Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) on Netflix
R20021h 53mBiographyComedyCrime
Chuck Barris wants fame in television. In Philadelphia he becomes Dick Clark's assistant and writes a hit song. A CIA agent named Jim Byrd recruits him as an assassin.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.0/1096,247 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes79%
Trailer
Plot summary
Chuck Barris moves to Manhattan hoping to make his name in television and works as an NBC page, but he is fired. Back in Philadelphia he becomes Dick Clark's personal assistant on American Bandstand, writes the song "Palisades Park", and takes up with Penny Pacino. He is allowed to pitch The Dating Game at ABC and gets money to make a pilot, but the network drops the idea. After he is thrown out of a bar for fighting, a CIA agent named Jim Byrd recruits him as an assassin. When ABC approves The Dating Game, the show becomes a hit, and Byrd proposes that its winners receive a first date in another country, with Barris traveling along as chaperone.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Chuck Barris admitted in a 1984 interview that he made the CIA assassin story up, saying he had applied for work with the agency in the early 1960s but never entered it; he wrote the book largely because the controversy over his show 3's a Crowd had driven him out of television.
- Chuck Barris was brought on as a consultant for authenticity, and the changes this prompted included uncredited rewrites that left screenwriter Charlie Kaufman unhappy with the finished film and the removal of a drug addiction subplot.
- Clooney cast Julia Roberts as the CIA agent Patricia Watson because of their work together on Ocean's Eleven, but the part had first been set for Nicole Kidman, who dropped out over scheduling conflicts with The Hours.
- In the earlier Columbia attempt, Jim McBride was set to direct and offered the lead to Richard Dreyfuss, who refused even to read the script because he believed Barris's morbid humor was distasteful.
- Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel and Clooney gave the 1960s scenes stylized racking focuses like Spaghetti Westerns, shot the 1970s scenes hand-held as an homage to Sidney Lumet, Mike Nichols and Alan J. Pakula, and drew on Klute, Carnal Knowledge and The Parallax View.
- Sam Rockwell spent two and a half months with Chuck Barris for research, going to coffee shops, dinners, movies, walks and the zoo, and had Barris tape his lines on a tape recorder to get the man's voice down.
