Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Showgirls" at Twenty-Five

Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. Gershon’s career survived. (MGM)

I was surprised when I heard from erstwhile Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jess Reedy that the show had opted to cover Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 riff on A Star Is Born set in the world of Las Vegas dancers. The movie got a lot of attention at the time, because Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas were both coming off of Basic Instinct — controversial, but also a huge hit — and because Verhoeven had promised their new $40-million plus movie would carry an NC-17 rating due to its realistic treatment of the sex trade.

But realism isn’t Verhoeven’s Versace (pronounced Vehrr-SAYce) bag. Showgirls tanked, all but ending the career of former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley, whose bizarre performance is one of the features that got the movie pilloried by critics 25 years ago, and is also one of the elements that has driven the movie’s latter-day reclamation as a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style campfest. (That reclamation is the subject of a good documentary called You Don’t Nomi, which in part inspired PCHH’s Showgirls episode. I recommend the doc.)

I was very happy to join in the Showgirls discourse with the brilliant panel of Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, and Barrie Hardymon a couple of months back. That episode has now posted, just when we need it most. One thing I wish I’d found a place to point out is how Showgirls’ failure (though the movie by most accounts become profitable on home video) sent Verhoeven back to the R-rated sci-fi satire genre for 1997’s Starship Troopers — another movie that underperformed and got lousy reviews at the time (though not from me!) but has, over time, been rightfully recognized as a sort of masterpiece.

FURTHER READING: Seven long years ago I made 1987’s RoboCop — the movie that made Dutch auteur Verhoeven into a bankable Hollywood filmmaker for about a decade — the subject of the first and ,sadly, only installment in a proposed series of posts for what was then called NPR’s Monkey See blog on the subject of remakes. The column didn’t happen, but I certainly didn’t abandon the approach, as my review of 2016’s instantly forgotten Ben-Hur remake shall demonstrate. Maybe I’ll get to revive it if the long-threatened remake of Starship Troopers sever happens.