DATE REVIEWED: 1/31/26
TITLE: Stephen Fry in America
BOX OFFICE RATED: BBC released abroad (This is not suitable for GOD’s children.)
PRODUCTION YEAR: 2007-2008 BBC / West Park Pictures / Sprout Pictures / Digital Classics / Lace Digital Media Sales (Harper Collins published the book)
RATING [1 LEAST FAVORITE TO 5 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]: 1
Stephen Fry from England began his 2007 USA journey by renting a black London cab as his means of transportation across the entire country (Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean) with his private camera crew. He visited Waterbury, Vermont, where he stopped in at Ben and Jerry’s headquarters (owned by British-Dutch Unilever Corporation since 2000) and handed out samples of his newly invented ice cream flavor, “Even Stephen.” He crossed over Lake Champlain from the Vermont side aboard a ferry and hung out with locals in upstate New York. Fry went deer hunting in the woods but didn’t shoot anything. Fry dropped by the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he chatted with a newly hired foreign employee from Asia and he stated that he didn’t approve of the casinos because they were vulgar, sad and tasteless and he believed that gambling addiction was like drug addiction that ruined people, yet the British actor/broadcaster most especially enjoyed his alcohol. He went to a tea party at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts where he met with a Harvard professor of divinity who was a gay black Republican Baptist and they discussed how Puritans traveled to America from Britain to persecute others and not flee from persecution in England and how some religious people believed that 9/11 happened because of the gays. He visited Salem, Massachusetts, where talked to a practitioner of the Wiccan religion who owned a witchcraft shop and informed him that the Christians were still incorrectly labeling them and then he attended an All Hallow’s Day party to celebrate the new year and the dead rising. Stephen traveled to the Angola State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana (18,000 plus acres) where almost 100 life-sentence inmates were on death row and it was said that illegal drugs were possibly present inside the prison. Non death row inmates were put to work in the fields growing their own food and few prisoners tried to escape because they would be killed either by wild animals or hunting bloodhounds. He went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and toured the body farm located behind electric fences, where more than 100 human corpses (cadavers), some the victims of murders, were being kept in trash cans and black garbage bags while forensic university employees and students tried to identify them. Fry visited the town of Elkhart, Indiana, where the local fire chief told him that engineers wanted to prevent building collapse whereas firemen wanted fires to happen so they could put them out. The firemen and fire chief then taught the Englander the skills needed to put out fires during a burning building scenario the first responders had set up. He stopped in Chicago, Illinois where he participated in a homosexual skit by playing the part of a gay character. Afterward he visited a local Chitown company and helped the factory workers manufacture gold, silver, and bronze Oscar trophies. He went underground with the coal miners in West Virginia to get a glimpse of their dangerous everyday jobs that subjected employees to toxic fumes and constant risk of cave-ins. Stephen visited Miami, Florida, where he hated on the palm trees and basically everything else including the dance hall where the elderly women paid the men to dance with them and outnumbered the males ten to one. He visited the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he had a talk with Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman who co-founded the club and together they laughed about how it was Barack Obama’s time to be President in 2008 and America needed to focus on its citizens and not race and oppression. He visited the Ford and Chevrolet car factories in Detroit, Michigan, and talked with a vehicle designer. He joined in on a Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) celebration in New Orleans that featured half-naked people and transgender people dressed up and drinking in the streets, alongside children. He also visited with a female who practiced both Judaism and voodoo black magic. Stephen somehow broke his right arm somewhere along his USA travel and wore a cast sling with 10 metal bolts holding the bones together for some of the state episodes that followed. He went to the Maharishi Vedic Science Department’s Center for the Brain in Fairfield, Iowa, to have his brain waves tested along with hundreds of people practicing transcendental meditation. Fry drove through Ohio without stopping and mentioned the Kent University students who were shot by the Ohio National Guard while protesting against the Vietnam War. He went to the Hmong Asian community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where 40,000 descendants of the refugees from Laos and Vietnam relocated after the war now lived. He met with the state senator, who explained that they evolved to have Hmong grocery stores, bankers, lawyers and hospital workers to give them a voice and place in America.He toured a US Navy nuclear submarine base in Connecticut and talked to a military official who educated him about the Tomahawk missile. He went to Newport, Rhode Island, and discussed with a woman JFK and Jackie’s wedding and how the Kennedys were a different sort of rich with their Boston Catholic heritage and pro-Nazi beliefs.He went to Washington D.C. to meet with the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and they discussed the nonprofit’s success and vast control over the website’s content. He toured the Woodford Reserve whiskey distillery in Versailles, Kentucky and got drunk on bourbon and had to sleep it off before he got back on the road. He sat in on multiple hearings at the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, in Montgomery, which displayed a coat of arms with the British and Confederate flags among others, where the judges listened to the victims and relatives of the inmates and then decided whether or not to grant them early parole. He mingled at Mitt Romney’s Republican 2008 presidential campaign event in New Hampshire. He went to a fundraiser gala for the Society for Performing Arts in Houston, Texas, where wealthy black-tie attendees paid anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 for a seat at a table and those who didn’t attend were shunned by the uppity socialites in society. He gave a speech about art, wine and love being useless but how people can’t live without them, and he flogged a weekend for 2 to a Mexican resort for $16,000. Stephen traveled to the Texas-Mexico border in El Paso, where he did a ride-along with a border patrol agent and witnessed illegals trying to cross the border into the USA. He then drank Corona at a local Hispanic bar and listened to 3 male Mexicans, all legal US citizens, singing about their love for Mexico and how they identify as American-Mexican. He then headed to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the Badlands, South Dakota where Russell Means stated that 1 in 4 native children born were adopted out to families outside the reservation and he believed that a black woman said it best that the white men tried to destroy them. He went to the Pine Ridge High School on the reservation and learned that the new generations of Oglala Lakotayoung people were learning to speak their native language. He visited Mount Rushmore in South Dakotaand thought his own face would look good carved next to the US presidents, and he then drove and saw the unfinished Crazy Horse monument that pointed southeast to where Columbus first arrived. He toured an underground bunker in Kansasthat was used for nuclear missile warfare in the Cold War days and was now the private residence of a hippie family. He didn’t ski in Aspen, Colorado, and instead took a ski lift to a ritzy café at the top of the mountain where he socialized with the wealthy over cups of hot chocolate. He went to the Salvation Army (began in London by Methodist minister William Booth and his wife Catherine) Headquarters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he discovered that middle-class Americans were in the greatest need of handouts and charity. He headed to the Shish Kebab restaurant later that night and was entertained by a female Salvation Army volunteer who worked there as a belly dancer. He then went to a local rodeo and watched children mutton busting. He went to the Airborn border patrol station at Great Falls, Montana, where some officials with the US Department of Homeland Security patrolled the 4,000-mile-long barbed wire fence that marked the border between the US and Canada. He visited Glacier National Park in Montanaand spoke to a geologist who confirmed that global warming was real. He met up with Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, who owned 2 million acres of land in South Montana with thousands of bison and wanted to convince farmers to help counteract climate change by switching from cows to bison. Bison produced less gas and were more environmentally friendly. He went to a remote ranch in Wyoming, where wolves reintroduced into the wild were killing horses and family pets, not always for food. He went dogsledding as a passenger bundled up and riding on the sled pulled by smaller sized huskies in west Wyoming. He stopped in Bismarck, North Dakota, and gorged himself on American food with a German twist at Kroll’s Diner that was run by German descendants. He took a hot air balloon ride over the Rio Grande Rift in New Mexico and then went to Santa Fe that had Pueblo Indian and Spanish heritage. He visited the 109 East Palace building, where from 1943 to 1963 Los Alamos scientists funded by the University of California made the atomic bomb that ended WWII.He met a scientist at the $2 billion national security science lab in Los Alamos and discussed moving hydrogen atoms and building a quantum super computer that could make the materials necessary to self-replicate. The scientist explained that countries like China and Russia were constantly trying to hack into their system and steal the research information. He headed to the Navajo reservation on the Arizona-Utah state line and toured Monument Valley, where the Hollywood producer John Ford filmed many Westerns. He tried his hand at weaving colored baskets out of sumac shoots, and the Navajo weaver sold her 20-inch baskets for anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000. He visited the Rainbow Bridge structure located on the reservation and then soaked in the hot tub aboard a houseboat on Lake Powell.
He flew to Tucson, Arizona, in a 1940’s bomber plane called the B17 Flying Fortress Sentimental Journey, and along the way he bashed the Americans for raining bombs on civilians in WWII. He stopped at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where hundreds of retired Air Force planes that could still fly were being kept in case of emergencies. He visited the Old Tucson Studios where Western movies were filmed on a ghost town set. He participated in a shootout scene where he outdrew a deputy and shot him dead, and then the marshal shot Fry. He had a dandy dramatic death and stayed for the 3 Amigos show. He then flew over the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam and Las Vegas in an aircraft guided tour. He arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada (which he stated was founded by the Mormons) where he participated in Spy Games, the newest rave in Sin City after gambling. In a hotel room he met with a female agent named Trixie who worked for the crime boss referred to as “The Boss.” She explained that she kidnapped Michael Caprio, the director of Chippendales, and she needed Fry to play the mole. He agreed and met with a group of agents who were hunting Trixie down and trying to rescue Michael, the missing person in Case #257. Spies were planted throughout the city waiting for informants they never met, and the special agents posed as informants for the Boss with a code word. Fry himself didn’t really understand the mission, but he played his part as best he could and worked with the Chippendale team to find the informants and accomplish his personal goal of sabotaging the mission for Trixie. They went to casinos and hangouts around the city solving clues, talking to informants and taking photographic evidence. The Chippendale guys caught on that Fry was trying to sabotage their investigation, so they later confronted him and discovered that he was the double agent mole and used tokens to pay off the people they visited. Fry confessed that he was the mole and he was working for Trixie. The group made the rendezvous and the game played out, and at the end Fry didn’t think he was spy material or could get a job as a Chippendale dancer. He later went to a Mormon photography studio in Vegas that produced sexy male calendars. He learned that the Mormons believed they could become Gods of their own universes and they had both conservative and extremely radical beliefs within their religion. The two young men Fry spoke with thought that Mormons were thought of as second-rate citizens due to lower access to the education system and prejudice against gays and polygamists. He drove outside the city of Las Vegas and visited the Mustang Ranch whorehouse, which was legal in Nevada. He interviewed a prostitute and spoke to the madam, who explained that sex and money had to be discussed in a private room and never in public per state law. There was no pimp beating up the prostitutes, but rather the madam kept everyone in line and regulated things. The prostitutes were their own independent contractors who set the prices for their services, and they paid taxes on the money they earned and claimed to be productive members of society. The females were all certified clean and couldn’t touch the payment money until they conducted a “D.C.” (male genital check for diseases) on their clients using baby wipes. The one female hooker he spoke with said if she fell hopelessly in love and married then her partner would have to understand she wasn’t about to quit her job because she was good at it and enjoyed sex and getting paid for it. Fry toured the Italian, Hawaiian and Asian suites and compared the bedrooms to 4-star hotels It was said in the Asian suite since the bed was so big they had orgies. He visited Lake Tahoe between California and Nevada and then walked on the beach when he reached the Pacific Ocean. He took a trolley to Chinatown in San Francisco, California and ate chocolate fortune cookies made by the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company. He drove to Mendocino County in Northern California, where the cultivating of marijuana for medical purposes was legal. He did a ride-along with the local sheriff, who explained that the police department regularly destroyed hundreds of thousands of illegal pot plants using a wood chipper that emptied the drug into the woods where it was eaten by animals. By law, the police couldn’t bust into a house without knocking on the door first and waiting for an answer even though they had a warrant. Fry joined the local law enforcement on a drug bust, but first he received a shooting lesson from the officers with a special Dirty Harry Magnum 44 revolver. The police arrested 2 suspects after confirming that they were mass-producing illegal plants in a commercial operation intended for drug trafficking. The sheriff gave Fry a tour of the grow roomand explained that the plants were all female and just like in life they had no use for males. He went to the Muddy Waters Coffee Co. on the Humboldt University campus, Arcata, California where he attended the all-female open mic night (singing lesbian songs) that only allowed males to participate if they were in drag. He spoke to a female student about to receive a degree in energy efficiency, and she believed that California should mirror Colorado in passing the Equal Act to legalize marijuana and alcohol. He traveled to the Rogue River Forest in Oregon, where he white-water rafted with two environmentalists. The spotted owl was a local endangered species that fed on red tree voles, and in order to protect its habitat they had to prove that a population of voles existed in the area. Fry quoted “Vole’s the thing to catch the conscience of the king,” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and then the environmentalists climbed a tree to collect a vole fecal sample. Fry took a poop sample with him to prove that the rodents were present in the forest. He drove to the eclectic city of Seattle, Washington, and compared it to Liverpool. He went to a cancan club, where he watched burlesque dancers and listened to a 15-year-old girl play guitar and sing adult lyrics. His Seattle tour guide explained that the city’s suicide rate matched the number of heroin drug deaths. Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks were all headquartered there and Fry thought perhaps that had something to do with the drug and suicide problem along the young people. He visited the Seattle Aquarium, where the caretakers fed and brushed the teeth of harbor seals and Fry then fed the otters a British-flag themed fish cake that an employee made special for his filming. He then parted ways with his black London cab in Washington State and headed to Alaska via plane. He arrived in Alaska, which the US bought from Russia for $7.2 million. He visited the Russian Orthodox Church on Kodiak Island and then took a boat ride. He saw in Alaska endangered sea otters in the wild and fished for halibut, but he caught an Irish Lord and said goodbye to the ugly fish and God blessed it before he threw it back into the water. He flew to Cache Barrow, Alaska (now Utqiagvik), the farthest north city in America located on the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean. He met with the local Inuit people, who hunted the bowhead and beluga whales once the ice on the frozen sea began breaking up. 10 communities participated in the whaling, and they were allowed 22 kills per year using a 60-pound whale gun. They used either GPS or the stars to hunt caribou in winter, and they shot any polar bears that came too close when they were butchering whales. The oil companies kept coming back to Barrow to try and convince the Inuit to let them drill for oil in the ocean, but they refused because an oil spill would destroy their food supply. Fry did not shoot any whales with the Inuit because conditions on the water in the little boat were treacherous and the event was canceled.
He journeyed 3,450 miles to the island of Oahu in Hawaii, whose flag kept the British Union Jack. He visited Waikiki Beach in Honolulu and spoke to Terry Pennington, a private investigator who helped find missing persons. He explained that Honolulu had drugs, prostitution and corruption just like any other US city, and the different governments on the mainland gave homeless people free airline tickets to relocate to the smaller islands and live on the beaches as bums. Terry and Joe, an ex-PI, took Fry out on a boat to go swimming with sharks in a cage. Joe explained that they lost the pineapple and sugarcane plantations and were struggling to keep the land away from the developers to prevent them from ruining the scenery like they did in Waikiki. Fry took a scary plane ride to Kauai, where he and tour guide/surfer Titus explored the island in their flip-flops and discussed how the British man Thomas Cook was eaten by cannibalistic Polynesian natives. Fry compared the scenery to Hawaii Five-O, and he took a canoe ride to Titus’ home where they and the family had a luau with food, dancing and pig-eating. He visited the Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii and then went to Waimea to see the W.M. Keck Observatory, the largest telescope in the world. He met with Alex Filippenko, an astrophysicist from University of California Berkeley, who explained that we have had no alien encounters because we are not as advanced as the extraterrestrial civilizations.
British Fry ended his months long USA journey surrounding the upcoming 2008 Presidential election by stating that America is a country constantly being reborn and will always be that way.