5 Examples Of Movie Marketing That Shamelessly Embellished What "Starring" Means
4. A 1983 Ski Resort Infomercial Featuring Jim Carrey Is Released As A Movie Twenty Years Later
Though Jim Carrey hasn't had a hit in a few years, some of you are probably old enough to remember that he was once one of the few actors who could score a $20 million paycheck for a film. Conventional wisdom has it that Carrey was a star on the FOX sketch comedy series In Living Color and then, after three hit film comedies in 1994 alone - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber - Carrey became a movie star.
However, that summary of Carrey's career path is a bit misleading because Carrey had appeared in a number of popular films before debuting on In Living Color, including Peggy Sue Got Married, Earth Girls Are Easy, and the final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool. But way before those movies Carrey made his first film appearance in Copper Mountain: A Club Med Experience, which is only true if you're willing to stretch your definition of "film" to absurd lengths.
The 1983 movie starred Carrey and Alan Thicke as two buddies who take a vacation to the Club Med village ski resort at Copper Mountain in Colorado. Nonetheless, their attempts at romancing some ski bunnies and a few moments of Carrey's trademark comedy take up less than half the runtime of this hour-long movie. Most of the movie features performances by country music bands. If that content seems a bit odd to you, that's because the entire feature was an infomercial meant to promote the ski resort. In other words, not only is Jim Carrey in less than half of this movie, it's not even an actual movie.
The infomercial was released on DVD in 2004 with a then-current photo of Carrey slapped on the cover and the tagline "Jim Carrey in one of his first and funniest films, running riot on the Colorado ski slopes." Of course, hardly any of that statement is factual.The trailer focuses entirely on Jim Carrey blatantly ripping off Steve Martin routines and features nearly every single one of his comedy bits, saving you the $4.99 one might spend to purchase this infomercial. One can even tell that it isn't an actual movie because the trailer is unable to convey any semblance of an actual story, something that even the trailer for Scary Movie V can do.