Rando! Americathon (1979)
Like many movie lovers, I find myself rewatching movies constantly. But where most folks re-watch movies that they love because it gives them pleasure and joy and allows them to briefly escape the inexorable horror of everyday life, I tend to watch movies for much different reasons.
Don’t get me wrong: I will re-watch the fuck out of Goodfellas or The Godfather or Role Models but it’s much more common for me to choose to re-watch a movie for work that I have seen before because it’s already let me down and I am hoping against hope that something in my cracked brain will have mutated in a way that makes me dig it today.
The Master is probably my favorite movie of the teens yet I have seen it less often than Stuart Saves His Family or Battlefield Earth. I watched Americathon for the first time two decades ago for an A.V Club feature called Films That Time Forgot because it looked great and terrible at the same time.
The brain child of Fireside Theater members Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, Americathon imagines a then-future 1998 where the United States has run out of oil, Jews and Arabs have put aside their differences to become a major world force, China has embraced capitalism with the zeal of a convert and our country is so broke that unless it raises a small-to-moderate fortune within a month it will become the property of Sam Birdwater (Chief Dan George), to whom it owes a great deal of money.
To save the country from going out of business a 30 day telethon is staged hosted by desperate sitcom star Monty Rushmore (Star Wars Holiday Special’s Harvey Korman) showcasing all our country has to offer, which, to be brutally honest, ain’t much!
What a cast! Americathon is narrated by George Carlin and stars, in addition to Korman and George, Peter Reigert, Fred Willard, Meat Loaf, Elvis Costello, Jay Leno, Tommy Lasorda, Howard Hesseman, Cybill Shepherd and Allan Arbus.
How could a movie with so much going for it not be at least a little bit awesome? Funnily enough, I knew the answer going in yet hope sprung eternal all the same and I figured that Americathon was worth another shot.
Verily, I am Christ-like in my compassion and delusional in my blinkered optimism because while I found things to like about Americathon this time around it pains me to report that Americathon still kinda sucks.
Americathon cries out for a director like Michael Ritchie or Robert Altman, someone with a keen understanding of social and political satire as well as comedy and human behavior. It needs someone with a vision for the material that would make it more than just the sum of its ramshackle parts.
Instead it has in Neal Israel, future screenwriter of Police Academy and Bachelor Party as well as many less auspicious lowbrow comedies, a hack who goes for the laugh every time in a way that makes Americathon feel scattershot and disjointed but also paradoxically results in it being less funny as well.
From the vantage point of 2021 it’s striking how much this dumb comedy got right about the future, from a California governor getting elected President (Reagan entered the White House the year after Americathon was released) to China emerging as a major economic super-power.
An early throwaway gag about enraged Americans displeased with Jimmy Carter’s performance as president storming the White House and lynching him along with several of his advisers isn’t so funny or far-fetched following the events of January 6th. To be fair, it wasn’t particularly funny before then either, just bracingly dark in a way that unfortunately proved prescient.
As Americathon begins, a complete lack of oil has finally ended our nation’s intense love affair with the automobile and the fossil fuels that make them go vroom. Instead of driving everywhere, Americans ride bikes and roller skate and rollerblade to the psychotically upbeat sounds of The Beach Boys’ “It’s A Beautiful Day.”
Paper money is worthless but gold is king and gold is what our country does not have and desperately needs. President Chet Roosevelt (John Ritter), a New Age type we’re told is a graduate of EST, Scientology, Transcendental Meditation and Primal Scream therapy hires slick television Eric McMerkin (Peter Riegert) to come up with an idea to raise enough money to save the country from bankruptcy.
The ambitious young TV professional proposes a telethon to raise money. Fred Willard costars as Vincent Vanderhoff, a cynical schemer intent on sabotaging the telethon so that it fails and he can arrange a sale to a powerful group of Jews and Arabs.
To that end he ensures that damn near the only performers approved by the government are an endless assortment of ventriloquists. It’s not unlike how the Trump administration was looking to film celebrity PSAs encouraging mask wearing and social distancing early in the COVID 19 pandemic but was flummoxed in that the only famous people who didn’t very publicly despise Trump and everything he represented were Scott Baio and Kristy Swanson, and even they passed.
Despite sub-par talent and a host fueled by large amounts of stimulants the telethon proves unexpectedly popular as it grinds on with increasingly out-there acts reflecting the mounting desperation of everyone involved.
Meat Loaf shows up as Roy Budnitz to fight a car in a scene that’s not exactly funny but does feature the Bat Out of Hell hit-maker in combat with the last working automobile in existence while a young Jay Leno plays a man who boxes his mother as one of the telethon’s freak show attractions.
Israel clearly did not understand what he had. Elvis Costello barely makes a cameo as himself in a sequence featuring some of the most distractingly bad lip-synching this side of Top of the Pops but the scene where Jay Leno punches an old woman who is supposed to be his mother drags on for a seeming eternity.
Sketch performers are attracted to movies about television because the medium’s episodic nature suits comic sensibilities oriented more towards individual scenes and gags rather than long-form storytelling.
Unfortunately what doesn’t work in Americathon is downright painful, like a subplot where the latest and least President Roosevelt falls into an instant state of lust with Vietnamese “Puke Rocker” Mouling Jackson (Zane Buzby) and embarks on a sordid extramarital affair.
The affair renders Ritter’s president unlikable but it’s also deeply unfunny in its own right. Americathon runs a mere eighty-five minutes yet it still feels hopelessly padded with unnecessary subplots and scenes.
Instead of building to a close, Americathon just sort of peters out. I suspect I was attracted to Americathon because it reminded me of UHF, another ramshackle slobs versus slobs comedy about a gaggle of goofs and oddballs who put on a big telethon to raise money only UHF is a Chinatown-like apogee of the screenwriting form compared to Americathon.
There’s a reason UHF is beloved while the simpatico likes of Americathon and Pray TV have been mercifully forgotten. It’s because UHF is funny and likable where its lesser colleagues are not but also because it benefits from a coherent vision rooted in its creator and star’s well-wrought aesthetic and sensibility.
Americathon was a little better than I remembered. It’s not entirely devoid of mirth and inspiration, merely a crushing disappointment that wastes a terrific cast and a nifty premise on a bunch of scattershot scatology and puerile nonsense.
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