My Favorite Year (1982) on Netflix
In 1954, junior writer Benjy Stone works on Comedy Cavalcade, a live variety show. When his screen idol, Alan Swann, arrives drunk, Benjy vows to keep the guest star sober until showtime.
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- IMDb7.3/1011,375 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Benjy Stone looks back at a week in 1954, when he was a junior comedy writer on Comedy Cavalcade, a live variety show starring Stan "King" Kaiser. The week's guest is Alan Swann, Benjy's screen idol, a swashbuckling matinee idol long past his prime and known as a drinker. Swann turns up late and drunk, and Kaiser nearly fires him until Benjy promises to keep him sober through rehearsals and to the broadcast. Swann's chauffeur Alfie helps Benjy watch him. Benjy also tries to win over K.C. Downing, a production assistant who sees him as a goof-ball. Swann keeps a private watch on Tess, his young daughter, who has been raised by her mother. Karl Rojeck, a union boss, objects to the show's parody of him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about My Favorite Year (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- It has long been said that the swashbuckler Errol Flynn was a guest on one episode of Your Show of Shows, that his appearance inspired Dennis Palumbo's mostly fictional screenplay, and that the character Swann was based on Flynn. In fact Flynn never hosted the show.
- Cameron Mitchell got his part over lunch. Meeting at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer commissary in 1981, Mel Brooks told him that Gorilla at Large, which starred Mitchell and Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft, was his favorite film, then asked him to play a Jimmy Hoffa-type character; Mitchell was cast as Karl “Boss” Rojeck.
- Herb, one of Kaiser's writers, whispers rather than speaks, and the character is based on Neil Simon. According to Carl Reiner, Simon, another of Caesar's staff writers, whispered ideas to colleagues rather than trying to shout above the din of the noisy writers' room.
- The character Rookie Carroca came out of Mel Brooks' own life: according to Brooks, he was based on a Filipino sailor in the U.S. Navy who was his neighbor in Brooklyn.
