By PHIL PROCTOR, PETER BERGMAN (BearManor Media; 2018)
The futuristic comedy AMERICATHON was a box office flop upon its initial release in 1979, but has since become quite the cult item. It makes sense, then, that this book, which relates how the movie came about, took until 2018 to be published.
It consists of brief recollections by Phil Proctor and the late Peter Bergman, of the fabled Firesign Theatre and the Proctor & Bergman comedy act, of a pair of skits they performed in the mid-1970s called GOTHAMATHON and AMERICATHON. The film’s director Neil Israel provides an essay relating how he caught a performance of the latter sketch in a Boston club and became determined to make it into a movie. He faced, he claims, “universal rejection (including the rejection at Universal),” but managed to set the film up with the help of a girlfriend who happened to be sleeping with a powerful studio executive.
Beyond that we learn very little about the making of AMERICATHON (outside the fact that Israel fired Proctor and Bergman shortly after hiring them to write the screenplay), nor the stage show that inspired it. Mostly this book consists of transcripts of the GOTHAMATHON and AMERICATHON skits that so impressed Mr. Israel.
Both are somewhat difficult to read, being transcriptions rather than proper scripts. Furthermore, much of the humor is of the behavioral variety, with Proctor and Bergman taking on various different guises that don’t really register in transcript format, and steeped in seventies pop culture (the once-popular Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethons are spoofed, and references are made to seventies-centric targets like the Bicentennial, Patty Hearst, Smokey the Bear and John Denver). But there’s an undeniable brilliance to these skits, which have a freewheeling surreality the movie never came close to achieving.
In GOTHAMATHON Bergman plays Jerry Jerry, the obnoxious host of a telethon designed to save the city of Gotham. Much of the country, it seems, has been decimated by an oil shortage only slightly worse than the one that actually afflicted the United States in the mid-1970s. Proctor plays various odd characters who perform in the telethon and beg for money, with accoutrements that include edible clothing and contaminated fried chicken (spoken of, as all props were invisible). Eventually Proctor assumes the guise of Richard Nixon, who proves to be an irrepressible impressionist.
The transcript of AMERICATHON re-tells the former skit in a much broader manner. Jerry Jerry is back hosting the telethon, which is now a nationwide event put on by the US government to pay off the National Debt. The roster of guests is far greater than that of GOTHAMATHON, with both Proctor and Bergman tasked with playing the various roles. The brilliance of the skit is the sense it achieves of an actual multi-person telethon and its audience, despite the fact that it actually consists of just two guys with invisible props. The overriding joke is that despite all the begging and entreaties to “give till it hurts” nobody actually pledges any money.
The real-life resonance of these skits is undeniable. Quite a few present-day realities were predicted, so again, it’s not inappropriate that it took until 2018 for this book to appear. Let’s just hope the real “Americathon” doesn’t end up like the one depicted here!