Passings #1: Howard Hesseman, TunnelVision (1976) by Kymm Zuckert

“We have listened to four days of your prepared testimony, and not once have you attempted to defend the content of your programming, or the, um, questionable advertising that you accept from, er, questionable advertisers. Now, in fact, nowhere have you acknowledged the facts which point to how your free television, as you call it, have corrupted this country’s youth, disrupted the social order, and left the other four networks with practically no viewers at all!”

Last year, when I was doing my 365 Films in 365 Days Project, I started doing little tributes when people died. I would watch and review a film of the decedent, preferably one that I had never seen before like O’Hara‘s Wife for Ed Asner, although sometimes it would be a film that I just adored and hadn’t seen in years, like Heaven Can Wait for Charles Grodin.

Well, there were so many deaths in January 2022, that I decided to do a subsection of these reviews, and I’m calling it Passings.

I am not doing them in order of said passing, and thus am starting with the most recent, Howard Hesseman, who died last week. Now, he didn’t do tons of films, mostly being a television star on WKRP in Cincinnati and Head of the Class, so there wasn’t masses to choose from, and obviously I have seen This is Spinal Tap one million times, but then I came across this little number on IMDb. 

Back in the olden days of the 1970s when I was a child, there was a great yearly film festival here in Los Angeles called Filmex. My parents would go to it every year, and they would always take me, because my movie going was never censored, so I saw some crazy ass things, one of which was TunnelVision. 

Yes, I know I’ve seen this before, but I saw it when I was 11 years old and I literally remembered one thing about it, which was a commercial where there’s a bishop or a cardinal who undresses and is a naked lady and then she walks across the screen and supertitle is something like “The New Church,” so I think this fits in just fine with the idea of seeing something new. 

TunnelVision, if it was ever seen by anyone outside of the festival circuit, is pretty much entirely forgotten. It’s similarity to the better known Groove Tube from two years earlier probably didn’t help, but what a cast of future stars! 

SCTV also debuted in 1976, and the first episode of SNL I saw was in 1977, so I did not know from Chevy Chase (also in The Groove Tube), John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Lorraine Newman, Al Franken or Tom Davis, let alone Betty Thomas, Ron Silver (making his debut), or even the man in question, the man of the hour, Howard Hesseman, two years before Dr. Johnny Fever.

The DVD of this film is out of print and thus usuriously priced in the secondhand market, but it’s also available on YouTube for free, so I appreciate the fact that nobody cares enough to take it off the service.

The film takes place in the faaaaar off future of 1985, in Washington, D.C., where a senate committee is trying to shut down TunnelVision, an uncensored TV station that was allowed to go on the air after a Supreme Court decision about freedom of speech meaning dirty TV is A-OK. 

Hilariously, Howard Hesseman, in a very un-Johnny Fever turn, plays the senator in charge of this committee, claiming that there are more murders, burglaries, and people quitting their jobs just to stay home and watch the station, and that America has become a nation of shut-ins. 

They decide to watch a representative day of programming, which is, of course, the movie. 

There’s a commercial for a correspondence course in proctology, Ron Silver teaching a Spanish lesson with some really aggressively rolled r’s, a blindfolded chef trying to tell the difference between margarine and reconstituted herring (he keeps staggering through the rest of the film, blindfolded, which is very funny, and I had a flash of memory of the bit), a game show where people answer questions about horrible things they have done in order to win money (with a naked Betty Thomas and Joe Flaherty in a dress), a primal scream telethon, a sitcom about a disgusting family that I’m pretty sure Quentin Tarantino saw before writing the Rodney Dangerfield scene in Natural Born Killers, and, of course, the naked lady archbishop that remained in my memory for lo these 46 years, but the tagline is actually, “Convert. The church is changing.”

This is the kind of movie where, if a sketch isn’t working, it’ll be over soon enough and on to the next one. The funniest ones are the shortest ones, particularly the tiny promos of upcoming shows, which are little diamonds. Of course, there is some language used that wouldn’t fly today, but it’s not hard to remember that it is a product of its time, not with those lapels. 

All in all, it’s quite a time capsule, sometimes pretty funny, and Howard Hesseman actually has the biggest role in the film, as they keep coming back to the senate chamber, so it unexpectedly turned out to be a great tribute to a great talent. You’ll be missed, sir. Rest well. 

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog