Despite all of the idiosyncratic behavior displayed by the dog owners in Christopher Guest‘s 2000 satire Best in Show, there was one moment Guest heard of as he was researching the cutthroat world of professional dog shows that he thought was too extreme to include in his film.
Specifically, Guest heard that backstage “a person came along with a clipper” and cut off part of the dog’s hair right before the show.
“That dog cannot be shown for then a year or whatever. That’s how brutal that was,” Guest said after a 25th anniversary screening of Best in Show at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. “They would come and clip huge segments out of the fur, and that’s how vicious it was.”
Seemingly surprised by the revelation, moderator Stephen Colbert asked if Guest considered including that moment in the film, which Guest said he did but ultimately demurred, thinking it was too awful.
“I thought about it, but I thought, ‘No, it’s too much.’ And it was horrible,” the writer-director said.
Best in Show is just one of a series of films that Guest has made that are largely improvised, with an outline and the backstory of the characters written out and scenes broken down but no dialogue written.
Speaking about the experience of acting in such a project, Best in Show castmembers Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins recalled their early nerves.
Lynch, who plays the trainer for Jennifer Coolidge’s character’s Rhapsody in White poodle, recalled how this was her (and Coolidge’s) first movie with Guest after she was a big fan of his previous work on This Is Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman.
“[Coolidge] was nervous and I was nervous, and we’re really grateful we had each other,” Lynch said. “We did a lot of talking about our characters and our relationship, and we walked through Stanley Park together.”
Still she recalled the fear she felt as Guest began filming: “None of that prepares you for when Chris says ‘action,’ and then the camera [begins rolling] and it doesn’t stop.”
Higgins added, “It’s a cold bath that first day, and it can remain a cold bath for for a full week. If you’re doing a normal movie, there’s rehearsal, there’s all these things that happen, sort of a standard procession of events. And here we get in there. I remember specifically the lobby of the hotel where the director of photography, says, ‘OK, don’t go near this fern. … Stay over there.’ … Chris is like, ‘OK, let’s roll.’ … And this was film, you know, that’s what’s rolling through — it’s money.”
Despite Higgins and Lynch’s initial nerves, Best in Show received rave reviews, boasting a 93 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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