The year is 1981 and Warren Beatty is on top of the world. He has just swept the oscars with his historical epic set in Bolshevik Russia, ’Reds’. The film is very much Beatty’s, on top of producing, directing and writing he also stars in it. To describe ‘Reds’ as a vanity project slightly under sells it. After years of concerted effort he has finally shrugged off his persona of the playboy with the good looks from Bonnie and Clyde to become a serious filmmaker in his own right, the good looks still very much in tact. Now at a career height he turns his producing powers to ‘Ishtar’, an action-comedy directed by his longtime collaborator Elaine May.
Ishtar bombs. Not only does Ishtar bomb but it’s a certified disaster. David Putnam had just taken over Columbia Pictures and was less than happy with the film. In an attempt to sink the film poor press releases were leaked before the film came out and rumours of a chaotic set swirled seeped in misogynistic inference. If you haven’t seen ‘Ishtar’ I would highly recommend it, an excellent if not slightly bizarre film. It withstands the test of time rather elegantly with stellar central performances from Beatty alongside Dustin Hoffman and a characteristically whip-sharp screenplay by May. Never the less, the film is a commercial and critical failure of rather calamitous proportion. And in one of the most unjust career hijackings in Hollywoods history Elaine May never directs a film again. Years later she offhandedly quips that “If all the people who hated Ishtar had seen it, I’d be rich”. In the wake of this box office blunder the stakes are high for Beatty’s next project to be a surefire hit. And he has just the ticket: Dick Tracy.
Yes thats right Dick Tracy. Everybody’s favourite comic book character. Come on, don’t pretend to not know who Dick Tracy is. No, not the guy who instigated the war on terror. Don’t google it! Dick Tracy! You know, he wears a trench coat and has a watch or something.
If you’ve been living under a rock the last 90 years and don’t know who Dick Tracy is, he’s a comic strip vigilante who made his way to serials in the early 1940s. He’s really cool and everyone knows who he is, trust me. The film, made in 1990, comes right off the heels of Tim Burton’s Batman as a slew of old timey pulp characters are reimagined in hopes of the next big hit. Of this faddish slate, which included the Billy Zane Phantom and Alec Baldwins The Shadow, Dick Tracy is the only one to go on to become a moderate hit. I have not seen Dick Tracy nor am I planning to. The thought did cross my mind to do so for this article however everything I’ve seen from the film scares me too much. If you don’t know what I mean just look up what Al Pacino looks like in it. Perhaps the day will arrive when I will subject myself to the film. It looks like a colourful if harmless blockbuster with insane prosthetics and set design.
There is another key factor to Warren Beatty making ‘Dick Tracy’ that is important to note and that is that he bought the rights for the character from Tribune Media services for £3 million in 1985. In fact, Beatty had wanted to make a Dick Tracy film since 1975 being, like millions of us, a big fan of the character. The film had been in various stages of development before Beatty acquired the rights with various directors being circled at different times, including John Landis, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese
So why, in the year of our lord 2023, am I talking about this irrelevant film by an arguably irrelevant 70s movie star based on an inarguably irrelevant comic strip character? Well, its because Dick Tracy is back, in zoom form.
On Friday the 10th February, a day that shall now forever live in infamy, at 10:30 pm the American television channel Turner Movie classics aired ‘Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In’. What occurs in the next 30 minutes can only be described as pure madness. The film, although it is perhaps a stretch to describe it as such however no other term has yet been invented, consists of film critics Ben Mankiewicz and Leonard Maltin interviewing the character of Dick Tracy, played by Beatty, over zoom whilst also interviewing Warren Beatty, who is simultaneously playing himself. The broadcast, that is available to view on YouTube and would highly recommend doing so, is surreal to the an almost hallucinogenic degree. Beatty reads lines, from what I assume to be a teleprompter off screen, in a fumbled rambling manner. The video “glitches”, cutting out in order for each individual screen to sync up. The production budget seems incredibly low with very flat lighting, one wonders where he got the Dick Tracy outfit or if he just has it at hand at all times. The zoom screens don’t look like zoom. The eye lines of everyone don’t line up. Theres a moment at the end where (spoilers!) Tracy and Beatty meet up and they talk at the same time. For some reason the two critics, despite being in the same zoom, are split as if on different screens. All four performances are stilted to no end. And it’s my film of the year, if not the decade.
The film has possessed my very soul. I have watched it, without fail, every day in an attempt to decipher it, understand it. Anyone I meet up with, or pass on the street, I casually ask “Have you seen the new Dick Tracy Special?” only to be met with bemusement. I have emailed the editor asking about it, as well as the production company and Turner Media themselves, all strangely to no reply. It’s all I think about from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep as the video replays in my minds eye. All my relationships have broken down as all I can think of as my friends and colleagues talk to me is 85 year old Warren Beatty in his Dick Tracy outfit rambling at me from a fake zoom screen.
‘Tracy Zooms In’ is a powerful piece of filmmaking. It gives you this flashback to peak pandemic only your speaking to two identical old men one of whom is in a bright yellow trench-coat. It shows clips from the 1990 Dick Tracy film while Beatty, in character, inarticulately comments over it. I can only hope for some sort of special edition of the original film with a full commentary track as its comedic genius. He goes off on this long rant about some guy called Morgan Conway who, from what I gather, played Dick Tracy in the 1930s and how much better he was in it. In fact, the character of Dick Tracy as portrayed here very much dislikes the Beatty film, a fascinating perspective for him to take.
The ultimate question that arises is why does this avant-garde piece of artistic batshittery exist? To understand this we must go back 12 years as, believe it or not, this is not the first time Beatty has pulled this stunt. In 2010 Turner movie classics again released a television special titled ‘Dick Tracy Special’. In it Leonard Maltin interview Beatty in character. This film does not hold a candle to the new special, being still bizarre but lacking the unhinged energy of Beatty’s most recent output. The only notable aspect of this special is that renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezkir shot it for some reason. Beatty made this 2010 special for purely litigious reasons. You see, in 2005 Tribune had wanted the rights to the character back and even assumed they would get them, going so far as to begin production on a Dick Tracy TV show. However, Beatty had other ideas. He sued Tribune in a long running court case that went to court in July 2006 and reaching a climax as Tribune filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2009, the quickly stacking legal bills perhaps accelerating their demise. In 2008 Beatty shoots this ‘Dick Tracy Special’ and the Judge rules it sufficient use of the ip for him to maintain the rights to the character.
This is perhaps telling of why ‘Tracy Zooms In’ was created. One can only surmise that the rights to the character were going to either return to the now defunct Tribune media or be acquired by a new company who perhaps had ideas to use the character. So in order to keep the rights Beatty did the only thing anyone in his position would do, he called his friends over at Turner Movie Classics and dusted off his Dick Tracy outfit. In many ways this leads to more questions than answers. Who would even want the rights to Dick Tracy at this point? Why does Warren Beatty still want them? Why do I care so much? How have you read this far? Do we both not have better things we could be doing right now? Am i wasting your time on purpose?
Beatty seems to have no answers either. He teases that he perhaps wants to do another film with the character but it seems like he has no concrete plans to do so and the idea of octogenarian Warren Beatty starring in a full film as this character does not have much box office potential, outside of me and some old geezers. Perhaps Beatty wants this to be his legacy and his children to inherit the rights to sell off, although there is again very little money in this plan. He even mentions casting a new younger actor in the role, maybe after seeing the success for comic book films in recent years he has misguidedly thought he could throw his yellow hat back in the ring.
Whatever the reason, I’m very glad this has resulted in this crazy 30 minute film. The context only adds another layer of insanity to this defiant piece of work that acts as much as a statement of legal intent as a piece of artistic expression. ‘Tracy Zooms In’ currently has just over 20k views on YouTube, further confirmation that there is obviously no interest in the character. One comment on the video describes the film as ‘insider outsider art’, a perfect summation of this truly singular film.
