The First Nudie Musical

I was recently looking through the movies that are about to leave Tubi, and among them was one that I had seen somebody mention on one of the movie boards that replaced the old TCM boards: The First Nudie Musical. Since it's leaving at the end of the month, I made a point to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here and give you a chance to catch it too.

I was surprised to see the name Cindy Williams in the opening credits; this was made just before Laverne and Shirley became a hit. She plays Rosie, the secretary to Harry Schechter (Stephen Nathan). Schechter is the boss of a Hollywood studio, albeit one that's fallen on hard times, no pun intended. Harry's dad had been the studio head back in the golden days of Hollywood, and Harry has continued in Dad's footsteps, although much less profitable. In fact, Harry has had to resort to making porn to keep the studio afloat, and not telling his dad about it.

The suits inform Harry that the studio is about to go broke unless it can turn a profit on a film. When Rosie walks into the meeting and starts doing a bit of dancing, it gives Harry an idea: make the first nudie musical, in the style of all those past musicals Busby Berkeley or the Freed Unit might have done a generation or two prior. Of course, this is just a pitch at first; they don't have a script or cast, and certainly don't have any songs or choreography. But the suits agree to the idea, with a couple of caveats. Harry has to put the studio up as collateral, and has to get the movie made in two weeks, which is a quick turnaround even for the adult film industry.

Oh, there's one other catch, which is that to save money, one of the suits informs Harry that he's got a nephew, John Smithee (Bruce Kimmel), who is a budding film director, and he'll do the movie for cheap! Needless to say, Harry discovers that John is thoroughly unsuited to make any sort of movie, let alone an adult film, and one of the plot strands is a running joke about how to get John away from the director's chair so that the real action can happen.

Well, to be honest, most of the plot strands are little more than tropes, around which, well, we get the putative numbers from what would be a nudie musical. There's the casting, with an innocent Esther Blodgett type coming in from the Midwest; the adult actress who's been through one too many adult films; all the problems that can go on while trying to make a movie or a stage musical; and so on. That, and the nudity, since they are after all making a nudie musical.

So, of course, The First Nudie Musical is a movie that would be decidedly NSFW. That having been said, much of the movie disproportionately has the tone of what sort of musical you'd make if Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney said, "Hey, let's put on a show!", only at a nudist colony instead of their backyard, and with consenting adults who have a raunchy sense of humor. It's more full-frontal nudity combined with bad sex jokes than it is the sort of simulation of sex you'll see if you watch Boogie Nights. There is, however, one scene where the joke is that they have to bring in an actor who had "keep it up" through multiple takes, but the filming angle we get is from the ribcage up. So breasts, and a bad simulation of sex (although I think that's part of the joke).

The First Nudie Musical is also clearly not going to be a movie for everyone. But as I wrote when I blogged about Booty Call, I have the sort of sense of humor where something that's so off-the-wall combined with raunchy works for me. Objectively, the movie is poorly acted and has an extremely low-budget look (although I think that latter is also a deliberate choice). But if you're in the right mood, it's a lot of fun.