Whoopi Goldberg Tried To Ban One Of Her Flops From Hitting Theaters
In the mid-1980s, Whoopi Goldberg exploded onto the entertainment scene via her self-titled, one-woman Broadway show, which was considered so electric and essential that HBO filmed a performance and aired it within a year of its stage premiere. At this point, Goldberg was a force of nature, a comedic dynamo capable of zipping from one deep-tissue character study to another with the ease of Richard Pryor. Meanwhile, her big, brilliant brain seemed to run a mile a minute, like the one possessed by her friend and colleague Robin Williams. Whoopi, it seemed, could do anything. Movie stardom seemed a cinch.
It was. Kind of. After making her dramatic debut in Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple," she scored a smallish hit with Penny Marshall's comedy thriller "Jumpin' Jack Flash." That led to two more star vehicles in the 1987 duo of "Burglar" and "Fatal Beauty," but they didn't take. The studios' strategy to find Goldberg a "Beverly Hills Cop"-style action-comedy that would showcase her riffing talents wasn't necessarily wrongheaded, but the material was nowhere near as fertile as the film that made Eddie Murphy a superstar.
Perhaps what Goldberg needed was a smaller comedy that placed her front-and-center without the fuss and fury of action set pieces. Just let Whoopi cook. It wasn't a bad idea, but the film that sought to give us pure, uncut Goldberg wound up being so lousy that the star tried to bar its release.
Whoopi Goldberg's The Telephone dialed a very wrong number
On paper, "The Telephone" sounds at the very least like a cult classic. Goldberg stars as an out-of-work actor who spends her downtime at home calling various people and businesses as a variety of characters with different accents and ethnic backgrounds. The screenplay was written by counterculture legend Terry Southern ("Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb") and the great singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, while the film was directed by surly character actor Rip Torn. This was not cookie-cutter studio stuff. Alas, as far as its star was concerned, it was nowhere near up to snuff.
Goldberg believed that she had final cut over the finished film, so when she wasn't happy with the version that screened at the Sundance Film Festival, she sued to prevent the film's release. The $5 million lawsuit was decided in favor of the film's distributor New World Pictures, which paved the way for the studio to dump the movie in 50 theaters. The reviews were savage. The New York Times' Caryn James called the movie a ripoff of Jean Cocteau's "The Human Voice" while bemoaning its squandering of Goldberg's talents. Leonard Maltin was harsher, claiming that Goldberg "may have hit rock bottom with this clinker."
36 years after it bombed, "The Telephone" is largely forgotten. You'd think that a film with its pedigree might've garnered a reassessment, but only Nashville Scene's Jason Shawhan (who compared it to Robert Altman's ultra-shaggy "O.C. and Stiggs") has stepped up. Perhaps Goldberg's hatred of the movie has scared people off. Maybe it's time for this to change.