My Dinner with Andre

My Dinner with Andre
Film poster
Directed by	Louis Malle
Produced by	George W. George Beverly Karp
Written by	Andre Gregory Wallace Shawn
Starring	Andre Gregory Wallace Shawn
Distributed by	New Yorker Films
Release date(s)	October 11, 1981 (1981-10-11)
Running time	110 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 film starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, written by Gregory and Shawn, and directed by Louis Malle.

Plot

The film depicts a conversation between Gregory and Shawn (definitely playing themselves) in a chic restaurant in New York City. Based mostly on conversation, the film's dialog covers such things as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of life. The dialogue contrasts Shawn's modest, down-to-earth humanism with Gregory's extravagant spiritual experiences.

Gregory is the focus of the first hour of the film as he describes some of his experiences since he gave up his career as a theatre director in 1975. These include working with his friend Jerzy Grotowski and a group of Polish actors in a forest in Poland, his visit to Findhorn in Scotland and his trip to the Sahara to try to create a play based on The Little Prince. Perhaps Gregory's most dramatic experience was working with a small group of people on a piece of performance art on Long Island which resulted in Gregory being (briefly) buried alive on Halloween night.

The rest of the film is a conversation as Shawn tries to argue that living life as Gregory has done for the past five years is simply not possible for the vast majority of people. In response, Gregory suggests that what passes for normal life in New York in the late 1970s is more akin to living in a dream than it is to real life. The movie ends without a clear resolution to the conflict in worldviews articulated by the two men. Shawn reminisces during a taxi ride back home about his childhood and mentions that when he arrived at home he told his girlfriend Debbie about his dinner with Andre, as Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 plays in the soundtrack.

Filming and Production

The movie was filmed in the then-abandoned Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia. Although the film was based on actual events in the actors' lives, Shawn and Gregory denied (in an interview by film critic Roger Ebert) that they were playing themselves, and stated that if they remade the film they would swap the two characters to prove their point.

Reception

The Boston Society of Film Critics Awards awarded the film the title "Best American Film" in 1982 and awarded Gregory and Shawn its prize for best screenplay. Roger Ebert, along with his TV partner Gene Siskel, had also praised the film and helped bring public attention to it; in 1999, Ebert added it to his Great Movies essay series.

Parodies and homages

• My Dinner with Andre was parodied by Andy Kaufman and wrestler Fred Blassie in My Breakfast with Blassie (1983).
• The 24th and final episode of the first season of Frasier was entitled "My Coffee With Niles" and involved a long conversation between Frasier and Niles which touched on many topics of their lives and involved Niles recurrently asking the question "Are you happy?"
• In the episode of The Simpsons, "Boy-Scoutz N the Hood", Martin Prince plays an arcade game based on the film.^[1]
• In Waiting for Guffman, Corky St. Clair, played by Christopher Guest, shows off his My Dinner with Andre action figures during the tour of his shop.
• A strip from the comic The Far Side is captioned "My Dinner With Andy".
• The television show Community paid homage to the film (along with Pulp Fiction) in episode 2x19, "Critical Film Studies."

References

1. ^ GameSpy.com - Review

External links

• My Dinner with Andre at the Internet Movie Database
• My Dinner with Andre at AllRovi
• Roger Ebert (1981). "My Dinner with Andre". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19810101/REVIEWS/101010347/1023. 
• Roger Ebert (1999). "My Dinner with Andre". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990613/REVIEWS08/906130301/1023.