One of my favortie movies. Peter Sellers is just... He breaks his career mold here. It's hard to believe this guy was Dr. Strangelove or Inspector Clouseau.

Have got the script but haven't yet read it, although I did read the Kosinski book. Sellers had wanted to make a movie of the book for years. Luckily he got to do it before he died. Some people who knew Sellers claimed he was never sure exactly who he was, and that this was why the character of Chance - who becomes different things to different people - was so appealing to him. Not sure if Sellers ever made any such comment himself. Another left-field project from the great Hal Ashby. "Harold and Maude" AND "Being There"? That's a director with guts.... And that ending! That'll have any GITS readers who have yet to see it talking for days.

One of my all time favorite films. Yes, it's a satire, but it's a subtle one. And the tone is so unique. Forrest Gump is the obvious comparison but Being There is much more elegiac. Also highly recommend the soundtrack if you can find it.

Crafty choice. Louise was wrong when she said all you've got to do is be white in America. So many similarities between those economic times and the ones we're going through now, and we don't have a white man in office. The industrialist Rand echoes Ayn Rand's philosophy, and there's Eve to start the whole thing over again with the blank slate that is Chance. I remember seeing this ages ago with a group of friends who were not inhaling (much) and all of us talking about what a profound statement it was about the dumbing down of America because of television. We were the simpletons :-) It's a terrific opportunity to revisit this film by reading the script. Napoleon Hill was very big at the time Kozinski wrote his novel, and the part of that book that's rarely talked about was the sexual energy involved with achieving wealth. It was sure ripping here! The one time the screenplay's title is mentioned with emphasis is when Eve gets into bed with Chance, who responds briefly as he mirrors the movie he's watching, which just happened to be another one of Ashby's films, The Thomas Crown Affair. Rand manufactured mirrors. It seems that Chance acts as the mirror for other people to see themselves, or the truth, or what they need to see. Chance moves from watching to being the one who is watched. Love that transition. Chance trips us up and makes us think something fishy has to be going on with erased files and identity. Chance shows us the seasons we fail to see in our hustle and bustle, points out to us the cycles where the old and overgrown must die to give way to the new, which will one day be the old (the dissection of his clothing shows so many cycles). It's a film that could easily become an abyss one falls into, as opposed to walking on air. But about the screenplay. The opening action blocks are novelistic, poetic, and establish the tone. There's abstraction and plenty of room for the director to make his visual choices. After that is established, the script quickly moves into letting the scenes move the story forward with very little intervention by the writer, just beautiful use of conflict, tension, irony, dilemma, and all the other tools of the writers trade. The ending is a closed and open scene at the same time, with the writer standing back and letting the momentum of the story take over. What a fantastic example of how a script can be written. Golden stuff.

I'm not a huge Peter Sellers fan at all, but I think the film and his performance are both brilliant. However, I don't think Forrest Gump is similar at all beyond the surface. In FG everyone is aware of Forrest's mental capacities, but in Being There the satire is based on the fact that no one knows the truth of the situation, not even Chance himself. It's a classic example of what's called "audience superior," where the audience knows at least one thing that at least one character in a scene doesn't know. Audience superior is the basis of suspense (in Hitchcock's definition) and irony. And here, the same bit of audience superior sustains the entire film. That's what I think makes it brilliant.