THE GONG SHOW MOVIE

It's been a twenty-four year wait, but last night I finally caught the great Chuck Barris' masterpiece, his 8 1/2, his Birth of a Nation, his World's Greatest Sinner. THE GONG SHOW MOVIE is available from any number of bootleg DVD purveyors online, but financial circumstances prohibited me from plunking down $25 for a film so iconic, intriguing and mysterious to me that it was bound to disappoint. Finally Scarecrow Video came through and stocked it, so I was able to actually rent the holy grail, a film reportedly so awful that it was pulled from distribution after a month and never released on any sort of home video.

Was I disappointed? Well, of course I was. As a child I was enamored with the Gong Show. I was desperate for some color, outrage and surreality in the bland world of canned vegetables and Methodist culture in which I languished. If nothing else, the Gong Show was loud and abrasive, and sometimes that's all it takes. Chuck Barris simultaneously mocked and celebrated the untalented, rewarded and punished eccentricity. It was all a big send-up of television as a whole, and if the panel of "celebrity" judges (talent-starved hacks like Jamie Farr, Pat McCormick and Jaye P. Morgan) took themselves far too seriously, their bloated arrogance taught me just how unimportant famous people really were.

So, the movie is a massive ego trip for Barris, a disjointed, overindulgent fantasy about his own stardom in which he attempts to self-aggrandize by painting himself as an exhausted, put-upon TV producer imprisoned by his own fame. Yeah, yeah, we've heard that one before. It's hard to be successful, no one really knows just how hard, and you have all these lunatics hounding you for spots on the show night and day, and the censors are breathing down my neck, and my sweet, understanding girlfriend left me because I'm a prick and I told her to get lost, and ... you get the picture. Barris obviously thought that a self-deprecating portrait of himself on film would be perceived as brave or truthful, a great statement on fame, but by the end of THE GONG SHOW MOVIE, when he's exiled himself to the deserts of Morocco to get away from the pressures of celebrity, a television executive flies out a marching band and dozens of friends and fans to beg him to return to TV because of how damn special he is. Amazing.

About a third of the film is real Gong Show audition footage, which is truly fascinating in the bizarre lengths people will go through for fame. Various censored clips from the show are used too, including two teenage girls whose act is seductively licking popsicles, a man dressed as Christ on a cross singing "Please Release Me," and "Count Banjula," a man dressed as Dracula hanging upside down from the ceiling strumming the banjo ... his act ends abruptly when the rope accidently breaks and he crashes painfully through the floor of the stage. The narrative never flows, the plot is nonexistent and a cruel streak of bad taste humor warps the moments when Barris tries to take the film in a serious direction. It's no wonder THE GONG SHOW MOVIE was universally hated when released in 1980. Even the TV version was running out of steam by this point ... if the film was made a year or two earlier, it would have gained an audience no matter how bad it was, but this flaccid ego trip just had everyone confused and offended.