Sometimes timing is everything.
Chevy Chase plays an air traffic controller at JFK who gains telekinetic powers after being doused in nuclear waste. That must have been the pitch meeting opener, but…
The film opened on Christmas Day 1981, which ironically – if that’s what irony meant, was just four months after Reagan had fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers for demanding better working conditions and relief from job-related stress.
And here, Chase’s character is a man buckling under work pressure, relationship failures, and the general malaise of modern life.
The timing was almost too on-the-nose. Here’s a comedy about an air traffic controller having a nervous breakdown, released the same season that thousands of real controllers lost their livelihoods for saying the job was, in fact, breaking them down.
Behind the scenes, the production was reportedly a hot mess. Executive producer Doug Kenney, co-founder of National Lampoon and the writer behind Animal House and Caddyshack, died in a cliff fall in Hawaii before filming even began. Chase was nearly electrocuted during a scene and spent weeks in the hospital. His divorce had just been finalized, and he was being sued by Cary Grant for $10 million throughout the entire shoot after calling him a “h0m0” on The Tomorrow Show.
Director Ken Shapiro, who’d helped launch Chase’s career with The Groove Tube, left Hollywood after this and never directed another film.
The film was recut from an R to a PG, which the writers claimed gutted its best laughs. And yet it still pulled in a lukewarm $26 million on an $8 million budget, becoming an HBO daytime staple for latchkey kids throughout the decade.
Chase was still riding his boom, but this was the film that marked a real stumble by Hollywood accounting standards.
Well, before a certain Vacation movie changed all that. -Pop
Modern Problems arrived on Home Video this week in 1982, after a December 25, 1981 theatrical release.