
Real Life. 1979. USA. Directed by Albert Brooks. Screenplay by Brooks, Monica Johnson, Harry Shearer. With Brooks, Charles Grodin, Frances Lee McCain, J. A. Preston, Matthew Tobin. DCP. 99 min.
After directing short films for Saturday Night Live and acting in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), comedian Albert Brooks started a remarkable career as a film director—complete with congratulatory long-distance phone calls from Stanley Kubrick—with Real Life, in which he plays a documentary filmmaker obsessed with finding the perfect average American family and capturing their life for one full year. A predecessor to Nathan Fielder’s work around reality TV, Brooks’s film is one of the most innovative, hilarious comedies of the decade, its relevance and comic effect still undeniable today.