Being There

They did one

of a movie, Being There.

It was one of the most creative, innovative, strange movies.

It's called Being There.

And the premise is he's actually a simpleton.

And I don't have a medical term to describe him.

Another thing that surprised me, this film looks good and not just the animation and all that, but like the lens choices and the visual stylings and the way the camera moves looks good.

And to my surprise, veteran cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, father of Zoe and Emily Deschanel, who you might know as the director of Twin Peaks and the cinematographer of classic films like Being There, National Treasure, The Patriot, was the cinematographer for this stop-motion animator.

This man who's been doing this since the mid-20th century did a stop-motion animated film, and I don't know the process for how someone can be a cinematographer for that.

How do you oversee the lens choices for such a big project?

In the novel Being There and Hal Ashby's 1979 film adaptation, Chance, a gardener with what we would now call intellectual disability, rises through the ranks of high society through a comedy of errors.

With his advice on gardening taken as metaphor, he soon finds himself a confidant and advisor to the president.

And a big part of Chance's rise is that he repeats back what others say, making it seem like he's sagely agreeing rather than merely parroting it back.

Yes,

right out of existence.

In many ways, being there is its own metaphor for false confessions by those with intellectual disability, especially when law enforcement is putting words into the mouths of the most vulnerable.

Studies show there are two types of cases in which individuals with intellectual disability are especially likely to falsely confess to a crime.

Those involving sexual murders and those with multiple suspects.

with Peter Sellers, the fantastic British actor.

And this was his last film before he passed away.

And it's called Being There, based on a book whose author I do not

remember the

Do you remember the name? I don't remember that either.

Yeah.

Anyways, it's a beautiful film if you haven't seen it.

And so Peter was very diligent and did his homework, which was not homework, obviously, but he wanted to see the film that I mentioned that he had never seen.

The Peter Sellers-

Oh, Peter Sellers? Being There.

Being There.

Being There.

Okay.

Steph Uche is Peter Sellers-

[laughs] Okay

...

But yeah, now that you mentioned it, I didn't really put it on my watch list, but now that you've brought it up again, it brings it back to mind and it's definitely going to go back on.

All right, so next on my list is Being There, directed by Hal Ashby.

This is number 518 on the critics list, number 700 on the user's poll, and gets a 7.9 on IMDb.

It was nominated for two Oscars, including Best Actor and one for Supporting Actor Melvin Douglas.

It's a very interesting satire where Peter Sellers gives a much different performance than you see in the Pink Panther films.

And it's really amazing after seeing this, Dr. Strangelove and those types of films, how much his range was at doing different types of comedy.

Yeah, being there is on my rewatch list.

It's been a number of years.

Cheech and Chong's next movie, which I just think is hilarious because it is, it's hilarious.

Being There, The Rose, The Deer Hunter, Heaven Can Wait, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Marathon Man, Funny Lady, the list goes on and on.

And as an assistant, just because I think this is notable, he was a camera assistant on the Sugar Land Express, which, of course, was Steven Spielberg's first theatrical movie.

He'd done some stuff before that, but that was his first movie.

It was just great.

Yeah.

I took him with me on Being There and several other movies.

And this was long, long before what's now, which is they've got a monitor that they look at.