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Waiting For Guffman
Corky St. Clair: Christopher Guest
Dr. Allan Pearl: Eugene Levy
Ron Albertson: Fred Willard
Sheila Albertson: Catherine O'Hara
Libby Mae Brown: Parker Posey
Directed by Christopher Guest.
Written by Guest and Eugene Levy.
Running time: 84 minutes.
If you've ever been involved in disastrous community theatre productions, Waiting for Guffman will appeal to you on a completely
idiotic level that only troubled thespians or producers/directors will understand. I once heard of an amateur Shakespeare
comedy and the lead actor had apparently quit an hour before opening night. He was quickly replaced with a lesser actor who
was totally out of his face having been to the pub to calm his nerves before going on stage. Upon forgetting his lines as
Pyramus, the actor shouted, "I see my Thisbe's dick through the chink in the wall!" instead of "I see my Thisbe's
face through the chink in the wall!" much to the embarrassment of the cast and half the audience, the other half being
in hysterics at the time. Or the time I was in a play in the Gorbals (the legendary less-than-salubrious district of Glasgow)
when the guy I was meant to 'punch' in a crucial scene and of course 'miss' in a flurry of theatrics with a 'smacking' sound
effect, was off his mark onstage and I clattered him on the jaw, sending him careering to the edge of the stage. The massed
ranks of deliquency, making up 98% in the seats went "'pure mental man!...he pure copped him a dillion there - yes yes
yes!!!" was the consenus verbalised roar of approval! And so it goes.
When an actor blank-out occurs later in "Waiting For Guffman", Fred Willard advises, "If there's an empty
space, just fill it with a line, that's what I like to do. Even if it's from another show." Sound advice. Unless you
forget, "My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and instead start singing "Seventy Six Trombones"
from The Music Man.
Corky St. Clair (Christopher Guest) is a rampant, prancing but repressed gay and fed-up musical director who decides to
unleash his artistic terror, 'Red, White, and Blaine' onto the town of Blaine, Missouri.
Compiling the cast of misfits: Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara. Posey plays an inept Dairy
Queen worker who is so dense you could swear she's actually a Jerry Springer show guest. Her only dream in life is to make
a low-fat Dairy Queen 'Blizzard'. Levy is a cross-eyed dentist who sings vaudeville and decides that he's found his actor
calling in Guest's atrocity. Willard and O'Hara are travel agents who possess every obnoxious two-bit actor trait imaginable
and wear matching track suits to boot.
Filmed with Spinal Tap-reminiscent mocumentary precision, the wacky cast goes on to develop a mind-boggling musical about
pioneers, foot stools, and aliens. As Guest has a prissy fit in front of the city council when they refuse to give him 100,000
dollars for costumes and giant foot stools, I was literally wheezing from fits of laughter. It's the fact that Guest is so
sincere in his prancy poses that makes the moment so funny. That plus the only comeback he can think of: "You people
are bastard people!"
In fact, every cast member is so stubbornly sincere that you actually start to feel sorry for them. They are trying, you
think, as Parker Posey does stiff jazz dance moves across the stage; they really are trying. What's amazing is the cast's
ability to mimic really terrible actors down to an eye movement or forced choreography leaps. Certainly, it's easy to play
a bad actor - but to seriously look like a bad actor and not an actor playing a bad actor is something completely different.
Adding to the group's superb comic abilities is Bob Balaban, the high school band teacher, who is absolutely tortured
by Corky's terrible taste. He has very few lines and only tries to usurp power once, yet his sideway looks of anguish are
a joy to behold.
I laughed like a drain during the musical's opening night. The cast is dressed like factory workers, and they spin around
whilst sporting foot stools. They begin to chant along to music as they pretend to build the stools: "Working, Building,
Some for Selling, Some for Keeping!"
Combined with flailing arm movements and poorly achieved pirouettes, this is an exercise in complete madness. Later, when
cross-eyed Levy suddenly appears as a paper maché Martian, he sings an equally horrendous song called, "Nothing Ever
Happens On Mars." The refrain of this song is the repeated word: "Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring! Boring"!
Levy swishes from side to side while chanting this in a monotone. Parker Posey forces a Beauty Pageant smile. The sets
are painful reminders of the hellish suburban setting and the audience is entranced by the performance. One audience member
even claims, with glazed over looks of admiration and tears, that Corky is better than Streisand.
As the cast awaits their Godot, a Broadway producer known as Guffman, you're almost cheering them on because the characters
are so totally pathetic. My favourite line is Corky's queeny outburst on the phone at the father of the lead actor: "I
hate you...and I hate your ass face!" He cries, slamming the phone down a few times for effect. Poor Corky. "Nobody
truly understands tragic artists types, do they?"
The musical sequence is hellishly fabulous - Corky looks so ridiculous that it keeps you mesmerised in the production.
He's wearing trousers that are too tight and he struggles to lift the lithe Posey as they sing about World War 2 and 'pretty
pennies'. The final wrap-up is hysterical and has to do with selling Remains of The Day lunchboxes.
To sum up the insanity of this film, Corky expresses his views on acting: "It's a Zen thing, " he relates, "Like...how
many babies fit in a tyre."
(Unreleased in the UK - Region 1 DVD available only on import.)
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