Fran Drescher Movies

This lively musical comedy pays tribute to the birth of rock & roll in the late 1950s and the instrumental role played by disc jockey Alan Freed who helped bring the new sound into vogue. Much of the story centers on the daring deejay's attempts to put on the very first live rock & roll stage show at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn. To do this he must overcome the protests of concerned and angry parents, conservatives, and local police. Several performers of the era appear in the film including Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This two-hour TV entertainment special takes a surface skim (95 minutes minus commercials and promos) over the history of CBS, quickly skipping past decades of CBS radio to concentrate on CBS television from the late '40s to the present. It features more than a dozen hosts (Adam Arkin, Ed Bradley, Carol Burnett, David Copperfield, Roma Downey, Fran Drescher, Don Johnson, Angela Lansbury, David Letterman, Cheech Marin, Mary Tyler Moore, Dan Rather, Della Reese, Ray Romano, Jane Seymour) introducing a parade of primetime clips covering a variety of shows, events, and people -- Ed Sullivan, The Carol Burnette Show, 60 Minutes (Mike Wallace interviewing Barbra Streisand), Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Edward R. Murrow (his oft-seen editorial on Joe McCarthy), I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, The Waltons, Dan Rather reporting from Vietnam, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Green Acres, Dallas, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, M*A*S*H, The Andy Griffith Show, Murphy Brown, the JFK assassination, and more -- with reminiscences from Tom and Dick Smothers, David Letterman (on Ed Sullivan), Larry Hagman (on "Who shot J.R.?"), Alan Alda, Ron Howard, Walter Cronkite, and others. At 95 minutes, these nostalgic nods, truncated tributes, and familiar faces might leave many viewers yearning for an archeological dig through the little-seen rarities and antiquities buried in the Museum of Television & Radio collection while waiting for the major networks to cover broadcasting history in depth. Premiered May 20, 1998 on CBS. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

In this campy, nostalgic comedy based on a popular TV series from the early '60s, the two bungling cops Toody and Muldoon are assigned to guard a key witness who is planning to testify against a crime lord. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Chaos reigns in the Catskills in this low-budget teen comedy. Kavell (Michael Lembeck) and Bergman (Philip Casnoff) are college students who spend their summers working in the dining hall at Camp Oskemo, an upstate New York summer camp where they're the senior waiters. Serving food to bratty children doesn't interest them nearly as much as trying to make time with the female counselors at the camp, among them pretty but chaste Vicki (Lisa Shure) and attractive but significantly less virginal Evie (Fran Drescher). Kavell and Bergman also wage an annual war against the junior waiters with the help of deranged server Grossman (Dennis Quaid), but their real nemesis is Wallman (David Huddleston), the owner of the camp who makes no secret of his dislike for the waiters. Over the course of one eventful summer, Kavell, Bergman and their fellow food slingers dose the entire camp with amphetamines, taint the Kosher meals with pork, screen pornographic movies during Parent's Weekend, run a tank through the campgrounds and destroy the waiter's housing and most of what surrounds it. Hilarity, or something like it, ensues. While seemingly influenced by Meatballs, Gorp was actually shot at roughly the same time as Bill Murray's summer camp vehicle, though it was released nine months later. Director Joe Ruben later went on to better things, including True Believer, Sleeping With The Enemy and The Forgotten. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In this film by director Francis Ford Coppola, Robin Williams stars as Jack, a boy who is growing normally, but at many times the normal rate. In a bizarre flashback, we see that he was born when his mother was only ten weeks pregnant. Kept out of school for years, the neighborhood children consider him a freak, and generally avoid him. He is finally required to go to public school, and we catch up to him as he enters the fourth grade for the first time, a 10-year-old boy who appears to be a fully grown man in his 40s. His classmates tease him mercilessly until they begin to see the advantages of having him around. He must also have some grown-up feelings to go along with his grown-up body, because he asks his teacher out for a date. When she refuses him, he goes off into town and gets into adult-type trouble as he courts nightclub denizen Dolores Durante (Fran Drescher) over the objections of her boyfriend. Teacher Lawrence Woodruff (Bill Cosby) tries (with some success) to help Jack cope with his situation. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Bull (Richard Moll) hopes to express his love of youngsters by entering a children's book contest. Unfortunately, the judges reject his efforts as being too violent--and profane--for youthful consumption, leading Bull to dash out of the courtroom and shamefully squirrel himself away in a museum. Meanwhile, Dan is confused to the point of madness when he dates a schizophrenic client named Miriam (played by a pre-stardom Fran Drescher). Watch for Joe Alaskey, the post-Mel Blanc voice for cartoon stars Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, in a supporting role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime was a sprawling fictional account of American manners and mores in the years between 1900 and 1913. Among the mosaic of colorful factual and fictional characters in the novel were escape artist Harry Houdini and radical Emma Goldman. Both characters are all but eliminated in the film version, which only concentrates on three of Doctorow's many plot threads: The story of an immigrant artist (Mandy Patinkin) who becomes a movie director; the saga of "Gibson Girl" Evelyn Nesbit Shaw (Elizabeth McGovern), for whose sake playboy Harry K. Thaw (Robert Joy); kills architect Stanford White (Norman Mailer) and a lone black man's (Howard Rollins Jr.) quest for justice when his car is destroyed by a racist fire chief (Kenneth McMillan). This last subplot consumes most of the film's running time, to the overall detriment of the pacing. There are also several scenes involving an unnamed upper-middle-class family (headed by James Olson and Mary Steenburgen) who are evidently meant to be the audience's eyes and ears, but are frankly not terribly interesting. Back in 1981, Ragtime was given plenty of press coverage as the "comeback" picture for James Cagney, after twenty years in retirement. The problem is that Cagney's character (a police commissioner) isn't in the book, and his inclusion not only throws the story off balance, but necessitates the removal of several potentially interesting characters and events. Another detriment is the gratuitous (and illogical) nudity in the Evelyn Nesbit scenes, which earned the film its "R" rating. An ornate misfire, Ragtime is of interest today only for its remarkable cast of veterans and stars-to-be, including Pat O'Brien and Eloise O'Brien, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Allen, Moses Gunn, Jeff Daniels and Fran Drescher. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

John Travolta graduated from minor celebrity to superstar with Saturday Night Fever. Travolta plays Tony Manero, a Brooklyn paint-store clerk who'd give anything to break out of his dead-end existence. In life, Tony is a peasant; on the disco dance floor, he's a king. As the soundtrack plays one Bee Gees hit after another (including "Stayin' Alive"), we watch white-suited Tony strut his stuff amidst flashing lights and sweaty, undulating bodies. Tony's class aspirations are mirrored in his relationship with his dance partner, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), a secretary eager to move into the glamorous world of Manhattan. Saturday Night Fever's huge success grew meteorically thanks to the towering popularity of its soundtrack; during the first half of 1978, when the movie's disco songs saturated the singles charts up to four at a time, it was no longer clear whether the hit movie was feeding the hit songs or the hit songs were feeding the hit movie. This crossover between music and movies set the pace for many movies to come, as it also marked the rise and fall of 1970s disco culture. Two versions of this film exist: the original R-rated version and a PG version, edited down to more "family-friendly" fare and fed to the public with the tagline, "Because we want everyone to see John Travolta's performance." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Notable as an early effort from renowned horror filmmaker Wes Craven, this made-for-TV occult thriller was loosely adapted from a novel by Lois Duncan. Star Linda Blair -- whose film career had taken a detour into TV-movie territory after her legendary bow in The Exorcist -- returns to the demon-possession genre as a teenager who can't seem to convince her parents that her visiting southern-belle cousin (Lee Purcell) is an evil witch. Purcell's diabolical meddling seems focused entirely on the innocent Blair, who loses both her prize horse and her boyfriend to the scheming sorceress before the rest of the family catches on. Though Craven's well-known extremism is curbed by the limitations of television, his talent at generating high-intensity suspense is still evident, making this a modestly entertaining horror item. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Another "get even with Hollywood" satire in the tradition of SOB and Movers and Shakers, The Big Picture is an elongated inside joke complete with un-billed celebrity cameos. In this first feature-film directorial effort by actor/writer Christopher Guest, Kevin Bacon plays a "boy wonder" director whose willingness to compromise his ideals allows him to keep afloat in Tinseltown. Bacon's corruption begins when his first Hollywood project, a black-and-white experimental film about an over-40 menage a trois, is distorted beyond recognition into a color, big-budget "youth trip". Bacon hasn't really sold out; he's merely waiting to accrue enough industry clout to strike back at the Philistines in charge. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Nasal-voiced comic actress Fran Drescher, she of the braying laugh and garish bargain-basement wardrobe, was both star and co-creator (with her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson) of the long-running CBS sitcom The Nanny. Debuting November 3, 1993, the series cast Drescher as Fran Fine, a middle-class Jewish girl from Queens who is somewhat improbably hired by stuffy British-born theatrical agent Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy) to be the nanny for his three motherless children: shy Maggie (Nicholle Tom), wheeler-dealer Brighton (Benjamin Salisbury), and button-cute Grace (Madeline Zima). Comfortably installed in Maxwell's posh Manhattan town house, the healthily vulgar and outspoken Fran immediately ran afoul of snooty butler, Niles (Daniel Davis), who despite his forbidding demeanor was a softie at heart -- and who infinitely preferred Fran's company to that of Maxwell's overbearing business partner Chastity Claire "C.C." Babcock (Laura Lane). Also in the cast were Renee Taylor as Fran's mother, Sylvia Fine, who considered the day wasted that she didn't harass her daughter over her unmarried status; Ann Morgan Guilbert as Fran's earthy grandmother Yetta; and Rachel Chagall as our heroine's best friend, Val Toriallo. Having set her cap for the widowed Maxwell Sheffield, C.C. rightly perceived Fran as her rival, though Maxwell himself did not glom on to the fact that he was in love with Fran until the series was several seasons old. Even then, he balked at admitting his ardor and refused to pop the question, which sent Fran into an emotional downward spiral and into the arms of several lesser gentlemen. Finally, at the end of the series' fifth season, Fran and Maxwell were wed, whereupon Fran adopted her former boss' children. Eventually she became pregnant herself, giving birth to twins in the series' final episode (number 146). Meanwhile, the "hate-hate" relationship between Niles and C.C. took a surprising turn, with the warring couple ending up in bed together! After six successful seasons, The Nanny ended its CBS run on June 23, 1999. Some five years later -- December 6, 2004 -- the original cast was reassembled for The Nanny Reunion, a special broadcast consisting largely of "bloopers" from the old series. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Season one of The Nanny begins as the cheerfully abrasive Fran Fine (Fran Drescher) is fired from her job at her ex-fiancé's bridal store in Queens. Taking a new job selling cosmetics door to door, Fran ends up in the foyer of the lavish Manhattan town house owned by British-born Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy). Mistaking Fran as an applicant for the job of nanny, Sheffield's haughty butler, Niles (Daniel Davis), escorts our overwhelmed heroine into the house -- and before you can say "Oy gevalt!," Fran has accepted the nanny position, tackling the not inconsiderable task of caring for Maxwell's children: 14-year-old Maggie (Nicholle Tom), ten-year-old Brighton (Benjamin Salisbury), and six-year-old Grace (Madeline Zima). Although both Maxwell and Niles are aghast at Fran's manners -- or lack of same -- Niles would rather have Fran in the house than Maxwell's bitchy, predatory business partner C.C. Babcock (Laura Lane). Quickly establishing the series' predilection for guest stars, season one of The Nanny finds Cloris Leachman cast as Maxwell's former governess in the episode "The Nanny-in-Law," Andy Dick in a dual role in "Maggie the Model," Rita Moreno as the title character in "The Gym Teacher," and even Fran Drescher's real-life mother, Sylvia Drescher, who shows up in family home movies in "I Don't Remember Mama." Also, allowing for the fact that Maxwell Sheffield is a major showbiz mover-and-shaker, a handful of celebrities appear as themselves during The Nanny's maiden season, among them Carol Channing and Patti LaBelle. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide