Bill Cosby's Crimes Against Cinema

Now that Bill Cosby has been voted out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, I thought it might be interesting to briefly comment on some of his most "memorable" films. I do not mean to be flippant about the whole subject or to devalue (with my blog title) the importance of the testimony of women against Cosby. To the contrary, I think his films offer an interesting counterpoint to the narrative that Cosby successfully hid behind the facade of his "perfect dad" as seen on The Cosby Show or the fun-loving, Pied-Piper-like character he embodied for Coca-Cola and Jello ads. If we had only paid attention, we would have seen this awful man on full display in some of his most cynical and heartless cinematic offerings.

Let's start with the easy target. Leonard Part 6 is famous as an example of a well-funded movie gone horribly wrong, a disaster of a film that even Cosby urged people not to see.  The film critic for the Washington Post said the best thing about the movie is that "we didn't have to see Parts 1-5." The movie was partly funded by Coca-Cola, so there's plenty of product placement, including Cosby drinking a Coke.

This kind of product placement gets to the heart of what I mean about these bad movies revealing something about Cosby's character. Anybody can make a bad movie, but to be the man behind such a soulless, awful movie clearly designed (and miserably executed) to separate moviegoers from their money says something about the inner workings of that man. This is not what art should be about.

If you think Leonard Part 6 is low-hanging fruit, let me remind you of a little turd-basket called Ghost Dad, which came out just a few years later, as if Cosby hadn't learned his lesson. Film critic Roger Ebert, while naively wondering how someone like Cosby gets involved with a mess like this, called it a "desperately unfunny film."  Maybe we overestimated and overvalued Cosby's funniness, because he was good at putting together marginally quality TV like The Cosby Show and Fat Albert. But that's TV. TV proves nothing.

This is an original photo of a TV. Maybe somebody
watched "Fat Albert" on it.

I have a personal grudge against Bill Cosby for inflicting Ghost Dad upon the world. When the film came out, I was working at a summer camp. This was long before the Web as we know it, and the summer-camp staff lived and worked in relative isolation during the week -- very little TV or reading of newspapers. We would go into town on the weekend and see whatever movie seemed best considering the limited viewing times. (This was back when mid-size towns like San Marcos, Texas, had a single theater with maybe 4 movie screens.)  Mostly it was nice just to sip iced drinks in the cool of the air-conditioning, but we tried to pick entertaining films.

So in addition to a lot of other bad films (such as Lifeforce), this method of blindly picking films led to Ghost Dad one Saturday. I wasted my $4 to see Bill Cosby do slapstick as a ghost trying to continue to take care of his kids (or something). I remember it being awful, and I remember being annoyed that I had spent my hard-earned cash on this dreck while wasting precious Saturday off-time. I never blamed director Sidney Poitier for this, though god knows what he was thinking. I blamed Bill Cosby. I blamed him for not being funny and for thinking we would fall for this crap. He's the one we trusted, just based on those ads for products we knew were good (though this was also just a few years after Coca-Cola had its PR disaster with New Coke) and who had been behind Fat Albert, which we had all liked pretty well. What the hell was this crap? The Cosby Show didn't matter that much to me as an older teenager at the time, but I could see the man was an icon. Why was he selling us movies like this? 

This is an original picture of a Diet Coke and muffaletta in New Orleans,
Bill Cosby spent years as the spokesperson for Coca-Cola and Jello. He also shilled for Kodak and Texas Instruments.