Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film that was the second-to-last film Sellers made. When I was a kid I thought this was the funniest thing ever. Blooper reels were rare in major Hollywood films back then, so I’d never seen anything like it. I remember feeling amazed that I got to see secret scenes that weren’t in the movie. Quaint, I know.

According to the Wikipedia page for the film, Sellers supposedly didn’t want the outtakes to be included in the movie, “since, by all accounts, it was his attempt to show his skills as an actual actor as opposed to just a comedian. The inclusion of the blooper reel is sometimes blamed for Sellers’ failure to win that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor.” I find that last sentence hard to believe, but who knows.

[via Coudal Partners.]

Here’s an outtake from my December 2005 Vanity Fair assignment:

Other outtakes are here and here.

It is a truth not quite universally acknowledged that Ben Stiller is a lazy hack whose schtick ceased being amusing long ago. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan. But he’s had his funny moments in the past. Take the clip below, a compilation of footage from Stiller’s appearance in the penultimate episode of Freaks and Geeks. The clip opens with a minute or so of footage that actually aired, then segues into a seven-minute uncut take from the filming of the scene. I pulled the raw footage off of one of the two extra DVDs included with the special eight-disc F&G fan edition. (The collection sold in stores only has six discs.)

In the episode, Stiller guest-stars as a disgruntled Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who has traveled to McKinley High for an appearance. Stiller’s character becomes suspicious of the school’s longhaired guidance counselor, Mr. Rosso, and escorts him down the hall to Rosso’s office.

Stiller’s riffing in the raw footage is very funny; it’s interesting to watch him try out different approaches to various lines, and to see him react to the coaching from the episode’s director, Jake Kasdan. There’s also a good George W. Bush reference, made more hilarious by the fact that the scene was filmed in early 2000, when Bush’s blundering numbskullery hadn’t yet affected the world.