Stay Tuned

Stay Tuned (1992)

Something weird's on the air.

Salesman Roy Knable spends all his free time watching television, to the exasperation of his wife, Helen. One day, TV salesman Spike convinces Roy to buy a satellite dish offering 666 channels. The new addition to Roy's home entertainment system sucks him and Helen into Hellvision, a realm run by Spike, who is an emissary of Satan. For 24 hours, the couple must survive devilish parodies of TV programs if they want to return to reality alive.

Date of release
1992-08-14
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (200)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Comedy, Fantasy
Director
Peter Hyams

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $12M
  • Budget: $15M
  • Earned 0.8× its budget
  • Filmed in: Arizona and British Columbia

Stay Tuned is a 1992 American fantasy comedy film shot and directed by Peter Hyams from a screenplay by Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker, with an animated sequence supervised by Chuck Jones. The film stars John Ritter, Pam Dawber, Jeffrey Jones and Eugene Levy.

Production

Jim Jennewein and Tom S. Parker were both working in advertising, with Parker working as a copywriter for Saatchi & Saatchi and Jennewein as an associate creative director at Speer, Young & Hollander, and sought to move into screenwriting with consulting help from Richard Siegel who was a copywriter at Bozell.

In April 1990, the script was purchased by Morgan Creek Entertainment and Warner Bros. for $750,000. The script marked the second creative effort for Jennewein and Parker after leaving advertising with the duo having previously published a parody magazine of the trade magazine Adweek titled Madweek.

Tim Burton was originally chosen to be the director on account of his art and style, but left to direct Batman Returns.

Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, and Joe Johnston were considered as potential choices to direct the film. Peter Hyams lobbied Morgan Creek for the opportunity to direct the film as he'd always wanted to make a film with Spielbergian elements and Morgan Creek hired him in Spring of 1991 to direct due to his enthusiasm for the film.

Initially the Saturday Nite Dead section of the film featuring a sketch parodying Wayne's World called Duane's Underworld was supposed to feature Mike Myers and Dana Carvey of Wayne's World in a cameo appearance, but the two were heavily involved in the post-production and promotion of the movie Wayne's World and ultimately passed on appearing.

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

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