The Film of the Future: "My Dinner with Andre"
Who knew in 1981 that in 2025 the dominant form of entertainment would be dudes sitting around talking about far-out stuff?
Back around 1980, it looked like the future of entertainment was going to be blockbuster science fiction movies with spaceships blasting away at each other and music made on computers creating tones that had never been played upon physical instruments.
And, for awhile, that’s what the future was.
But in this century, the cutting edge of entertainment has become … dudes talking. And talking some more.
Perhaps that should have been foreseeable back then.
When I heard the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” on Top 40 radio in December 1979, it seemed like a delightful novelty in the tradition of “The Monster Mash” and “A Boy Named Sue” that could well spark a fad of 12 or even 18 months’ duration before everybody got bored and moved on to something else. Well, that didn’t happen
When in 1981 I saw My Dinner with Andre, written by and starring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory as Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, it didn’t seem like the future of entertainment. Critics and some of the public liked it, but the reason, the critics reassured us, was not because what audiences really want to pay for is to hear two guys BSing about far-out stuff.
No, it was because, the critical consensus then declared, acclaimed French director Louis Malle, coming off his excellent Atlantic City, had made a visual cinematic masterpiece due to his superb camera angles and mastery of lighting.
No way, they implied, could some guy in the future make $60 million per year just yapping with guests about (the way Joe Rogan does now). That’s not how entertainment was going to evolve in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
But now a USC film professor says that he plays My Dinner with Andre for his undergrad classes, and his 19 year old students love it because it seems contemporary to them. It can be hard for them to watch old-fashioned films with characters and plots like Atlantic City or Raiders of the Lost Ark, but two fellows shooting the breeze for two hours is so 2025!
I own the only set of "My Dinner with Andre" action figures. Prototypes really, never went to manufacturing.
Most combinations of people, almost all, really, fail to produce interesting conversations yet a lot of people enjoy interesting conversations. If you can't manage to participate in them in real life, watching people do it on the internet and imagining where you would occasionally make a good point if you were there, is a fair substitute.