'80s Roulette: FUNNY FARM

I have (almost) every single movie released in theaters in the ‘80s in the United States on a hard drive, and once a week, I’m going to hit shuffle and review whatever film comes up first.

Welcome to ‘80s Roulette!

JUNE 3, 1988

Funny Farm
Chevy Chase, Madolyn Smith, Kevin O’Morrison, Joseph Mahler, Jack Gilpin, Caris Corfman, William Severs, Mike Starr, Glenn Plummer, William Duell, Helen Lloyd Breed, Kit Le Fever, Dakin Matthews, William Newman, Alice Drummond, Brad Sullivan, Nesbitt Blaisdell, George Buck, Audrie Neenan, MacIntyre Dixon, Bill Fagerbakke, Nick Wyman, Raynor Scheine, Peter Boyden, Reg E. Cathey, Dan Desmond, Don Plumley, Brett Miller, Jamie Meyer, David Woodberry, Kevin Murphy, Dennis Barr, Barbara Baker, David Williams, Steve Jonas, Russell Bletzer, Evelyn McLean, Steven John, Robert Conner, Judson Duncan, Alison Hannas, Robert Ingram, Mary Johnson, Kristin Kellom, Paul Link
cinematography by Miroslav Ondricek
music by Elmer Bernstein
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
based on the novel by Jay Cronley
produced by Robert L. Crawford
directed by George Roy Hill
Rated PG
1 hr 41 mins

A sports writer and his wife move to a small Vermont town to start a new life and quickly regret the decision.

Jay Cronley wrote a series of comic novels over the span of 20 years, starting with Fall Guy in 1977 and ending with Shoot! in 1997, eight of them in all. Four of those were adapted as movies (one of them twice), and I’d argue that every film made from his work turned out well. Pretty damn good batting average.

It helps that Cronley wrote brisk, witty dialogue built around reasonably compact ideas, perfectly sized for adaptation. For the most part, the films adapted from his books hew closely to his comic voice. It’s wild that novels were his sideline, because he was really good at it. For the most part, Cronley was known for writing about sports and, specifically, horse racing. He proudly lived in Oklahoma, and his success as a novelist seemed like a nice footnote to the life he built for himself. Pretty much the moment his novel, Funny Farm: A Sweeping Epic of the Sticks, was published, Paramount optioned it. They ended up not making it, though, and seven months later, Warner Bros stepped in and bought it outright. Chevy Chase and his producing partner Bruce Bodner found the book and specifically chased it down for Chevy to star. They were the ones who hired Jeffrey Boam to adapt it, and Chevy was the one who pushed for George Roy Hill to direct after talking to several other filmmakers. Cornelius Productions didn’t make a ton of films, but there was a period where Chase aggressively hunted down material for himself to star in, and they optioned quite a few books, including H.F. Saint’s very good Memoir of an Invisible Man.