2001 - LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, Neil Simon looks back at his early career

A film that probably won't make much sense for a modern audience.  During the 1950's,  a 90 minute comedy-variety television program called "Your Show of Shows," ruled the early days of television.  The star was comedian Sid Caesar who is practically forgotten today but was a big star on this show.  Incredibly the writing and production staff managed to crank out a 90 minute show once a week. The pressure must have been enormous.

One of the writers in the "writers room" was Neil Simon who along with a very talented group of comedic writers was tasked with feeding this show new material.   In 1993 Neil Simon dramatized the making of Your Show of Shows in his play Laughter on the 23rd Show which was eventually turned into a film.

 

Nathan Lane plays the part of the Sid Caesar character here called Max Prince.  Simon is a character called Lucas Brickman and the rest of the characters all famous comedy writers are names that would probably not mean much to a contemporary audience today with the exception of the Mel Brooks character called in this case Ira Stone who apparently drove everyone crazy with his antics.

Simon adds a lot more drama than comedy in his script, which is kind of unusual for a joke machine like him.  Nathan Lane does a good job playing the Sid Caesar like star of the show.  The conflict in this film is Lane's battle with the TV network to keep from censoring skits they don't find funny or appropriate.

Laughter on the 23 Floor is a fairly decent comedy/drama of a now nostalgic time in Neil Simon's life.  The film benefit's from the director Richard Benjamin's working with a talented cast of character actors and performers.

The running time is 102 minutes.

1984 - CITY HEAT, Eastwood and Reynolds together in a classic Hollywood disaster

 The director Blake Edwards wrote the story for City Heat which apparently was going to be a tribute to hard boiled crime films of the 1930's and 40's. Edwards was also going to direct and Warner Brothers persuaded Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds to team up together.  It seemed like easy money in the bank for the studio with those two stars.  The end result was a big flop which did additional harm to Burt Reynolds now fading movie career.

Apparently Eastwood was immediately disenchanted with Blake Edwards and had him removed during pre-production on the film.  Eastwood's production company took over the film and hired actor turned director Richard Benjamin a man who was fairly good with comedies but clearly didn't know anything about shooting an action film with lots of fights and gun battles.

 

Blake Edwards had his name removed for the screenplay and used a pseudo name " Sam O Brown," aka SOB which was the name of the film Edwards made that was a fairly nasty view of Hollywood studios.  Edwards claimed that his dealings with Warner Brothers and Clint Eastwood inspired SOB.  This seems very unlikely as SOB came out in 1981 and City Heat was released in 1984.

 

As you may have guessed this hasn't been a post about the actual film, frankly the film is just not good.  Audiences sniffed out a turkey and the studio deservedly lost money considering the mess that was made of it during the production phase of the film.

The running time of City Heat is 97 minutes.  Besides Blake Edwards the film lists an additional writer Joseph Stinson who wrote a couple of mediocre Clint Eastwood movies, (Sudden Impact and Heartbreak Ridge).