s back,” Zemeckis explained before noting that merely thinking that because a studio is helping a director to make a film doesn’t actually mean that they have an interest in seeing it succeed, as he well found.
The director’s second movie, 1980’s Used Cars, saw Kurt Russell play a cunning salesman who works for an unsuccessful car dealership where the brother of the proprietor is aiming to take it over for his own use. The film would go on to achieve cult status, but again, it was a film that suffered at the box office.
Eventually, perhaps Zemeckis learned his lesson and began to pay more attention to the way that his films were being marketed. After a three-year break, he returned with Romancing the Stone, in which Michael Douglas played an adventure who helps a romance novelist save her sister from criminals in Columbia.
Zemeckis saw the film as something of a turning point in his career, noting, “That was a very fortunate thing for me, and I knew it was the whole ballgame. By that time, I’d had a three-year dry spell.” There was a risk in hiring Zemeckis, according to the director himself, and it was Michael Douglas who convinced the studio to take the filmmaker on despite his previously disastrous efforts at the box office.
