Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1937 Rover's Rival, directed by Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones. .
This is the first Looney Tunes short to feature The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down as the theme song and feature the end card with Porky Pig tearing through the drum to stutter "That's all Folks!", which would last all the way to 1946.
The staff at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour has taken their annual vacay and I'm left holding down the fort. So I'm going to one of my fail safe choices: -
I've said this countless times - I believe Kathleen Madigan is truly a great comic, woefully underappreciated.
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1979 satirical comedy Being There, directed by Hal Ashby and starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, and Jack Warden. The film opened to strong reviews and marked a much-needed boost to Peter Sellers’ career after a string of failures - aside from the Pink Panther franchise.
Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There, first published in 1971, inspired Sellers to begin an eight-year campaign to bring the story to the screen. Unfortunately, his career was at its lowest point in 1972, and no studio would seriously consider the proposal. Undaunted, Sellers approached Hal Ashby, his first choice as director. Sellers’ character, Chance, is a distinctly surreal hero: a man who drifts through life utterly ignorant of the perils of the modern world. Instead of being destroyed by them, he is lifted up by sheer luck and serendipity. Interestingly, Sellers despised the outtakes shown at the end of the film and repeatedly asked the producers to remove them from the version submitted to Cannes. While audiences loved the bloopers, Sellers became convinced that they cost him the Academy Award. He felt the outtakes undermined his performance and ruined the film’s carefully crafted mood. So join us here at the ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour. Sit back, get comfortable, and enjoy tonight’s feature presentation: Being There.
Nathan Lane, an admirer of Peter Sellers and the film, once approached Stephen Sondheim with the idea of adapting it into a stage musical. Sondheim, himself an avowed film buff, found the idea intriguing but doubted it could succeed, since the main character, Chance, is essentially a cipher and an observer - and audiences would not accept him suddenly bursting into song.
Demand Euphoria!
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