Moment by Moment (1978)

[JonathanVik 37]

How about this horrible romantic drama starring two people with no chemistry and look like they could be siblings? Did I mention that John Travolta's character name is this is Strip?

 

[media='']https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTh9Bvqhdl8[/media]

[SlidePocket 707]

Lily Tomlin and John Travolta make a very strange pairing in this forgettable romantic drama. Perhaps most notable is where Tomlin met her longtime companion, Jane Wagner, who wrote and directed this one.

[sillstaw 414]

Perhaps most notable is where Tomlin met her longtime companion, Jane Wagner, who wrote and directed this one.

 

They'd been collaborating for years before this movie, actually.

[WillHarrisInVA 8]

When I did a Random Roles interview with Tomlin, I wasn't sure how to broach the subject of Moment by Moment, and I kept wondering if there was any way to bring it up without her suddenly shouting, "This interview is over!" But she actually provided me with an opportunity when she mentioned it offhandedly in conversation about a different film, because I was able to reference the way she mentioned it:

 

AVC: You mentioned Moment By Moment in a manner that sounded like you didn’t really want to discuss [the film] a great deal.

LT: Oh, I don’t care. That’s just the way things go, you know? But I will say that after people just laid on it and laid on it, I said to one of the movie critics for The New York Times—I can’t think of her name right now and I don’t think she writes there anymore—“I’m not going to discuss Moment By Moment because it’s too long ago, and it doesn’t do me any good.” For years that’s all anybody ever wanted to talk about, because John [Travolta] was such a big star.

AVC: What was the experience like of working with your partner Jane as your director?

LT: Oh, that was hard as hell. It’s not Jane’s temperament to do that. She’s too genteel, too Southern, too kind, too empathetic. It’s too much to go into it. I’m not going to even talk about it. We loved John, though. John had come to see Appearing Nightly, our first Broadway show, and he loved it so much that he went back and… He had a three-movie deal with Robert Stigwood, and he told Stigwood that he wanted to do the third movie with us. And we’re thinking, “Yeah, okay, that’ll be fun!” [Laughs.] And it just wasn’t for us. It didn’t work out. But we didn’t know we’d get whacked over the head for it! We’d seen movies come and movies go, but never anything like that. And we hated to have let John down, because he’d been riding so high and all that stuff.

[VideodromeDiscotheque 0]

This is an amazing dog of a film, and was kept from home video until an anamorphic DVD slipped out in Germany. Most of the versions on youtube are from terrible TV broadcasts, let me know if you want to do this one and I'll post a Vimeo link with the high rez version.

 

From the wikipedia page:

Critical response[edit]

Moment by Moment was widely panned by critics and moviegoers.[6]

During filming of Moment by Moment, a Los Angeles magazine reported from the set at the time: "The chemistry between Tomlin and Travolta began to rival that between Menachem Begin and Yassar Arafat." A crew staff was also quoted saying: "Two weeks into the shooting on location in Malibu, there was nobody on the set that didn't know we were in the middle of a turkey. It was like being on the voyage of the damned."

Two years after its release, Lily Tomlin said of the experience: "John and I were totally unprepared. We thought it was a sweet, small, lightly funny movie. We were not prepared for what others thought. It's the one thing that all performers live in fear of—total failure. And when it happens and you survive, I think you're probably in a much better place. It's made me less cautious. It made me place more importance on the experience of working with other artists than on the reaction of critics or the public."[7]

The film remains a "camp classic," with a reputation sufficient to have prompted Mystery Science Theater 3000 producers to try (unsuccessfully) to obtain the rights necessary to broadcast it and mock it on their show.[8]