Emerald City Video

Hey, Vern! It’s a documentary!

Recently, the character of Ernest P. Worrell made a return to the public consciousness in a big way with the announcement that he will be headed to comics. The character, who starred in nine movies, countless advertisements, and a handful of TV specials between the years of 1980 and 1998, was played by beloved comic actor Jim Varney (Toy Story) until his death.

While it’s Ernest’s name in the title, it’s Varney who gets the spotlight in the trailer for the upcoming documentary film The Importance of Being Ernest. Based on Justin Lloyd’s book of the same name, The Importance of Being Ernest looks at Varney’s life through a unique point of view: that of his family and closest friends, including Lloyd himself, who was Varney’s nephew.

You can see a trailer for the film below.

“I had been approached through the years by different people — nobody really that I got excited about,” Lloyd told Emerald City Video. “Until David Pagano. He and Erin Natal, who did Ernest Goes to Podcast, which was really good — They did almost 50 episodes, and all of the research they had done for that podcast, David started thinking about doing a documentary.”

After a conversation with Lloyd, the filmmaker decided to base his film not explicitly on the Ernest craze, but on Lloyd’s book and Varney’s life. In addition to firsthand interviews, the film features a look at Varney’s life from both his personal and professional sides, with both the Varney Family and the Estate of John Cherry — the advertising executive who oversaw all the Ernest movies — cooperating with the film.

Among the interview subjects is Mary Politis, a woman in her eighties who has the distinction of having been Varney’s first drama teacher, back when he was 11 and she was 19 years old. That would place the lessons in around 1960.

 Lloyd says that his favorite Ernest productions aren’t the movies, but the advertisements. Originally conceived as an all-purpose pitchman who could hawk any product Cherry was hired to represent, Ernest starred in thousands of commercials in small and mid-sized markets all over the U.S. they did thousands of commercials, market to market all over the country.

“Ernest basically hit the national scene in ’84, ’85. Dan Rather covers him twice on the CBS Evening News. Tom Brokaw covers him on the NBC Nightly News, and then on ABC, he’s live on Good Morning America…and this just from his notoriety from the commercials. This was two years before Ernest Goes to Camp comes along. I love that we’re covering that aspect, because people don’t know about that. They interviewed his cousin, friends, ex-girlfriends, me and my sister, of course…and then some people that worked with him too and knew him more personally. [They hope] to feel that it’s comprehensive — that you’re getting to know all of who he was other than Ernest.”

The Importance of Being Ernest does not yet have a release date.

You can pick up Lloyd’s book, The Importance of Being Ernest: The Life of Actor Jim Varney, at Barnes & Noble here.