Yesterday afternoon, I decided it was time to watch Spice World. It tells a fictional tale of the events leading up to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, comprising many surreal moments and fantasy sequences, not to mention self-parody by the band members.
Let’s be clear, this is not a great picture if you like a plot. The disjointed story interweaves a crew trying to make a fictional movie about the band, an entirely separate crew trying to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and a newspaper mogul trying to usurp their success. It instead helps to think of the film as a series of loosely-related sketches.
That’s before we arrive at the dozen or so celebrity cameos, some slotted clumsily into a screenplay written by Kim Fuller, brother of the band manager Simon Fuller. As such, there is a lot of self-indulgence here.
Despite this, the film has become, according to one source, the highest-grossing musical film of all time. The initial negative reactions from its 1997 release tend now to be coloured by nostalgia. The Odeon even held limited screenings to mark its 20th anniversary.
It’s even been suggested that some studios make intentionally bad films in a go-for-broke fashion. Sometimes it’s to keep the rights to an idea – or sometimes they reckon the gamble can pay off. The 2003 Tommy Wisaeu film The Room is a case study all of its own.
If there’s any sort of lesson to be taken from this, I think it’s that writers sometimes need to worry less about the quality of work and focus on simply producing it. If you want it to exist in the world, sometimes you need to make it yourself. In Spice World, someone took arguably the most famous singers of the era, wrote them into a rather silly script, and we’re still talking about it more than 25 years later.
Gavin Cameron 