Honorable Mention
(…Well, part of it is science fiction. If you squint hard enough.)
The same year that Ghostbusters came out, Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd appeared in a comedy written and directed by one of the best writers from Saturday Night Live, Tom Schiller, in his feature film debut.
But you’ve never seen it.
And, if you’re waiting for it to come to DVD, you probably never will.
Let’s talk about lost and legendary films: There are some which never got made or weren’t finished (like Jodorowsky’s Dune); there are some whose prints got lost or were destroyed, like U.F.O Abduction; some which got lost due to a messed up release, like Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime; there were a few that were censored or banned, like Gold or The Testament of Dr. Mabuse; and a very few which the studio refused to release for one reason or another.
This is one of those
Nothing Lasts Forever looks like a film made in the Thirties. It is in elegant black and white, complete with the old MGM logo and a lot of dirt and scratches so it looks like a genuine older film. A young man, Adam Beckett, played by Zack Gilligan (who had just starred in Gremlins) dreams of being a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall, only for his fans to turn against him when they learn he’s using a player piano.
Adam longs to be an artist, but he has no idea what form of art he wishes to pursue. He decides to leave France and go back to New York City. Only, thanks to a major strike, The Port Authority is now ruling the city with an iron fist — and only the people they approve can emigrate there.
Adam fails the official art test so they make him a worker at the Holland Tunnel instead, where his job is to yell at people.
In his off-duty hours, he explores the weird and self-obsessed New York art scene.
But he has come to the attention of the secret society who lives deep beneath the city. They’ve been helping him for a long time and tell him that he is to go to the Moon and there he will fall in love with one of the natives.
And when he does he will become an artist.
More than anything else, Nothing Lasts Forever reminds me of some of the fantasy films from the Thirties and Forties, like Stairway to Heaven, perhaps, or Between Two Worlds, or one of several others. As in The Wizard of Oz, color is used in the more fantastic sequences — in the underground world and on the Moon after Adam falls in love — while the “real” world remains monochrome.
The use of deliberately aged black and white film also allowed Tom Schiller to borrow lots of footage from an impressive collection of old films.
I’ll confess that I quite like the moon sequence: there are quite a few very clever SF ideas at work here. It might have made a pretty good satiric Science Fiction comedy on its own (spoilers ahead!): there has been a secret lunar colony for a very long time, which is actually a shopping mall for retirees, who have a chip implanted in their brains so, if they try to tell about their trip to the Moon, they’ll say “Miami Beach” instead! I love the animatronic Apollo 11 Astronauts and the wrecked Luna 2 Probe (with the sign on its back revealing that it was provided by a theatrical supply company).
However, we really aren’t given much of an explanation for why there are hula-dancing natives on the Moon, complete with small, light up antennae.
But then let’s face it: Nothing Lasts Forever feels no need to explain any of its odd little quirks.
Bill Murray plays the official host on the bus to the Moon in a decidedly nasty-nice sort of way, while Dan Ackroyd plays Adam’s harried supervisor. Imogene Coca and Larry “Bud” Melman (Calvert DeForest) are passengers on the bus, while Eddie Fisher plays Eddie Fisher, a lounge singer who wonders how he got stuck in his job as entertainer on a secret Moon bus, a question he must have been asking a lot at that time in his career. Voice Actress Lauren Tom (Amy on Futurama) is appealing as Eloi, the girl from the Moon. Quite a few other old familiar faces show up along the way, and, if you look quickly in the control room on the Moon, you might even spot G’Kar from Babylon 5 (Andreas Katsulas).
So what happened?
Why did this film get flushed down the memory hole by MGM?
It is a very strange sort of film: it certainly wouldn’t have been what those who watched it because of Ghostbusters or Gremlins would have been expecting — or those who were fans of Saturday Night Live. For that matter, I’m not sure how many people would have understood it.
But then, David Lynch still has a career, last time I checked.
Nor is it ever a “laugh-a-minute riot,” even if it does have a lot more laughs than what passes for a comedy on the Indie circuit (which isn’t a lot).
…And then there is the conspiracy theory promulgated by whoever the guy was who finally leaked a copy of this film to Youtube back in 2014: he claimed that the film is full of Masonic secrets, and that it was all a secret plot (shades of Amadeus and The Magic Flute).
I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else.
Whatever it is, this is a weird, culty, retro-Indie film which somehow got made on an “A” budget with lots of “A” actors. It’s far from perfect, but then, so are a lot of other films.
Most of them, in fact.
It isn’t as easy to find as it once was (those darn Masons!), but if you look around hard you can probably find it. It’s worth a look, particularly if you love old films, weird films, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, or Saturday Night Live.
Just don’t expect Ghostbusters, okay?
rivets on the poster 
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