The Unauthorized Full House Story (2015)
(On Cable TV, October 2022) Form versus function is an interesting question, especially when from prevents function—such as in The Unauthorized Full House Story. There are, at a minimum, three good reasons why this is a film that cannot satisfactorily reach its goals: It’s unauthorized, it’s low-budget, and it’s meant for broadcast to a family audience. All three of these constraints keep the film from reaching its potential in telling us about the story of the Full House TV series. The most familiar and least interesting of those is the low budget of a made-for-TV film: of course, the actors aren’t the best (the ones playing Coulier and Stamos only sort of resemble their subjects, although the hair does a lot of heavy lifting), and, of course, the production values are low—meaning reused sets and empty staging. This being said, this low-budget stage-bound film has the advantage of portraying low-budget TV series stage-bound filmmaking—one gets the impression that much of the film’s production values consisted of director Brian K. Roberts pulling the camera further away from the set to show what the camera usually doesn’t, and calling it a day. A more amusing issue is the unauthorized nature of the production: the desire not to infringe on intellectual property explains why the main set of the sitcom is here portrayed flipped right-to-left. Otherwise, the “unauthorized” thing doesn’t really play as big as the neutering required to churn out a family-audience film. One big subplot, for instance, takes a look at the stark contrast between Bob Saget’s foul-mouthed stage persona and his innocuous screen role: But fully exploring this idea would require a much more permissive rating than is the goal of this film: as a result, there’s barely any difference between the two facets of Saget, making this subplot odd even at the best of times. So, yes, The Unauthorized Full House Story is one odd duck, trying to get inside its topic while being held back from fully doing so. It will obviously appeal to fans of the series (or its more recent “Next Generation” revival), but it just may have something interesting for those studying edge cases of production limiting execution.