A narrative feature telling the story of comedy duo the Smothers Brothers and their fight with network CBS of content on their 1960s variety series is being developed at Imagine Entertainment.
Based on the 2009 book Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by David Bianculli, the film will center on Tom and Dick Smothers three-season comedy-variety series, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and their effort to put more socially relevant material onto the air in the face of network opposition.
The writing team behind USA’s series Necessary Roughness, Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro, and Dan Patterson will be handling the screenplay duties. No director has been named to the film yet.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour started life on CBS as a mid-season replacement series in the early months of 1967. It was scheduled opposite Bonanza on NBC. The western had been a perennial ratings powerhouse for years, and there wasn’t much hope that the series was going to last to a second season. But the Smothers Brothers’ younger skewing humor and the more contemporary music guests they booked onto the show helped to draw an audience that was never going to watch the older, more staid and conservative Bonanza.
And while CBS was glad that the show was pulling an audience, they were often not thrilled with jokes that referenced, however obliquely, drugs, the Vietnam War or a multitude of other socially relevant subjects. The struggles really started to build through the production of the show’s second and third seasons with disagreements over having folk singer Pete Seeger on as a guest to perform his anti-Vietnam tune “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy,” comedian David Steinberg’s satirical “Sermonette” monologues and a performance by Harry Belafonte of the song “Lord, Don’t Stop the Carnival” using news footage of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a backdrop.
Even after the network pulled the plug on the show, the Smothers would sue the network over their treatment. Their Breach of Contract suit proved successful and in 1973 CBS was ordered to pay the Brothers $776,300. Ironically, the show won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy, Variety or Music show after it’s cancellation.
The Smothers Brothers struggle with CBS was previously the subject of the 2002 documentary Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
