At heart, Waterworld was inherently a B-movie, the sort of film people end up watching drunkenly at 3 a.m.
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"It was an ecological parable about a messianic mutant fish-man who drinks his own wee and sells dirt for a living, for crying out loud. In 2001, he told The Onion's AV Club that he wrote some puns, and "a few scenes that I can't even sit through because they came out so bad."Īs The Guardian recently put it, only an idiot could have expected Waterworld to be a blockbuster. (In the opening scene, Costner, the film's gilled protagonist, seems to be sending a message to his critics: He pees into a filter, then quaffs the recycled fluid with relish.) Whedon recalls spending "seven weeks of hell" touching up the screenplay in Hawaii. Despite a hot script doctor in Joss Whedon, the movie got lukewarm reviews and a chilly reception at the domestic box office. Set in a post-apocalyptic tomorrow where climate change has melted the ice-caps and flooded the planet, Waterworld is a place where freshwater is scarce while saltwater is everywhere. "No matter if they cite a source, it's just bullshit, and they're bullshit for printing it." "I was so surprised that it came from Newsweek," Costner told CNN in 1995. No, what ticked off Costner was the idea that he had demanded that the special effects department add "computer-generated hair" to hide his balding pate.
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The actor didn't mind the press dismissing his film as "Fishtar" and "Kevin's Gate" or gossip about an on-set fling with a Hawaiian hula dancer that supposedly broke up his marriage or reports of a dust-up with director Kevin Reynolds or the whispers of cost overruns that nearly doubled the original (and huge for the time) $100 million budget, making Waterworld the most expensive film to date.
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Of all the terrible rumors that were floating around the production of Waterworld-and there were many- Newsweek published the one that most offended its star, Kevin Costner. Twenty years ago, this magazine made a minor bit of cinematic history.