Before ‘Gorgeous,’ a ‘Smile’ Worth Remembering

Just as “Sleepless in Seattle” spurred video rentals of “An Affair to Remember,” perhaps the theatrical release of “Drop Dead Gorgeous” will bode equally well for “Smile,” Michael Ritchie’s 1975 satirical comedy set against the backdrop of a small-townteenage beauty pageant in California.

Championed by critics but abandoned by its studio, “Smile” has gotten nowhere near the recognition it deserves (“nor the money,” joked screenwriter Jerry Belson). The film’s buried-treasure status is one that confounds its star, Bruce Dern, who plays glad-handing car dealer and pageant torchbearer “Big Bob” Freelander.

That the film did not find its audience is one of the “huge disappointments” of his career, he said. “I’ve never understood it. Roger Ebert told me a couple of times that it was such a great waste that somebody never re-released it.”

Because both films chronicle pageant preparations and behind-the-scenes skulduggery, comparisons between “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and “Smile” are inevitable. Dern may not be the most impartial of judges, but, he said, “I’ll guarantee you our movie is funnier, darker, sweeter, honest and more real.”

“Smile,” released theatrically by United Artists and now available from MGM / UA Home Video, was inspired by Ritchie’s experience as a pageant judge. Intrigued by what beauty pageants represented in post-Watergate America, he recruited Belson--writer of “The End,” a script Ritchie had admired--to observe the inner workings of an actual pageant.

“Michael brought me up to Santa Rosa and made me do my homework,” Belson recalled. “He dragged me around to all the things these girls had to do, like the Kiwanis Club breakfasts. Every character in the movie is based on someone who was in that town, except for the choreographer [portrayed by Michael Kidd], who is based on me. He has my [cynical] attitude.”

Ritchie set the documentary tone for the film in the audition and casting process. The film was shot in Santa Rosa.

“There were only about eight of us who were actresses,” recalled Annette O’Toole, who made her screen debut as ambitious All-American Miss contestant Miss Anaheim. “Everybody else was a local girl. They gave us forms to fill out as if we were entering a beauty pageant. It asked about special talents, so I wrote down that I did impressions. It never occurred to me that Michael would make me do them, but he did. So I did my dead cockroach and my really bad Groucho Marx. He thought anybody that desperate would be OK in a beauty pageant.”

Veterans and Newcomers and Lots of Spontaneity

Ritchie staged an actual pageant at the local Veterans Administration Armory building. On the last night, townspeople paid to get in (the money was donated to charity) and all the products placed in the film were raffled. To ensure a spontaneous reaction from the cast, Ritchie and Belson withheld the name of the girl who would be crowned the winner.

The impeccably cast ensemble is a seamless mix of veteran character actors and newcomers. Dern had starred in “Silent Running,” another cult favorite, but was perhaps best known as the villain who shot John Wayne in “The Cowboys.”

“I didn’t care how many people they might have gone to before me,” he said. “They paid me very little money for starring in a picture, but you did things in those days if they gave you that opportunity. I wasn’t about to pass on it.”

Barbara Feldon, in a dramatic departure from her signature role as Agent 99 on the TV series “Get Smart,” co-stars as former pageant-winner Brenda DiCarlo, the “mother hen” devoted to her “girls” and the pageant at the expense of her marriage.

“I just knew how to do that role,” Feldon said, laughing. “It was something very much in my middle-class background. There’s a kind of Southern belle who is not even Southern, who is just so chipper and so bright. She dresses a little too young for her age and she’s just a little too delicious to be real. She’s hiding all the hostility and pain under this charming and seemingly warm exterior. I was a little disconcerted how easy it was to be so bitchy. Agent 99 didn’t draw on that.”

Nicholas Pryor plays Andy, Brenda’s increasingly unhinged husband, who, like Kevin McCarthy in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” can’t decide whether it is he or the town that is going crazy.

In addition to O’Toole, look among the contestants for early glimpses of Melanie Griffith and, as Miss Imperial Valley, whose talent is packing a suitcase, Colleen Camp. “Big Daddy” director Dennis Dugan appears as the janitor’s assistant.

“Smile’s” theatrical release was “a disaster,” Ritchie said. “My agent, Sam Cohn, said to me, ‘This is how much money you’re going to make on the film,’ and he wrote a number on a piece of paper. Of course, it turned out to be off by many, many zeros.”

The film was panned by New York critics, who only a week before had seen Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” “They all decided to go bananas for ‘Nashville,’ ” Ritchie said, “and here was a film that appeared to be similar. I don’t find it that way at all, but there you go. They called it a two-bit ‘Nashville.’ ”

How a Little Film Builds a Big Reputation

Validation of a sort came the following fall, when “Smile” was invited to the New York Film Festival. Critics such as John Simon reversed themselves and called it one of the year’s best movies.

“That’s how the film began to gather a reputation,” Ritchie said, “but at that point, the studio wasn’t interested in spending any more money [on it].”

Nearly 25 years later, this “Smile” is undimmed. “Throughout the whole movie, you think it will be this sardonic sendup,” Feldon said, “but the sendup has such an affection to it and such an understanding of human nature.”

Echoed O’Toole, “[After the film was released], I ran into the handful of people who had seen it and who were into beauty pageants. They thought it was fabulous. Then other people would say, ‘Oh, what a sendup.’ I think people read what they want into the film, which shows how well it was done.”

“I didn’t come to the film with the attitude that beauty pageants are an object of scorn and ridicule,” observed Ritchie, “and, for all his cynicism, neither did Jerry. One reason that ‘American Pie’ is a success is that it has a similar attitude. Strip away all the grossness and it really takes teenage rituals very seriously.

“It’s so easy to make fun of pageants, and yet they are enormously popular. They represent a kind of American spirit of patriotism and idealism that can’t be found anywhere else. This was America in 1974, desperately trying to cling to the small-town values currently being eulogized by politicians.

“One of the most memorable moments during filming had nothing to do with the movie, but it also had everything to do with the movie. There was a rumor that President Nixon was going to resign. [On that night] we stopped filming. We were onstage at the auditorium and we wheeled in a TV. Everyone watched it and there was a profound silence. It wasn’t a time for cheering. But there was a feeling that we were really doing something, in fact, that was about what this country had gone through.”