Along with being one of the most inventive, unconventional comedians of the last 50 years, Albert Brooks has written, directed and starred in comedies that have a tendency to be way ahead of their time. His 1985 classic Lost in America lampooned baby-boomer nostalgia and yuppie conformity a couple of years before both those things became tiresome cultural trends. A few years before, in 1981, he dropped Modern Romance, a nakedly neurotic anti-romcom whose title has become a descriptor for those quirky, relatable relationship dramedies that have been an arthouse staple ever since mumblecore became a thing. (Before she saved the box office by directing Barbie, Greta Gerwig wrote and/or starred in several of those low-budget, cringe-filled lovefests.) But Brooks’ most eerily prescient film also happens to be one of my favorite comedies (“balls-out funny,” I once called it): His 1979 debut Real Life. It’s the most hilariously accurate sendup of reality television ever made—and it happened years before reality TV showed up.
Real Life is actually a parody of An American Family, the landmark 1973 PBS docuseries about an upper-middle class California clan that is largely considered to be the first instance of reality television. This mockumentary has Brooks starring as himself—an exaggerated, self-centered version of himself—a comedian and filmmaker who heads to Phoenix with a production crew to do his own doc about a suburban fam. “We want the greatest show of all: life!” he proudly exclaims to a Phoenix audience in the movie’s opening minutes.
The family he’ll be tailing is the Yeagers, a bland brood led by timid veterinarian Warren (a deadpan Charles Grodin) and his fed-up wife Jeannette (Gremlins mom Frances Lee McCain). Brooks uses “a whole new generation of motion picture equipment” to stealthily capture this family on film, including wall cams that resemble small mirrors and cameramen wearing gigantic camera helmets that look like bidets. “Only six of these cameras were ever made,” Brooks tells the viewing audience. “Only five of them ever worked. We have four of those.”
Although Brooks claims he wants to capture these people in their natural element without any interference, he nevertheless moves in across the street from them, keeping tabs and making sure their every move is documented. It isn’t long before he inserts himself in their everyday lives. He ratchets up these folks’ mundane existence by orchestrating scenes like Jeannette’s trip to the gynecologist and Warren doing surgery on a show horse. Yeah, both of those don’t go well.
Brooks, along with his longtime writing partner Monica Johnson and comedian/SNL alum/mockumentary vet Harry Shearer (who plays one of the bidet-wearing cameramen), gives us a subtly savvy, razor-sharp spoof of media-manipulated cinéma vérité, with Brooks playing an egomaniacal, showbiz-obsessed God. He assumes the role of a conceited, clueless filmmaker with delicious, deluded gusto, practically oblivious to the stress, pressure and overall dysfunction he literally brings to this family’s doorstep. At one point in Real Life, Brooks briefly bonds with Jeannette, selfishly striking up a sexual tension that’s more suited for a soap opera than a documentary.
Real Life eventually becomes less about following an actual family and more about Brooks trying to come up with an entertaining movie. Halfway through, he brings out swelling orchestral music and slo-mo shots to show the family having fun around the city (“a chance to show the French what a montage was all about,” Brooks says in voiceover). All this culminates in a side-splitting, scorched-earth finale that had me gasping for air the first time I saw it.
Some critics got it, and some didn’t. Siskel and Ebert disagreed, with Roger giving it one star (“the movie… gets most of its laughs in the first 10 minutes, slides into a long middle stretch of repetitive situations and ends on a note of embarrassing hysteria”) and Gene coming with a three-and-a-half-star rave (“Admittedly, documentary filmmaking doesn’t sound like the greatest subject to be satirized, but Real Life is full of undeniable laughs”). As reality TV began blowing up in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and over-the-top media burlesques like The Truman Show and EDtv were there to comment on the genre’s impending oversaturation, people started coming around to Real Life’s skewering of allegedly honest, fly-on-the-wall storytelling on both the big and small screen. Critic Peter Rainer once wrote, “The movie got into the whacked-out love/hate relationship we have with television—and the absurdity of making the ‘real’ real.”
Basically a feature-length version of those absurd but straight-faced, media-lacerating shorts Brooks did during the first season of Saturday Night Live, Real Life practically predicted how reality TV would spend decades attempting to get drama out of common folk (and continues to do to this day), creating storylines and scenarios out of thin air to show what happens when, to quote that famous opening spiel from MTV’s The Real World, people stop being polite and start getting real. Thankfully, Real Life also kept it real funny.
Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.