Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your Host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1991 supernatural black comedy, "The Addams Family".

Barry Sonnenfeld directed from a screenplay written by Linda Thompson and Larry Williams, neither of them strangers to macabre comedy.

"The Addams Family" stars Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, and Christopher Lloyd, with support from Christina Ricci, Jimmy Workman, Judith Malina, Carel Struycken, Elizabeth Wilson, Dan Hedaya, Dana Ivey, and Paul Benedict.

The movie is all about family, although in this case, the family is creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky, indeed, altogether ooky, "The Addams Family".

We first meet this odd group of merry misfits welcoming Christmas carolers by pouring a cauldron of hot tar over them.

But it soon becomes clear that not all is well in the Addams' household.

The head of the family, Gomez, is saddened by the approaching anniversary of the disappearance of his older brother, Fester, after the two had a falling out some 25 years before.

Gomez finds solace in the sympathy of his wife, Morticia, the sometimes lethal antics of their two young children, Wednesday and Pugsley, and his regular practice of hitting golf balls off the roof of their gothic mansion and through the windows of their nearest neighbor, Judge Womack.

After a visit to the Addams forbidding abode, their attorney, Tully Alford, meets with a loan shark, Abigail Craven, to whom he owes a large sum of money.

Abigail is a seasoned con artist and her homicidally inclined son, Gordon, serves as her willing enforcer.

Tully's recent visit to the Addams' house and Gomez's sorrow over the apparent loss of his older brother lead Tully to realize that Gordon bears a striking resemblance to the missing Fester.

He proposes to Abigail that Gordon pose as Fester, ingratiate himself with the family and find a way to gain access to the underground vault where the Addamses keep their trove of priceless artifacts and piles of gold coins.

Later, Tully and his wife, Margaret, attend a seance at the Addams mansion led by Grandmama as the family attempts to contact Fester's spirit on the anniversary of his disappearance.

At their climactic moment, Gordon arrives in the guise of Fester.

He is accompanied by Abigail, posing as a German therapist, Dr. Greta Pinder-Schloss.

She explains that Fester had been trapped in the Bermuda Triangle for 25 years until she found him snared in a tuna net.

Little Wednesday is skeptical, but the other Addamses welcome the supposed prodigal home with open arms while Tully, Abigail, and Gordon proceed to carry out the rest of their dastardly plan.

[soft music continues] Cartoonist Charles Addams was born in 1917 in Westfield, New Jersey, a distant relative of presidents John and John Quincy Addams, as well as social reformer, Jane Addams.

He always loved to draw, and after stints at Colgate University and the University of Pennsylvania, he studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in the early '30s.

He first had a cartoon published in "The New Yorker" magazine in 1932, and some five years later, he became a regular contributor with the first appearance of the set of sinister characters who later became known as the Addams family.

They subsequently appeared in 150 standalone one-panel cartoons over the next 50 years until their creator's death in 1988.

Initially nameless, each family member nonetheless had a distinctive personality.

The Addamses were members of an old money clan whose unusual tastes and way of life sometimes bordered on the supernatural.

They were later identified as married couple Gomez and Morticia Addams, their young children, Wednesday and Pugsley, Uncle Fester, and Grandmama their butler, Lurch, and Pugsley's pet octopus, Aristotle.

The ubiquitous and helpful Thing, a disembodied hand, first appeared in 1954.

The family members got their names and were joined by cousin It, Morticia's pet lion, Kitty Cat, and her carnivorous plant, Cleopatra when the Addams family debuted on television in 1964.

In both cartoons and on television, they always remained totally unaware of, or at least unconcerned about their effect on other more normal people.

They instead went about their business doing whatever they wanted and let the devil take the hind most, perhaps literally.

The first live action incarnation of Charles Addams's odd collection of bizarre characters came in 1964 when the black and white 30-minute situation comedy "The Addams Family" debuted on ABC on September 18th and ran for a total of 64 episodes.

The series was the brainchild of David Levy in collaboration with Donald Saltzman and cartoonist Charles Addams.

It was this program that first turned the series of standalone one panel cartoons with recurring characters into a cohesive narrative about a family with names, relationships, and a catchy theme song.

Charles Addams's primary contribution, apart from the cartoons that provided the program's inspiration, was a list of potential names for the family members.

David Levy, along with producer Nat Perrin downplayed the family's darker side in favor of a more comedic approach leading Charles Addams to criticize the result as only half as evil as the characters in his cartoons.

It was the television program that introduced many of the elements that became such an inextricable part of Addams family lore that they were carried over into the first motion picture version in 1991.

The idea for the movie arose when Scott Rudin, then head of production at 20th Century Fox, was returning from a movie screening in a van with other Fox executives.

The son of one of the executives started singing the theme song for "The Addams Family" television series, as Rudin later told the Los Angeles Times, and suddenly everyone in the van was singing the theme, letter perfect, note for note.

The next day, Rudin suggested to the others that Fox make an Addams family movie, and the idea took off.

But Orion Pictures owned the rights, not Fox.

There were other rights issues as well, plus the fear that the original television series was too old and obscure to support a motion picture version.

But after Charles Addams's widow sold Orion the remaining rights to the Addams', the production company moved ahead with Rudin producing.

The screenplay was written by Caroline Thompson, who also wrote the script for 1990's "Edward Scissorhands" and later wrote 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and Larry Wilson, one of the writers of 1988's "Beetlejuice."

The screenplay for "The Addams Family" drew not only on Charles Addams's original cartoons, but also on much of what had been created for the television series in 1964.

This included the character of Cousin It, Gomez and Morticia's passionate love affair fueled by tangos and Gomez's arousal whenever hearing Morticia speak French, Lurch's fondness for playing the keyboard, and Gomez's fascination with blowing up his toy trains.

In the event David Levy, who had produced the television series sued Paramount Pictures, and the lawsuit was eventually settled out of court.

There were other problems during production of "The Addams Family" movie.

Orion sold it to Paramount when filming ran over budget due to constant rewrites and health problems among key people involved in the production, including star Raul Julia.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld took over as cinematographer after both previous cinematographers quit.

To emulate Morticia's slinky figure, Angelica Huston had to wear a metal corset in addition to gauze eye lifts, neck tucks, and artificial fingernails that had to be applied daily.

"Come afternoon," she later told "Entertainment Weekly," "I could be prone to a really good headache from my various bondages.

And because I couldn't lie down or rest, it was fairly exhausting."

According to Huston, Judith Malina, who played Grandmama, had her own way of dealing with the discomfort of being embedded in latex for over 12 hours a day.

"Her solution," Huston said, "was to smoke an endless series of joints in her trailer during filming."

Despite these and other troubles during production, and Orion's fears over the cost of the movie, "The Addams Family" was a major success making back almost seven times its production expenses.

It was followed by a sequel, "Addams Family Values" in 1993, and the franchise has continued in both live action and animated versions ever since.

Perhaps most notably, "The Addams Family" motion picture inspired a commercial arcade pinball machine created by the company Bally Williams and released in March 1992.

With more than 20,000 units sold, it became the bestselling pinball machine of all time.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.