Season 9 Episode 23: Pump Fiction

April 30, 1995

Published 04/30/95

Kelly’s assignment at the Larry Storch School of Acting is to make a film, and she enlists her father. What they produce is a short called Shoes, which the show plays straight as an avant-garde work and which gets a festival screening, where the emcee introduces it as a taut and gripping piece in the Warhol tradition. Marcy heckles from the third row and is told to sit down, at which point she announces that the heckler has upset her husband, and the cut to Jefferson explains why that threat carries no weight. Then the film wins ten thousand dollars of public arts funding to make another one, and Al’s sequel is titled A Day in the Life of a Shoe Salesman and is cast entirely with bikini models and attractive men. Marcy’s response is to bring an alderman to the shoe store to stop the production, and the alderman’s reaction to one of the cast members ends that intervention immediately. Al’s justification, that the grant was for a film about his own life and that Marcy is welcome to rent something more suited to hers, is the line of the episode. Jeremy Piven is in the audience at the premiere, uncredited.

The money is what turns the half-hour. Ten thousand dollars of funding arrives for a follow-up, and Al’s artistic instincts reveal themselves immediately: the sequel is bikini models and leading men in a shoe store, made over Marcy’s objections and with no visible interest in whatever the first film was supposed to be about. The episode also checks in on Luke Ventura, Al’s co-worker from the first season, now Salesman of the Month at a major Chicago department store and on the cover of Shoe News, which is about as pointed a comparison as the series ever drew.

Episode Facts

Original air date: April 30, 1995
Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 23
Overall episode number: 207
Written by: Kim Weiskopf and David Castro
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Production note: Jeremy Piven appears uncredited as one of the audience members at the premiere, in glasses and a turtleneck, seated behind Jefferson.
Production note: Luke Ventura, Al’s co-worker from season 1, is mentioned as now working at a major Chicago department store and making the front page of Shoe News as Salesman of the Month. The photograph used is a real season 1 publicity still of Ritch Shydner.
Title note: A play on Pulp Fiction, which had come out the previous autumn, crossed with a style of women’s shoe.