Troubled Production

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"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." —Francis Ford Coppola, Hearts of Darkness (a documentary about the production of Apocalypse Now)

Say for example that you're an actor, and there's this part you're interested in. You audition for it and you receive it. You're obviously happy about it and can't wait for the movie's production to start since you come in later.

Then you show up and you see the set's horrible, the special effects are laughably stupid, the director's a Prima Donna Director, all the other actors are arguing with each other and despite only filming for a week, you're two months behind schedule.

Congratulations, your production has gone completely Off the Rails.

Far be it from us to suggest that producing a movie, an album, a TV series or the like are easy, simple processes, but most of the time they're relatively straightforward. Then there are these productions. The ones where it don't ever go smooth, where everybody slams headfirst into Finagle's Law. The expensive sets break down. The Small Name Big Egos end up quarreling with each other. The director's in way over his head. The Record Producer's Phil Spector. What unites them all is that it's gonna be a hellish experience.

These sort of productions tend to range from complete disasters to the slightly more benign ones, but what they always have in common is frayed tempers, patience, screw-ups, delays and breakdowns. Reality Subtext may happen too. Both Protection From Editors and Executive Meddling can exacerbate this phenomenon. Epic Movies are particularly vulnerable to this. This trope always applies to small or start-up studios, due to how little experience the show runners or head businessmen have in running a new one.

Troubled Productions frequently will end up resulting in bloated, overindulgent disasters that become the laughingstock of public imagination, or something really, really awesome. In the former case the completely out-of-control production can serve as an explanation for why said work turned out like it is. And the latter just tends to make people admire the creators even more - hey, look, they went through all this bullshit that would make a normal dude probably give up and still created something great! In some cases, the insanity behind it might actually contribute to the quality of the finished product, in one way or another. It's exceedingly rare for a troubled production to result in a So Okay It's Average product.

A few of those overlap with, and may often lead to, Development Hell and Vaporware, which is having trouble on starting the project. Others enter The Shelf of Movie Languishment after being finished. When concerning the music industry this can overlap with Music Is Politics, where the politics of the industry leads to this trope.

See also Movie-Making Mess, the smaller-scale, amateur version of this.

As mentioned, a lot of the examples here tend to be famous for their quality, good or bad.

Examples of Troubled Production include:

Real Life

Troubled Production/Real Life

• Anime and Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Film
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Other Media
• Theatre
• Video Games
• Web Original
• Western Animation

Conventions, Concerts and other Events

• The infamous 2014 convention Dashcon, Tumblr-themed and run by fans, became a byword for disastrous events before the event even ended. Most of it was due to horrible organization.
  • The initial name for the convention was "TumblrCon", which has to be changed when Tumblr itself forbade the organizers to use the name of the company due to the event not being directly affiliated to them. This lack of foresight was a prelude of what would come.
  • According to people who were involved in the initial planning stages, the whole thing was disorganized from the get go. Anyone and everyone were welcomed to create committees for a fandom, no experience required. Communication and moderation between and within groups was insufficient to nonexistent. Since most of the committees were fandom themed, many of the ones on small fandoms imploded or dissolved, while the committees for SuperWhoLock, the overlapping fandoms for Doctor Who, Supernatural, and Sherlock were blatantly favored by the organizers.
  • Organization on the event itself proved insufficient, with panelists having to moderate their own panels when the intended moderators didn't appear, invitees not getting refunds on their accommodations, and the vendors in the Artist Alley being mistreated. Security was also very lacking, to the point that a member of /pol/ managed to enter without identifying himself and filming the con with complete impunity.
  • While the event managed to get an initial funding of $4,000 via a successful Kickstarter campaign, this amount proved to be insufficient. This lead to numerous invitees not getting paid nor had their expenses reimbursed, and to the infamous drive in the event floor to collect S17,000 from the assistants to pay the hotel bill.
  • The convention claimed to have hired Steam Powered Giraffe, but turned out they actually hadn't booked them. Despite it, they keep promoting their concert until the very last minute, and even changed the rules on money devolution on the fly to deal with angry con-goers. They also promoted a panel with the members of famous podcast Welcome to Night Vale, but the podcast actors bailed out the minute they discovered their weren't going to be paid.
  • Besides the panels, the convention was very lacking in attractions. The most notorious one was a half-deflated ball pit, whose patheticness in pics and use as a bribe to distract angry con-goers ("A free hour in the ball pit!") gained immediate Memetic Mutation. There were projections, too, and those were also plagued with troubles - and they projected material without express consent of its copyright holders, which is an felony in Illinois, the state where the convention was held.
  • The projected assistance turned out to be extremely off. They expected around 5000, but the estimations on actual people attending was between 500 and 1500 at most, a good chunk of them being teenagers between 13 and 16. Not helped by the fact this con was held one week after the very anticipated Anime Midwest, which was held in the same area.
  • And proving that the organizers learned nothing of this debacle, they decided to polish the turd and rebrand their convention Emoti-Con. This one didn't got to celebrate, though, as the group imploded during the planning stages, but not before getting $120,000 in debt. This post has all the details.

Fictional

Advertising

• A 2011 commercial for the Citi card is told from the perspective of a makeup artist working on a film. This trope seems to be in play if the lead's cell phone going off, rain delay, and demand for a bigger explosion are any indication.

I thought we'd be on location for three days. It's been three weeks.

Anime

• Paranoia Agent: the production of an anime series is increasingly troubled by Executive Meddling, staff infighting, deadlines approaching, supernatural bad vibes everywhere, and the sociopath killing everybody related to the production.
• The school film directed by Haruhi Suzumiya. Among the things going wrong are a cast of amateur school kids doubling as equally inexperienced filming staff, the main actress developing eye powers, doves changing colors, a cat gaining sentience and speech, and Haruhi taking her usual self to higher levers of jerkassery. That they had an actual video at the end of such a disaster of a filming to exhibit at the school festival was a little miracle by itself.

Film

• Tropic Thunder parodies this phenomenon, with specific jabs at Apocalypse Now.
• A fictional example can be found in Werner Herzog's Incident at Loch Ness. To give any details would be ruining it.
  • As the folder for real examples above shows, it is inspired by Herzog's actual career.
• Living In Oblivion is a nineties independent flick in which Steve Buscemi plays the role of a director in a nineties independent flick where everything goes wrong. The movie itself is supposedly based on the director's experience while working on a Brad Pitt movie called Johnny Suede.
• The film within the film for Singin in The Rain (The Dueling Cavalier) experienced severe troubled production due to the transition from silent to talkie pictures; the crew was too inexperienced to realize that every sound could be recorded and the actors were unable to adjust to the idea of speaking into microphones, leading the film to be laughed off by audiences at its first screening. This lead to the film being retooled into a campy musical called The Dancing Cavalier and a complete dub of the female lead's voice.
• At one point in Walk Hard, Dewey Cox (under the influence of a number of drugs) attempts to create his bizarre masterpiece "Black Sheep" (a clear parody of the above mentioned Brian Wilson song "Smile"), which leads to the band and his wife to break up with him and his inevitable drug fueled rampage through the city in nothing but his underwear.

I need ten thousand didgeridoos!

• Shadow of the Vampire fictionalizes the production of Nosferatu highlighting the disagreements between stars and producers, director and crew, and an actual vampire.
• Irreconcilable Differences is mainly about young Drew Barrymore divorcing her parents, but the best parts involve Ryan O'Neal's hilariously overblown Gone with the Wind clone spinning out of control.
• The film-within-a-film of Scream 3, based on the 'real-life' Woodsboro murders, is quickly shut down when Ghostface starts targetting the cast.

Literature

• "Coppola's Dracula" by Kim Newman, which is basically Hearts Of Darkness … In "Anno Dracula" Transylvania!
• Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for players consists entirely of this. At one point, the desperate Broadway producer explicitly writes down a list of "13 reasons why Troubled Waters cannot possibly see the light of day".

Live Action TV

• Slings and Arrows has one of these every year. The first two turn out well; the third one ends with the lead actor dying and everyone else involved in the production being fired.
• Part one of the Young Indiana Jones movie The Hollywood Follies revolves around Indy engaging in a battle of wits with Real Life primadonna director Erich von Stroheim over Foolish Wives.
• Pretty much any of Vincent Chase's movies on Entourage (Smokejumpers, Aquaman, Medellin... pretty much all except Gatsby) fall victim to this trope.
• The Community episode "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux" depicts the Dean trying to film a 30-second ad for the college and slowly driving himself and all the other characters to madness. The episode is shot as Abed's documentary, which explicitly described as the Hearts of Darkness to the Dean's Apocalypse Now.

Theater

• The Producers, when they weren't troubling their own production, were overjoyed with the 'bad luck' that struck it, until the worst disaster: audiences loved "Springtime for Hitler".
• The play being performed in Curtains! is one big screwed-up mess, thanks to a lot of back-stage drama, an entire number being badly-choreographed, the lead actress giving a terrible performance, and a whole lot of murders happening. Fortunately, the detective investigating said murders is a Promoted Fanboy who puts just as much time into improving the quality of the play.

Video Games

• In Fallout 4, you discover that Hubris Comics was trying to make the Silver Shroud radio serials into a successful TV show. Unfortunately, it was rife with infighting, drama, and backroom passions - which proved to be all for naught as the nuclear apocalypse put said show and its creators off the air permanently.

Web Original

• The crappy student film Marble Hornets was called off due to "unworkable conditions," with the director getting increasingly hysterical and paranoid. Later analysis would reveal that in this case, "unworkable conditions" means "driven to near-insanity by the constant presence of a creepy guy with no face."

Western Animation

• The Simpsons while filming the Radioactive Man movie.
• The Animaniacs episode "Hearts of Twilight", yet another Apocalypse Now spoof.
• Metalocalypse: Every single in-universe album during the show's run. The first is done underwater in an attempt to sound as "analog" as possible, deafening the producer. But the biggest example of this trope is the second album: the band procrastinated big time getting it out, causing mass panic. When they finally got to it, Nathan demanded to perform in a suit of armor that made recording difficult, Pickles was starved while everyone else ate, Toki and Murderface produced their own song which, due to how bizarre it was, failed to even make it on the album and to top it all off, Guitarist Skwisgaar Skwigelf was forced by feedback to do his guitar parts skydiving, and thanks to Toki deleting the parts, they did it twice.
• An episode of What's New, Scooby-Doo? revolved around director Vincent Wong's attempt to make a re-make of a cheesy spy movie Spy Me A River. Besides the lead actor quitting halfway through, no one reading the script, Mystery Inc. being used as stunt doubles, and a Classically-Trained Extra with eyes on the lead role, the production was haunted by the Faceless Phantom who turned out to be the director who wanted to sabotage the film after realising how awful it was.
• The Wacky Deli episode of Rocko's Modern Life, in addition to being a parodic take on the creation of an animated show, has the titular show being one complete mess from beginning to end.