It’s hard to believe, but there hasn’t been a Saturday Night Live-spinoff movie since 2000’s little-seen The Ladies Man. For a while there, it seemed like the parade of half-hearted, one-note, laugh-free clunkers would never stop. Remember gems like Superstar, A Night at the Roxbury and Stuart Saves His Family. Neither did we, until we decided we better up and do some research for this piece. For every monster success like The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World, there are legendary bombs like It’s Pat (which grossed about $1.95, adjusted for inflation) and — ahem — Blues Brothers 2000.
But, much like the show that spawns them, SNL movies won’t ever go away permanently. They’re back with MacGruber, which is based on a bunch of interstitial skits that parody ’80s TV series MacGyver. To almost everyone’s surprise, it’s been generating good buzz thanks to its full-on embracing of an R rating and rising stars Will Forte and Kristin Wiig. If it’s a success, look for Lorne Michaels to set his sights on dominating Hollywood once again. So it’s as good a time as any to look back on some great skits from SNL‘s past that we think would have made for fun movies. Or at least better than Coneheads.
Sprockets
This one came very close to happening back in 2000, with Mike Myers, fresh off the surprising success of the first two Austin Powers movies, demanding a $20 million payday to bring his surreal Expressionist-inspired West German talk show host Dieter to the big screen. Co-stars were to have included David Hasselhoff and Jack Black, but Myers backed out because he insisted that the script, which he helped to write, was “unacceptable.” A notoriously long, drawn-out lawsuit followed while Myers moved on to other presumably more “acceptable” projects like another Austin Powers sequel and all things Shrek. His 2003 defiling of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat sent him into exile before he resurfaced in 2008 with the even more horrendous The Love Guru. The time for a Sprockets movie has probably passed, but I’d still be up for touching Dieter’s monkey and watching him dance.
The Continental
Strictly speaking, Christopher Walken isn’t part of the SNL cast, but he’s a particularly special special guest. Putting him onscreen as The Continental, his over-anxious bachelor persona with the perennial offer of a glass of “cham-pan-ya” would be a challenge. The first-person, hand-held camera perspective of The Continental would probably give everyone a headache if it went on for a full-length film (think Blair Witch Project) — but all the more reason to do it in IMAX 3D, don’t you think? Imagine being able to see the dribbles of drool at the corners of his mouth as he lasciviously pushes his glued-on mustache up to the screen, filling your entire periphery with that insipidly suggestive expression. And don’t think that The Continental would stop at embracing an R rating when, for just a few extra glasses of champagne — sorry, “cham-pan-ya” — an NC-17 could be the blissful, sweet reward for all of his past failures.
Nick the Lounge Singer
Whether he’s Nick Sands, Nick Summers or (my personal favorite) Nick Winters, Bill Murray’s cheesetastic lounge singer deserves to be seen and heard on the big screen. We could catch up with Nick as he’s stuck in a nowhere club, about to give up his dream, when he decides to give it one last shot and appears on an American Idol-type show, proceeding to take the nation by storm. From there, it would take a typical Behind the Music story arc, with Nick letting the fame go to his head before crashing and burning. Perhaps on the way down he could cross paths with Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute. I nominate Wes Anderson to direct. “Oh Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, gimme those Star Wars, don’t let them end …”
Nick The Lounge Singer – Powder Room – The best video clips are right here
Brian Fellow’s Safari Planet
Tracy Morgan’s finest moment on SNL was probably Astronaut Jones, but really, could you reasonably expect an audience to sit for an hour and a half while Jones ogles some smokin’ hot space alien, just waiting for some line or other about an alien probe? Morgan’s portrayal of would-be urban safari show host Brian Fellow’s Safari Planet is a better bet. With his sixth-grade education (“Brian Fellow is not a licensed zoologist”) and paranoid fear of having his ignorance of animals exposed, Brian would be at his out-of-his-element best as a tour guide on the plains of the Serengeti, screaming, “Oh, no you’re not!” at mating lions he’s taken wealthy Westerners to see. (How does he get out there? After the parrot who learned to say “I’m Brian Fellow!” trashed his credit rating and cost him his show, Brian had to find something to do.) Tina Fey and her glasses would be the Jane Goodall of Brian’s world. Brian would end up learning a little about animals in the end, but don’t worry — not enough to give him any actual credibility.
Wong & Owens: Ex-Porn Stars
Here’s a little gem from the mid ’90s that might be new to you. They only made two appearances that I know of (please let me know if you find more), but listen to the concept and consider that movies have been manufactured from far less: Don Wong and Reggie Owens were adult-film superstars in the ’70s who became fed up with the business and decided to go legit. Trouble is, they just can’t quite shake their open-shirted, lascivious ways. When some lady at the office shows Wong how to work a pencil sharpener, saying he shouldn’t be afraid to “stick it all the way in” and advising him to “go deep and hard,” what’s a guy to do but cue the waka-waka music and start disrobing? I can easily see a 90-minute, Secret of My Success-style romp with them unwittingly climbing the ladder in Corporate America, somehow heading off a hostile takeover and getting the girls. It must, however, feature Alec Baldwin reprising his role as Count Monster Rod Von Hugenstein.
MacGruber: © 2010 Rogue Pictures. Credit: Greg Peters/Rogue Pictures
