May made radical comedies that eluded any sort of expectations, which is even more true of her final film Ishtar, only remembered today solely for its over-sized budget, critical shellacking, and failure at the box office. However, Ishtar’s comedy now seems twenty years ahead of its time—it is the type of film that one would make now with Will Ferrell and John C. Riley. But Ishtar was doomed from the start; Grodin, who plays the willy CIA agent, notes, “The media jumped on the cost of Ishtar because it was a good story…the brunt of all this cost seemed on Elaine May, which was really strange because she’d be about the third person to look at…If the picture had cost half as much, I believe the reviews would have been twice as good."
