How to Sleep

How to Sleep (1935)

A humorous look at the problems people have trying to sleep.

A lecturer seated at a desk promises an informative film about how to sleep; it's a sequel to and inspired by "How to stay awake," which put his audience to sleep. He plans to examine the causes of sleep, the causes of insomnia, and recent research on sleep, including a time-lapse film of a man changing positions 55 times during an 8-hour rest: why exercise, he asks, when you can sleep like a top? The film instructs one on how to get a drink of water during the night without waking completely, and other useful skills for the insomniac.

Date of release
1935-09-14
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (19)
Runtime
11m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Nick Grindé

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, Comedy

How to Sleep is a short comedy film written by and starring humorist Robert Benchley. Filmed and released by MGM in 1935, it features Benchley as a narrator as well as film subject, discussing four parts of sleep—causes, methods, avoiding sleep, and waking up.

Production

The production was inspired by a Mellon Institute study on sleep commissioned by the Simmons Mattress Company. It was filmed in two days, and featured Benchley as both the narrator and sleeper, the latter a role Benchley claimed was "not much of a strain, as [he] was in bed most of the time." Benchley was in fact a last-minute participant.

The film was well received in previews and was promoted heavily, with a still from the film being used in Simmons advertisements. The only group not pleased was the Mellon Institute, which did not approve of the studio mocking their study.

How to Sleep won an Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Subject in 1935. MGM kicked off an entire series of situation-comedy reels, each 10 minutes in length, showing Benchley giving mock-instructional lectures (How to Be a Detective, How to Rest, etc.) or coping with household situations (An Evening Alone, Home Movies, etc.).

How to Sleep is included as an extra on the DVD of the 1935 Marx Brothers feature film, A Night at the Opera, and is also available on the DVD set The Robert Benchley Miniatures Collection.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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