Watch This: John Belushi Walks on His SNL Co-stars’ Graves in Tom Schiller’s Short
Tom Schiller will join AFS for a screening of SCHILLER’S REELS, his best short films, and his feature NOTHING LASTS FOREVER on Monday December 21. The show will be cohosted by author and Schiller superfan Zack Carlson.
From the earliest days of Saturday Night Live, short films were a part of the show. Albert Brooks and Penelope Spheeris were among the many who made short films for the show, but writer/filmmaker Tom Schiller made the most abiding of all the SNL shorts of the first 15 years of the show’s run.
Today the shorts are as funny as ever, and have new layers of meaning and sometimes pathos. John Belushi is hilarious in old man makeup, walking on the graves of his erstwhile cast members, but there’s more to the gag now. Schiller’s reels never pounce on the easy laugh. There is wit and sophistication about them, such as in LA DOLCE GILDA, which places Gilda Radner in the decadent Roman milieu of Federico Fellini. Schiller also loves distending and displacing time periods, as in his feature NOTHING LASTS FOREVER which glides between a 1930s Capra reality, a 1950’s television consumer frenzy and an ’80s New Wave future.
Here’s that Belushi short: DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER, one of many shorts that will be featured at our December 21 screening.
