I can give you an example of an entire cast and crew reluctantly agreeing to participate in one of the most embarrassing cinematic abominations ever, and doing it only for the money: It was producer-director Otto Preminger’s horrendous 1968 film “Skidoo,” featuring this motley assemblage of desperate talent…
Jackie Gleason
Carol Channing
Frankie Avalon
Frank Gorshin
Peter Lawford
Burgess Meredith
George Raft
Cesar Romero
Mickey Rooney
Groucho Marx
Slim Pickens
…and several others
Skidoo was an incoherent mess of former boxoffice and television stars from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s mixing it up in some kind of flaccid, cross-generational mobster/hippy “comedy,” futilely attempting to appeal to young, hip audiences using old and iconic faces.
This is one of those films that nobody in the cast or crew thought was a good idea, but they did it for the paychecks alone.
Comedy legend Groucho Marx (who, along with Jackie Gleason, dropped acid for the first time just to “get into the mood” of the script) described this film and his performance in it as “godawful”; it was, in fact, Groucho’s last film.
Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero and Frank Gorshin knew that their employment (as The Penguin, The Joker and The Riddler, respectively) on the “Batman” TV series was coming to an end in 1968, so they signed onto this movie to pad their bank accounts. No doubt they were talked into doing it by Otto Preminger, who himself had appeared on the Batman series as Mr. Freeze.
Frankie Avalon and Mickey Rooney, of course, would agree to appear in any film, no matter how humiliating, as long as there was a paycheck involved.
The feeling of the whole movie is that of coercion, as though the cast and crew are being forced to participate against their wills, perhaps to pay back old favors, but certainly not out of any sense of creative accomplishment or professional pride.
To top it off, nobody in the cast and crew even liked Otto Preminger because he had a reputation as a rude and bullying tyrant. So, there was a profound dearth of enthusiasm and morale in the making of “Skidoo”; the cast and crew simply took the money and ran when production was finally, mercifully done.