Windy City Heat
Windy City Heat is a made-for-TV reality film produced by Comedy Central. It first aired on October 12, 2003.
Background
is an aspiring celebrity and struggling comedian and actor who was "discovered" in 1992 by comedian Don Barris, the warmup comic for Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Man Show, during an open mic night audition at The Comedy Store in Westwood, Los Angeles, California. Barris offered Caravello a chance at stardom and, along with Tony Barbieri playing a perpetually stoned "Walter 'Mole' Molinski," befriended Caravello and have played pranks on him since 1995. Caravello's ongoing commitment to achieving this stardom, with the assistance and participation of Barris and Barbieri, is known as The Perry Project, which is noted with a title card at the beginning of the film.When performing as a trio, Caravello, Barris, and Mole are collectively known as "The Big 3." In a scene in "Windy City Heat", Caravello cites an unnamed source referring to the group as "the Three Stooges of the new millennium". In the 1990s, the Big 3 prominently appeared on Simply Don the Public Access Program, a popular public-access television show in the Los Angeles area created and hosted by Barris. Kimmel later joined the show as an announcer.
Plot
Perry Caravello believes he has been given a chance to star in a movie called Windy City Heat, a crime film about a "sports private eye" named Stone Fury. However, there is no such film, as the entire project is an elaborate prank played on him by Don Barris and Mole with the help of producers Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla and real celebrity cameos including Carson Daly, Dane Cook, Tammy Faye Bakker, and William "The Refrigerator" Perry.Caravello's participation in the "film" begins with the audition process, where he is introduced to Daly, who is also up for the lead role of Stone Fury. After a botched audition, interrupted numerous times by Barris and Mole, he eventually wins the role over Daly. The plot of the movie revolves around a dubious story involving Fury trying to track down the actual refrigerator of William "Refrigerator" Perry and the pants of Ernie Banks. Caravello appears in most scenes with Barris and Mole, who portray Chicago Outfit gangsters "Big Lou" and "Brock," the antagonists of the film. Windy City Heat is directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, who is the actual director in addition to playing the director of the fake film-within-the-film, wearing jodhpurs and only speaking to people through a bullhorn.
Caravello is followed around by at least fifteen cameras during the filming process. He is told from the beginning that he is being recorded and interviewed for the film's DVD extras. Some of the pranks include repeatedly dumping him into a dumpster filled with manure; making him drink a milkshake made of coffee, Chinese food, raw egg, pizza, and beer during while filming multiple takes of a scene, giving him a case of severe diarrhea; and bringing in a stunt double to film Caravello's sex scene with his leading lady, which Caravello is told involves actual sexual penetration on set. Along the way, Barris and Mole continue to egg him on, performing a balancing act of pushing his buttons and stroking his ego. The stress increasingly infuriates Caravello and frequently leads him to scream in a high-pitched shriek. Barris regularly tells Caravello to "Unleash the Fury!"
Throughout the filmmaking process, Caravello is introduced to several individuals involved with the production, purported to be real people, whose names are identical to historical and cinematic figures. Such individuals include the eccentric English producer of the movie, "John Quincy Adams", casting director "Roman Polanski", studio receptionist and soon to be co-star "Susan B. Anthony", Japanese "money man" "Hiroshima Nagasaki", who backs out of financing the production when Mole knocks over a table of junk food, limo driver and aspiring rock musician "Travis Bickle", set photographer "Ansel Adams", production assistant "Frances Farmer", Caravello's personal assistant "Burt Ward", and stagehands "Sacco and Vanzetti". Notable exceptions to this naming convention include attorney "Sol Sternbergowitz-Greenbaum" and Santiago, a wardrobe assistant who mistakes Caravello for Luke Perry, provoking a homophobic outburst that Caravello attributes to a homosexual encounter with a casting agent in 1992. Caravello never questions these coincidences on film aside from expressing doubts as to the identity of a man purporting to be Charlton Heston, who refuses to leave Caravello's assigned trailer. To placate him, he suavely offers the old man a cameo in the film, which he enthusiastically accepts with humorous results.
The film culminates in an intentionally hindered race to the fake film's "one time only screening," during which the Big 3 are delayed by a number of setbacks, finally making it in time to see only a select few scenes of the film. They finally arrive at the theater and discover that Caravello's name is misspelled on the marquee. A running gag in the movie is that whenever Caravello's name appears in print, it is usually misspelled. The film itself features laughably unrealistic special effects, lines of dialogue ripped from Casablanca and Gone with the Wind, ludicrously named characters such as "Jiggly Wrigley" and even a dinosaur, which is inserted into the film at the insistence of Yurgi, a Romanian pornographic film producer who takes over as the film's new financier. Immediately following the screening, Caravello is met with an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience and is presented with an oversized and extravagant trophy from the "President of Show Business".
The film ends with a montage backed by Louis Armstrong's song When You're Smiling.
Aftermath
Unlike typical prank shows, it is not revealed to Caravello at the end of the film that the entire thing was a prank; this is due to the fact that the movie is only one component of The Perry Project, which continues to this day. However, included on the DVD for the film is a video recording of Caravello watching the actual film for the first time in his home, alongside Barris and Barbieri. He does not seem to react as if anything is unexpected, and does not even acknowledge the fact that the finished product he is watching is not the film he thought he was going to be in.On Caravello's star commentary track for the DVD, recorded two years after the initial release of the film, he acknowledges that he has since realized that sequences in the film were set up as pranks on him, and that he knows Barris and Barbieri were intentionally conniving to infuriate him, yet he continues to speak of the "film" and his acting abilities with the same gusto. Notably, Caravello claims that he was playing along during his audition, when Dane Cook introduces himself by the name "Roman Polanski," stating that he had "fucked with everybody" because he did a report on Roman Polanski in elementary school. Despite acknowledging that "Polanski" wasn't really a casting director, he continues to believe that it was a real audition and he legitimately beat out the other actors to win the Stone Fury role. He also gets emotional watching the scene at the film's premiere when he receives the trophy from the "President of Show Business," and says that he cries every time he watches it.
When the DVD of the film was released in 2006, the cover is listed as starring "Perry Karavello", continuing the running gag of misspelling Caravello's name.
On June 1, 2007, Caravello filed a lawsuit against Jackass star Johnny Knoxville, alleging that Knoxville, along with Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla, promised him ten million dollars to put his genitals in a mousetrap to show that Perry F. Caravello could prove his "Stone Fury" worthiness live on The Adam Carolla Morning Show on 97.1 FM KLSX as a stunt, and to promote the recently released DVD, and also for payment for his performance in the movie. Caravello dropped this lawsuit on June 10, 2008. In a 2013 appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, Barris revealed that an unnamed attorney representing Caravello received a portion of a relatively small financial settlement, but did not divulge further details.