Ben Stiller, Nobody Knows Anything and the Big Video Box Bait and Switch
A sizable portion of my work day is devoted to finding images to accompany articles. Since I write primarily about film that means that I look at a LOT of movie posters and covers for videocassettes, Blu-Rays and DVDs.
There are few things in the world that I adore quite like a great movie poster. There is a special place in my heart, for example, for the illustrated movie posters of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the ones created by Jack Davis.
I love great movie posters but they are few and far between these days. Most movie posters are brutally pragmatic eyesores. They’re artless and mercenary and do a terrible job of selling the movies they’re promoting.
This is particularly true of DVD boxes. It’s not unusual for me to encounter five or six different covers for an obscure movie, each uglier and more regrettable than the last. Oftentimes I’ll see three or four ostensibly different DVD boxes for something I’ve written about that all clearly use the exact same stock photo.
Then there are DVD covers that lie shamelessly in order to trick audiences into wanting to see a movie that does not exist but is WAY more commercial than the actual movie being sold.
A few months back, for example, I watched and wrote about 2013’s 3 Geezers! for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the film industry.
It was directed by J.K. Simmons’ wife Michelle Schumacher and, in a stunning non-coincidence, stars the ubiquitous, Academy-Award winning Whiplash star.
For the purposes of the DVD box it’s not enough that the movie actually stars a popular character actor, however. So it instead tries to create the illusion that the geezers of the title are Simmons, Kevin Pollak and Tim Allen, all of whom are pictured on the DVD box/RedBox avatar rather than the infinitely less famous older actors who actually do play the title characters. None of them made the box because none of them are famous.
As a favor to Simmons, Pollak, Allen, Randy Couture and Spiderman director Sam Raimi all showed up for an hour or two of improv as celebrities the titular geezers give the business on Halloween night.
The cameos run a few minutes at most yet the DVD box nevertheless tries to convince a gullible public that 3 Geezers is a star-studded extravaganza rather than a micro-budgeted exercise in geriatric vulgarity.
The iconography for 3 Geezers! is forthright in its honesty compared to the Amazon image for the 2003 show-business comedy Nobody Knows Anything.
Nobody Knows Anything! was written by David Pasquesi, an absolute legend in the Chicago improv scene, where his shows with longtime partner T. J. Jagodowski have been a hot ticket for twenty years.
Pasquesi also stars in Nobody Knows Anything! but his fame as one of our country’s most revered long-form improvisers clearly did not impress who created the image on the film’s Amazon page.
Nobody Knows Anything! stars Pasquesi and newcomer Alanna Ubach as a recent film school graduate who moves to Los Angeles to make it in the business. But neither is particularly famous but there are a LOT of famous people with tiny cameos in the film’s cast.
Mike Connors, Janeane Garofalo, Paul Dooley, Stephen Colbert, Kristen Johnston, Margaret Cho, Robert Englund, Richard Kind, Ed Lauter, Virginia Madsen, Tim Meadows, Mary Kay Place, Michael Lerner, Scott Thompson, Mary Kay Place and Fred Willard all appear in Nobody Knows Anything!
That’s impressive! That’s VERY impressive for a low-budget movie with semi-unknown stars but the two biggest names in the film’s cast are two bona fide superstars: Ben Stiller and Mike Myers.
So whoever made the Amazon image for Nobody Knows Anything! decided that, fuck it, Ben Stiller and Mike Myers were the names-above-the-title stars of the film.
Bear in mind that Stiller’s cameo as himself lasts maybe fifty seconds while Myers is in the movie for maybe two or three minutes alongside his then-wife Robin Suzan.
That somehow did not keep these criminals from trying to pass off Nobody Knows Anything! as a Ben Stiller vehicle and/or a Ben Stiller/Mike Myers buddy movie.
Stiller does a lot of favors and makes a lot of cameos. I can’t imagine he even remembers spending an hour or two ad-libbing for the film. So I can only imagine how confused and outraged he would be to discover that on Amazon Nobody Knows Anything! is being sold as a Ben Stiller movie.
Images like that aren’t just dishonest: they’re immoral as well. It’s not just a matter of exaggerating or misrepresenting the presence or role of a big star; it’s flat out deceit.
It’s funny and it’s sad and as long as people are fooled by this level of bait and switch, it’s not going to end any time soon.
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