DIRECTOR
Chuck Barris
SCREENWRITERS
Chuck
Barris
Robert Downey Sr.
PRODUCER
Budd Granoff
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Richard C. Glouner
MUSIC
Milton Delugg
EDITOR
James Mitchell
CAST
Chuck Barris (Himself)
Robin Altman (Red)
Mabel King (Mabel)
Murray Langston (The Unknown Comic)
Jaye P. Morgan (Herself)
Jamie Farr (Himself)
Gene Patton (Himself)
Rip Taylor (Raoul)
James B. Douglas (Buddy Didlo)
Harvey Lembeck (Man in Steam Room)
Ed Marinaro (Man in Locker Room)
Phil Hartman (Man with Gun)
Melvin Presar (Himself)
Della Barris (Herself)
Taylor Negron (Auditioning Man)
Vincent Schiavelli (Mario Romani)
Tony Randall (Himself)
Kitten Natividad (Herself)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 89m
U.S. release: May 9, 1980
Video availability: TBA
Chuck
Barris fan page
See also:
- Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind
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One way to understand The
Gong Show Movie is to realize that it isn't really a comedy.
Sure, it has its funny moments, mostly dealing with the onstage
antics of the brutally untalented contestants who made Chuck
Barris' prime-time masterstroke both addictive and reviled. But
the movie it kept reminding me of was The King of Comedy,
which Barris' film predated by three years. (Tony Randall has
jokey cameos in both movies.) These two movies are really meta-comedies
-- they're more about comedy, and the toll it takes on
the anointed famous, than actual ha-ha-funny romps. If Scorsese's
film had stuck with the beleaguered Jerry Langford instead of
focusing on his obsessive stalker Rupert Pupkin, it might've
come out a bit like The Gong Show Movie.
The movie is a fascinating
public act of career seppuku. If Chuck Barris intended
the film (which he wrote with the notoriously audience-challenging
Robert Downey Sr., who had his own crashing flop that same year
with Up the Academy) to end his tenure as America's favorite
master of raunchy, inept ceremonies, the movie can only be called
an unqualified success. Viewers expecting a feature-length string
of manic absurdity must have been bewildered: What they found
was a rather sour document -- Chuck Agonistes, in which
the haggard-looking fifty-year-old celebrity bemoans his fame
and feels trapped inside the phenomenon he created. Calling it
The Gong Show Movie was the final perverse touch; yes,
the film has some Gong Show highlights -- including the
infamous bits with the Popsicle Twins and Jaye P. Morgan exposing
herself -- but most of the film plays like Barris' version of
Woody Allen's bitter Stardust Memories (also released
that year).
Poor Chuck! Everywhere he goes,
people recognize him and disrespect him on a variety of levels
-- launching into impromptu, excruciating auditions; telling
him how dumb the show is and what a schmuck he is. Some of this
must be exaggerated a little for absurdist effect, but probably
only a little. (If you've read Barris' Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind and The Game Show King, you
know that the loons he encounters in the movie aren't far from
reality.) His girlfriend Red (Robin Altman, Barris' real-life
wife for a while) encourages him to get out of the show to save
his own sanity. An unctuous network executive (James B. Douglas)
keeps telling him the show is getting too wild for mainstream
America. Chuck drags himself out of bed every morning knowing
that he has to endure an endless stream of auditions, followed
by a crushing schedule of shows filmed back to back. His life
has become all-invasive; he can't get a moment's peace. Even
on his morning jog, a vicious dog strains at its leash trying
to get at Chuck.
For reasons of its own, Universal
bankrolled this 89-minute psychotherapy session, only to bury
it quickly and decisively -- as of this writing in January 2003,
it has never been made available on home video, and fans have
had to make do with bootleg copies probably taped off of the
Movie Channel back in the early '80s (I saw a bit of it back
then). If you're expecting nonstop raunchy laughs, the movie
fails, and even some of the bits of business Barris intends to
be funny don't really make it. But the film is always fascinating
when it's not funny. To watch it is to show belated respect for
Barris, a genuinely gifted writer and also a songwriter, who
sort of fell into the creation of game shows and never meant
to become the American schmuck of the airwaves (he would've had
someone else host The Gong Show, but felt nobody else
would really understand its premise as a subversion of conventional
talent shows).
It isn't all Barris' show.
He pulls together some oddball talents aside from the people
onstage, such as a young and much skinnier Phil Hartman harassing
Chuck at an airport, or the eternally death-faced Vincent Schiavelli
as a guy incensed at Barris because the judges gonged his mom.
We also get the usual standbys: Father Ed, Gene Gene the Dancing
Machine, and the Unknown Comic. Possibly the most unexpectedly
saddening appearance is by Barris' then-16-year-old daughter
Della, looking happy and healthy; she died of a drug overdose
in 1998. The movie functions in part as a family portrait and
a snapshot that could only have been taken at the dusk of the
'70s.
Chuck Barris has been credited
with being the godfather of what we know as reality TV today,
an unfair label I don't think he deserves (why blame him for
The Bachelor?). His true achievement on television was
to bring the counter-cultural concept of anti-entertainment --
best typified by Andy Kaufman's onstage experiments -- to a mass
audience five nights a week. The order of things, of course,
was re-established when one of the familiar TV personalities
hit the gong; but for minutes on end, people across the country
were watching horribly bad performances, and tuning in night
after night for more of the same. Barris celebrated fringe behavior,
exalted the no-talents who displayed their ineptitude in exchange
for their 15 minutes (usually far less). The Gong Show Movie
is about the intelligent man behind all the rampant stupidity.
All the movie lacks is the true-life happy ending: Chuck dumps
the show, sells his production company to the tune of $100 million,
and moves to France, where Jerry Lewis (Langford?) has already
prepared the natives for the arrival of a misunderstood comedian.
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