Ishtar is a 1987 American adventure comedy film written and directed by Elaine May, and produced by Warren Beatty, who co-stars opposite Dustin Hoffman.

The story revolves around a duo of talentless American songwriters who travel to a booking in Morocco and stumble into a four-party Cold War standoff.

[10] Chuck Clarke and Lyle Rogers are inept songwriters who are down on their luck, but dream of becoming a popular singing duo like Simon and Garfunkel.

Though they are poorly received at a local open mic night, agent Marty Freed offers to book them as lounge singers in a hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, explaining that the last act quit due to political unrest in the area.

When they arrive in the fictional neighboring country of Ishtar, Chuck agrees to give his passport to a mysterious woman who claims her life is in danger.

The CIA ends up having to support Shirra leading social reforms in the country, and back an album written by Rogers and Clarke with a tour starting in Morocco.

Warren Beatty felt indebted to Elaine May, who, in addition to co-writing his 1978 hit Heaven Can Wait, had done a major uncredited rewrite on the script of his Academy Award-winning Reds and helped immensely with its post-production.

[11] At a dinner with Beatty and Bert Fields, their agent, May said she would like to do a variant on the Road to ... films of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, set in the Middle East.

Her idea would feature Beatty and a co-star as a mediocre singer-songwriter duo who would go to Morocco and get caught in the crossfire between the Central Intelligence Agency and a local left-wing guerrilla group.

She thought it would be funny to cast Beatty against type as the Hope part, the bumbler of the duo, while the co-star, possibly Dustin Hoffman, would play the self-assured ladies' man that Crosby usually portrayed.

However, McElwaine was also afraid the property could be a hit for another studio if Columbia passed,[11] because Beatty had a solid record of commercial success in his four movies as producer and star.

However, Columbia's parent company at the time, Coca-Cola, had money in Morocco it could not repatriate, so the studio relented and allowed production to take place in the real Sahara Desert.

[11] Another frequently related incident, as told by production designer Paul Sylbert but disputed by others on the film, concerns the dunes where scenes with Beatty and Hoffman lost in the desert would be shot.

As Columbia had feared, she shot a large amount of film as well, reportedly in one instance calling for fifty takes of vultures landing next to Beatty and Hoffman.

When a replacement part was needed for a camera, it was sent over to Morocco with a New York-based location coordinator instead of just being shipped, out of fear it might get lost or held up at customs.

He also publicly criticized Hoffman for allegedly using his star power to force rewrites to the 1979 film Agatha, which had promoted his minor character to a lead.

[11] Due to his history with both stars, the new studio head promised to stay out of Ishtar's post-production, but Beatty and Hoffman felt that move was subtly intended to undermine the film by suggesting it was a failure for which he wanted to avoid responsibility.

Because McElwaine, whom he had tried to please as a friend, was no longer in charge, Beatty eventually relented to letting May cut the film her way, partly because he detested Puttnam and believed he was leaking negative information about Ishtar to the media.

[12] On December 14, 2017, Variety published a report in which a woman named Melissa Kester, as well as an additional source who chose to remain anonymous, accused Dustin Hoffman of sexually assaulting them during the production of Ishtar.

[18][19] In the Variety article, Kester, whose boyfriend worked on the music for Ishtar, alleged that, while recording a vocal track for one of the film's songs, Hoffman invited her into an isolation booth and inserted his fingers into her genitalia.

In the same article, an anonymous source, who worked as an unnamed extra in one of the film's nightclub sequences, claimed that Hoffman engaged in a similar action while riding home from a wrap party with her in a station wagon.

She also alleged that he then directed her to the San Remo apartment complex, where he lived at the time, and engaged in oral sex and sexual intercourse with her, interactions that she claimed arose from dubious consent on her part.

However, in response to the article, Hoffman's attorney Mark A. Neubauer wrote a letter to the Penske Media Corporation, which owns Variety, in which he called the allegations "defamatory falsehoods".

In an interview with May, Mike Nichols described the bomb as "the prime example that I know of in Hollywood of studio suicide",[21] implying that Puttnam sandbagged the project by leaking negative anecdotes to the media because of his grudges against Beatty and Hoffman.

[26] Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum surmised that the media were eager to torpedo Ishtar in retaliation for instances of Beatty's perceived "high-handed way with members of the press".

The Washington Post's critics were split: Desson Thomson described the film as an "unabashed vamp for a pair of household names, and as such it works, often hilariously",[28] while Hal Hinson wrote that "it's piddling—a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs.

The website's consensus reads: "Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and laughter itself get lost in the desert during a flawed spoof of classic road movies that proves ill-suited for its mismatched and miscast stars.

[49] However, particularly since its 2013 Blu-ray release, Ishtar has received a wave of positive reviews and retrospectives from a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Slate, IndieWire, and The Dissolve.

"[50] Charles Bramesco of The Guardian wrote upon the film's 30th anniversary, "While Ishtar has not appreciated into a stealth masterpiece in the mold of Showgirls' long road to reappraisal, its stature as the definitive cinematic failure has been outed as undeserved.

"[51] Filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Lena Dunham, Joe Swanberg, and Edgar Wright have all publicly praised Ishtar, and Martin Scorsese has further cited it as one of his favorite films of all time.