For the three-hundredth installment of Movie of the Week, something special: Elaine May’s “Ishtar.” It’s one of my favorite films, and it’s the victim of enduring misunderstandings—which are ultimately May’s very subject. It’s her fourth feature—unfortunately, the last to date—and it came more than a decade after her third, “Mikey and Nicky,” which received a merely pro forma release, in late 1976, to fulfill the unhappy studio’s contract with May. The studio for that film, Paramount, was unhappy because May went far over budget, and time as well—her editing of her hundred-plus hours of footage took two years, and resulted in acrimony and litigation. When May made her first feature, “A New Leaf,” released in 1971, Paramount shortened the film from her three-hour cut to one hundred and two minutes; litigation resulted. In between, she made “The Heartbreak Kid,” without litigation.

“Ishtar,” of course, is one of the most famous cases of conflict between filmmaker and studio (Columbia Pictures) in existence. It’s worth mentioning because that conflict is the reason for the movie’s undeserved place in movie history as an epochal disaster. It is, in point of fact, a masterwork (as are all four of May’s films), for reasons that I discuss in this clip. May is one of the best American directors ever to wield a camera, and the conflict that she has endured with the industry reveals the inherent difference between a genius and a system. Even more, it reveals a peculiar mindset, among journalists and critics, that tilts in favor of the system. “Ishtar” was a victim of publicity—but, even more, it was a victim of that enduring prejudice.

The stories of May’s methods of filming are legion; her impractical use of time and money was justifiably frustrating to studio executives, whose careers rise and fall with profits. But the films that result are unlike any others—not despite but because of May’s personal, willful, exploratory approach. There’s a Hollywood history of visionary directors whose expensive films aroused the derision and the enmity of journalists and critics, whether Erich von Stroheim or Orson Welles or Michael Cimino (whose “Heaven’s Gate” was another victim of facile critical attitudinizing). The tendency to blame the artist (“who the hell does she think she is?”), the deference to the attitude that discounts the filmmaker’s creative furies, is a mark of critics’ demagogy, or even their resentment of those who, unlike themselves, manage to work beyond the boundaries of the columns.

The cost of “Ishtar,” the disputes that arose on location, the stars’ increasing frustration, the studio’s displeasure, and May’s costly changes of plan in the course of the shoot all make for good stories. It’s a miracle that, under such circumstances, anyone can create anything at all. Lesser filmmakers than May work on conflict-riddled superproductions, producing only a mediocre gallimaufry of compromises, a patchwork of ass-coverings. Even run-of-the-mill Hollywood filmmakers need nerves of steel to negotiate the high pressure of creation amid the smell of burning money.

Independent filmmakers working with sympathetic independent producers under less generous financing than studios provide—and usually with less pressure and conflict than arises from studio-scale investments—often internalize the behind-the-scenes comity. That’s one reason for the amiable, complacent mode that frequently characterizes the worst of independent films. The ferocity that goes into them comes from the filmmaker rather than the process. (On the other hand, it also is sometimes fuelled by the infuriating derision of critical misunderstandings.)

May is a victim of a system that has seen fit to let her direct only four times in the last forty-five years. Yet she’s also a beneficiary of that system—which grudgingly provided the resources, material and human, that proved to be the subject of dispute. And she’s even an artistic product of that system, inasmuch as she sees it both from below, as an outsider, and from above, as an insider. No less than the directors of superhero movies or large-scale historical dramas and political thrillers, May makes movies about power. There’s a special agony that emerges, in her films, from conflict with the bosses. In May’s films—as in “Ishtar”—the imbalance of power can become a literal matter of life and death.

“Ishtar” is a portrait of artists who manage to rise from small mortal problems to big mortal problems. The difference between geniuses and the self-deluding losers of “Ishtar” is only talent. The story of art is the story of trouble, and May’s genius is in bearing and surviving that trouble and finding original, astonishing ways of showing it.

View Richard Brody's one-hundredth Movie of the Week, “The Great Dictator.”