Ishtar Film full HD movie download free with screenpaly story, dialogue LYRICS and STAR Cast

Chuck Clarke (Hoffman) and Lyle Rogers (Beatty) are inept songwriters who are down on their luck, but dream of becoming a popular singing duo in the mould of Simon and Garfunkel. Though they are poorly received at a local open mic night, agent Marty Freed (Weston) 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. Nearly broke, both single, and without any better options, Lyle and Chuck decide to take the gig.

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. She promises to meet him in Marrakesh. Unfortunately, Chuck learns at the U.S. Embassy that it will take longer than expected to get a new passport. Lyle goes to Morocco in a bid to save their booking while Chuck stays behind.

Alone in Ishtar, Chuck meets CIA agent Jim Harrison. Chuck agrees to be a mole for the CIA and, in return, Harrison gets Chuck to Morocco by the next evening.

Now together again, Chuck and Lyle unwittingly become involved in a plot to overthrow the Emir of Ishtar. The mysterious woman, named Shirra, has a map that she needs to get to the leftist guerrillas opposing the government of Ishtar. Harrison gets involved when Shirra contacts Lyle and Chuck.

Both Shirra and the CIA attempt to use Lyle and Chuck to further their own agendas, resulting in Lyle and Chuck getting lost in the desert, and unwittingly exposing the CIA's top secret operation in Ishtar. To keep the situation quiet, 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. At the show, Shirra is in the audience. Meanwhile, a military officer orders the rest of the men in uniform that make up the audience to "APPLAUD!" when songs are finished.

Pre-production

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. He began looking for a project that she could write and direct. She had never, he believed, had a sufficiently protective producer, and by starring in and producing her next film he could give her the chance to make the film he believed her to be creatively and commercially capable of making.

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.

Hoffman, who was also indebted to May for her extensive uncredited rewrite on Tootsie, initially turned it down due to "misgivings". At Beatty's request, the two met with May and Hoffman's creative confidant, playwright Murray Schisgal. The latter two felt that the action plot in Morocco overwhelmed the rest of the film and that it "should not leave New York". Hoffman was finally persuaded by Beatty's assurances that he would provide May with the room she needed to work.

When May finished the script, Beatty, Hoffman, and some other friends including Charles Grodin had a meeting and read-through at Beatty's house. All present agreed that the script needed work, but it was funny and could be a hit.

Beatty went to Columbia Pictures production head Guy McElwaine, who years before had been his publicist, instructing Fields, "Bert, anything she wants. Period. That's my negotiating position." Despite the prospect of having two major stars on the same project with a well-regarded writer, McElwaine did not immediately approve it. He worried about the effects of having Beatty, Hoffman, and May on the same set, since they were all known to be perfectionists. May, in particular, had a reputation for shooting as much raw footage as Beatty himself or Stanley Kubrick. But McElwaine was also afraid the property could be a hit for another studio if Columbia passed, since Beatty had a solid record of commercial success in his four movies as producer and star.

The two bankable stars and May received $12.5 million (equivalent to $29.4 million in 2017) in salaries before principal photography began. Beatty and Hoffman offered to defer theirs, but Columbia declined; Fields said that an agreement the studio had with HBO covered most of that cost. Beatty, Hoffman, and May all had final cut input as well (although Beatty has denied this). The film's original budget was set at $27.5 million.

Other roles were cast through connections to the three. Grodin was a friend of May and had starred in a successful comedy she directed, the original version of The Heartbreak Kid. Isabelle Adjani, who played the female lead disguised as a boy for most of the film, was Beatty's girlfriend at the time. Vittorio Storaro replaced original cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno when Rotunno was unable to change his schedule to accommodate a delay in the shooting.

Paul Williams began working on the songs the lead duo would sing. "The real task was to write songs that were believably bad. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had in my life. I've never had more fun on a picture, but I've never worked harder." May preferred that Williams write whole songs, even if she intended to use only a few lines, and then teach them to the stars and have them perform them, necessitating more time and money.

The studio had wanted to shoot the desert scenes in the Southwest in order to keep costs down and production under control. But 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. It was expected that shooting in Morocco would take ten weeks, after which the New York scenes would be shot.

Principal photography

Ishtar began principal photography in October 1985, amidst high political tensions in North Africa. Israeli warplanes had just bombed Palestinian Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis and, seven days later, the Palestine Liberation Front hijacked a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, murdering a wheelchair-using elderly Jewish American, Leon Klinghoffer. The Moroccan military was fighting the Polisario Front guerrillas at the time as well. There were rumors Palestinian terrorists might try to kidnap Hoffman, and some locations had to be checked for land mines before shooting could begin.

There were also production difficulties. The filmmakers appreciated the Moroccans' hospitality and willingness to cooperate, but there was no one in the country with experience supporting a major Hollywood film production. Requests by the producers were sometimes unfulfilled, and calls for local extras led to thousands of people showing up.

Some of the film's production woes have become Hollywood lore. The film's animal trainer went looking for a blue-eyed camel in the Marrakech market, and found one he considered perfect. But he chose not to buy it right away, expecting he could find others and use that knowledge to bargain with the first trader for a better price. He did not realize that blue-eyed camels were rare, and could not find another camel good enough. He returned to the first trader, who had since eaten the camel.

Another frequently related incident, related 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. Sylbert had scouted dunes in the United States and Morocco but none seemed to fit the vision of May, who was very uncomfortable in the desert environment. She suffered from toothaches that she refused to have treated locally, and took extensive measures to shelter herself from the harsh sun, not only spending much of her time under a large parasol but wearing large sunglasses and wrapping her face in a white gauze veil, to the point that her appearance was compared to a Star Wars stormtrooper. After one unsuccessful search for dunes, Sylbert says, May suddenly announced she wanted a flat landscape instead. It took ten days to level an area of a square mile (2.6 km²).

May feuded with others on set, as well. She and Storaro frequently differed over camera placements, since she was looking for the ideal comic effect while the cinematographer, who had little experience making comedies, sought the most ideal composition. Beatty often took Storaro's side in disputes between him and May. "She probably felt ganged up on by the two of them," Hoffman observed later on. Eventually Beatty and May began quarreling, and Hoffman sometimes served as the mediator. He claims there were times when the two were not speaking to each other. May also did not get along with Adjani, which adversely affected the latter's relationship with Beatty.

The director remained aloof from the film's editing staff, taking copious notes during dailies but refusing to share them. As Columbia had feared, she shot a large amount of film as well, reportedly in one instance calling for 50 takes of vultures landing next to Beatty and Hoffman.

Expenses continued to grow. "This was the kind of film where nobody would say 'Sorry, we can't afford that,'" according to Mac Brown, who monitored the budget. 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. The coordinator's airfare and a week's hotel stay were paid for by the production.

Privately, both Beatty and May began to confess they had made a mistake. "I was going to give this gift to Elaine, and it turned out to be the opposite," Hoffman recalls Beatty telling him. Matters came to a head when it came time to shoot the film's climactic battle scenes. They were far outside May's background in improvisational theatre, and during a confrontation with Beatty, May said, "You want it done? You shoot it!" Many crew members said that, on any other film, the direc