Another Nice Mess was conceived as an aggressively topical 1972 political farce, recasting President Richard Nixon as the blustering Oliver Hardy figure and Vice President Spiro Agnew as the foolish Stan Laurel counterpart. Rich Little played Nixon and Herb Voland played Agnew, while Bob Einstein—later famous as Super Dave Osborne—wrote and directed. The film was produced by Tom Smothers and Jonathan Haze, with a reported budget somewhere between $250,000 and $1 million, a considerable gamble for a deliberately absurd comedy built around two highly controversial real-life politicians. Its Laurel-and-Hardy imitation and Nixon-era satire failed to find an audience: the film earned only about $30,000 at the box office. The commercial disaster became so embarrassing that Smothers later said bluntly, "It was a terrible film," while Haze summarized the production as "Another Nice Mess was a mess." Smothers then effectively buried the picture for approximately 40 years, keeping it from ordinary circulation and turning an obscure flop into an unusual case of a producer suppressing his own film rather than attempting to revive or exploit it. The episode is less a conventional censorship scandal than a striking example of personal embarrassment and financial failure determining a movie's afterlife.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Tom Smothers Buried His Failed Nixon Comedy for Four Decades
Another Nice Mess / 1970s
Another Nice Mess was conceived as an aggressively topical 1972 political farce, recasting President Richard Nixon as the blustering Oliver Hardy figure and Vice President Spiro Agnew as the foolish Stan Laurel counterpart. Rich Little played Nixon and Herb Voland played Agnew, while Bob Einstein—later famous as Super Dave Osborne—wrote and directed. The film was produced by Tom Smothers and Jonathan Haze, with a reported budget somewhere between $250,000 and $1 million, a considerable gamble for a deliberately absurd comedy built around two highly controversial real-life politicians. Its Laurel-and-Hardy imitation and Nixon-era satire failed to find an audience: the film earned only about $30,000 at the box office. The commercial disaster became so embarrassing that Smothers later said bluntly, "It was a terrible film," while Haze summarized the production as "Another Nice Mess was a mess." Smothers then effectively buried the picture for approximately 40 years, keeping it from ordinary circulation and turning an obscure flop into an unusual case of a producer suppressing his own film rather than attempting to revive or exploit it. The episode is less a conventional censorship scandal than a striking example of personal embarrassment and financial failure determining a movie's afterlife.
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