BEING NOT ALL THERE

BEING THERE (1979)
dir: Hal Ashby

BEING NOT ALL THERE
MAD #218, October 1980
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

Chance (Peter Sellers) is a gardener for an old man (we're not sure what he does) who's spent his whole life doing nothing but watching TV.

After the old man dies, the maid Louise (Ruth Attaway) seeks employment elsewhere, leaving him there all alone, until he's evicted, and he's sent out into the real world to fend for himself, though he's never set foot outside the house.

He's hit by the car of Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) who's the wife of a rich and powerful politician.

He watches TV in the car and far the longest time I wondered what it was. I finally found it. It was shown in theaters before Ashby's The Last Detail. (warning: it may not have been considered racist in 1974 but is in 2020.)

(Note Pink Panther in a few panels, referring to actor Peter Sellers' role in the Pink Panther franchise.)


Eve feels responsible for wounding Chance's leg and allows him to stay at her house and be looked after by Dr. Allenby (Richard Dysart).

He befriends her husband Ben (Melvyn Douglas), who mistakes his simple demeanor for genius. He tells the president what he thinks and the president thinks he's a genius too. He's talking about gardening, everyone else thinks it's a metaphor, and he becomes an overnight sensation.

Eve seeks love outside her marriage and goes to Chance thinking he knows what he's doing. He copies what he sees on TV and she thinks it's advanced sexual technique.

(Fred Silverman was head of NBC at the time and it was big news that under him the network had its lowest ratings ever).

Ben has died of old age and Chance is now the president (Jack Warden)'s closest advisor. In MAD's version, his recommendation of Preparation H from a TV commercial is mistaken by the President as dropping the H-Bomb.

Sellers reportedly didn't like that Ashby added a blooper reel to the end credits since this was the first film he did that wasn't slapstick and he felt it kept he and the film from being taken seriously.
UPDATE:
For cover of Mexican/Latin American version of MAD. I'm surprised the movie was popular enough to do a version of here let alone there. I think this is of that, there were no winter or delivery scenes in it, but that guy couldn't be anyone else.