Fun City Editions has a new 2K film restoration (the film’s 35mm interpositive) of director Michael Ritchie’s savagely-funny 1975 comedy, Smile, ready for a Blu-ray release on May 25.
Michael Ritchie had been a beauty contest judge at one time, so he knew how it all worked. According to the trade press coverage back in 1974, Ritchie went so far as to cast something like two dozen Santa Rosa teenagers and then and literally went out and got some of the hottest young talent in movies at the time to be the center focus of his actually beauty pageant.
Counted among the cast members — the beauty contestants — is Melanie Griffith (as Miss Simi Valley), who was 17 at the time and this was only her second film after her official debut in Night Moves.
Interestingly, Smile and Night Moves opened about the same time in 1975, but the film production on Smile was actually before that of Night Moves, so technically-speaking, Smile is Melanie Griffith’s film debut.
Another young actress also making her theatrical film debut (she had done television series work for some years leading up to Smile) is none other than Annette O’Toole, who was a typical “Hollywood” teenager — 22 years of age at the time of the film’s production.
Others in the “professional” cast for the Young American Miss Pageant are: Denise Nickerson — as Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory); Colleen Camp (The Swinging Cheerleaders, Funny Lady, Valley Girl, etc.), Caroline Williams in her film debut (later in such films as Days of Thunder, Leprechaun 3, director Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, Hatchet III and most recently in writer/director Erik Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes to Midnight); Maria O'Brien, also in her film debut (daughter of Edmond O’Brien) and Joan Prather (The Single Girls, Big Bad Mama, The Devil’s Rain … and as Janet Bradford in the Eight is Enough television series).
Leading the “adult cast” are the likes of Bruce Dern, Barbara Felton and Geoffrey Lewis, with Eric Shea from The Poseidon Adventure cast as the mischievous “Little Bob.”
As to bonus goodies, there is commentary from actor-filmmaker Pat Healy and film curator Jim Healy and a newly-filmed video session with Bruce Dern that is titled “Dernsie's Credo.”
No comments:
Post a Comment