By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Michael Schlesinger’s “Vintage” Comedy Shorts With “The World’s Favorite Fake 1930s Comedy Team” Hit The Bricks

Posted Friday, March 30th, 2018 - Comments Off on Michael Schlesinger’s “Vintage” Comedy Shorts With “The World’s Favorite Fake 1930s Comedy Team” Hit The Bricks
Be Sociable, Share!

KINO LORBER ACQUIRES ALL NORTH AMERICAN RIGHTS TO RETRO COMEDY BIFFLE AND SHOOSTERz

Collection of New “Vintage” Comedy Shorts Starring “The World’s Favorite Fake 1930s Comedy Team” Available on DVD May 22, 2018

Feature-Length Compilation To Be Released on Major Digital Platforms including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and Vudu on May 22, 2018

March 30, 2018 –  Kino Lorber has acquired all North American rights to BIFFLE AND SHOOSTER, a collection of new “vintage” comedy shorts written, produced and directed by former studio exec turned award-winning independent filmmaker Michael Schlesinger.

Harking back to the glory days of Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Hope & Crosby and The Three Stooges, Biffle and Shooster are vaudeville comics who get themselves into (but seldom out of) various scrapes with a minimum of smarts and a maximum of laughs, plowing through life armed with slapstick, puns, impressions and an occasional song. Though first created by the actors who portray them, Nick Santa Maria and Will Ryan, it was Schlesinger who developed the characters into full-fledged movie stars in these amazingly authentic-looking shorts, presented in 1.37:1 and (mostly) black-and-white.

Advance screenings have already garnered lavish praise from such filmmakers and writers as Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Leonard Maltin, Scott Eyman, Tim Lucas, Sid Ganis and many more.

The collection includes six shorts: “The Biffle Murder Case,” “Imitation of Wife,” “Schmo Boat,” “Bride of Finklestein” and “It’s A Frame-Up!” — plus a faux-Vitaphone novelty, “First Things Last.” Among the familiar faces in the cast of nearly 50 are Jim Beaver, Daniel Roebuck, Robert Picardo, H.M. Wynant, Dick Miller, Fay Masterson, Academy Award®-nominee Robert Forster and — though you don’t actually see his face — Academy Award®-winning VFX artist Chris Walas as a gorilla. (“Any film is improved by a gorilla,” Schlesinger noted.) The discs will contain over three hours of hilarious bonus material spanning their alleged film career from 1928 to 1962.

To avoid confusion — which is a normal state of mind for the team — the DVD will be titled THE MISADVENTURES OF BIFFLE AND SHOOSTER, to be released on May 22, 2018, while a feature-length compilation of four shorts plus additional songs and bits, simply titled THE ADVENTURES OF BIFFLE AND SHOOSTER will be available on all major digital platforms including iTunes, Amazon Instant, Google Play and Vudu, beginning May 22nd. Special features on the DVD will include audio commentaries, additional short subjects, extended and deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and bloopers and outtakes.

The deal was negotiated between Kino Lorber CEO Richard Lorber and Schlesigner. Schlesinger observed: “Kino Lorber was always my first choice. They’ve been around for over 40 years, I know and admire everyone there, and as one of the premier distributors of both old and new movies, who better to release a new movie that looks like an old movie?”

About Writer / Producer / Director Michael Schlesinger:
Michael Schlesinger is widely acknowledged as the dean of classic film distributors, having worked for more than 25 years at MGM, Paramount and Sony, keeping hundreds of vintage movies in theatrical release (and later on DVD), and instigating the restoration of many more, including the completion of Orson Welles’ 1942 documentary It’s All True some 50 years later. He has also recorded several DVD commentaries, including some for Kino Lorber, is a “Trailers From Hell” guru and has appeared in numerous documentaries as a film historian, as well as the recent HBO smash If You’re Not In The Obit, Eat Breakfast. Behind the camera, he wrote and produced the American version of Godzilla 2000 and co-produced such Larry Blamire parodies as The Lost Skeleton Returns Again and Dark and Stormy Night. BIFFLE AND SHOOSTER represents his first effort as a director. He hopes it won’t be his last.
Be Sociable, Share!

Posted in MCN Curated Headlines, Movie City News, Press Releases | Comments Off on Michael Schlesinger’s “Vintage” Comedy Shorts With “The World’s Favorite Fake 1930s Comedy Team” Hit The Bricks

Comments are closed.

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