KINGS CORNERS: THE TRUE STORY OF A SMALL TOWN COP IN RURAL MISSOURI

Randy recently published a book, “Kings Corners: The True Story of a Small Town Cop in Rural Missouri,” about his time as a Seymour police.
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But even this could get you in trouble. On one occasion, Smirnoff was summoned to the Department of Humour to explain why he should be allowed to do his ant joke, which tells the tale of an ant who falls in love and marries an elephant. They have an amazing honeymoon, a night of wild passion that is so passionate, in fact, that the elephant collapses and dies in the middle — the ant, however, is even less lucky.

When the censor accused Smirnoff of masking an anti-communist message in the joke, he denied it. He had a very difficult life! In a country where even food was scarce, getting hold of helium was virtually impossible. The experiment exploded grandly in his hands, and it was only by sheer luck that neither he nor his father were seriously harmed. The balloon never got off the ground. Smirnoff and his parents arrived in the US in December , when he was 26 years old.

Smirnoff used to sell the device on the road during his comedy tours, until the KGB ordered him to desist. On their first night at their new home on the Lower East Side of New York City, Smirnoff and his parents slept on the floor of an empty apartment. After taking a mixology course of which he could barely understand a word, Smirnoff began to work as a bartender. The idea to change his name from Pokhis to Smirnoff came to him when he encountered Smirnoff brand vodka while tending bar.

Even though he could barely speak the language, and his act consisted of little more than mimed punchlines and a Russian folk dance, he was allowed a few minutes on stage.

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Smirnoff soon moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself by working as a carpenter during the day. His English steadily improved and more gigs opened up. In the early s he began touring around the country and by , Smirnoff had made a big enough name for himself that Miller Lite hired him to do a TV advertisement. The ad was a huge hit, and began to open doors for him. After receiving this honour in his first appearance on the show, Smirnoff went on to become a Tonight Show regular. In , a sitcom called What A Country was developed for him and ran for a season; the same year, Smirnoff appeared in the film Heartburn , which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.

In those years, Jerry Seinfeld was opening for him. Reagan was a fan of Smirnoff and invited him to perform at various occasions. In Smirnoff, Reagan saw a comedian who could help him punch up his cold war script.

From McCarthy to Nixon, anti-Soviet rhetoric relied upon fear-mongering. It spoke not to the menace but to the day-to-day absurdity of Sovietism. In a culture in which most Americans encountered Russians as sneering Hollywood villains with nefarious-looking crewcuts, Smirnoff presented an image of the eastern European everyman who shared the values of regular Americans. He was the greenhorn next door, the kind of guy you continue to cheer for even after he strikes it rich and buys himself a Rolls-Royce — as Smirnoff in fact did.

When Reagan gave a major address at the Moscow Summit in he stood under a bust of Lenin and opened with a Smirnoff joke that strongly implied that heaven itself had endowed communist politicians with lazy asses. What I wanted, mostly, was to be able to get a nice car. Number one on that list: Major contracts were not renewed.

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The endorsement money, the TV and film roles, the invites to events and talk shows — they all dried up. Smirnoff began to panic. His daughter was still a toddler and he had a boy on the way. He knew he was in serious trouble when he could no longer draw an audience at small comedy clubs. After he received an enthusiastic response from the crowd of 40, people, he ran into Willie Nelson backstage. Nelson advised him to try Branson. At his first shows in Branson, he drew fewer than 20 people.

But as his audience grew over the years he was able to fill theatres once again. In , after three years of renting spaces from other acts — on the assumption that his stay in Branson would be temporary — he decided to buy his own theatre. Long known as a country music spot, the town expanded its offerings in the s to include theatre and comedy programmes and various sideshow-like venues such as a celebrity wax museum. The sensibility leans heavily towards nostalgia. God and country are served up in heaping portions at theatres with names like God and Country Theatres.

Branson tour guides like to say that the town has more theatre seats than Vegas and Broadway combined.

On off-season weekdays, the Strip, where all the big theatres line up, is full of tour buses full of retirees, and on weekends it is packed with families whose minivans and 4x4 flatbed trucks create a half-hour wait at the drive-through Starbucks. In the centre of town, you will find an almost life-size replica of half of the Titanic. The other half is apparently located somewhere in Tennessee. It has the look of something a tornado might have carried in and discarded haphazardly. The tour buses started to arrive at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater parking lot at about 3.

On stage that night, with a week left in his season, Smirnoff was introduced by a video of highlights from his life and career. The contrast between the old footage and the man who glided onto the stage at the Yakov Smirnoff Theatre gave a sense of how his persona has evolved over the years. At the height of his fame, in the late s, Smirnoff played the role of the bemused outsider on the make.

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On stage, he came off like an overeager provincial cousin who arrives at a summer picnic wearing a corduroy suit and tie, his unruly curls aggressively gelled down for the occasion, and a heartbreaking bouquet of carnations extended to his hosts. Now, roughly 30 years later, on stage at his own theatre, Smirnoff was no longer bemused. He had the lean, distilled look, the slim-fit designer outfits of blacks and greys, the elliptical polish of a veteran magician. It also included a full chicken dinner — itself worthy of an in-depth profile — with mashed potato, peas and carrots, ham, and some pie-thingy.

Each night, as dinner was served, the house lights would suddenly go on, and caravans of carts, piled high with dinner trays, would materialise in the aisles. From centre stage, Smirnoff gave flight attendant-style instructions for how to finesse the tray tables from our elbow rests. In the midst of this presentation, he proudly touted a device of his own invention: Instead he climbed down from the stage, walked up the aisles, shook hands, reminisced about the 80s, and helped his staff pass out meals.

Something about the chicken dinner spiel struck me as significant. Perhaps it was the bold literalness with which these comedic acts of food service dramatised the desire — the craven, poignant, doomed desire — of any performer to fully please his audience. After the show, Smirnoff could be seen sprinting around the lobby, mugging for pictures with fans and signing autographs with one arm, and with his other, waving cheques in the air for staff members, all the while talking to someone on a phone that he was balancing between his shoulder and ear.

Aside from performing each night, Smirnoff was also managing the theatre and running a staff of 60 people. The nameplate on his office desk, which reads, Yakov Smirnoff, President , is only a half joke. He is indeed head of a production company of his own, Comrade in America, Inc. It led to an identity crisis, Smirnoff told me. His move to Missouri was almost like a second immigration. His striptease celebrated the freewheeling ease with which a person can shed old identities and adopt new ones — but lurking behind the humour was an anxiety about the unstable, unsettling nature of identity.

He wanted to teach his Branson audience why laughter matters. This school of thought emphasises action over open-ended conversation, prescription over description. It speaks a language of handy acronyms like Perma positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishments , and is associated with can-do notions of self-help. The results were telling. The World Trade Center towers had been his view during his citizenship swearing-in ceremony. As Smirnoff worked on the painting, a vision came to him.

Smirnoff became emotional when describing the scene of the installation. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh. Opens Wednesday, November 22, at multiple theaters. You can search every inch of the map looking for Ebbing, Missouri, but you'd be wasting your time. Martin McDonagh's new film isn't really about the Midwest in general or Missouri in particular and from the smorgasbord of accents on display, it's unlikely that he's ever even been in the state.

The setting is instead a purely imaginary small town, a cozy American heartland of bumbling deputies and eccentric townsfolk on which McDonagh can hang his Coen Brothers-in-Mayberry conceit. Mildred's teenaged daughter was viciously raped and murdered seven months earlier, and her billboards ask why no one has been arrested. She even calls out the local sheriff by name. Now, she could have just walked to the sheriff's office to discuss this — it's right across the street from the ad agency — but then we wouldn't have a title, would we?

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Instead, the billboards are immediately and for no clear reason met with hostility by the entire community, not least by Sheriff Willoughby Woody Harrelson and the brutish Officer Dixon Sam Rockwell. Violence ensues, along with two acts of arson and a suicide.


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If you're looking for a message about grief or retribution or morality here, you're better off looking for Ebbing on that map. Writer-director McDonagh specializes in fast, foul-mouthed dialogue and sudden, irrational moments of mayhem, and he piles them on rapidly with no concern for how they add up. Every line has been fine-tuned for maximum provocation, usually hammered in with sitcom repetition. There are broad strokes of character here — the sheriff has pancreatic cancer, Dixon is a half-witted mama's boy — but they're really just set-ups for recurring punchlines.

When Peter Dinklage shows up briefly, McDonagh seems to think his very presence is a joke; nearly every line in his four scenes contains crass allusions to his size. Even the worst and broadest attributes are dismissed with a smirk: We're told that Dixon is a racist with a history of torturing prisoners, a detail repeated so often that eventually it's regarded as little more than an eccentricity.

As a playwright, McDonagh has a reputation for sharp dialogue and imaginative plots, but Three Billboards feels lazy, even self-indulgent. There's no sense of Mildred's grief, no consequences for any of the film's increasingly cartoonish acts of violence. As a crime film, it teases a coherent plot but quickly withdraws from it.

As a character study, it's almost deliberately superficial, half-heartedly tossing in a few cliches about redemption but dropping them just as carelessly. Mostly, Three Billboards is just casually, absurdly violent.