You Must Consider This

A film pretending to be a documentary about an actor making a film... In the hands of director Christopher Guest, this potential self-serving disaster becomes a comedy coup, writes Jim Schembri.

Few actors in the history of cinema have managed to capture the ambition, the drive, the indomitable spirit of what it takes to survive as an actor.

Theres Dustin Hoffmans desperate thespian in Tootsie, who dresses as a woman to land a part in a soap. In Rosemarys Baby, John Cassavetes uses witchcraft to blind a rival so he can get a choice stage role. Annette Bening employs some brilliant manipulations in Being Julia. And, of course, theres Anne Baxters scheming against Bette Davis in All About Eve, arguably the best film ever made about movie-making.

Then theres Harry Shearer in For Your Consideration, the latest comedy offering from Christopher Guest, the master of mock-documentary comedy films such as Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind and Best in Show.

However, while For Your Consideration employs the improvisation techniques seen in his mock-docs, the film is Guests first real stab at a conventional comedy movie.

In the film, Shearer - best known as bassist Derek Smalls in the mock-doc classic This Is Spinal Tap, as the folk singer in A Mighty Wind and for his voice work on The Simpsons - plays Victor Allan Miller, a veteran actor starring in a small-scale piece of arthouse cornball called Home for Purim.

Initially intended as a low-budget film for a limited, mainly Jewish audience, talk on the internet begins generating Oscar buzz for certain members of the cast, who are still busy shooting their scenes. Marilyn Hack (Catherine OHara), the ageing matriarch on the set, is the first to be blessed by the vibe, which soon ripples through much of the cast.

It hits Miller at just the right time. After a distinguished career on the stage and in film, the poor sod has been reduced to a pathetic piece of Hollywood detritus, desperate for work and auditioning for demeaning voice-over work in TV commercials.

Now he is the subject of media attention, being invited on teen music programs to promote the film and himself. He is having the time of his life. The news that Oscar is suddenly interested in him transforms his dire career prospects.

But not his attitude. Miller is that special breed of seasoned, old-school actor who will never surrender their indefatigable striving for professional excellence, however crappy the acting gig theyve just taken to cover the bills.

Oscar buzz or no Oscar buzz, he will put his heart and soul into everything. Theres a nobility to the man, a quiet dignity that will stay with him even during the ghastly humiliation of a weight-loss infomercial.

"Its interesting that people tend to feel that way about him," Shearer says.

"And I wasnt drawing on anybody else but me. I figured, Gee, I know what this guys gone through. So I basically took my own experiences and removed what I thought were my coping mechanisms. What I was left with was Victor!

"The choices I made in terms of how it felt to me were choices of desperation. Like a travelling salesman, a smile is his life-preserver. A good attitude, a smile and a willingness to please are all that separate him from the unemployment line at any given moment."

Guest tried playing some scenes with Miller being despondent, but "it was just wrong. Victors choices were always going to be to stay afloat, no matter what the medium is that he appears to be floating in."

As memorable and funny as his work in For Your Consideration is, and whether he likes it or not, Shearer will always be known for two things.

On The Simpsons he provides the voices for many key characters, including Ned Flanders, Smithers, Seymour Skinner, Kent Brockman and C. Montgomery Burns.

He has been with the show since it began 18 years ago and is, he says, bound by the US Official Secrets Act not to reveal anything about The Simpsons movie. He does, however, offer his considered view on how much longer the puff-depleted series can continue.

"Ive always said that the end will come when Fox finds another comedy hit, so I would say weve got another 45 years ahead of us."

For most of us though, Shearer will forever be the mild-mannered Derek Smalls, the bassist from heavy-metal band Spinal Tap, the focus of the seminal 1984 mock-documentary classic This Is Spinal Tap.

Directed by Rob Reiner and starring Christopher Guest as Nigel Tufnel, Michael McKean as David St Hubbins and a long list of bit players as their rotating roster of drummers, This Is Spinal Tap drew huge audiences and popularised the mock-documentary form as a comic device.

Along with Woody Allens Zelig (released a year earlier in 1983), Tap is often cited by filmmakers and comedians as having inspired their work. Ricky Gervais, who has a bit part in For Your Consideration, cites it as "maybe the best comedy film of all time" and Christopher Guest as probably having had "the single biggest influence on my comedy".

Its no surprise, then, that his neo-classic TV series The Office is one of the most skilful examples of the mock-doc form.

But while Spinal Tap helped popularise comedy mock documentaries, the device had served as an attractive means of spoof and satire for decades beforehand.

As early as 1935, American humour writer Robert Benchley employed the device in his hilarious Oscar-winning short film, How To Sleep, and subsequently used it in many other gems, such as That Inferior Feeling and How To Read.

In the 1960s the mock-doc form found much favour with British TV comedians, particularly among the cast of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, whose sketch on crime brothers Doug and Dinsdale Piranha remains a superb, hilarious example of the mock-doc form.

Woody Allen pioneered the device in feature films with his directorial debut Take the Money and Run in 1969. In 1979, American comedian Albert Brooks produced the little-known, ground-breaking film Real Life. Foreshadowing reality TV by over a decade, the film featured a TV crew documenting the everyday life of an average American family on digital cameras.

And there were musical precursors to Spinal Tap. Monty Python veteran Eric Idle offered a Beatles send-up in The Rutles in 1979 and the British TV series The Comic Strip Presents produced the very Tap-like Bad News Tour in 1983.

The half-hour film, starring Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer from The Young Ones, followed the flailing fortunes of a low-rent heavy-metal band that comes into violent conflict with the camera crew.

But it was the comic impact of Spinal Tap, and the buoyancy of its subsequent cult status, that catapulted the mock-doc form into a bona-fide comedy genre.

Among the more noteworthy post-Tap films are: Tim Robbins political satire Bob Roberts (1992), which he openly says was inspired by the film; rapper spoofs CB4 (1992) and Fear of a Black Hat (1994); beauty-pageant spoof Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999); the very funny Norwegian boy-band satire Get Ready To Be Boyzvoiced (2000); and the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog (1992), in which a cheerful mass murderer is followed around by a film crew. Woody Allen has returned to the form twice with Husbands and Wives (1992) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999). And, of course, theres the Australian 2006 comedy hit Kenny.

The mock-doc form has also spread extensively across TV with Larry Davids Curb Your Enthusiasm, the British comedy series People Like Us, The Office and the Australian shows The Games, Frontline and We Can Be Heroes.

Sacha Baron Cohens controversial film Borat, in which he tricks hapless Americans into thinking he is a journalist from Kazakhstan who is making a TV documentary, may represent the next step in the evolution of the mock doc as a comic form. As with the Borat segments on his TV program, Da Ali G Show, Cohen fuses fake and real to create an occasionally revealing, constantly tasteless new form.

Shearer believes the alleged attractions of the mock-doc form are deceptive and have resulted in a lot of bad comedy films.

"Obviously for filmmakers who all too often resort to voice-over narration to fill gaps in storytelling its very appealing to just have the character sit down and tell you everything you need to know," he says.

And the use of comic improvisation is prone to seduce filmmakers into disaster.

"There are people who actually, God help us, think that its easier if you just have the actors ad lib. The bargain bins are littered with the evidence of how its not easier. In some ways its more work for everybody.

"Its certainly more work for the actors than in a normal acting gig. Were far more invested in the characters. And for the director its a much longer editing time than in a conventional movie, so its so not easy. So you have to have a better reason (for doing a mock-doc) than just wanting to ad lib."

On Guest side-stepping the mock-doc form he pioneered for a more conventional narrative, Shearer says it was something of a liberation because it allowed the film to show characters in truly private moments rather than always being aware that they were being filmed.

"Camera consciousness is the most slithery part of all this because in Spinal Tap it dominated our approach to the material. The question we asked ourselves at every point was: Would somebody do this knowing they were on camera?

"It really was a central concern and one of the reasons Chris has been moving away (from doing another mock-doc) is because he wanted to have behaviour that would not be done by somebody knowing a camera was there. That was the big leap.

"Its a central part of that form and with a more conventional narrative you get shots you couldnt get otherwise. For instance, Victor wouldnt have a camera watching him waiting for the telephone to ring at five in the morning!"

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