Silver Screen CPAs

This week, CPAs in social media circles were enthusiastically tweeting as well as posting on Facebook about how the cast of CBS’ hit show The Big Bang Theory did a parody promo for the accountants who tallied the votes for this year’s Emmy Awards telecast. The star of the show, Jim Parsons, who plays socially awkward genius Sheldon, gives his cast members a play-by-play description of each accountant as they’re introduced to the crowd. The skit ended with the cast members chanting “C-P-A... C-P-A!

It was great exposure for a profession that traditionally has toiled below the celebrity radar.

Much like sports referees, (and I’m not going there — as tempting as it is after Sunday’s Seahawks-Packers debacle) accountants usually draw attention, if unfairly, only in times of crisis. After all, how many prime-time series have they made about those who toil in an accounting firm as opposed to law firms or a hospital?

 

Not too many, I would guess.

Along those lines, while I was at Accounting Today, I once received a surprise call from the prop department at NBC who requested a number of copies of our magazine and other intellectual property we thought important. The woman explained they were to be used as a backdrop for a new show that would star Late Night with Conan O’Brien alumnus Andy Richter as a disbarred CPA who now was a private detective. Although the show — Andy Barker P.I. — was cancelled, we all were thrilled that a major TV studio was giving a national platform to a profession that was often overshadowed by the legal and medical fields in terms of visibility.

That got me to thinking about some famous accountants on the silver screen. No, not the ones such as  comedian Bob Newhart or rugged cowboy actor Jack Elam, who actually WERE accountants before changing professions, but the ones who portrayed CPAs in some of Hollywood’s most famous films.

How about Leo Bloom, the Gene Wilder character in “The Producers,” as he and Zero Mostel attempt to create a flop Broadway play which they figured out would be more profitable than a smash hit, or Louis Tully, the geekish accountant who becomes a savage demon in “Ghostbusters.”

On a more serious note (and my personal favorite), in the chilling 1950 film noir “D.O.A.,” Edmond O’Brien portrays Frank Bigelow, a California accountant who is fatally poisoned by a former client and enters a police station to report his own murder.

And there are I’m sure countless others. The above-mentioned films of course did not have technologies like social media to promote them in viral waves as we saw this week, but it was good week for the profession nonetheless.

Although to date, NBC has not returned my official Accounting Today calculator.