Jaye P. Morgan in The Gong Show Movie (1980)

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Great multitudes of American intellectuals are unaware of the cultural heights scaled by daytime television during the mid-1970s, an ignorance that can be erased with a single enlightening viewing of The Gong Show Movie (1980). Curly-haired, glimmer-eyed gnome Chuck Barris functions as director, writer, and star of The Gong Show Movie. That same Chuck Barris was also the creator and host of TV’s legendary, groundbreaking, and archetypal The Gong Show. Packaged as a talent contest for the talent impaired, Barris’s cathode creation spawned a list of slavering imitators that’s far too long to begin enumerating. The influence of The Gong Show Movie on Hollywood cinema is likewise unlikely, far-reaching, generally under-acknowledged, and unjustly disputed.