Culture Junkie: My ‘movie date’ with Tommy Smothers

It was nearly 25 years ago ‒ September of 1999 ‒ that I met the legendary comedian Tom Smothers in downtown Santa Rosa to go to the movies. At the time, I was engaged in a years-long journalism project in which I invited interesting people to see interesting movies in what I thought of as my “quest for the ultimate post-film conversation.”

Smothers graciously accepted my invitation, having instantly understood the concept of my project.

“I like movies and I like to talk,” he said on the phone, as we arranged the details of our afternoon “movie date.” The film I suggested was a little comedy titled “Outside Providence,” about a working class stoner named Timothy Dunphy who is forced to attend a strict preparatory school, where he quickly clashes with various authority figures while breaking as many rules as possible.

On the appointed day, Smothers and I met up at the now-gone Third Street Cinemas, and afterwards sat down for lunch at Third Street Aleworks, also now shuttered. I recorded the conversation on a portable cassette tape, and from it I wrote a newspaper piece capturing the details of our conversation. It was published, people read it, Smothers kindly called to congratulate me on a fine article and encourage me to continue the project. The cassette eventually went into a box alongside interview tapes with people like John Travolta, Sofia Coppola and Charles Schulz, plus hundreds of post-film chats with folks like singer Joan Baez, actor Walter Mosely, radio hosts Dr. Demento and Larry King, stand-up comics Will and Debi Durst, each one capturing a certain moment in time while dissecting and debating the merits of different films.

When I learned last month that Smothers had died at the age of 86, the day after Christmas, I got curious about that conversation from a quarter-century ago ‒ when Smothers was 62 and I was 39. After a bit of searching in my garage, I located the box of cassettes and found the tape. Finding a working cassette player was trickier, but I eventually did.

The conversation, most of which I’d forgotten, begins with Smothers offering a quick review of "Outside Providence,“ based on a book by Peter Farrelly, one of the two filmmaking brothers behind the cleverly crass hit comedies “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary.”

“It was a real nice film, but kind of dumb,” Smothers says. “I thought it was going to be a coming-of-age movie, but it was actually just about how fun it is to be stoned all the time. I’m not a square on that, but I got tired of it. It’s not something that I’d see twice, that’s for sure.”

The film is set in 1974, and yes, there is a lot of pot smoking in it.

“I graduated from high school in 1978, so this was definitely my time period,” I volunteer, “but I was never one of the stoners at school.”

“I wasn’t a stoner in school, either,” replied Smothers, who attended high school in the mid-1950s. “I didn’t get high the first time until I was 21.”

Our conversation is briefly interrupted as we order some lunch and a couple of cups of coffee. When we get back to discussing the film, Smothers has something else on his mind.

“It’s another example of these movies where every other word is f--k. You know?” he says. ‘F--k this, f--k that.’ I hear it all the time in movies, but I’m not sure people talk like that all the time. That kind of language is indulgent and unnecessary.”

“I’ve known people who drop F-bombs every few words, but it’s usually people who are just learning to curse,” I say.

“Yeah, right. Maybe you have to be 25 or 30-something to like this film,” he notes. “I’m 62. Did you like it?”

“I liked parts of it,” I confess. “The scene where they were standing in front of the mirror and the dad was showing him how to tie a tie, that actually choked me up a bit. For me, it was the defining scene of the film.”

“Yeah, that was a nice moment,” he says.

“And I did like the stoner funeral,” I add.

“And I liked the scene where the dean of the prep school reads the letter from his friend, Drugs Delaney,” Smothers says. “It was funny, and very clever. There were actually a lot of genuine laughs in this. There was too much swearing and too much drug use, but when I think about it, this was really a fairly nice, positive film.”

“The reason I thought about you when this movie appeared,” I tell Smothers, “is that I’m interested in the idea of authority and what happens when someone bucks that authority. You’ve certainly had experience with that, going up against the censors on television and everything.”

“Right. In the film, the Dunphy character gets into it with the vice principal character,” Smothers says. “I remember when they brought in a new president of the network, when we were doing the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and we were the only ones talking about Vietnam, and there was this big screaming match. This guy was saying, ‘Calm down, calm down,’ and I was going, ‘How can you tell me to calm down when people are dying in Vietnam!’”

The food arrives, giving Smothers a moment to think over what we’ve been discussing.

“Let me tell you something,” he says. “There's a great illusion that we now have more freedom merely because people say ‘f--k’ more often. So here we are, the language in movies and on TV has gotten raunchier, the subject matter has gotten sexier and more explicit. But there's no content to it.

“There's practically no real political satire or social commentary. And as we get further and further along with these media conglomerations and ownerships being tightened up, you won't see a single word of political satire on prime-time TV. People come up to me and say, ‘Man, don't you wish you were on TV today? Look what people get away with saying?’ And I answer, ‘Really? What are they saying?’ It's all jack-off jokes and narcissistic reference to bodily functions.

“But, wow, we've got ‘freedom of speech,’ so we'll still have Hill Street Blues, with its dirty words and naked behinds,” he continues. “When we were censored, it wasn't four-letter words we were fighting for. It was ideas. We were censored for talking about the war, about voter registration, about Martin Luther King. If we were on the air right now we'd be talking about how our government is up for sale to the highest bidder. We'd tell how all these politicians, busy playing the money game, have turned America into the most corrupt country on the planet. We'd talk about how American arrogance has damaged country after country, all around the world. We sure wouldn't waste what ‘freedom of speech’ we have, trying to pass off a few four-letter words.”

"The kid in the movie handles every confrontation by telling the authority figures to just shut up,“ I suggest. ”It’s not really an argument, and it gets him in more trouble.“

“He reminded me of me,” Smothers says. “I got into so many screaming matches with network presidents. I was ‘bucking authority.’ But I know now that I handled it all wrong. I was behaving inappropriately. I know that, and I know I'd do it differently now. But It doesn't mean I wasn't right.”

David Templeton’s ‘Culture Junkie’ runs once a month, give or take, in the Petaluma Argus-Courier. You can reach him at david.templeton@arguscourier.com.