"I shouldn't be allowed to do this! Why did I pick reality? I don't know anything about it!" Albert Brooks, one of cinema's greatest comic minds and director of some of our nation's funniest social experiment pictures (Modern Romance, Lost in America, Defending Your Life) made his feature film debut with the independently produced mockumentary Real Life. Albert Brooks plays "Albert Brooks," a comedian and wannabe documentary filmmaker — and the type of brazenly obnoxious, anxiety-riddled, joy-to-watch chaotic schmuck that would also appear in most of his later films. The premise (a satire of PBS's 1973 An American Family, arguably the first "reality" TV show) is that the fictional Brooks has embedded himself in a family of four, selected from among thousands of applicants by the definitely real National Institute of Human Behavior, in a groundbreaking social experiment where he will film every moment of their daily lives. It goes spectacularly downhill. Brooks's prescient film anticipates the onslaught of television's most degrading genre, the morally bankrupt and grotesque slate of offerings that have poured endlessly from a spigot opened sometime in the '90s. Owing in no small part to another great comic mind, Charles Grodin (as the father in Brooks's guinea pig family), Real Life is still explosively, uncomfortably funny almost 50 years later. - Text courtesy of the Chicago Film Society
 

35mm from Paramount

Preceded by: Real Life "3D" teaser trailer – 3 min – 35mm

A. S. Hamrah writes for a variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Fast Company, and the Criterion Collection. From 2008 to 2016, he worked as a brand and trend analyst for the television industry, and he also produced a documentary feature which was the opening-night film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight 2022. In addition, he has worked as a political pollster, a football cinematographer, and for the director Raúl Ruiz. He lives in New York.