It was a challenge to narrow this list down to 100, but a scrupulous winnowing effort yielded the following collective and individual stupid moves. Remember, it's only the tip of the iceberg.
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1. Nobody had the balls to tell Mike Ovitz to give up on packaging Madonna for the big screen and start thinking Las Vegas and infomercials.
2. Nastassia Kinski and Quincy Jones named their baby Kenya.
3. Jack Valenti's MPAA invented the useless, randomly applied NC-17 rating.
4. TriStar failed to supply theaters showing Chaplin with free methamphetamine for the audience.
5. The industry flaunted its weepy, narcissistic, self-important nonsense on national television throughout Clinton's Inaugural extravaganza.
6. Making other industry folk look like sober diplomats, the half-clad Goldie Hawn stunned Inaugural festivity watchers with falsetto babbling so unprecedentedly airheaded it threatened to undermine the first six months of the Clinton administration.
7. Sally Field, apparently deciding to top her Oscar speech embarrassment of several years ago, appeared with Goldie Hawn on the aforementioned Inaugural broadcast.
8. Zillions of actresses underwent breast implants.
9. Movieline put Danny DeVito on its cover.
10. Flogging the subject in the trades, the industry deluded itself into believing that booming box office means booming success, when what it really reflects is rising ticket prices that mask falling attendance.
11. A young director of music videos was allowed to destroy the Alien franchise with a big-budget, boring, art-school-project sequel.
12. Disney continued to blitz audiences with countless unforgivably lamebrained bombs for every successful cartoon or hit comedy.
13. Spike Lee claimed that tickets sold for Malcolm X were being credited by computers to films like Aladdin.
14. Spike Lee didn't get a Best Director nomination for Malcolm X.
15. Studios decided to go ahead and let directors make movies that ran well beyond any reasonable or necessary length: Malcolm X (201 mins.), Scent of a Woman (157 mins.), A Few Good Men (138 mins.), Hoffa (140 mins.), Blood In... Blood Out (180 mins.), Howard's End (140 mins.), Jennifer 8 (124 mins.).
16. Edward James Olmos temporarily abandoned his acting career to pursue sainthood.
17. Agents demanded and studios granted casting approval to actors who are lucky to be working with anybody.
18. Paramount hired Brandon Tartikoff as studio boss.
19. Paramount didn't fire Brandon Tartikoff when he greenlighted All I Want For Christmas.
20. Paramount didn't fire Brandon Tartikoff when he decided to release 1492: Conquest of Paradise.
21. Paramount didn't fire Brandon Tartikoff when he failed to shut down production of Cool World.
22. Paramount didn't fire Brandon Tartikoff when he greenlighted The Temp, or later, when he couldn't figure out an ending for it.
23. Paramount didn't fire Brandon Tartikoff for signing Steve Guttenberg to a multipicture deal.
24. Paramount didn't fire L Brandon Tartikoff for greenlighting Whispers in the Dark, or later for releasing it.
25. Paramount didn't fire Brandon Tartikoff when he planned Leap of Faith as the studio's Christmas offering.
26. The industry took Clinton's election as a signal to haul out bongs during working hours.
27. An epidemic of changing film titles hit studio marketing departments, resulting in a slew of icky names that all sound like they were generated by the same computer: The Rest of Daniel became Forever Young; The Baboon Heart became Untamed Heart; The Specialist became Point of No Return; The Arrowtooth Waltz became Arizona Dream; Three Rivers became Striking Distance.
28. Fox allowed Macaulay Culkin's father to trample one director and strong-arm another in the making of The Good Son.
29. Whoopi Goldberg decided to host her own talk show.
30. Paramount allowed Sharon Stone to go into her Lee Strasberg phase several years earlier than necessary by letting her play Richard Gere's wife instead of his girlfriend in Intersection.
31. Anne Archer.
32. The industry failed to develop a strategy for paying declining fees to declining directors (Sidney Lumet, Brian De Palma, Mark Rydell, Mel Brooks, Norman Jewison, etc.) as an alternative to paying anything to completely incompetent first-time directors.
33. Some of the worst titles in movie history were given to films that were not likely to survive good titles: Wind, The Ox, Being Human, Late for Dinner, The Pickle, Leaving Normal.
34. The insanity of making more than one version of the same story--which gave us one bad, successful Robin Hood and one piece of garbage--continued: first, two disastrous Columbus movies, and on their way, three Huckleberry Finns, two Pancho Villa movies (by two different directors named Scott), two Wyatt Earp movies and, if the rumor is true, several Viking movies.
35. Thanks to the scourge of the High Concept, movies came to lack not only a third act, but a second act as well.
36. Wes Studi was not given a Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Last of the Mohicans.
37. Agents and studio bosses have spent a bundle on high-tech headsets so they can go on not listening to anybody.
38. The industry began favoring trailers that give away the entire upcoming movie.
39. Nobody broke up Warren Beatty's romance with Annette Bening so that he would be prevented from doing to her career what he did to Leslie Caron's, Julie Christie's and Diane Keaton's.
40. Main Line Pictures, makers of Boxing Helena, thought a verbal agreement from Kim Basinger meant she would actually show up to make their film.
41. The increased presence of women on-screen was manifested almost exclusively in psycho films like Basic Instinct, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female, The Temp and Body of Evidence, or in matinee slop like Used People and The Cemetery Club.
42. The Academy continued to have live, campy musical numbers as part of the Oscar show.
43. The Academy increasingly took its Oscar nomination cues from the nitwit Golden Globes.
44. Michelle Pfeiffer made Frankie and Johnny, in which her character was supposed to be a plain woman.
45. The studios devised increasingly complicated publicity organizations to flog increasingly simpleminded product.
46. Martin Brest was given a Best Director nomination for Scent of a Woman.
47. Body of Evidence.
48. Despite the evidence--For the Boys, Newsies and Swing Kids--deals to make more musicals kept coming.
49. Keanu Reeves became the period drama star of his generation.
50. Hollywood paid Joe Eszterhas $3 million for Basic Instinct, $1.55 million for Original Sin, $2.5 million for Jade, $2 million for Showgirls, and heaven knows how much for anonymous script doctoring, all despite this screenwriter's never having written a decent line of dialogue or bothered to vary his plots.
51. Joe Pesci was given the lead in a serious film.
52. Tom Selleck starred in three films in one year.
53. Barbra Streisand and Madonna were given $60 million deals.
54. Hundreds of actors got tattoos.
55. Hollywood, the predatory sex capital of the cosmos, busily prepared a raft of movies about sexual harassment.
56. 20th Century Fox unloaded Hoffa, Toys and Used People on 1992's innocent holiday filmgoers.
57. In the new era of , austerity, Carolco paid $2 million for the script to Cutthroat Island, Imagine bought The Sea Wolf for $1 million, Paramount paid $1 million for The Cheese Stands Alone, Largo paid $1 million each for The Ticking Man and Texas Lead and Gold, Warner Bros, paid $1 million for Wasteland, and Touchstone paid $1 million for Ultimatum --and none of these movies have been made.
58. In the new era of austerity, Icon Productions bought Forever Young for $2 million, Morgan Creek bought Stay Tuned and Freejack for over $750,000 each, Geffen Company bought The Last Boy Scout for $1.75 million, and Cinergi bought Medicine Man for nearly $3 million--and these movies actually got made.
59. Jeffrey Katzenberg criticized the industry for thinking too much about profit.
60. Director Luis Valdez was forced to shut down production of his movie about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo after the protests over his casting of Italian-American (and Kahlo dead ringer) Laura San Giacomo. Meanwhile, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Winona Ryder were cast as Latinas in the adaptation of Chilean Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, a project being directed by the Danish Bille August.
61. Long-in-the-tooth Robert Redford got cast in two big romances, Havana and Indecent Proposal, while romantic figure Tom Cruise got cast in a chaste courtroom drama, A Few Good Men, and a legal thriller, The Firm. Go figure.
62. No one figured out how to make Andy Garcia into a star. And nobody managed to get him to stop swallowing his dialogue, either.
63. Moral giants such as Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli supported a boycott of Colorado for passing an amendment that deprives gays and lesbians of civil rights, but no one ever thought to demand that their records and films not be sold there.
64. Movieline put Bette Midler on its cover.
65. Entertainment Weekly put Nina Siemaszko on its cover.
66. Shadows and Fog.
67. People in the industry became guinea pigs in an experiment to see whether cellular phones really cause brain cancer.
68. David Lynch made "Twin Peaks" into a movie.
69. Dustin Hoffman was cast in Billy Bathgate.
70. Dustin Hoffman was cast in Hero.
71. James Woods and Dolly Parton starred together in a movie.
72. Woody Allen decided to have an affair with his lover's adopted daughter.
73. Eddie Murphy retroactively erased whatever anyone used to like about him by making The Distinguished Gentleman.
74. Hollywood didn't appreciate Batman Returns.
75. CAA, overly impressed with its I.M. Pei architecture and massive Roy Lichtenstein, developed the habit of letting the biggest names in the business sit in their cavernous lobby for insulting lengths of time.
76. TriStar hired Richard Attenborough, director of the disastrous movie version of A Chorus Line, to direct the upcoming movie version of Les Miserables.
77. Warner Bros., two producers and director Martin Brest all let Al Pacino wear a Mafia don haircut for his role as a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel in Scent of a Woman.
78. Lorraine Bracco was given the lead opposite Sean Connery in Medicine Man.
79. Before the picture had even started filming, Francis Coppola predicted that Frankenstein, which he is executive-producing, would make over $200 million.
80. With full knowledge of what Barry Levinson did the last time he got to make a pet project (Avalon), Joe Roth let him make his ultimate pet project--Toys.
81. Shirley MacLaine, Kathy Bates, Marcia Gay Harden and Jessica Tandy were all cast as Jews in Used People.
82. Ellen Burstyn, Diane Ladd and Olympia Dukakis were all cast as Jews in The Cemetery Club.
83. Jim Belushi.
84. Gerard Depardieu's dialogue was not subtitled in 1492: Conquest of Paradise.
85. Final Analysis.
86. Sylvester Stallone was paid money to make Oscar and Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot.
87. The Marrying Man.
88. While making the WWII movie Shining Through, Melanie Griffith explained that she had no idea six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and commented, "That's a lot of people."
89. Sony Pictures spent a fortune developing movie ideas for Michael Jackson.
90. The studios installed phone mail in order to apply new technology to the old strategy of treating everyone like shit.
91. Range Rovers became the hottest studio perk for people who seldom stray more than 10 miles from their gym, The Sports Club-L.A.
92. Universal and Columbia allowed themselves to be bought by the Japanese.
93. Julia Roberts decided not to work for two years.
94. Debra Winger backed out of A League of Their Own and This Boy's Life and said yes to Leap of Faith, then thought it wise to be directed by Richard Attenborough in Shadowlands.
95. Hollywood forgot how to make romantic comedies, film noir, musicals and thrillers.
96. Woody Allen put out his best movie in years at the exact moment he committed career suicide.
97. Mel Gibson, who long ago was so good in Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously, continued his more recent habit of giving profoundly inconsequential performances in ultimately so-what? movies.
98. Studios okayed more Death Wishes, Stakeouts, Look Who's Talkings, Weekend at Bernies' and Beverly Hills Cops, but not the one sequel that might have been good, Who Framed Roger Rabbit 2.
99. Despite the box-office bombs that have resulted from modern attempts to translate Jim Thompson's novels to the screen--The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet--Largo Entertainment decided to remake Jim Thompson's The Getaway (which was a bomb back when Sam Peckinpah made it with Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen), then cast the explosive two-some Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin, and topped it off by choosing as director Roger Donaldson, who recently gave us such box-office bombs as Cadillac Man and White Sands.
100. On the heels of the disappointment The Doors, Hollywood resurrected bio pics. The good Malcolm X was more than compensated for by the awful Chaplin and Hoffa. Now we are threatened with movies about Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, Harvey Milk, Chico Mendes, etc.