Failed Oscar Campaigns: "Dick Tracy" (1990)

Scene from Dick Tracy (1990)

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

The Movie

Dick Tracy (1990)

Directed By: Warren Beatty

Written By: Chester Gould (Based On), Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. (Written By)

Starring: Warren Beatty, Madonna, Al Pacino

Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime
Running Time 105 minutes

Summary: The comic strip detective finds his life vastly complicated when Breathless Mahoney makes advances towards him while he is trying to battle Big Boy Caprice's united mob.

The Movie

This upcoming Sunday marks a special moment in Oscars ceremony history. For the first time ever, a comic book movie will be competing for Best Picture. The question now is whether or not Black Panther will defy all odds and take the top honor in a year fraught with controversy over whether a popular film is worthy of recognition. With this in mind, it only feels right to look back through comic book history and see the other points when they've crossed over with the Oscars. There's been a few that have made some sort of a mark: Skippy, Road to Perdition, Ghost World, and of course The Dark Knight. But, does anyone know what the film with the most Oscar wins is? While one would posit a theory that there's been a Marvel Cinematic Universe film that's won half a dozen Oscars from technical fields, the answer is far from that. As it stands, Marvel has only one Oscar from the past decade (Best Animated Film - Big Hero 6). No, to answer the question as to what has the most Oscar wins involves going back to the 20th century. No, not Superman (1978) or Batman (1990). You're getting close, though.

Almost 30 years later, director Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy seems like a strange film to call an Oscar darling, but it's true. With three Oscar wins, the film beats The Dark Knight by one as the bigger winner as of this publication. One can assume that Black Panther will put this to shame. But for now, in its waning days of Oscar distinctions, it's important to remember the anomaly that is this movie. It's far from the modern sensibility as it's shot on sound stages with matte painting backdrops as well as THREE music-related releases. It's hard to remember now, but Dick Tracy was a phenomenon and the follow-up to Beatty's Best Director win for Reds nine years prior. More than just a film that rode the coattails of Tim Burton's Batman, it was a film that filled the fledgling genre with a sense of prestige that seems increasingly weird and more a sign of New Hollywood growing long in the tooth.

It was based on a 1930's comic book whose sets intentionally looked as colorful as any of the comic strips. Characters had exaggerated names like Breathless, The Kid, and Big Daddy. It was silly, but it was also technically impressive and captured a nostalgic look and feel that few films of the time weren't ashamed of making. It was a flamboyant follow-up to Batman, and its omnipresence in 1990 made it both a phenomenon and, as Touchstone Studios producers suggest, a box office failure. What was it exactly? It was Beatty's comeback film, a moment where Madonna got to be taken seriously as an actress, and when mainstream audiences got to hear some of that sweet, sweet Stephen Sondheim music. The film plays like an alternate dimension example of where comic books would've gone if they were popular more for aesthetics than narrative. With an Oscar-nominated performance by Al Pacino, it's a film that left voters awestruck for a time when excessive gunfire and sensuality were more common in cinema. 

- The Campaign -

The story of Dick Tracy feels like one that's been fabled for either a James Cameron-level Oscar campaign, or a monumental box office flop. In 1975, Beatty had an idea to adapt the Dick Tracy comics to the big screen. As his next two films, Heaven Can Wait and Reds, would suggest that didn't happen immediately. In fact, Reds was such an undertaking by Beatty that it left the studios not wanting to make ambitious projects with him. Scripts made the rounds and landed in the hands of directors like Walter Hill, Steven Spielberg, and John Landis. After endless negotiation, Beatty eventually got the rights back and completed the film in 1988. There were controversies behind the scenes, notably in the firing of Sean Young (who played the role taken by Glenne Headley) who accused Beatty of sexual harassment. Beatty apologized by saying that he should've never cast Young in the first place.

Around the same time Beatty was having a public relationship with pop star Madonna. Their chemistry meant that they were a hot item and the chance to see them in a film together seemed promising. This wasn't the end of Beatty's hubris, as he chose to make the film designed in primary colors to reflect the old school comic strip. Many of the characters were adorned with prosthetics to better look like drawings of their characters. Meanwhile, Pacino improvised his make-up to fit how he wanted to look. The sound design was also considered cutting edge, as the stereo effects allowed for everything to sound bigger and more impressive. With Danny Elfman writing the score (in large part because of his work on Batman) and Sondheim writing five original songs, the film was about as big as they would come. Add in an Ishtar reunion with Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles, and you got one of the most impressively stacked comic book movies up to that point.

The marketing of the film was just as exhaustive as the production. Following the success of Batman, Beatty and crew used the marketing to the best of their capabilities. Madonna would incorporate footage from the film into her Blonde Ambition Tour. McDonald's would sell toys. There was over a dozen commercials, including some emphasizing the younger character as to appeal to children. Even old reruns of the TV serials aired until audiences complained that villains like Go Go Gomez and Joe Jitsu were considered offensive. There was a video game released for NES and Game Boy. There were plans to open a ride at Disneyland and various other resorts called Dick Tracy's Crime Stoppers that never came to be. In the world of soundtracks, it followed in Batman's footsteps and released three that included Elfman's score, Madonna singing the Sondheim-penned songs ("I'm Breathless"), and an album of inspired by tracks that included artists like k.d. lang, Jerry Lee Lewis, Al Jarreau, and a 90's mix by Ice-T. To say the least, the marketing was saturated in a way that made every last person in America know the name Dick Tracy.

The reviews were mixed. Roger Ebert gave it a perfect score and praised its lush visuals. Meanwhile, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said that Beatty was too old for the part. The film would open atop the box office and had the third best opening of 1990. It would gross over $100 million and become the ninth highest grossing film of the year. Despite this success, the marketing inflated the production costs and left Disney producer Jeffrey Katzenberg to consider it a failure. It opened  with a short called Roller Coaster Rabbit, which was based on the Roger Rabbit cartoon character. This was a measure to get younger audiences into the movie. Internationally, it would gross over $160 million in 1990 and would acquire another $60 million from rental figures alone. 

While it didn't quite legitimize comic book movies to the status of prestige cinema, it did suggest that there was more to love than the genre was getting credit for. With a studio budget, the films could look gorgeously like comic strips, playing with form in a way that was stylized but still told a story that audiences wanted to hear. It helped that Beatty still had a great reputation in Hollywood and the film's ability to break $100 million at the box office helped to legitimize the recent trend set by Batman less than a year prior. Audiences wanted goofy films that were entertaining. Not only that, but serious actors could now play these roles and not feel like their careers were days away from ending. Dick Tracy may have rode the coattails of an arguably and critically superior film, but it did so with an impeccable team of artists with many Oscar and Tony wins to their credit. It was a perfect symbol for what the decade to come would look like, for better and worse. Now all it had to do was win some Oscars and prove that Beatty's decades-long gamble was worth it.

- The Payoff -

Not only did the film show up for Oscar nominations, it received a still impressive seven nominations. The majority of them were for technical fields that included Best Sound, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design. Al Pacino would receive a Best Supporting Actor nomination, which proved that these performances were worthy of higher praise. While it alludes to the actor's eventual spiral into playing nothing but cartoon characters, it lead to a belief that comic book characters could still be rich and interesting. There were three categories that won, including Best Art Direction-Set Direction, Best Make-Up, and Best Original Song for "Sooner or Later." It's the film that won Sondheim his Oscar and in return he adapted four of the five songs from the film to a later Broadway production.

Dick Tracy's success would remain largely unprecedented for several decades. While comic book movies have been nominated and won, none have managed to win three since. The Dark Knight has won two, which posits the question as to how a film could even think to compete and be taken seriously if it can't win technical fields. Some of that success is owed to Beatty, who remained an Oscar darling after the film. He even held onto the rights for a sequel but was so marred in rights disputes that it never came to fruition. The closest that came from it was a 2008 TV special where Dick Tracy was interviewed by Leonard Maltin and shot by famed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubeszki. As of 2006, Beatty says that he has ideas, but there's nothing official yet. Considering that his most recent film, Rules Don't Apply, bombed... it's hard to see one last move by Beatty as a director.

Audiences nowadays are likely to laugh at Dick Tracy's success in part because it was a direct response to Batman. They consider the idea that one superhero film did well inspiring 30's detective films to be laughable, as it should. Still, the rich color pallet and whimsical personality lead to a certain trend in films to come. As much as Batman made things dark and brooding, it  can be argued that Dick Tracy's enthusiasm lead to a cynical misreading of comic book cinema with Batman & Robin: a film that has been publicly now admitted to exist solely to sell more merchandise. In that way, Dick Tracy is a bit of a plague on pop culture, even if it doesn't do anything wrong. If anything, it's a shame that it didn't inspire more dense productions with style and music that created its own universe.

That is exactly what makes Black Panther such a fascinating potential big winner. Even if it looks nothing like Dick Tracy, it has so much of the core elements to be as compelling of a film. It has the Best Original Score AND Best Original Song nominations. It has a lot of technical fields as well. More than any film of the 21st century, it has built a world that feels just as exciting and new as Dick Tracy felt in its nostalgic lens. Who knows how things will shake out, but to see a film with such ambition and cultural acceptance shows that the 28 years between the two films has shown a lot of growth from artifice to exploring something deeper and more personal. Black Panther has a lot of chance to be the most Oscar winning superhero film in history, and it's a good time to pass the torch. All it has to do is win four. Though here's hoping that disputes over the rights doesn't keep the sequel from getting made sooner than later like Dick Tracy was.