JD Shapiro did a
bad thing, and he's sorry. He penned the initial screenplay that germinated, like psychedelic mushrooms in a cow turd, into Battlefield Earth; the main difference being that people have actually paid money for mushrooms and don't have to pretend to enjoy the experience ironically later.
This year, the movie won its ninth Razzie for "Worst Picture Of The Decade". Battlefied Earth was released in May of 2000. Think about that for half a second. In nine and a half years of the decade of
Gigli and
Catwoman, where Hollywood thought sequels to
Basic Instinct and
Baby Geniuses were a good idea, not one movie topped Battlefield Earth in straight-up fuck-awfulness. That's actually kind of impressive, in the same way getting crushed by some stray remaining piece of Skylab would be impressive.
You can go ahead and
Google that last joke if you need to. Noone will judge you.
So anyway, Battlefield Earth, and its ridiculous overuse of
Dutch tilts (whatever the fuck those are), was pretty bad (just to give you an idea how entwined the two are, the pic at the top of this article is one of the first GIS images for both "Battlefield Earth"
and "Dutch Tilt"). In a recent
New York Post article, JD opens up by apologizing to anyone that paid to see the movie in the theater. The opinions of all five of them (four of which were John Travolta) have not yet been reported.
He then blames the whole thing on his penis. No, really. He even refers to it as his "Willy Wonker". No, really. Willy Wonker. It's right there in the article. As far as vaguely topical pop-culture euphemisms go, "Willy Wonker" is somehow even worse than "The Kracken" (and any subtexts regarding the releasing of such).
It does make a better euphemism than "blobfish", tho. Barely.
To the disappointment of those of you reading this article with Guy Fawkes masks on like it's still 2008, JD doesn't really give up a whole lot of dirt regarding Scientology. He took some vitamins, hung out on a boat, drank some scotch and couldn't get laid. You probably had a more interesting time during Spring Break, the way he tells it.
The rest of the article consists of him relaying his version of the
"Executive Meddling" entry on TvTropes before ending on a weak birth control joke. The end.
In any case, he's sorry, and he damn well should be. Really now,
Willy fucking Wonker? What about
Battlefield Girth?
Little Hubbard?
Terl, Ker and Johnny Goodboy? Hell, even calling it his "
Operating Thetan" could have garnered more laughs. Then again, snarky or not, he's still the guy who wrote the script for Battlefield Earth. He hasn't exactly set the bar particularly high for himself.
Kimchi Bloody Mary
