Old Shame/Film

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• Anything at all directed by "Alan Smithee". Entering this name into a movie database credits him as the director of dozens of movies, several television show episodes, music videos, and even some animated cartoons. Almost all of his work was panned by critics. The reason is that there's no such person, it's a pseudonym used since 1968 by directors who do not want to be associated with their own work – usually because they've lost control of a picture at some point in development. Clearly, some directors are pragmatic enough to know a Career Killer when they see it.
• Alfred Hitchcock called his 1948 film Rope "an experiment that didn't work out" before disowning it. Based on the play of the same name, he was trying to capture the feel of a theatrical play with a movie, and shot the 18-minute movie in real-time. The movie was made with only ten takes, and some of them lasted over ten minutes. Because he hated it, it was not released for public viewing until his daughter did so in 1985, which most critics say is a shame - it was actually pretty good.
• Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire sued to prevent the release of Don's Plum and won a partial success; the film can't be shown commercially in the United States or Canada.
• Tom Hanks feels this way about his film debut in a horror flick called He Knows You're Alone.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movie, Hercules Goes Bananas, AKA Hercules in New York, in which he appeared under the name of "Arnold Strong" and his voice was dubbed over. According to an old interview with Arnie, both were the result of Executive Meddling.
  • It Gets Worse - the film was so bad its rights were sold on eBay.
  • Arnold has also mentioned that when his children would misbehave, he used to punish them by making them watch the Red Sonja film (in which he was a main character).
• Although it's hard to believe now since the film is considered a classic, Harrison Ford had nothing but contempt for Blade Runner for years—presumably due to not getting along with director Ridley Scott while filming and the fact that the studio forced him to record a terrible voiceover and film a new, happy ending. He's since "made peace with Blade Runner" (in his words), which probably had a lot to do with the "Director's Cut" and "Final Cut" versions of the film, which got rid of the voiceover and restored the original ending. Given his appearance in 2017's Bladerunner 2049, there's no reason to doubt him.
• For a long time, Tim Curry had pulled out all the stops to disassociate himself with Dr. Frank-N-Furter and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, including gaining weight to escape the attention he had gotten from the role. In more recent years, though, he has become more comfortable with being linked to Frank-N-Furter -- to the point that he appeared as the Criminologist in the Halloween 2016 TV production.
• Sylvester Stallone was in at least one softcore porn movie before he became beloved as Rocky called Party at Kitty and Stud's. It was re-released after the movie, re-edited and retitled The Italian Stallion. He's so ashamed of it that he was unwilling to pay $100,000 to even block its release.
  • Stallone has also commented on Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot as follows: "Maybe one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we’ve never seen. A flatworm could write a better script than Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. In some countries – China, I believe – running Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot once a week on government television has lowered the birth rate to zero."
  • Stallone also deeply regrets Rhinestone, though he did enjoy working with Dolly Parton.
• Jackie Chan was in a racy Sex Comedy in China called All In The Family long before he became famous.
  • In his autobiography, he also expresses this attitude about an early action movie where they had him swear gratuitously and featured nonsensical Fan Service (a drug lab staffed by naked women). He may also feel this way about the Bruceploitation films he made under Jerkass Triad-affiliated director Lo Wei, who tried to squash Jackie's desire to do action comedies.
• Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd have these in the form of Cops And Robbersons and My Stepmother is an Alien respectively.
• Kevin Costner's Old Shame isn't The Postman—or even Waterworld—it's a gem called Sizzle Beach USA.
• Ben Affleck's Old Shame isn't starring in Gigli—it's directing a short film called I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney.
• The Marx Brothers' first movie ever, Humor Risk, is a cobbled-together silent mishmash of their vaudeville routines. Groucho apparently hated it so much that he burned it after viewing. At any rate, it doesn't exist any more.
• This is reportedly the case for Matthew McConaughey and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, which also starred Renee Zellweger. They were both struggling actors at the time and needed the cash, but McConaughey was reportedly so embarrassed at having appeared in the film he attempted to block its release.
• Robin Williams' first movie was an extremely un-PC 1977 sketch comedy film called Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses?. Notably, his scenes were cut out before the film's first release; but just before Popeye came out, they were restored, it was re-released, and he was promoted as the star despite only having two scenes. He reportedly sued for wrongfully using his name and image, and subsequent video releases had him cut out again. It is now available on DVD uncut.
• The Day the Clown Cried is a movie known for being disowned by its creator, Jerry Lewis, who claimed "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
• Howard Hughes felt very guilty over his decision to film The Conqueror miles away from the Nevada test site where nuclear devices are tested. It is believed that the location had dangerous material in the air that led to many of the crews' deaths, including John Wayne. The film was poorly acted and was considered one of the worst films ever made. It is also believed that Hughes had watched this film endlessly on television during the last few years of his life (possibly due to his Super OCD).
• Nancy Allen seemed to figure out quickly that the RoboCop franchise was suffering from a bad case of Sequelitis, and only agreed to be in the third movie if they killed her character off. Which they did.
• Paul Newman's acting debut was in a historical epic, called The Silver Chalice, which was a total commercial and critical failure. Years later the film was scheduled to run several nights on a Los Angeles TV station, and Newman spent $1200 on black-bordered newspaper ads reading "Paul Newman apologizes every night this week–Channel 9."
• Rob Morrow and Johnny Depp apparently swore a pact to eradicate every copy of Private Resort (1985) from the face of the planet. Given that it was given a DVD release, it's clear that they have not yet succeeded in their quest.
• Both director Tinto Brass and writer turned politician Gore Vidal would like to forget about the horror that was Caligula. In fact, pretty much anyone who was involved with that production (except Helen Mirren and Penthouse publisher and Caligula producer Bob Guccione) would like to forget all about it.
• Stanley Kubrick was embarrassed about his first feature film, Fear and Desire; he called it "a bumbling amateur film exercise" and tried to obtain all known prints in order to prevent it from ever being seen again.
• Jason Segel revealed in interviews that the Dracula puppet musical his character is writing in Forgetting Sarah Marshall is, in fact, based on a real Dracula musical which he began writing in his youth, and the song he sings in the karaoke bar is a real song from that musical. He claims to have played a demo tape for Judd Apatow, whose only response was "You can never let anyone hear this tape." Listen for yourselves.
• In 1980, following the success rival gag magazine National Lampoon had had with Animal House, William M. Gaines, founder and then-publisher of Mad, allowed the magazine's name to be used in MAD Magazine Presents: Up the Academy. Gaines, upon the film's release, was so disgusted with the finished product (which included the non-ironic use of racist jokes, as well as coarse language and sexual content Gaines would never allow to be published in his magazine) that he paid $50,000 to have all references to the Magazine removed, including a statue of Alfred E. Neuman that was prominently featured in the academy square. Gaines even parodied the film in his magazine as Mad Magazine Resents Throw Up the Academy. The spoof lasts just two pages before ending with a series of memos between Gaines and the editors (whose names are intentionally scribbled out) agreeing just to stop the article, even though they had only covered the first twenty minutes of the film.
• James Cameron's first credited directing gig was Piranha 2: The Spawning (which he only got after the original director was fired), although it's not clear how much of the finished product Cameron really created. It's alleged that at one point he even tried to break into the studio to either salvage or destroy the film. Eventually Cameron developed a sense of humor about it, having been quoted as saying it's "the finest flying-piranha movie ever made." He also credits the film for helping him hone the puppetry that would be needed for the Facehuggers in Aliens.
• Naomi Watts has outright called some of her pre-Mulholland Drive films (which include the film adaptation of Tank Girl and Children of the Corn IV) "pieces of shit".
• While we're in Children of the Corn: Eva Mendes' first role was in the fifth movie. She admits it's shameful.
• George Clooney has said in interviews that if anyone approaches him and says they saw Batman and Robin at a cinema he will refund their ticket price from his own pocket.
• Roger Moore wasn't too pleased with his final James Bond film A View to a Kill. He said, "I was horrified on the last Bond I did. Whole slews of sequences where Christopher Walken was machine-gunning hundreds of people. I said 'That wasn't Bond, those weren't Bond films.' It stopped being what they were all about. You didn't dwell on the blood and the brains spewing all over the place." His use of the plural "those weren't Bond films" suggests he also disowns other Bond films of his, though he didn't specify which.
  • On the subject of James Bond, Sean Connery has publicly expressed being ashamed of how in Goldfinger everything hinged on Bond being able to get into the pants of the villain's top henchwoman.
  • Connery is more ashamed of Zardoz, which he said he only starred in as an attempt to break away from the James Bond image.
• The "Weird Al" Yankovic movie UHF is a touchy subject for Michael Richards, who played Stanley the Janitor. However, he was a good enough sport to do the commentary on the DVD.
• Christian Bale has not been subtle about his dislike for Newsies, which he starred in back in 1992, although he acknowledges the cult audience the film has.
• Yeardley Smith is still extremely embarrassed by Maximum Overdrive. So is Stephen King, who called the film a "moron movie." Thus far, it has remained his only attempt at directing.
• Leonard Part 6 was so bad, Bill Cosby himself told everyone to avoid seeing it.
  • It should be noted that "William H. Cosby Jr., Ed.D." has story credit, and that his production company made it, so...
• John Barrowman in the epically painful Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. In an interview with Jonathan Ross, he renounced the entire script as bloody awful and admitted that his one most infamous line was actually an attempt at easing one of the actresses' stress that the director left in. He didn't find this out until he was watching it later on with his young nieces and nephews.

I'm still feeling pretty wired. What do you say I...take you home and eat your pussy?

• Disney does everything in its power to make people forget about Song of the South, due to its Unfortunate Implications. This led to some Adaptation Displacement for their Splash Mountain ride, which used the characters from the animated segments before Disney remodeled it after The Princess and the Frog. "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" falls into the same boat; Disney still uses the song, and most people know it, but they don't know where it comes from.
• Bill Murray admitted that, on account of his mistaking of Joel Cohen (writer of Cheaper By the Dozen and Money Talks) for Joel Coen (writer of The Big Lebowski and Fargo), he regrets lending his voice to the 2004 movie Garfield. He even does it in the film Zombieland!
• Timothy Dalton has a doozy in the form of the 1978 film Sextette, in which he's paired up with an 84-year-old Mae West in a film which misguidedly treats her like she's still a Memetic Sex Goddess.
• Given her decade-plus long career as an extremely capable Action Girl (The Fifth Element, Ultraviolet, the Resident Evil films), Milla Jovovich prefers people not think too hard about 1992's Return to The Blue Lagoon.
• Amy Adams has gone on to disown Cruel Intentions 2 but likes to joke about making it on occasion.
  • Psycho Beach Party, however, not so much. She would much prefer everyone forget about this horror-comedy movie where her most remarkable scene was losing her bikini bottoms. (The word "remarkable" used loosely, much like "horror" and "comedy" for this one.) Granted, that was only her second role, but since she's become famous, hormone-addled teen fans keep dwelling on it.
• Jamie Lee Curtis is on record describing 1999's Virus as "an awful piece of shit".
• John Landis, as everyone knows, inserts the phrase "see you next Wednesday" in each of his films, often as the title of an imaginary movie. He explains that it's the title of a script he wrote in his youth which shall never see the light of day.
• It's probably safe to say that Vincent D'Onofrio doesn't mention his film debut in the painfully awful sex comedy The First Turn-On!
• Jennifer Aniston's turn in the low-budget horror schlockfest Leprechaun.
• In his first autobiography Lucky Man, Michael J. Fox looks back on Teen Wolf with a great deal of embarrassment.
  • Hence explaining why he refused to do the sequel (which, curiously, neither star Jason Bateman nor scriptwriter Tim Kring talks about much nowadays).
• Misha Collins of Supernatural fame has stated many times that he regrets his participation in Karla, the 2006 film based on real-life serial killers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. He has explained that he was unaware how infamous and emotionally relevant the cases were in Canada at the time. He also states that the director of the film took things way too far and would compliment him after shooting particularly horrible rape scenes, saying "That was hot." He ended up having a phone conversation with one of the victims who escaped, and now tells people not to watch the movie, especially when it comes up at fan conventions.
• Wild Wild West. In a 2009 interview Will Smith apologized to Robert Conrad for making it.
• Jack Benny turned The Horn Blows At Midnight into a running joke.
• Whoopi Goldberg disowned 1987's The Telephone (she even tried to keep it from being released). As one American critic noted, this was the same year as Burglar and Fatal Beauty...
• While promoting Coming to America, Eddie Murphy 'fessed up to hating Best Defense and The Golden Child; since he later refused to do any promotion for The Adventures of Pluto Nash, it's safe to say he has no warm feelings for this one either (a view shared by Alec Baldwin, who took his name off the credits). He also hates Beverly Hills Cop III as he felt it ruined the character of Axel Foley and he admitted that money was his main motivation for doing that film in the first place. In fact, he's spoken negatively about all his pre-Nutty Professor films from the 90s. Besides Beverly Hills Cop III, he has disowned Vampire in Brooklyn, also an Old Shame of director Wes Craven.
• Michael Madsen hasn't got good things to say about Species II (the original, on the other hand, he says it's one of the few actual good movies he worked on).
• It shouldn't be surprising that Donald Pleasence once declared Puma Man the worst movie he was ever a part of.
• Orson Welles came to regard Citizen Kane as an old shame. Yes, that Citizen Kane. In particular, he thought "Rosebud" was a cheap plot device, a "dollar-book Freudian gag" as he put it. Welles thought his best film was The Trial.
• Ask Bob Hoskins what his biggest regret about his film career is, he will reply, "Super Mario Bros" without hesitation.
  • He'd probably feel that being given a role in Parting Shots wasn't a career highlight either. Hell, anyone who was involved in Parting Shots.
• Aaron Eckhart once encountered a fan buying a copy of The Core at a video store, and attempted to talk the guy into spending his money on something else.
• Mel Gibson was so ashamed of The Million Dollar Hotel that he fought to prevent it from being released to theaters in the U.S.
• After almost twenty years and several much much much much much MUCH better films later, David Fincher still hates talking about Alien 3.
• For the longest time, Leonard Nimoy refused to even mention his participation in Transformers: The Movie, to the consternation of fans. His complete disavowal of all things Transformers-related finally cracked when he was convinced to voice Sentinel Prime in Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
• Mark Wahlberg sees his earlier films and his singing career as this. Looking back, he found this era of his life rather shameful. (It even leads to a Self-Deprecation Actor Allusion moment in Rock Star.)
• David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly aren't too big of fans of Labyrinth. Both of them even get uncomfortable (in Bowie's case) or embarrassed (in Connelly's case) when their children are watching the film.
  • Bowie also regrets 1978's Just a Gigolo, his second major film, simply for its poor quality. In a 1980 interview with New Music Express, he said "Oh well, we've all got to do one [bad movie] and hopefully I've done mine now."
• Michelle Williams has disowned Species (her second film) due to the torment that she got from people at her school over playing a character that becomes a giant cocoon. She also hates her first film, Timemaster (even calling it Timewaster on set, which other cast members also took to calling it).
• Jason Flemyng has said the only film he'd erase from his filmography is Seed of Chucky - "I was dressed as Santa, getting killed by a doll, on a set in Romania, thinking: ‘Where did it go wrong?’"
• If you meet Jaime Pressly, don't bring up Piñata: Survival Island. Just don't.
• Mickey Rourke admitted that Passion Play wasn't a very good film, though he did nevertheless praise Megan Fox's acting.
  • He also hated A Prayer For The Dying (as did director Mike Hodges; both have disowned this).
• Purportedly, mentioning the Bill and Ted movies to Keanu Reeves annoys him greatly.
  • May not be true, since he and Alex Winter are doing a third Bill & Ted flick.
• After What Ever Happened to Baby Jane Joan Crawford starred in a string of B-horror films where she clearly kept taking them too seriously. Eventually after her film career was over she admitted how dreadful they all were.
• Madonna would just as soon people forgot her first movie, A Certain Sacrifice.
• Shannon Elizabeth would probably prefer people forget about the time she was raped by a snowman during her small part in Jack Frost 1997
• Carol Burnett disliked her performance as Hooker with a Heart of Gold Mollie Malloy in The Front Page so much that years later, when she was a passenger on a flight that had The Front Page as its in-flight movie, at the film's end she stood up and apologized to the passengers for what they had just witnessed.
• When Titanic was re-released in 3D in 2012, both Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio expressed embarrassment at seeing their younger selves on the big screen again.
• Joe Mazello, who played Tim in Jurassic Park, apparently gets rather annoyed if one mentions to him, according to David Fincher who directed him in The Social Network.
• Jake Lloyd isn't fond of his role as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, in no small part due to it being the reason he was bullied throughout middle school and high school. He even burned all of his Star Wars memorabilia and never watched a single Star Wars film again, stating it was too creepy to watch them again.
• Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn't like Simply Irresistible any more than most other people who've seen it.
• Both Chris Columbus and Daryl Hannah have less than warm feelings about 1984's Reckless (which he wrote and she starred in). Hannah is also probably very glad the box office returns for The Clan Of The Cave Bear meant films of Jean M. Auel's other books about Ayla were out of the question.
• Jason Bateman regrets making The Change-Up and called it garbage in interviews promoting the film.
• Apparently, Tom Cruise doesn't like Legend much.
• For at least twenty years, John Cusack apparently regarded Better Off Dead as an Old Shame, and refused to talk about it in interviews. Since the middle-late 2000s, though, he seems less hostile to the film.
• In the middle 2010s, Julia Stiles seemed to be leaning toward viewing Ten Things I Hate About You this way, not so much because of the film itself, but because reporters and interviewers insisted on talking about it years later when she had long since moved onto bigger and better things like the Bourne film series.
• Douglas Fairbanks, of all people, starred in a lot of cheesy (and bad) films before he became famous, and one he was especially not proud of was Mystery of the Leaping Fish. Released in 1916, this comedic lampoon of Sherlock Holmes stories had Fairbanks portray a Captain Ersatz of Holmes named "Coke Ennyday" who was hooked on opium and cocaine. That's right, Fairbanks had done the Stoners Are Funny routine more than 50 years before Sean Penn made it popular in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
• David Hasselhoff has one of these, and he was far from the only one involved in making the low-budget, hastily-made Starcrash who regrets doing so. A space opera made in 1978 as a cash-grab hoping to profit from the success of Star Wars. The film was originally made for American International Pictures, who deemed it too terrible to even release; New World Pictures did so after buying the rights to it, and it has since been regarded as "a masterpiece in unintentionally bad filmmaking" and compared to Plan 9 from Outer Space.
• Several actors who became famous for staring in Doctor Who often wish they had a TARDIS to undo their work in movies they aren't proud of:
  • Christopher Eccleston - famous for playing the Ninth Doctor - has two of them. First off, he would love it if fans forgot he was the one playing Destro in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, given how the movie was critically panned and regarded as a big mess.
    • Even worse was his role in Gone in 60 Seconds, a movie with a nonsensical and boring plot that was about 80% car chases.
  • David Tennant - the Tenth Doctor - starred in an unremarkable (meaning boring) movie called St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold. The second film adaptation of the St. Trinian novels, it's a likely reason why there isn't a third, that and the fact that Tennant wants nothing to do with it. Eccleston's inclusion in a supporting role was pretty much the only decent part of it, something that could not be claimed by leads Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie.
  • Catherine Tate starred in a flick called Nativity 2: Dude, Where's My Donkey. Tate appeared on the The Graham Norton Show to promote it in an interview that can best be described as Self-Deprecation humor, although to be fair, the third movie in that series was even worse.
  • Tom Baker - Fourth Doctor, one of the most popular heroes in science fiction history - had a small role in the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which pretty much everyone remembers as a badly acted, badly scripted, badly-everything piece of garbage, Baker included, although to be fair, that saving grace was likely the only saving grace of the movie.
  • Beloved Companion Billy Piper starred in a direct-to-DVD flop called Spirit Trap, a Cliche Storm that she's come to regret.
    • She also played the female lead in The Calcium Kid. With a flat 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, it's not something she's proud of.
  • Fans were upset when Karen Gillan left the show in 2012, but had high hopes for seeing her in Not Another Happy Ending. Unfortunately, said movie was a disappointment that reeked of shoddy scripting.
  • Before he starred as the Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann starred as the villainous Walter Golic in Alien 3, a movie that everyone involved in the production knew was doomed from the start, spending years in Development Hell due to frequently changing writers and directors and ending up with a cobbled together mess of a script.
  • Before being cast as Captain Jack Harkness (and for that matter, the star of Torchwood, the Spin-Off series) John Barrowman starred in a lot of low-budget films, like Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, a hilariously funny parody of monsters films... Which unfortunately, the director intended as a serious one. Again, Barrowman's scenes - like a steamy shower-sex scene with the female lead - are the only things that make this movie even slightly redeemable.