Back in 1973, hot young director Peter Medak was given the chance to direct Peter Sellers in a pirate movie, to be shot in Cyprus in a two-month window. It went ... badly. According to Medak, his career suffered badly in the aftermath. Forty-five years later, he planned out and directed this documentary as a sort of inquest into the catastrophe (well, spoiler alert, nobody actually died), filming on location and interviewing as many of the survivors as he could find.
It's a very interesting tale, full of pretty unbelievable incidents which seem to have actually happened. I would also suggest that it be watched in business schools, so well does it dramatize what happens if the criteria for success of a project are not determined in advance, if the organizational chart is not clearly filled out, if some of the key players (Sellers, e.g.) have no clear incentive to complete the project and if their nominal supervisors have no real power to induce them to.
The only real problem with this movie is that Medak is not a neutral party - he has clearly been stewing all this time about how he was treated by Sellers and by financier John Heyman, and he is ready to expose it all to us. I'm not saying that I don't trust Medak's account - I rather do. And it's still a good movie. But I think it would have been a better one if someone else with a little distance had had editorial control. For one thing, I don't think Medak bears it in mind enough that we, the viewers, don't know up front who the crew and management all were, and that we might have a hard time following the organizational chart. For another, there are a few questions that could be posed to Medak himself that he doesn't think of - like, "Did you, with like two pictures on your resume, worry enough in advance about how you were going to run a project where Sellers was the person whose fame would impress everyone and was likely to walk all over you?" Some movies can't be made, and some job offers shouldn't be accepted.
It's a very interesting tale, full of pretty unbelievable incidents which seem to have actually happened. I would also suggest that it be watched in business schools, so well does it dramatize what happens if the criteria for success of a project are not determined in advance, if the organizational chart is not clearly filled out, if some of the key players (Sellers, e.g.) have no clear incentive to complete the project and if their nominal supervisors have no real power to induce them to.
The only real problem with this movie is that Medak is not a neutral party - he has clearly been stewing all this time about how he was treated by Sellers and by financier John Heyman, and he is ready to expose it all to us. I'm not saying that I don't trust Medak's account - I rather do. And it's still a good movie. But I think it would have been a better one if someone else with a little distance had had editorial control. For one thing, I don't think Medak bears it in mind enough that we, the viewers, don't know up front who the crew and management all were, and that we might have a hard time following the organizational chart. For another, there are a few questions that could be posed to Medak himself that he doesn't think of - like, "Did you, with like two pictures on your resume, worry enough in advance about how you were going to run a project where Sellers was the person whose fame would impress everyone and was likely to walk all over you?" Some movies can't be made, and some job offers shouldn't be accepted.