Real Genius

So, Starz has been showing some older movies on their Starz Comedy Channel (personally, I think it beats the usual strategy of playing nothing but recently-released movies on a 4 hour loop). The past couple of days have featured some great mid '80s movies like Money Pit, Man With One Red Shoe and Spies Like Us. But, today they had a cult classic on - Real Genius. For those of you who have never seen it, it stars Val Kilmer and is about a group of genius college students who are tricked when the laser they think they are making for a final is really being made into a weapon (in classic mid-80's fashion, it's weapon that could vaporize a person from space. Hollywood loved its space weapons in the '80s). As I was watching the movie today I was thinking about what other films I could use to identify the rest of the cast from. They looked familiar, so they must have been in something more recent than a movie from 1985, right? Actually, nope.

Seriously, if you look at the cast on IMDB, it's pretty much a list of people who made this movie and went on to careers of being Guy #4 in Store. Outside of Kilmer the only person who I could place in another movie is the dickish professor, who made a career of being the dickish guy - either the dickish reporter in the first two Die Hard movies or the dickish city inspector in GhostBusters. When he's the second most recognizable person in your movie and even a guy like me (who watches a lot of movies), has no idea what his name is then you may have made some casting errors. Though, when you stop and think about it, the fact that 90% the cast seemed to have peaked as actors in this one film is a pretty impressive feat. It must have been one hell of a job by the director to get a good movie out of this crew... it's almost like when Herb Brooks was able to win an Olympic gold medal with a bunch of kids who went on to fairly unspectacular NHL careers.

Just know, there is no way this movie gets made today with a cast like this. If they did try to get no-name actors they would receive almost no pre-release publicity and be out of the theatres in a week. Instead, studio executives would insist that every person, no matter how small a role, be played by an actor that the audience would recognize. They would bring in someone like Jeremy Piven to be the dickish professor and have Ryan Reynolds do his best Val Kilmer impression (which, let's be honest, is all Van Wilder was anyway). They would follow that with Michael Cera as the geeky boy-genius and put thick glasses on the girl from Juno to play the smart girl who deep down every knows is actually pretty cute. Then sneak in a cameo by a comedian like Paul Rudd and you've got a scene for the trailer. And this movie, which would not be half as funny as the original Real Genius, would make $50 million opening weekend. Damn, I should move to Hollywood.