Bad movies tend to stay bad over the generations, but the stories about how they were screwed up and the agonies that the various participants shared (both during shooting and after release) are always good reading material.

And so it follows that this short but well-crafted John M. Miller article about the making of Billy Wilder‘s Kiss me Stupid provides a much better time than one could possibly derive from watching the 1964 film, which was a total fiasco — the Bonfire of the Vanities of its day — and still kinda stinks.

Which reminds me that Julie Salamon‘s The Devil’s Candy, a book about the making of Brian DePalma‘s Vanities, was far more entertaining than the film. And that the two-hour “Making of Cleopatra” documentary on the Cleopatra DVD is a much richer portrait of tragic grandiosity than Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s 1963 epic.