The 1993 Super Mario Bros. Movie Star Who Got The Directors Blacklisted In Hollywood

When Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel made their feature filmmaking debut by remaking Rudolph Maté's film noir classic "D.O.A.," most critics expressed dismay, if not disgust. (Hey, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert liked it!) How dare a couple of commercial/music video directors befoul the chiaroscuro integrity of this inventive 1950 murder mystery that most modern moviegoers had never heard of, let alone seen? Disney and Touchstone Pictures didn't care about integrity, but they clearly didn't believe in the movie. "D.O.A." hit theaters on March 18, 1988, finishing third behind "Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach" and "Good Morning, Vietnam." Within weeks, it had been forgotten, and it remains relatively unknown to this day (despite the efforts of Quentin Tarantino).

This stinks. Morton and Jankel's "D.O.A." is a briskly paced, visually arresting piece of neo-noir, while the filmmakers themselves aren't style-over-substance hacks. Rather, they had directed influential videos for Elvis Costello ("Accidents Will Happen"), Tom Tom Club ("Genius of Love"), and Donald Fagen ("New Frontier"), and even co-created the satirical media presenter Max Headroom.

So, it felt like a big step down when the pair were hired to direct 1993's "Super Mario Bros." This was set to be the first American feature film ever based on a video game, and, as such, it was viewed with skepticism. But with "The Killing Fields" and "The Mission" director Roland Joffé onboard as a producer, perhaps something strange and unconventional was in the works.

"Super Mario Bros." lived up to those expectations, but it came at the expense of Morton and Jankel's Hollywood careers. The film's production was pure chaos, with stars Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo turning against the directing duo. However, it was Dennis Hopper, having been cast as the villainous President "King" Koopa, who ran them out of town.

I'm a fan of big-budget studio mutts, i.e. movies that are hell to make due to conflicting creative input yet, in the end, prove exhilaratingly original. I'll always go to the mat for Michael Lehmann's wonderful, wrongly maligned "Hudson Hawk" (along with Glenn Gordon Caron's fiery rom-com "Wilder Napalm"), and I love it when fellow film buff travelers try to turn me around on a box office wipeout from talented directors that I'd previously dismissed.

I'm not all the way there on "Super Mario Bros.," which didn't even come close to making back its $48 million budget at the box office, but it's got bursts of fun and genuine hilarity that keep it from descending into dullness. The sets from "Blade Runner" designer David L. Snyder are eye-poppingly elaborate, while Joseph A. Porro's costumes are completely absurd. Per a 2023 oral history by Inverse, it sounds like Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel couldn't figure out the script; that Morton clashed with the gifted and easygoing screenwriter Ed Solomon feels like a big red flag.

Nevertheless, rough shoots happen. This should've been a learning experience. Instead, Dennis Hopper painted Morton and Jankel as buffoons when interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 1992. Upon being told that Morton and Jankel wouldn't talk to the paper, Hopper replied, "That's the smartest thing I've heard from them. That's the only intelligent thing I've heard that they've really actually done."

To be fair, Hopper wasn't alone in trashing the directors. After the film's release, Bob Hoskins called the pair "f***in' idiots," while John Leguizamo accused Morton of pouring hot coffee over an extras head (which the director vehemently denied in Inverse;s oral history). But Hopper's comments had immediate and devastating professional repercussions.

The day after the Los Angeles Times' piece was published, the Creative Artists Agency dropped Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel as clients. This was practically a death sentence in 1992. Led by super-agent Michael Ovitz, CAA was a talent-packaging powerhouse. Ovitz and his associates controlled access to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Barbra Streisand, Sydney Pollack, Kevin Costner, and Sylvester Stallone, and they were loath to let them work with non-CAA clients. They made life difficult for studios and rival agencies, but when the alternative was having no shot at working with the aforementioned talent, the headache was worth it.

Getting excommunicated from CAA meant you were on an industry-wide blacklist. Notably, the agency cut ties with Morton and Jankel when they'd just begun post-production on "Super Mario Bros." That they did so because a more valuable client, Dennis Hopper, had shredded them in the press meant a lengthy Director's Jail sentence.

Years later, Jankel went solo and once again found success as a music video and commercial director. She went on to direct an adaptation of David Almond's acclaimed YA novel "Skellig" and the romantic drama "Tell It to the Bees." Both Morton and Jankel (who divorced in 2005) have been heartened by "Super Mario Bros." finding an enthusiastic cult following, going so far as to attend a 2023 midnight screening of the movie at Quentin Tarantino's New Beverly Cinema in West Hollywood. The duo didn't deserve the desert in 1993. But unlike John McTiernan, whose own directing career took a major hit a month later when "Last Action Hero" bombed, they didn't have a string of blockbusters to bolster their cause. The Dream Factory can be a nightmare that way.