My Journey Through the Films of 1994 Continues with a Mortified Look at Car 54 Where Are You, Which Had All Its Musical Sequences Cut But Still Bombed
It is semi well known that James L. Brooks, one of our most powerful and influential entertainers, wrote and directed the 1994 flop I’ll Do Anything, a deeply personal comedy-drama musical about show-business with songs by Prince and Twyla Tharp about the cruelty of show-business and the sadism of focus groups and test screenings that then became a non-musical when focus groups and test screenings revealed audiences hated all of the musical sequences.
It didn’t work. Brooks’ modest little film bombed with critics and audiences alike. It’s half-remembered these days almost exclusively for being a musical about test screenings that became a non-musical after dire test screenings.
It is less well known that something similar happened with Tapeheads director Bill Fishman’s ill-fated adaptation of Car 54, Where Are You.
According to an interview I apparently conducted with John C. McGinley back in 2013, Car 54, Where Are You was filmed as a musical in 1990 and then re-edited extensively before being just barely released in 1994 with the musical sequences largely edited out.
Critics were not impressed. Nor were audiences. Hell, even Fishman hated the movie. He claims that he only learned that the movie had been released after it had been released and would have used the Alan Smithee pseudonym of shame if he’d known what they’d done to his movie.
McGinley was similarly unimpressed. He told me, back when I had a job, “I have mixed feelings about Car 54, Where Are You? Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of The Wizard Of Oz; it wouldn’t be that interesting. So the film, to me, doesn’t make sense without the musical numbers in it. They kept in one of Buster [Poindexter’s] musical numbers. And then maybe there’s one other, but the film doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t pretend to know what happened, what the decision-making process was, but we busted our humps on those numbers, and then the film came out and I didn’t understand what I was watching.”
I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for McGinley to learn how to sing and dance for the musical sequences in a musical adaptation of a semi-obscure non-musical cop comedy, only to have them all be cut.
As McGinley alludes, Car 54, Where Are You has just enough music in it to seem strange and off. The movie opens with Gunther Toody (David Johansen) swaggering his way through a musical fantasy sequence about how beloved he is in his neighborhood.
It’s all just a self-aggrandizing dream, however. In reality he’s in the midst of a riot doing not much of anything at all. This is ostensibly the tone that the film was going for in its original version: goofy, over-the-top spectacle.
This opening sequence isn’t terribly promising but it promises more than the rest of the film delivers. I would rather see the musical version of Car 54, Where Are You because it couldn’t be any worse than what was inexplicably theatrically released.
They have fun!
Like the tune-filled, never-to-be-released incarnation of I’ll Do Anything, the musical version of Car 54, Where Are You would at least have the novelty of being a musical about a subject people generally don’t make movies about.
Instead we got a desperate, laugh-less mismatched buddy cop comedy that, honestly, could use a massive injection of Cop Rock-style razzle dazzle. The breathless bigness of the opening sequence makes sense in a musical comedy; in a comedy it just feels wrong and off.
That isn’t the only music in the film. Jeremy Piven raps at one point and the score, from Parliament Funkadelic/Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Pray For Run is unusually insistent and filled with lyrics relating to the film and its title.
The studio castrated Car 54, Where Are You but it’s nevertheless filled with shadows of what once was.
Johansen’s casting suits the musical version of this abomination. He is, after all, a successful novelty artist AND the lead singer of the New York Dolls, a glam rock group that played a crucial role in the development of punk rock.
I like Johansen. He is a legendary musician and a scene-stealing comic character actor in movies like Scrooged and Let It Ride. What Johnsen is NOT, however, is a cinematic leading man.
I do not need to spend ninety minutes looking at that face or listening to that razorblades-on-sandpaper rasp. I similarly dig McGinley. He’s a great character actor with an impressive resume who is terrific playing tough guys and authority figures.
McGinley’s performance as Francis Muldoon, the by-the-books straight arrow cop Fred Gwynn in the original show, illustrates that the actor isn’t a movie star any more than Johansen is.
In the great pantheon of mismatched buddy cops, Johansen and McGinley occupy a place near the bottom, alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Theodore Rex, Will Smith and the Orc in Bright, Anthony Michael Hall and the Gnome Named Norm in A Gnome Named Norm and Gene Hackman and Dan Aykroyd in Loose Cannons.
In Car 54, Where Are You?, Francis is partnered with Gunther because he’s a wiz at a new system involving computers, which were very advanced and futuristic when the movie was made in 1990 but old hat by the time it was eventually released.
I assume he’s trying to pinpoint the exact location of Car 54.
The mismatched cops, who I initially thought were so dissimilar that they would never get along or put aside their differences, are assigned to help guard Herbert Hortz (Jeremy Piven), a numbers cruncher who is set to testify against a powerful mobster played by Daniel Baldwin.
Incidentally the last movie that I watched and wrote about this website, the 1998 thriller Mercury Rising, also had Baldwin as a bad guy, in this case Alec, the thinking, rich man’s Baldwin.
That, ultimately, is not much of a coincidence. There are a LOT of Baldwins. Over a dozen! And they’re all character actors. One of them is Justin Bieber’s father-in-law. They’re often cast as villains on account of the public hating the family SO much.
Piven is cast in the Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2 role of the wisecracking comic relief motormouth who steals the film with his live wire energy. Piven is operating giddily in a comic vacuum. He’s clearly been given free reign to riff and improvise and ad-lib to his heart’s content and the nervous energy that he brings to the film is just about all that it has going for it other than Fran Drescher.
When he directed Car 54, Where Are You Fishman was coming off the well-received music video comedy Tapeheads. That helps explain a supporting cast filled with such colorful characters as The Ramones (performing at CBGBs, no less), Tone Loc, Penn and Teller and Mojo Nixon.
Rosie O’Donnell picked up a Golden Raspberry for her performance as Gunther’s hectoring wife. Johansen and O’Donnell’s scenes together are painful. They’re the worst twosome this side of Johansen and McGinley.
Labor icon and UHF alum Fran Drescher fares much better as Velma Velour, a badge bunny who has a thing for men in uniform. A SEXUAL thing, involving sex stuff.
Velma rocks the inexperienced Francis with the volcanic force of her sexuality. Drescher doesn’t have any funny dialogue. No one does but she has a spark and a sensuality that sets her apart from the rest of this nonsense. Whenever she’s onscreen it’s a treat. When she’s not it’s torture.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why they made a movie based on Car 54, Where Are You, and unlike 97 percent of the public at the time, I was actually familiar with the TV show because I used to watch it on Nick at Night as a child.
I would see anything in a movie theater, particularly if it involved mismatched buddy cops, yet I still stayed away from Car 54, Where Are You. It turns out I was right.
This notorious flop is predictably very bad but even more disastrously, it’s very boring. And THAT is unforgivable.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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