Movie 43

Plot

Movie 43 is a series of different, interconnected short films and sketches containing different scenes and scenarios about a washed-up producer as he pitches insane story lines featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

The Pitch

Produced and directed by Peter Farrelly and written by Rocky Russo, Jeremy Sosenko, and Ricky Blitt

The film is composed of multiple comedy shorts presented through an overarching segment titled "The Pitch", in which Charlie Wessler, a mad screenwriter, is attempting to pitch a script to film executive Griffin Schraeder.

After revealing several of the stories in his script, Wessler becomes agitated when Schraeder dismisses his outrageous ideas, and he pulls a gun on him and forces him to listen to multiple other stories before making Schraeder consult his manager, Bob Mone, to purchase the film.

When they do so, Mone's condescending, humiliating attitude toward Schraeder angers him to the point that, after agreeing to make the film "the biggest film since Howard the Duck", he confronts Mone in the parking lot with a gun and tries to make him perform fellatio on the security guard (Wessler had gotten on the lot by doing the same thing) and kill him if he does not make the film.

Wessler tries to calm Schraeder down with more story ideas to no avail, but Mone pulls out a gun and shoots Schraeder to death. As the segment ends, it is revealed that it is being shot by a camera crew as part of the movie, leading into the final segments.

Cast

Dennis Quaid as Charlie Wessler

Greg Kinnear as Griffin Schraeder

Common as Bob Mone

Charlie Saxton as Jay

Will Sasso as Jerry

Odessa Rae as Danita

Seth MacFarlane as Himself

Mike Meldman as Himself

Alternative version (The Thread)

Directed by Steven Brill and written by Rocky Russo and Jeremy Sosenko

In some countries, like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the structure differs. Instead of a pitch, the films are connected by a group of three teenagers searching for the most banned film in the world, Movie 43, which will ultimately lead to the destruction of civilization. Calvin Cutler and his friend J. J. make a video in the style of MTV's Jackass and upload it on YouTube where it instantly reaches over 1,000,000 views. This turns out to be an April Fool's prank from Calvin's younger brother Baxter, who cloned YouTube and hyper-inflated the views while working on his science project.

Calvin and J.J. attempt to get revenge by telling Baxter of a film that's so dangerous it will cause the annihilation of the world. The movie is known as Movie 43. While J.J. and Baxter look for Movie 43 on a Google stand-in, Calvin retrieves Baxter's laptop and loads it with viruses from porn sites, and masturbates to a strip tease video on the porn sites in a bathroom. Baxter finds hundreds of results for Movie 43 on a website referred to by him as a dark corner of the Internet. They find the sketches starting from the 43rd search on the list of results.

As Baxter and J.J. keep watching videos, they are interrupted by Vrankovich and a group of Chinese mobsters wanting to find Movie 43, going so far as to take J.J.'s classmate Stevie Schraeder, film executive Griffin Schraeder's oldest son, hostage. Vrankovich warns them that if they find Movie 43, civilization will be destroyed. They ignore his claims and keep searching, eventually finding the real, Movie 43, which turns out to be from the future, and which shows Baxter as a profane commando, leading a group of recruits to survive after the world has ended.

As Calvin finishes ruining Baxter's laptop, their mother enters, wearing the same shirt and shorts that the woman in the strip tease video wore, causing Calvin to have a mental breakdown, realizing he masturbated to a video of his mother. Afterward, a deadly earthquake rumbles and mankind is lost. However, a few years later the only survivor, a crippled Calvin, finds Baxter's laptop still working despite the viruses. He watches the last remaining skits on the laptop.

Segments

Produced and directed by Peter Farrelly, written by Bill O'Malley, Rocky Russo, and Jeremy Sosenko

Single businesswoman Beth goes on a blind date with Davis, the city's most eligible bachelor. When they arrive together at a restaurant, Beth is shocked when he removes his scarf, revealing a pair of testicles dangling from his neck. Over dinner, it confuses her that he fails to acknowledge his anatomical abnormality, and nobody seems to be surprised by it. When two friends of Davis come by, one of them convinces him to give Beth a kiss. Davis agrees, but when he kisses her on the forehead, his neck testicles are dangling near Beth's mouth, causing her to scream and break off the kiss.

Cast

Hugh Jackman as Davis

Kate Winslet as Beth

Roy Jenkins as Ray

Rocky Russo as Jake, The Waiter

Anna Madigan as Abby

Julie Claire as Pam

Katie Finneran as Angie

Directed by Will Graham, written by Will Graham & Jack Kukoda

Recently moved in, Sean and Clare have coffee with their new neighbors, Robert and Samantha who have a teenage son, Kevin, whom they home-school. They begin inquiring about the homeschooling, and Robert and Samantha describe how they replicated a full high school experience, going as far as hazing, bullying, ostracizing, and giving out detentions.

To make the experience as awkward as possible, like "real high school," they threw parties that excluded Kevin, Samantha instigated Kevin's "first kiss" and Robert revealed romantic feelings for Kevin. Visibly disturbed, the neighbors end up meeting Kevin, who says he is going out and gives them the impression that all is fine: until he reveals a doll made of a mop with Samantha's face on it, referring to the doll as his girlfriend.

Production

Development

Charles B. Wessler first came up with the idea for an outrageous comedy made up of several short films in the early 2000s. "It's like Funny or Die, only if you could go crazy," judged Farrelly, "because with Funny or Die, there are certain limits. And we just wanted to do that kind of short and go much further than that." Charlie Wessler affirmed that he "wanted to make a Kentucky Fried Movie for the modern age".

Wessler then recruited three pairs of directors—Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, and David and Jerry Zucker—to sign on to write and direct one-third of the project each. He then began working out a deal with a studio for the project, but the project did not stick. "They ended up calling me about a month after we started negotiating the deal and said 'we can't do it' because they had political pressure to not make R-rated movies that were marketed to teenagers," claimed Wessler. He then went to multiple other studios, but, according to Wessler, "no one could understand what I was trying to do".

In 2009, Peter Farrelly and producer John Penotti took their pitch—along with about 60 scripts for the vignettes—to Relativity Media. At that meeting, Wessler, Penotti, and Farrelly presented one short that they already had shot, starring Kate Winslet as a woman going on a blind date with a seemingly successful and handsome Hugh Jackman. "They just looked at me and said, 'Go for it,'" Wessler told The Hollywood Reporter. "It takes a lot of balls to make something that is not conventional." Relativity provided $6 million for the film, but no other studio would sign on. "Other potential backers", Farrelly revealed, "didn't believe it could happen—a movie with Kate Winslet for $6 million?"

The film officially began principal photography in March 2010, but due to its large cast, producer/director Farrelly told Entertainment Weekly that "This movie was made over four years, and they just had to wait for a year or two years for different actors. They would shoot for a week, and shut down for several months. Same thing with the directors. It was the type of movie you could come back to." Shortly before shooting, writers Parker, Stone, and the Zuckers backed out.

The film ended up with thirteen directors and nineteen writers tied to it, each one co-writing and directing different segments of the sixteen different storylines. Farrelly directed the parts of the movie with Halle Berry and Kate Winslet.

Casting and filming

Wessler spent years recruiting actors for the film. Many turned down the project.

"Most agents would avoid me because they knew what I wanted to do—what agent wants to book their big client in a no pay, $800-a-day, two-day shoot?" he said. "The truth is, I had a lot of friends who were in this movie. And if they didn't say yes, this movie wouldn't have gotten made." In the end, most of the actors were willing to take part because the film only required a few days of their time and often allowed them to play a character outside of their wheelhouse.

Hugh Jackman was the first actor Wessler cast. He met the star at a wedding and then called him sometime later and pitched him the short. Jackman read the script and agreed to be a part of the film. "He called me back I think 24 hours later and said, 'Yeah I wanna do this,' which I think is, quite frankly, incredibly ballsy. Because you could be made a fool of, or you could look silly, and there will be people who say, 'That's crazy; he should never have done it.'"

After talking to the multiple agents of Kate Winslet, she eventually agreed to take part. The Winslet-Jackman sketch was shot shortly after and became the reel to attract other A-list stars.

John Hodgman, who plays opposite Justin Long in one sketch, signed on with no knowledge of the project. Long, Hodgman's co-star in the long-running Get a Mac series of Apple commercials, asked him to do the project, and he then signed on, without still knowing too much. Hodgman said, "I got an e-mail from Justin that said, 'I'm going to be dressing up as Robin again. Do you want to dress up as the Penguin?' And I said yes. Without even realizing cameras would be involved, or that it would be a movie."

James Gunn revealed during a Facebook Q&A that he was convinced to do the film by Elizabeth Banks and to "blame her" for it. He added, "I didn't even get to edit that stupid thing!" He also has never seen the film.

Richard Gere, a friend of Wessler's, agreed to appear in the film, but said that he would not be available for over a year. Gere later contacted Wessler, saying he was available to shoot the film, but on the condition that they do it in four days and relocate the shoot from Los Angeles to New York City.

Promotion

The title of the film, Movie 43 has no meaning. Farrelly heard his son talking with friends about a film called "Movie 43", but when Farrelly discovered the film did not exist, he cribbed the name.

Relativity did little to promote the film and none of the cast members did any promotion of the film. The film was not screened for critics in advance. "The slapdash title, the lack of promotion and advance screenings, the release date—none of it bodes well," opined Entertainment Weekly senior editor Thom Geier. "January is usually where movies go to die," Geier argued. "And to go by the trailer—the only option—the content seems dated." A red-band trailer was released on October 3, 2012. Farrelly was optimistic: "Kids, teenagers, 50-somethings who still smoke pot—they're all going to find something here," he asserted.

Reception

Critical response

Movie 43 was universally panned by critics, with some considering it to be one of the worst films ever made. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 5% of 87 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 2.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "A star-studded turkey, Movie 43 is loaded with gleefully offensive and often scatological gags, but it's largely bereft of laughs." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 18 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a D rating.

Brian Gibson (Vue Weekly) describes Movie 43 as "An execrable waste cooked up by a hell's kitchen of directors and writers. It's death-of-laughter by committee. Its title? Because it's like one of those many asteroids out there—a dismal chunk of rock hurtling through an empty void, without purpose." IGN's Gregg Katzman gave the film a 1/10, with the main criticisms being its unfunny jokes and the waste of its all-star cast, with the only positive being its sub two hour running time. It would go on to tie with Scary Movie 5 for IGN's worst movie of 2013.

In his guest review for Roger Ebert's website, Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times outright panned the film, giving it zero out of four stars, calling it "aggressively tasteless", and going so far as to say "Movie 43 is the Citizen Kane of awful". He wrote that the film has nothing in common with The Groove Tube and The Kentucky Fried Movie, two "very funny and influential" sketch-comedy films. He additionally criticized Movie 43 for what he calls "female humiliation", saying that although the men are "jerks, idiots, dolts and fools", the women have it even worse. Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph gave the film 1/5 stars, describing it as "the work of a confused man thrashing around in an industry he no longer understands". Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave the film zero out of four stars and called it the worst film he had ever seen. Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News gave it a negative review, saying, "As a film critic, I've seen nearly 4,000 movies over the last fifteen years. Right now, I can't think of one worse than Movie 43."

In one of the few positive reviews, Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post gave the film three and a half out of four stars, calling it "a near masterpiece of tastelessness". Alonso Duralde of TheWrap said that the film was "gross, juvenile, disgusting, scatological, vile, reprehensible and in the worst possible taste. But heaven help me, I laughed."

Box office

Movie 43 was predicted to debut to less than $10 million, with the studio expecting $8–9 million. It took in $1,810,561 on its opening Friday, far below expectations.

The opening weekend total came to $4,805,878, opening in seventh place. At the end of its run, closing in the United States on March 14, 2013, the film had grossed $8,840,453 domestically and $23,598,535 internationally for a worldwide total of $32,438,988.

Relativity stated that they had already covered all costs with international pre-sales deals and a deal with Netflix.

Home media

Movie 43 was released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 18, 2013.