VANCOUVER, BC — There really is a funny side to rising housing costs pricing out the middle class. It's just that college professor Phil Loder, as played by Peter Dinklage, is having a lot of trouble finding the humor in so much unaffordability.
Dinklage lives in New York City and says he finds the housing market confusing.
"I walked around Manhattan at night and there were all these enormous penthouse apartment buildings that are just empty," he said in an interview over Zoom. "Nobody lives in them. Cuz they're dark at night so we're sorta losing neighborhood. Nobody can afford anything anymore."
Inspired by an episode of "This American Life," "American Dreamer" teams up Dinklage with the legendary Shirley MacLaine who plays the woman willing to sell her estate for pennies on the dollar on the condition she can live there until she dies. The movie was filmed in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island.
In 1970 C.D.B. Bryan, the father of Evening host Saint Bryan, spent two days in New York City with MacLaine for a magazine article. Together they watched rushes of her movie Desperate Characters. Saint Bryan shared what his father had written with MacLaine and Dinklage.
"There was something very strange about sitting next to Shirley MacLaine and watching Shirley MacLaine watching Shirley MacLaine on the movie screen in front of me...and I had an insane impulse to ask Shirley MacLaine to hold hands!"
MacLaine laughed and joked "Well I won't tell you the rest of the story, son..."
MacLaine also lived outside Tacoma, in Graham, between 1985 and 1993 where she wrote many of her best-selling books.
In "American Dreamer" Dinklage is often black and blue and bandaged, the result of prat falls Dinklage did himself. He has too much respect for stuntmen to call them stunts, but he did hurt himself.
"If I have a crick neck at the end of the day it means I've earned my keep," Dinklage said. "If I have a couple of bruises, so be it. We shouldn't be pampered as actors. We should put stones in our shoes and be uncomfortable now and again."
They may be one of the oddest odd couples to ever hit the screen, but American Dreamer finds its delights in the comedic chemistry of the two stars.
"I think we liked each other immediately," MacLaine said. "As soon as I met him on the street, big hug, and somehow we connected and it was real. I really like him."
The feelings are mutual.
"Fingers crossed when you are just in love with someone through their movie performances that they're going to be just as great in life," Dinklage said. "And of course I was correct in assuming Shirley was, and then some, the most charismatic, loveliest person."
"American Dreamer" is available as a video on demand.
KING 5's Evening celebrates the Northwest. Contact us: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email.