When Original Director Tim Burton Bailed, 1994's Cabin Boy Became the Least Commercial Film in History
Welcome to the first entry in 1994: A Look. Back, a year-long exploration of one of the greatest film years of all time. I’ll be going through the film schedule chronologically and you can help choose what movies I cover by pledging to the site’s Patreon account.
It is a minor miracle that 1994’s Cabin Boy exists. It is, after all, a preposterous endeavor: a theatrically released Chris Elliott vehicle parodying Captain Courageous that takes everything that enraged the masses about Get a Life and amplifies it.
It is the fanciful tale of a fancy lad played by Elliott who is impossible to identify with, relate to, root for or like because he is an insufferable ninny. It would be difficult to imagine a less commercial premise for a major motion picture. It’s hard to believe that a number of people within the Touchstone Pictures organization looked at this screenplay and signed off on allocating millions upon millions of dollars and significant resources to bring this story to life.
I suspect that the reason Cabin Boy exists is because Tim Burton was initially supposed to direct it until he left to make Ed Wood instead. Burton remained a producer but when he bolted the movie instantly went from being a pet project of one of the hottest, most successful and consistent filmmakers alive to a weird little orphan that was going to be the directorial debut of a television newcomer named Adam Resnick.
Ten million dollars is a relatively cheap price to pay to get into the Tim Burton business. It’s an obscene amount of money to pay, however, for a Chris Elliott movie spoofing movies only the elderly even remember at this point.
In Cabin Boy Elliott stars as Nathaniel Mayweather He’s the Chris Elliott character in his purest form, a self-satisfied boob who acts as if the world owes him a favor for just existing.
Elliott’s persona is a bold rebuke to American cinema’s cult of likability, its tiresome insistence that the main characters in movies should be lovable dreamers that we like, root for and identify with.
I can’t imagine anyone identifying with Elliott’s character, watching the movie and thinking, “That’s me! I am an effete boob who is totally out of touch with the world! I feel seen for the first time!”
Cabin Boy is the product of the magnificently curdled mind of Adam Resnick, who wrote a memoir that barely touched upon his television and film career but that I loved because it conveys that Resnick really hates people.
For Resnick, misanthropy is no mere pose or pretense; he genuinely despises humanity. And why shouldn’t he? I don’t want to seem negative but someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
In Cabin Boy everybody is wildly unlikable and oddly off-putting. Resnick fills the supporting cast with the kind of tough guy character actors who look and act like they were born forty years old, with a beard, a drinking problem and a criminal record.
These are actors that nobody pays money to see in movies even though they make everything they’re in better. I’m talking about the dependable likes of rat-faced thespian Brion James, grizzly James Gammon, Russ Tamblyn, Mike Starr and Brian Doyle-Murray, everyone’s favorite Murray who isn’t Joel.
These are actors who look like they smell unfathomably awful, like they haven’t known the civilizing touch of a bar of soap in a long time, let alone a woman’s sensual caress.
Touchstone’s money-loser begins with anti-hero Nathanael Maryweather graduating from prep school, much to the annoyance of anyone unlucky enough to have to deal with him.
He treats everyone with aristocratic condescension, confident that his daddy’s money will prevent him from having to deal with real problems or real people. The Fancy Lad is supposed to take a swanky ship called The Queen Catherine to Hawaii on his father’s dime.
Due to a mix-up he ends up instead onboard The Filthy Whore, a ragged aggregation of crusty seamen with no use for someone with Nathanael’s delicate constitution. Cabin Boy is a throwback in that it takes a curious delight in artificiality.
Cabin Boy is a movie about the sea that clearly has never touched water and was instead filmed on sets as impressive as they are obviously fake. The sole innocent about The Filthy Whore is Kenny, a half-wit played by Andy Richter, in his film debut who is too stupid to live and just dumb enough to die.
Melora Walters costars as Trina, a long distance swimmer with a dream that Nathanial destroys. He falls hopelessly and madly in love with her. Like everyone, she thinks he’s a creep and a ninny as well.
Our anti-hero’s bumbling leads the ship into Hell’s Bucket, a Bermuda Triangle-like realm of bad vibes and cursed souls that is home to many creatures out of a Ray Harryhausen spectacle.
When it journeys into Hell’s Bucket Cabin Boy embraces fantasy through characters like a half-man, half-shark who is loyal but unpredictable played by West Side Story’s Russ Tamblyn, an ice giant and a six armed blue woman played by uptown Ann Magnuson who relieves Nathaniel of his cursed virginity, much to the chagrin of her husband.
In one of his more unusual roles the great Mike Starr plays a giant who wears an unflattering suit and works at a luggage store that doesn't get much business. Cabin Boy occupies a crazy time warp where everything is stylized like it’s a movie from the 1930s that was shot entirely on a studio set except there are microwaves and all sorts of other modern detritus that tells us that the movie takes place in the present.
In the end it doesn’t matter. It's just one more element of post-modern fuckery in a movie that has the courage of its lunatic convictions. That’s why it was a stone cold flop upon its theatrical release (this thing played in theaters!) but attracted a sizable and loyal following immediately afterwards.
visual proof that Tim Burton spent at least one day on the set of Cabin Boy.
Cabin Boy is that rarest and most wonderful of anomalies: a Chris Elliott film. And an Adam Resnick film. Elliott would go on to become a prolific character actor in television and film but as a supporting player, not as a lead. Elliott would wrack up an impressive resume with major supporting roles in hits like There’s Something About Mary and Groundhog’s Day, where he re-teamed with Brian Doyle-Murray.
There would never be another cinematic Chris Elliott vehicle. As with the case of Tom Green, it’s amazing that there was one in the first place. Blame Tim Burton. Or give him all the credit.
Would Cabin Boy be better if it were directed by Burton in his prime? Of course. Rifkin does a perfectly fine job as director but his primary goal is to serve the writing and the performances rather than making the story cinematic.
The result is an oddball romp that lurches from one spectacularly silly set-piece to another with an excess of absurdity and absolutely no shame.
It does eventually at least attempt to satisfy suits by doing the bare minimum to make the movie audience-friendly. Nathanael his virginity and has sex at least twice. He slays the giant and is reunited with his father (played by Chis’ real-life dad, Bob) but decides climactically that his place is at the sea onboard The Filthy Whore.
Elliott is very funny here in a way seemingly designed to annoy eighty percent of the viewing audience. Cabin Boy is Elliott in his purest form, which is why a mass audience violently rejected it but cultists immediately took to it.
Incidentally I’m amused at how Elliott was left out of so much of the show-ending hoopla for Schitt’s Creek.
It seems like the consensus for Schitt’s Creek was
Catherine O’Hara: an absolute queen in her finest role and performance!
Eugene Levy: A stunning tour de force! A glittering apex in an extraordinary career!
Dan Levy, Annie Murphy and Emily Hampshire: Utter revelations! Charming, charismatic stunners in star-making roles!
Chris Elliott: He was pretty good. He was the weakest element, obviously, but his parts weren’t bad necessarily.
Elliott was funny on Schitt’s Creek but it wasn’t his show. It belonged to the Levys and Catherine O’Hara but Cabin Boy, for better or worse, belongs one hundred percent to Elliott and Resnick, who is a prickly comic genius in his own right.
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