Panic Button

With its assets in a sling, a panicked business group decides to solve its tax problems by creating a gargantuan entertainment flop and use it as a tax write-off. Before all you film buffs shout out the name of the famed comedy The Producers, let us introduce you to Panic Button, an earlier, lesser-known comic riff on the same theme.

Michael Connors (Mannix) plays the biz group’s front man and spearhead of a sham film production of Romeo and Juliet that would have made The Bard put down his quill forever if he had seen it. Essential to the front man’s scheme: hire a lead actor (spiritedly played by Gigi's Maurice Chevalier) whose movies only draw flies, a non-actress vamp to play Juliet (Jayne Mansfield, celebrated early in her career as “sex on the rocks") and a director (Touch of Evil’s Akim Tamiroff) proud of his ability to guide actors in portrayals of lampshades and trees. Eleanor Parker (The Sound of Music) also stars.