Myra Breckinridge drew record crowds while earning the most hostile reviews ever

Evidence

More overground, if equally outré, the Hollywood version of Gore Vidal’s bestselling satire Myra Breckinridge opened at the Criterion, at Broadway and Forty-Fourth Street, four days short of the Stonewall’s anniversary, and effectively previewed the week’s Christopher Street Liberation Day March. … Myra nearly doubled the Criterion’s previous opening day box office record, going on to garner the most hostile reviews ever accorded a Hollywood release. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1570

Categorization

• XREF: The hostile-review/box-office divergence connects to the shelf’s broader claims about taste hierarchies and mass-cultural change.
• SHARE: The Mae West quotes and the box-office-record-vs-hostile-reviews stat are fun tidbits for someone into Hollywood scandal history.