Pauly Shore Interview on "Son în Law" (June 24, 1993)
Son in Law is a 1993 American comedy film directed by Steve Rash, written by Fax Bahr, Adam Small, and Shawn Schepps, and starring Pauly Shore, Lane Smith, and Carla Gugino.
After Encino Man, Shore was considering a project with New Line Cinema, but was heavily pressured by Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to stay with Disney and make Son in Law.[2]
Promotions
The promotional poster for the film is a parody of the painting American Gothic. The opening title sequence and graduation ceremony scene were filmed at Wasco High School in Wasco, California.[3]
To promote the film, MTV ran a contest to marry Pauly Shore in Las Vegas, won by Tanya Cinotti of Salisbury, Mass. Though there was a ceremony on July 2, 1993, no marriage certificates were signed.[4]
Reception
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 21% based on reviews from 19 critics.[5]
In the Los Angeles Times, reviewer Michael Wilmington suggested that the film "... tries to pretend that it’s about tolerance: a kind of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner about anti-L.A. freak bigotry". He also criticized the film's premise:
Son-in-Law suggests that somebody like Crawl would be as weird as a lunar being to the Midwestern Warners. That isn’t so. Because of TV and the movies, L.A. subcultures are the ones everyone knows about. ... In any town within reach of cable TV, the teen-agers would not only recognize a Pauly, there might be imitation Paulys at the high school.[6]
In the United States and Canada, the film grossed $36.4 million.[1] By the end of 1993, it had grossed $4.6 million internationally.[7]