Where Has ‘Who Is Harry Kellerman’ Been for 28 Years?

It’s not just vintage films that home video rescues from obscurity. Twentieth Century Fox Home Video has just released for the first time on videocassette “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?,” the 1971 surreal comedy directed by Ulu Grosbard, written by Herb Gardner and starring Dustin Hoffman and, in an Oscar-nominated performance, Barbara Harris.

Though the film received mixed reviews, it is certainly essential viewing for anyone interested in Hoffman’s career. That it has been inaccessible and virtually unseen has only heightened its cachet as a buried treasure. Hoffman, who was recently saluted by the American Film Institute with a Lifetime Achievement Award, stars as Georgie Soloway, a perhaps Dylan-esque troubadour who has another hit on the charts, his face on the cover of Time magazine, a stable of women and an accommodating pharmacist (“Send me an overdose of anything,” Georgie requests).

He is also plagued by insomnia and suicidal fantasies that literally land him on the couch of his psychiatrist (Jack Warden), who in Georgie’s increasingly demented imagination appears in various guises ranging from New York cabby to Santa Claus.

Further unsettling is news that someone named Harry Kellerman is telling lies about Georgie and undermining him with girlfriends and colleagues.

Harris, for whom Gardner wrote her part, is characteristically touching and sweetly vulnerable as Allison, whom Georgie meets during an audition and who becomes his last, best chance to connect with another human being and save himself. Her audition scene, Grosbard noted in a phone interview, “is a precious moment of my career. You know that’s the real thing. You know at the moment that this is as good as it gets.”

Dom DeLuise is also a standout in his brief scene as Georgie’s accountant.

“Harry Kellerman” is based on a short story Gardner was commissioned to write for the Saturday Evening Post. “The Valentine’s Day issue, can you imagine?” Gardner said in a phone interview. “As is still typical of me, one week before the deadline, I suddenly remembered I was supposed to do it. I took some stuff that keeps you awake and since I don’t take that kind of stuff, whatever you’re doing, that’s what you do for, it seems, the rest of your life. I wrote the story from beginning to end without stopping. It has been in about 10 short story collections. It’s in a Columbia University textbook on how to write stories. I don’t remember a word of it. So its genesis was hallucinatory and kind of odd and funny, which is, I think, how the movie came out.”

The film, Gardner said, was a meeting of kindred spirits. Grosbard and Hoffman had been friends in New York since 1957. Gardner and DeLuise attended high school together. Harris appeared in the film version of Gardner’s “A Thousand Clowns.”

“We were all living around 11th Street [in New York] at that time,” Gardner recalled. “We had a strange bunch of neighbors, including Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft.”

For Grosbard, the movie is about “the character’s relationship of his outward success to his inner self-destructiveness, the dissatisfaction with what seems outwardly to be a perfectly happy and successful life and being unable to let go of the inner unhappiness,” he said. “I found [the screenplay] very moving.”

DeLuise, in another phone interview, said that at the heart of the film was “the implication that you were your own worst enemy.”

Mortality is another theme, eloquently and touchingly expressed by Georgie as he tells his soon-to-be-ex-wife how terrified he is of time. “How come I’ve got two kids, and I feel like I’m only 18?” he asks. “Those kids, they keep ticking at me like clocks.”

Never mind who is Harry Kellerman. After nearly three decades, a more pressing question for Gardner was where was “Harry Kellerman”? He spent the last 18 years trying to track it down.

“I had reached the point where I wanted to prove to my kids what I used to do to make a living,” he said. “You suddenly get that sense of mortality and you want a print of everything. I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t find out who owned it. It just disappeared.”

Gardner’s search ended at CBS, for whose short-lived film division, Cinema Center, the film was made. He credited Carol Morgan, a CBS employee about to retire, for “tracking it down in the midst of this Kafka-like bureaucracy. She found the negative and made a print for me.”

This print was shown last year at New York’s Film Forum on a double-feature with “A Thousand Clowns.” That brought it to the attention of Fox, paving the way for the video release.

“It’s so nice to have this record,” DeLuise said. “Considering I didn’t work very long on the picture, I have a lot of vivid memories. Dustin is dangerously, mysteriously naughty. You don’t know when he’s going to say something that will completely throw you. . . . It’s great to be around people who are willing to give up comfort and take a risk.”

Making “Harry” was a risk, Gardner said. “Unless it’s a risk, it isn’t worth it. We all felt the same way: Let’s not find out where we stop. Let’s see how far we can go.

“I saw Dustin a couple of weeks ago. He came by the studio where I come in everyday and pretend to write. We were talking about something else, and we started running around the room very excitedly talking about this idea we both had. For a moment, it might as well have been 30 years ago. Nothing has changed. You still start running up and down the room when it strikes you. I could see no net anywhere.”