A Session with the Committee

Plot synopsis:
The movie follows a man (Paul Jones) who is unnamed. The movie starts out with the central character in a car with a man (Tom Kempinski) who just picked him up. The victim talks to him, but he's uninterested. The victim decides to pull over because he doesn't like the sound of the engine. While he's looking under the bonnet of the car the central character slams the bonnet down on his head several times, decapitating him in the process. The central character eventually sews the head back on, and the victim wakes up. The central character tells him he doesn't want to drive anymore that day and to leave without him.
A few years later the central character is called on to be part of a committee, groups that supposedly keep the system running but really don't do much of anything. He feels paranoid that the committee was called on account of him, and runs into the victim while there, who doesn't seem to remember him.
The central character talks about this with a man listed as 'The committee director' (Robert Langdon Lloyd) in the credits. This conversation lasts for the duration of the movie, and features most of the music Pink Floyd wrote for the film.

Tags: comedy, satire

Review:
Classic concert film from hilarious, influential comedy troupe!. This little-known film is actually an invaluable slice of classic  comedy from one of the more influential comedy troupes of recent times,  the Committee. Founded by a handful of ex-Second City  writer/director/actors in San Francisco in the '60s, it was a very  risk-taking, political comedy group. They were definitely the hippest  comedy theatre on the West Coast, attracting such future stars as  Richard Dreyfuss and Rob Reiner, as teens, to their shows. The more  famous alumni include Peter Bonerz (from "The Bob Newhart Show," now a  busy TV director of such shows as "Friends"), Howard Hesseman (Dr.  Johnny Fever from "WKRP In Cincinatti," "Head of the Class," "Soap"),  Carl Gottlieb (who wrote "Jaws" and co-wrote and appeared in "The  Jerk"), Avery Schreiber (the comedy team "Burns & Schreiber," "My  Mother the Car"), Garry Goodrow ("Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," "National  Lampoon's Lemmings," "The National Lampoon Radio Hour"), Larry Hankin  (the Trucker in "The Sure Thing," a grumpy neighbor on "Friends"), John  Brent ("Catch 22," "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"), and improv guru Del  Close (who taught John Belushi, Chris Farley, & others at Improv  Olympic & Second City). The troupe also commonly appeared on the famed  "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and had parts in the cult classic  "Billy Jack." This film is a collection of classic skits. Some are a  bit dated (draft-dodging the Viet Nam War, anyone? Pot smoking cops,  anyone?), but it is still very funny and historically valuable. Plus,  Cheech & Chong apparently stole much of the Committee's then-outrageous  drug humor to form the basis of their act! Great '60s laughs!. a comic time capsule of the Sixties. Former Second City director Alan Myerson decided to found his version of an improv-based sketch comedy company in San Francisco. Some of the players who played there over the years also clocked significant time with Second City, and one can see the two companies having a kind of dialogue about the possibilities of the form as well as providing a vital function of maintaining an ongoing commentary on what was going on in the country at the time.Most of the original Second City people were well-read, college-educated folk (frequently from the University of Chicago). The Committee's people generally had greater contact with what was happening in the street. Or maybe it's just that more of the street spilled into their doors.At any rate, this film is a collection of some of the more popular sketches at the time and it features some dazzling performances by a company, most of whom went onto bigger (though not always better) things. I run chunks of this for my students frequently and they always goes down very well indeed.Anybody interested in the intersection between American social and political history and satire should find this pretty compelling stuff.