It seems impossible to believe that I have only tagged The Cable Guy once on this blog. It has to have come up more than once, but only once did I consider that the discussion merited giving it a "label" (the tags appearing at the bottom of the post), which enables you to search the blog by subject matter. And in that post, I didn't even use its poster, so according to my own rules for never using the same poster art twice on the blog, its poster still remains available for use in this here post today.This lack of Cable Guy love on my blog surprises me because the movie is in my top 20 all time on Flickchart. It doesn't just barely eke into the top 20, either. It is my full-on #12 movie of all time, so it's closer to my top 10 than my 20-30.
It is by far the most surprising choice in my top 20. I won't go on at length about how it scaled these heights in my personal film rankings, nor will I apologize for it or feel guilty about it. On what was probably my tenth viewing of it on Thursday night -- I only have the last three recorded, so that's just an estimate -- I still loved it. Just to give you some explanation, I first saw it under the absolute perfect circumstances to appreciate it, and it became a minor religion for a couple friends and me for years afterward, as we would quote it incessantly. In fact, the reason for my viewing on Thursday, my first in six years, was having a phone call with one of those friends, and still being able to quote lines to each other like we'd just seen it last week rather than 24 years ago.
So while The Cable Guy undoubtedly deserves some post where I plumb the controversial depths of its brilliance -- I'm reminded, from recently exposing it to other film fans in a monthly project to watch each others' highest ranked films, that few people like it as much as I do -- today I am instead going to focus on something I gleaned from the movie for the first time on my tenth viewing.
The Cable Guy and Flirting With Disaster were in close proximity on my 1996 year-end rankings, the first such one I ever did, coming in at #4 and #2, respectively. (For the record, Fargo, which is now ahead of them both, was my #3, and Looking for Richard, which I have only seen once, was my #1.) But I have never actually watched them in close proximity until now, as my most recent Flirting viewing was just at the end of May.
The thing these two films have in common, other than their release year and being squirm-inducing comedies that focus on socially awkward scenarios, is Ben Stiller. So, pretty great year for Ben Stiller, at least in my corner of the world. He's the star of Flirting With Disaster and the director of The Cable Guy. (Didn't know that, did you?) He also appears in a small role, or actually a small dual role, in The Cable Guy, as twin child actors Sam and Stan Sweet, the one of whom grew up to murder the other, whose trial is a running bit throughout the movie. One of the movie's many sharp satires of the tabloid entertainment machine of the mid-1990s.
But Stiller is not the only thing the movies have in common, and as I was watching on Thursday night, I kept noticing them.
The first one I have always known, which is that comic actor George Segal appears in both. In both films he plays the father, Stiller's adopted father in Flirting, and the biological father of the character Stiller would have played had he starred in The Cable Guy rather than directing it, which is instead played by Matthew Broderick. (I would never switch out Broderick for Stiller, since Broderick's performance is one of the reasons this movie is so good.) Checking on Wikipedia just now, I am pleased to see that Segal is still alive. For some reason I thought he had died.
Here's George from The Cable Guy. You know him:
But you may not know Shawn Michael Howard, who has not had quite the career Segal's had, though he's been busy enough over the years. Here's Shawn from around that same time, though I can't find any pictures of him from either movie, since his role is so small:
Only on this viewing did I realize that the guy who attempts to "car-jack" Stiller and company in Fliriting -- who is actually a member of a church group trying to return Stiller's lost jacket -- is the same guy who appears in the basketball scene in The Cable Guy, where Jim Carrey shatters the backboard after a monstrous dunk.
Neither film's Wikipedia page reveals when the movies were shot, and I can't be bothered to dig deeper on the internet to find out. But if we are to assume that they had the same delays between shooting and release as each other, and Flirting was released three months before The Cable Guy, I can see Stiller working with Howard on Flirting and then offering him a role in The Cable Guy.
The same basic timeframe and sequence of events could apply to Cynthia LaMontagne, whom you also probably don't know, but whose picture I could find in one of the films, in this case, Fliriting. Here is Cynthia:
She's the one on the left.
Her role in Flirting is memorable enough, as she has maybe five to ten lines of dialogue in a five-minute scene, where she's one of the potential biological sisters of Stiller's Mel Copeland, though of course the adoption agency made an error. Her presence in The Cable Guy may have been the real forehead-smacking find on this viewing, as it's really of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it variety. She plays the restaurant hostess seen for just a couple seconds when Leslie Mann goes on her date with Owen Wilson.
Alas, as women are never allowed to stick around Hollywood as long as men, she hasn't had a role in anything in 12 years.
The interesting thing is that their collaborations with Stiller were indeed limited to that year. LaMontagne didn't appear in another Stiller film, though she did work with Judd Apatow, the Cable Guy producer, again in her final role, as a bartender in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (I noticed that IMDB lists her as "Female Bartender," which should go without saying -- why do you need to clarify the gender?) And though Howard is still working, I don't see any other credit in his IMDB that relates to Stiller, though he did appear on an episode of Mr. Show, which features Cable Guy cameos David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, before they were famous enough to be considered cameos. (Interesting to note that when you search Howard on IMDB, the brief description that clarifies who he is says "Actor, The Cable Guy (1996)." I'm not even sure he has a line of dialogue.)
With Segal, the one most likely to have worked with Stiller again, I could not find anything that had even a couple degrees of Kevin Bacon separation from Stiller.
I'm wondering whether Stiller would have worked with these three again if The Cable Guy had not been such a massive flop, and if he were not so eager to purge anything and everything about it from his memory. Too bad. I always planned to tell Stiller, if I met him, how much I loved The Cable Guy, but I chickened out on my lone opportunity, when he and I were both in the same bathroom during intermission for a play.
I'm sure these sightings are not nearly as interesting to you as they are to me, but I think I also might be one of the only people who could even make them in the first place. Who else out there happens not only to love these movies enough, but watch them enough, to make the connection?
Ben Stiller's parents, maybe. (Rest in peace, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.)
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