A healthy bundle of nine titles came in from Japan today, including a trio of customer requests: Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence,” Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours,” and Hal Ashby’s Rolling Stones concert film “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Among the restocks were a trio of Woody Allen comedies (“Everyone Says I Love You,” “Mighty Aphrodite,” and “Small Time Crooks”) plus David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” Abraham Polonsky’s “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” and the Monty Python sketch film “And Now for Something Completely Different.”
Initially conceived by Playboy UK’s Victor Lownes as a way to introduce the Monty Python troupe to American audiences, “And Now for Something Completly Different”‘s production consisted of reshooting many of the “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” show’s sketches on film (the sketches’ interiors had been shot on video). Due to the project’s miniscule budget of £80,000 the movie’s production was done inside an abandoned dairy instead of a soundstage. Alas, the film initially failed to have its intended effect, only succeeding in America when re-released two years later after “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” had begun airing in the United States on PBS.