The Tuneless Cole Porter Musical

John Simon’s Esquire review called it “maybe the worst movie musical of this—or any decade”: “Sitting through this movie is like having someone at a fancy Parisian restaurant, who neither speaks nor reads French, read out stentoriously the entire long menu in his best Arkansas accent, and occasionally interrupt himself to chortle at his own cleverness.” Bodganovich and his then-girlfriend/leading lady Cybill Shepherd have referred to it as simply “The Debacle.” Never released on home video, At Long Last Love is well-known for being one of the only films so disastrous that its director resolved to publish a “letter of apology” in newspapers across the country shortly after the film’s release. The actual letter, it turns out, is even stranger than any of the Internet rumors about it: