Here's some stuff that happened in the past
My name is Nathan Rabin, and I am addicted to new ideas. I can’t help it. My stupid, frazzled brain is constantly coming up with new ideas. I fall in love with these new ideas. I am agog with excitement, atwitter with anticipation.
I become convinced that while my previous seventeen ideas all failed spectacularly, THIS is the one that’s going to succeed. This idea will change things. This idea will capture the fickle imagination of the public and ignite the comeback I’ve been chasing for long, endless, hopeless years.
Then, unfortunately, my brain will come up with a new idea, and I will lose interest in ideas I was previously obsessed with.
So it is with great trepidation that I am announcing a whole new column for paid subscribers at my Every Episode Ever Buttondown account and Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
This new column, which may become a glorious new staple of my life and career or may be abandoned after a single entry, is called The Debuts. It will cover the starring film debuts of Saturday Night Live cast members.
Saturday Night Live has created more movie stars than any other show in the history of American entertainment. Some of the biggest movie stars got their big break on Saturday Night Live.
Eddie Murphy, for example, saved Saturday Night Live from possible cancellation when he joined it during one of its intermittent bleary nadirs. Murphy was a breakout star of Saturday Night Live. Then again, so was Joe Piscopo.
Murphy went on to become one of our biggest stars. Piscopo’s film career fizzled, and he’s fuzzily remembered as a has-been, a walking punchline, and a flop.
The total obscurity I am unwisely beginning this column with grossed over fourteen million dollars on a modest four-and-a-half million dollar budget, but it’s safe to call it a flop all the same.
The movie in question is Wholly Moses! Though she had appeared in a supporting role in 1978’s American Hot Wax, Wholly Moses! marked the first time she was a female lead.
I am beyond impressed with Newman as a Saturday Night Live cast member. She was so funny, hip, and sexy, yet doomed to be overlooked and underrated because she was young, attractive, and a woman.
The inhuman pressure of Saturday Night Live wreaked havoc on Newman’s psyche. She was barely old enough to drink legally yet found herself in the blinding, merciless spotlight of instant fame.
In Wholly Moses Newman has not one but two thankless roles in modern-day tourist Zoey and biblical harlot Zerelda. The film’s regrettable framing device finds Zoey and Harvey Orchid (Dudley Moore) discovering a lost scroll during a trip to Israel, chronicling the life and times of Herschel (also Moore).
Herschel is cursed to walk forever in Moses’ shadow. For example, he overhears God telling Moses to lead his people out of Egypt and mistakenly thinks that God is talking to him.
The film then unfolds in flashback as Herschel rises from humble origins to become a false prophet thanks to an endless series of deeply unamusing misunderstandings.
Newman is Herschel’s wife, but all I remember of the character or the performance is that she leaves her husband for a giant with a massive dong and later turns to stone like Lot’s wife.
It takes Wholly Moses! a very long time to get to Herschel stumbling obliviously into Moses’ outsized shadow and bumbling his way into all manner of famous stories, Forrest Gump-style.
Matters do not improve once the plot kicks in, and Jack Gilford, Dom DeLuise, John Houseman, Madeline Kahn, Richard Pryor as Pharaoh, and John Ritter all pop up for curdled cameos.
Newman is given nothing funny to do. She’s at least in good company. None of the more prominent names in the overstuffed, underwhelming non-entity have anything funny to do, either. Wholly Moses! is yet another empty extravaganza with funny people up the wazoo but nothing funny.
I am inherently skeptical of movies with exclamation points in their titles. Exclamation points are generally a sign that a movie is trying too hard and is more than a little desperate.
In the case of Wholly Moses!, that exclamation point is trying to wake up a sleepy-ass movie with all the energy and forward momentum of Jeb Bush running in slow-motion underwater.
If Wholly Moses’s premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s pretty much the premise of The Life of Brian, but with Moses in place of Jesus. A movie would have to be explosively funny to get away with essentially stealing the central conceit of one of the most beloved cult films of the past half-century.
Wholly Moses! It is not explosively funny. It’s not funny at all. It’s not just a movie that failed to make me laugh; it legitimately depressed me. It bummed me out.
It’s explosively unfunny, a real bomb devoid of a single meek chuckle.
It’s appropriate that so much of the film takes place in the desert because that’s what Wholly Moses! is: a comedy desert devoid of life where all things wilt and nothing can flourish.
The miscalculations begin with making Moore’s protagonist an unhappy, unlikeable jerk who is touring the Holy Land via a far-fetched mix-up. Harvey does not want to be where he is, and the same is true of Moore, the actor.
Wholly Moses! desperately wants to be an American The Life of Brian, but it’s not remotely satirical, barely a comedy, and barely a movie. This is more like Harold Ramis’ similarly muddled and underwhelming Year One; consider it Year Zero.
During my video store days, I sometimes looked at Wholly Moses!’s box and wondered how bad a movie with all of those stars could be. Now I know. It’s even worse than I had feared/anticipated.
Weis’s next film as a director, the 1984 soap opera spoof Young Lust, was never released. Wholly Moses! Merited such a grim fate but was instead sadistically disseminated to cinemas.
Newman deserved so much more than Wholly Moses! Though the film probably made a profit in the theaters and even more on home video, it’s hard to think of it as anything other than a failure.
Oh well. For Newman and this column, Wholly Moses! leaves nowhere to go but up.
Then again, my perverse, self-sabotaging brain is already excited about the prospect of writing up the Rebecca De Mournay/Mary Gross vehicle Feds, so, amazingly, I could be getting into even more obscure detritus in the very next entry.
What do YOU want me to cover for this column? Also, if you could #pleaseclap and #pleasepostsomethingnice, it would increase the likelihood that this will be an ongoing feature going forward and not a one-off.
neat, eh? Man, I LOVE this silly newsletter.
There were a few movies from around this period that had huge, amazing casts, yet somehow did not make a ripple on either pop culture or the box office. I remember being very intrigued by this movie when it came out, but the fact that I never saw any trailers or TV ads seemed very odd to my young self. And then it was gone from theaters in about two weeks.
Fortunately, HBO was there to assuage my curiosity, as this movie went into regular rotation not long thereafter. I found it a mildly amusing diversion, but then I was 11 years old. Like I said, there was a slew of mildly amusing yet completely forgettable movies with huge casts in those years, so in the context of the times, my expectations had been well muffled.
A couple of years later we had Yellowbeard, which, while funnier than this movie, was still unfunny enough in comparison to its pedigree, that it stood out as a bigger failure. At least Wholly Moses seemingly had no ambitions in comparison. In terms of "meandering historic comedies with big casts, that came out after Life of Brian"*, probably the most successful was History of the World Part I. But Mel Brooks is kind of in his own category.
- Did I just give you a new idea? No, wait! Forget I said anything! Uhh...look over there!
I forgot to mention in my substack comment that my biggest source of confusion over this movie when I saw it on HBO was the meaning of the title. I guess they wanted to avoid the quasi-blasphemy of using the word "Holy" so they went with a homophone: "Wholly". But "Wholly Moses" with or without an exclamation point makes no damn sense. Herschel isn't wholly Moses -- he's not even partly Moses. He barely qualifies as Moses-adjacent. Other "comedy" films had titles that were puns, but this wasn't even that. Columbia Pictures, a major Hollywood Studio, signed off on this title and paid a lot of money to promote and distribute it in theaters, TV and eventually home video. At no point did anyone at this studio take a step back and say, "Maybe this title is awful and makes no sense. Sure the movie is the same way, but at least we could put in a little effort and come up with a good title to sucker people in."?
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