"Lost Roles" is a weekly column exploring "what might have been" in movie and TV comedy as we examine close casting calls, abandoned projects, and other things that never came to be. This week, we're closing out the column after 2+ years by taking a look at bunch of comedians who almost became SNL cast members during the first 20 years of the show's history. The last "Lost Roles" column, tracking near-miss SNL cast members from 1995 to the present, will run next week.
Ever since Chevy Chase and John Belushi each starred in hit movies, Foul Play and Animal House, in the summer of '78, Saturday Night Live [...]
Parks and Recreation has one of the strongest and most eclectic comedy ensembles ever assembled, but as with most shows, the network and the producers looked at a lot of different actresses and actors before deciding on the group they wanted. When the show originally began gearing up for production in 2008, pretty much every other comedic performer in Los Angeles tried out for the show. Here's a collection of known actors who auditioned for Parks and Rec but didn't get the roles they tried out for, including one actress who went on to win an Oscar, three different guys who almost played Ron Swanson, the romantic lead [...]
Lost Roles is a weekly column taking a different comedian, actor, or writer each week and exploring all of their movie and TV projects that almost happened but didn't.
This week, we turn our attention to Michael O'Donoghue, one of the major creative forces behind National Lampoon magazine and Saturday Night Live during the two comedy franchises' 1970s heydays. After leaving his job as SNL's head writer in 1978, O'Donoghue began working on a variety of movie projects, but given the sluggish nature of the film industry and the fact that O'Donoghue's work is often too daring and edgy for mainstream audiences, most of the movies he wrote never [...]
Lost Roles is a weekly column exploring “what might have been” in movie and TV comedy as we take a different actor, writer, or comedian each week and examine the projects they worked on that never made it to the screen.
This week, we're taking a look at the lost works of writer Alan Spencer, creator of the '80s comedy series Sledge Hammer! and, most recently, IFC's short-lived Bullet in the Face. After befriending luminaries like Andy Kaufman and Marty Feldman by sneaking onto movie studios as a teen, Spencer became the youngest-ever creator of a network series (at the time) at age 26 when his crime comedy Sledge Hammer! got [...]
Adapting a popular comedy movie into an animated series aimed at adults rarely works out, but it's still something Hollywood has been trying after decades of failed projects. In the 80s and 90s, there was a trend towards turning movies into Saturday morning cartoons, with Ghostbusters, The Mask, and Beetlejuice, amongst countless others, serving as the basis for successful kids shows. But when it comes to adult series, these animated adaptations always fail, with cartoon versions of Spaceballs, Clerks, Friday, and most recently, Napoleon Dynamite all being quickly canceled, all in 13 episodes or less. Despite the lack of success in the field, numerous comedy writers and studios have [...]
