Chairman of the Board (1998)
This is going to sound hard to believe. But it’s all true. Carrot Top was once such a big star in the 90s, he got his own movie. 1998’s Chairman of the Board. It’s his only movie, and there’s no mistaking why. Carrot Top, as you might expect, plays a slacker who has a lot of inventions and somehow starts running a billion-dollar company. His character’s name isn’t Carrot Top, though that wouldn’t have been a stretch for this movie to do it. It’s much worse. His name is Edison. No, really. The movie spends about 90 minutes of Carrot Top just doing bits from his act. Not even the good ones. To say the movie bombed doesn’t do service to the word bomb. It made $300 grand. In 1998 dollars. Put it this way, people have spent more on homes than what this movie made at the box office. The DVD tried to salvage things with some special features in the early days of the format, but it wasn’t enough. Here’s the thing, if you have seen Carrot Top in Vegas, or back in the 90s when he was touring all the time, his show is highly entertaining. So, what went so wrong here? It’s hard to say. But if you lived through this era of the 90s, you remember stand-up comedians were being given TV shows and movies like someone was handing out fliers on a street corner all because of the success of Seinfeld. It’s one of Hollywood’s impulses that get it into trouble. Seinfeld was a show of the moment and was built off its cast and Larry David’s genius. Just because someone is a stand-up, it doesn’t mean their act will translate to a different medium. Carrot Top is one of those. On a stage, interacting with an audience, he’s very good. But give him a script he has to stick to, and try to work his gadgets into that is a mistake. If you were to go on a mission to watch some of these movies where comedians with zero acting experience were given a lead role, Chairman of the Board is a good starting point. It’ll be a long 95 minutes, but there’s some learning to be done from it. Mostly of what happens when you don’t let someone play to their strength. It might be a life lesson for all of us.
