Many people had no idea Touchstone pictures was owned by Disney back in the day. And this wasn’t by accident.
Then-Disney CEO Ron Miller created the label in 1984 so the mouse could release PG-13 and R-rated films without putting the castle on the poster, and thus keep Mickey far away from any F-bomb radiation.
The Touchstone logo, those little yellow streaks hitting a blue circle, ran in front of Splash, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, Good Morning Vietnam, Three Men and a Baby, Who Framed Roger Rabbit… and by the late 80s, Touchstone was one of the most commercially reliable labels in Hollywood. With any Disney connection buried so deep in the credits that most audiences would have to spot “Buena Vista Distribution” and know what that even meant. In 1989, nobody, outside of us film geeks who read the trades, was paying that kind of attention.
And Touchstone was rolling, between 1987 and 1988, they put out nineteen films. Stakeout made $65 million, Good Morning Vietnam made $123 million, and Three Men and a Baby became the highest-grossing film of 1987. The financing came from Silver Screen Partners IV (you’ll spot these guys in the credits of every Touchstone poster), an investment pool that was bankrolling both Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures well into 1991, and for a few years there the hit rate was almost absurd.
But for every Dead Poets Society, there was a Heartbreak Hotel, or a Gross Anatomy, or An Innocent Man with Tom Selleck, or any number of mid-budget swings that came and went without leaving much of a footprint. Touchstone’s business model needed volume, and volume means some titles were going to get the full marketing push while others got dumped into the spring schedule between the prestige releases.
Disorganized Crime was one of those.
Jim Kouf had earned that directing chair after writing Stakeout for Touchstone in 1987 and followed it up with The Hidden under the pseudonym Bob Hunt. His films were smart, commercially viable, and he’d go on to write Rush Hour and National Treasure. So when Kouf wanted to direct his own script, a scrappy ensemble heist comedy set in Montana, Touchstone gave him the greenlight and a paltry $5.3 million budget. Which is to say he didn’t get the funds for a cast that could open a movie.
Kouf had delivered one of Touchstone’s biggest hits, and the studio believed in the project enough to let a proven writer direct, why not spend a little more on faces that put people in seats? Instead, the cast reads like a roll call of guys you’d recognise from your living room TV. Ed O’Neill was a few seasons into Married with Children, Corbin Bernsen was on L.A. Law, the legendary Fred Gwynne was still Herman Munster to most of Noth America. Lou Diamond Phillips had the most film credibility of anyone here after La Bamba, Stand and Deliver, and Young Guns, but even he wasn’t the name above the title that sells a spring release against stiff competition. Poor Lou.
And my broken record scratch: timing. Major League opened a week earlier on April 7th, with Bernsen in the cast. Pet Sematary opened the following week on the 21st, with Gwynne as Jud Crandall. K-9 arrived two weeks later on April 28th, with O’Neill as a supporting player alongside Jim Belushi. And Phillips would turn up again in Renegades with Kiefer Sutherland in June. The entire principal cast of Disorganized Crime was more visible in other 1989 releases that same spring. If you went to the movies any weekend in April or May of ’89, you’d see these faces everywhere, in everything except the one film where they were all together. Which is apropos of nothing, but I always thought was an interesting little bubble.
But even without the scheduling, this movie’s biggest problem is that it didn’t seem to matter.
There was no trend to push it, no wave to catch. The Coen Brothers hadn’t yet turned bumbling criminals into their own subgenre, and around this time, there was no shortage of mid-budget caper films competing for the same audience like Family Business directed by Sidney Lumet – and it still only pulled in $12 million. If three Oscar winners and one of the greatest living directors can’t sell a heist movie in 1989, what chance does a cast of TV regulars have on a $5.3 million budget?
There was no cultural urgency to this thing, no reason to see it opening weekend instead of next weekend, and next weekend there was always something else. Siskel and Ebert both gave it thumbs down which helped nothing.
But audiences who hadn’t read reviews wouldn’t know any of that walking in, and bad notices alone don’t sink a film if there’s enough of a draw. The problem is that nothing about Disorganized Crime gave you a reason to choose it. This was 1989, and it wasn’t attached to a franchise, a bestseller, a hit song, or a star who could guarantee a return on your Friday night.
And it’s had 35 years to be ignored, which is honestly long enough.
If you can sit through 90 minutes of Ernest Goes to Jail, then movies are a fairly low-stakes investment for you, and lining up something like Disorganized Crime as a way to time-travel back to 1989 for an evening will absolutely fit the bill.
Maybe asking audiences in the spring of ’89 to fork out several dollars for a movie ticket was too big an ask, or a 3 dollar new release rental seemed like a lot when Stakeout was on the shelf for 2 dollars. Maybe it was always going to be a cable movie, provided you didn’t miss the window. And if you did, well, you could just wait another 30 years before getting around to it, provided it’s on a streaming platform somewhere. And if it isn’t, don’t worry, I’m sure in another ten years it’ll be available in pill form.
You’ll see this eventually, and it’ll be there waiting. -Pop