When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature earlier this year, Bret Easton Ellis took to his Twitter and said, “Alice Munro was always an overrated writer and now that she’s won The Nobel she always will be. The Nobel is a joke and has been for ages…” As a Canadian I was livid, but as someone who subjected himself to The Canyons, the film Ellis wrote, I laughed at the notion of someone putting pen to paper on that script calling anyone “overrated.”
But long before The Canyons came out, it was doomed to be a sideshow to the real story: its particularly difficult production, which was chronicled in a now infamous New York Times article. The perfect storm of Ellis, renowned screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, and the ongoing E! True Hollywood disaster that is Lindsay Lohan should have, theoretically, been enough to let the film skate on notoriety, but it’s a tribute to the general public that they didn’t stop to look at this car wreck.
Acted with all the finesse of a dinner theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Canyons couldn’t even find its way to the “so bad, it’s good” category. What the production called for was the deftly bizarre touch of Tommy Wiseau, not the “I’m taking this tripe very seriously” tone that Schrader had.