MCN Blogs
Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Is Click Seattle's "Almost Live" 20 years along?

Seattlest reports on a skit that precedes Adam Sandler’s Click by 20 years: “The premise of Click is pretty thin which is odd for Sandler who normally goes for “high concept” type stuff (moron goes back to school, moron joins the PGA, moron’s the devil). burns247_234.jpgThis time a moron gets… hold of a remote control that can manipulate the people around him. Fast forward through his wife’s ranting, pause his boss so he can punch him in the face a few times – that kind of thing. It has to be a difficult gag to drag out over 90 minutes, especially when you consider that [“Total Control,”] the ‘Almost Live’ bit it was stolen from barely manged to strangle three minutes of humor from it [for which] Scott Schaefer won a Northwest Emmy for in 1985.” In an email to Seattlest, Schaefer said, “At the time, we thought it was pretty cool to do the special effect of [a character] walking forward while everyone in the entire Northgate Mall was “walking backwards.” Of course, it was nothing more than shooting Keister walking backwards while holding the remote, then playing the tape backwards. Woo hoo… As an aside, this also highlights the fact that either remote television control technology hasn’t advanced an inch since 1985 or this movie was written by really old guys. In the trailer Sandler uses the remote to pause, fast-forward and play in slow motion. And, sadly, that’s about all a television remote did in 1985 and that’s all it can do today unless you count split-screen/picture-in-picture, menues, pay-per-view purchasing and your basic DVR/Tivo functionality.” [The original “Almost Live” skit is on YouTube here; Link courtesy of the Oregonian’s “Mad About Movies,” collated by Shawn Levy, who notes that “Almost Live” was a wonderful treat—a truly local show that was wedged for 15 minutes between the end of the 11 o’clock news and the start of “Saturday Night Live” on the Seattle NBC affiliate.”]

Be Sociable, Share!

One Response to “Is Click Seattle's "Almost Live" 20 years along?”

  1. Cadavra says:

    Well, the basic premise goes even further back than that: William Castle’s 1962 comedy ZOTZ!, about a magic coin that behaves pretty much the same way. Around that time there was also a “Twilight Zone” episode about a literal “stopwatch.” It’s all been done before.

Movie City Indie

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon