FLOPS!

Happy American family in their new 1959 Edsel

As a person with no talent who has never accomplished anything in his life, I take particular pleasure in reveling in the failure of others. (Admit it – you do too. We all do!) It is in this spirit that the following blog is submitted.

FILM

          What is the lowest grossing film of all time?

According to Wikipedia 

The Worst Movie Ever! is a 2011 action comedy musical film, written, produced, and directed by Glenn Berggoetz. The film had its theatrical premiere on August 19, 2011, in a single cinema, the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, resulting in the theater's worst box office results ever: just one paid admission and grossing just $11. According to director Glenn Berggoetz, the film sold just one ticket over the weekend (for the sole Saturday screening), with nobody attending the Friday screening.

Zyzzyx Road

(pronounced /zəˈzɪzɪks/ zə-ziz-iks) is a 2006 independent thriller film. It stars Leo Grillo, Katherine Heigl, and Tom Sizemore. The screenplay was written by John Penney, who also directed the film. The film has gained a degree of notoriety due to its extremely low U.S. box office gross ($30 USD).

Zyzzyx Road

was shown once a day at noon for seven days (February 25 through March 2, 2006) at Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas, Texas, a movie theater rented by the producers for $1,000. The limited release was deliberate: Grillo was uninterested in releasing the film domestically until it underwent foreign distribution, but needed to fulfill the U.S. release obligation required by the Screen Actors Guild for low-budget films (films with budgets less than $2.5 million that are not for the direct-to-video market). The strategy had the side effect of making the film at the time the lowest grossing film of all time, earning just $30 at the box office from six patrons. Unofficially, its opening weekend netted $20. The $10 difference is due to a personal refund by Grillo to makeup artist Sheila Moore, who had worked on the film, and her friend. It has since been beaten by the film The Worst Movie Ever! which took in $11 and sold only one ticket.Both

Zyzzyx Road

and the similarly named Zzyzx have been cited as the lowest-grossing film of all time.
The low gross of the former could have been a publicity stunt. The low gross of the latter was clearly due to unusual circumstances. The lowest box office gross I have found, that appears to be legitimate (ie; the gross was low because no one went to it) is the 1982 Columbian film Contaminacion. By this films tenth anniversary (1992) the film had grossed $1,500.
          The brilliant but extremely erratic filmmaker Terry Gilliam created Tideland in 2004. It was not released in the U.S. until almost a year later, when it appeared in one theatre and grossed $7,276.

                                            More Edsels


TELEVISION
What is the lowest rated TV show of all time?
In July 2004, famous tennis playing hot-head John McEnroe began a CNBC talk show entitled McEnroe. The show was unsuccessful, twice earning a 0.0 Nielsen rating, and was cancelled within five months. It’s the first show in the history of TV that scored so low it was a mathematical possibility that NO ONE watched it.

What was the TV show that was cancelled the quickest?
ABC’s Turn On! Was, arguably, cancelled in 11 minutes. Turn-On was an American sketch comedy series that aired on ABC in February 1969. Again, per Wikipedia: Turn-On's premise was that it was produced by a computer, though this was not the case. Distinguishing characteristics of the show were its use of the Moog synthesizer and lack of sets, except for a white backdrop. Unlike Laugh-In the show "focused almost exclusively on sex as a comedic subject", using various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape. Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.
(The show’s host) Tim Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its only episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancellation. Cleveland's WEWS stopped the episode before it finished (after "11 minutes", according to Conway).^[5] The station sent ABC network management an angry telegram: "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls." Denver, Colorado's KBTV did not air the episode, stating that after previewing it "We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience"; ABC's Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington affiliates also decided to not show the episode. Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas's KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, "jam[med] the station's switchboard" with complaints.
Turn-On was not officially cancelled for several days, but WEWS, KBTV, and KATV told ABC that they would not air the show again, and Bristol-Myers ordered Schlatter and Friendly to end production. ABC received 369 calls of complaint during the show, compared to 20 supporting it. Announcer Gary Owens was busy when it aired, so he has never seen his own show.
So, what the heck was so offensive? Here is Wikipedia’s outline of the shows contents

·                    Two policemen say, "Let us spray," before spraying cans of mace at the camera.

·                    A firing squad prepares to shoot an attractive woman when the squad leader says, "Excuse me, miss, but in this case we are the ones with one final request." (This skit was recycled in Schlatter's revival of Laugh-In in 1978, with no complaints.)

·                    A bikini-wearing Teresa Graves lounges on a park bench surrounded by cardboard bushes. She exclaims, "I feel so guilty - I mean, lying here and all." Pause. "I should be out *shopping* somewhere!"

·                    An armed hijacker tells an ersatz Superman: "OK buddy, take me to Cuba."

·                    Chuck McCann, dressed as a cop, prowls around cardboard bushes with his nightstick while singing, "Hello, young lovers, wherever you are ..."

·                    "The Body Politic", shown three times during the episode, featured a buxom, reclining blonde (Maura McGiveney) saying things like "Mr. Nixon, as President, now becomes the titular head of the Republican Party."

·                    McGiveny asks Tim Conway if he loves her. Conway gets offended, telling her that he just met her and, for all he knows, she could be a "a pot-smoking, jaded, wild-eyed, radical dropout." When McGiveny tells him that she's just that, he says, "I love you!"

·                    A sleazy TV pitchman (Robert Staats) promotes a breakfast cereal "soaked in mescaline."

·                    The same pitchman appears in a second spoof commercial selling women's shoes, though he is gradually revealed to be a foot fetishist.

·                    A diagram of a swastika is displayed as a narrator says, "You are now looking at the table at the Paris peace accords agreed to by General Ky."

·                    Several homosexual-themed messages scrolling across the screen, including "God Save the Queens", "Free Oscar Wilde" and "The Amsterdam Levee is a dike".

·                    A pregnant woman singing "I Got Rhythm" (alluding to the rhythm method of birth control).

·                    A vending machine dispensing the birth control pill, with an anxious young woman putting coins into it and then feverishly shaking the broken machine (some ABC affiliates cut the show off after this sketch).

·                    A draft-dodger holding a sign reading Sweden.

·                    Conway, dressed in a samurai outfit and speaking mock Japanese, is revealed to be university president/politician S.I. Hayakawa.

·                    A black man, face-to-face with a white man, says, "Mom always did like you best!" (an allusion to a popular catchphrase of The Smothers Brothers)

·                    One cop, played by Chuck McCann, asks a second, "You want to take some of this pornographic literature home with you tonight?" The colleague replies, "I don't even have a pornograph!" McCann then rips up a skin magazine and begins eating the pieces.

·                    A commercial spoof shows Conway touting a masculine deodorant while lifting weights and working out. "When I'm all through, I smell like a lady," he concludes and is shown in drag.

·                    In another commercial parody, Conway is shown wearing a tuxedo, and heavy eye mascara.

·                    A sequence (the show's longest) with the word sex flashing on and off in pulsating colors while Conway and Bonnie Boland leer at each other.^[3] Various stock photographs are displayed during the sequence, including one of Pope Paul VI.

·                    Conway as spokesman for "Citizens Action Committee of America," a group with the acronym CACA.

·                    The black programmer shown programming the computer supposedly generating the show says he dreamed he was a duck in Lester Maddox's bathtub. "I migrated," he says.

·                    A young woman in cap and gown is shown lobbing a hand grenade.

·                    Two men (Hamilton Camp and Chuck McCann) are standing at a globe. "Tell me," one says to the other, "where is the capital of South Vietnam?" The second man spins the globe and points, "Mostly over here, in Swiss bank accounts."

·                    A Catholic nun asks a priest, "Father, can I have the car tonight?" The priest replies, "Just as long as you don't get in the habit."

·                    Conway tells Graves, "I was so damned angry when I found out my kids were popping pills, I went out and got drunk."

·                    One message scrolled across the screen: "Israel Uber Alles."

·                    A recurring series of skits with Conway as a marriage counselor in session with an African American husband and an Asian wife. The last state laws against interracial marriages had been struck down only two years earlier.

·                    Two men in Stetson hats defend the principles of Southern womanhood. One then says to the other, "Come on, big beauty," and they hold hands and walk out effeminately.

·                    A white Southern hotel guest phones the main desk about the Gideon Bible which states "'Moses married an Ethiopian woman' ... in the Atlanta Hilton!?!"

·                    A puppet snake says, "Remember, folks, I could have given Eve the apple and the Pill!"