'Showgirls' Turns 20 - Director Takes the Blame, and Credit

It was 20 years ago Tuesday that an NC-17 movie about a Las Vegas stripper opened amid much hoopla, then promptly bombed at the box office, before going on to becoming a cult hit.

'Showgirls," starring 22-year-old Elizabeth Berkley as the dancer with little to wear and a lot of bad lines to say, premiered on Sept. 22, 1995 -- and everyone involved has in one way or another been trying to live it down, or explain it, ever since.

No more so than the director, Paul Verhoeven.

“People have, of course, criticized her for being over-the-top in her performance,” Verhoeven writes in a retrospective in "Rolling Stone" magazine. “Most of that comes from me. I pushed it in that direction. Good or not good, I was the one who asked her to exaggerate everything — every move — because that was the element of style that I thought would work for the movie."

That "Showgirls" went on to reap $100 million in video sales and become a late-night theater staple has softened the blow, and Verhoeven looks back fondly on the effort.

“Even now, when I see the movie, I think it’s shot in an extremely elegant way,” Verhoeven writes in "Rolling Stone." “There are beautiful movements of the camera, and beautiful choreography of how the camera worked with the actors and how the actors moved. I think it’s Felliniesque, certainly, in its over-the-top stuff.”