Steve Rossi: Marty Allen and I had a motion picture with Paramount where Sinatra was doing a movie at the time. He asked if I could get Nancy Sinatra into our movie called Last of the Secret Agents. It was Allen & Rossi and Nancy Sinatra.
Marty Allen: The movie was very funny.
Steve Rossi: I don't know. It seemed like everything that we did that I didn't write... didn't make it. I knew what was funny for us. Then you get involved with movies and all of a sudden they think they know more than you
do. The proof of what I'm saying is The Last of the Secret Agents.
Marty Allen: People say they love the
movie! We got a tremendous reaction.
Steve Rossi: We already knew what would work and they wouldn't even take our advice. So, consequently the movie was bad.
Steve Rossi: I felt like if that was going to be the first movie for Allen and Rossi - and we were hot
at the time - I felt that if we were going to do a movie, let's do some stuff out of our act that adapts to it. We got the top writers from The Carol Burnett Show and The Garry Moore Show, but they didn't know shit about writing a movie.
Marty Allen: It's an excellent movie. Very funny.
Steve Rossi: It was made for under a million
dollars, although it grossed, over the years, thirty or forty million
dollars. By rights we should have been kept under contract at Paramount,
but a new regime came in [with] Bob Evans. Howard Koch left and that was
the end of our deal.
Marty
Allen: Every time I have watched it I thought it was funny and not only
that, but it was done very well. Very tasteful.
Steve Rossi: If we had gotten a contract, I never would have allowed other
comedy writers to go in there and say, "This is what you have to do." We weren't in the driver's seat.
3 comments:
Count me in as one of the film's fans.
The first five minutes were good. The rest... well... I couldn't get through the rest.
Faint praise, but that wasn't any worse than Dino's Matt Helm epics.
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