an ice-cold curse. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

We talk through a lot of curses on this show. The Poltergeist Curse, the Power Rangers Curse,

the Curse of the Twilight Zone movie, were recently the Water World Curse to name a few.

But never have we talked about a movie curse so powerful that it created death and havoc before

it even filmed. Today, we're talking about a fish out of water comedy with a sinister reputation

for allegedly and conspiratorially stopping the biggest 80s comedians from fulfilling their

promising futures. Let's get into the Curse of Atuck. It all begins with a man named Mordekai Rikler.

A Canadian author and essayist who wrote a book called Stick Your Neck Out, and later the incomparable

Atuck, the incomparable Atuck, published for American audiences under McLelland and Stewart in 1963.

The novel told the story of a Canadian Inuit who is brought to the Metropolitan Super City of Toronto

and very quickly drops the ideology of his native people to become a big city asshole.

The incomparable Atuck slash Stick Your Neck Out satirized Canadian cultural

leadism with Toronto bigwigs fetishizing Atuck and then reframing him as a symbol of Canadian

nationalism and anti-American sentiment. The book wasn't canonized in Canadian or American literature,

but it was successful enough to warrant discussions of adapting the novel into a film.

In 1971, iconic Canadian director Norman Jewishson bought the rights to the film adaptation

and planned to shoot the movie after another little adaptation he was working on.

Jesus Christ superstar. Screenwriter and former national lampoon writer Todd Carroll was brought

in to pen the screenplay. Along with his satirical writing, Carol had previously written clean and sober,

starring Michael Keaton and Morgan Freeman, and national lampoon's movie madness with Diane Lane.

He called the screenplay Atuck and it is well very 1980s comedy.

In Carol's version, Atuck is an Alaska native with dreams of living in New York City.

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