In 1976 John had one of his first proper movie roles in a film called The Clown Murders. The Clown Murders is a horror film directed by Martyn Burke, the story follows four young men who dress up as clowns on Halloween to kidnap a businessman’s wife to prevent him from closing a business deal. The plan goes wrong and in a turn of events the group find out they are also being stalked by someone dressed as a clown.
Burke was looking for someone to play the part of Ollie, he told me, “There was a Canadian Comedian by the name of Al Waxman, who said John Candy is the only person who could play this role. I had never heard of John so I went to see him at the Old Firehall, Second City and he and Dan Aykroyd were a team. Aside from the overall ensemble of the cast they were kind of a team together and they were truly brilliant, they would do the improv part where the audience would throw out suggestions as to what they should make into a comedy routine. It was just breathtaking. So that’s where I met John. John was shy, truly decent human being. He did The Clown Murders, whilst learning on the set. I am going to say what everybody will say, everyone loved John, he was a terrific guy.”
The Times They are a Changing
- All Aboard to Melonville
In 1975 and 1976 John co-starred in two films, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time and Find the Lady respectively. He played the same character in both films, Kopek, who was the dim but sweet assistant of Detective Broom (played by Laurence Dane). Although neither film was great, John certainly got to perform and excel wonderfully in some physical comedy scenes and work alongside some legends. There is one scene in Find the Lady where John shows influences of The Stooges and Buster Keaton, with great physical comedy falling around in an office, a catalogue of disasters that literally destroys the whole room with clumsiness. Not only was he co-starring alongside Dane, he was also working with Peter Cook, Mickey Rooney, Dick Emery and in the case of Find the Lady, the beautiful Alexandra Bastedo. Sadly Bastedo passed away in 2014, but I did get to speak to her for 10 minutes on the phone back in 2012. She told me, “To work with he was very professional, with his lines, moves, he would keep the atmosphere on set quite light because he was such a jokey person. We would often go out to bistros with our mutual friend, Peter Thompson, who was a film and commercial director, in fact Peter first introduced me to John by taking me to Second City. John got on well with Peter Cook, in fact everyone got on well with everyone else, the only one who didn’t mix with anyone was Mickey Rooney”.
1975 also saw the arrival of the great American show Saturday Night Live (SNL) a live variety show with comedic actors performing sketches and improv, created by Lorne Michaels. Several of the key players from Second City ended up leaving to join SNL including Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Bill Murray joined them in their second season.
This left Second City with openings for new players. Dave Thomas took over Aykroyd’s role which meant he got to work even more with John. The birth of SNL left Andrew Alexander, Bernie Sahlins, Joyce Slone and Del Close a little twitchy, as they were worried all their talent would be snapped up by SNL, so they needed to think of something to keep their own troupes happy.
Alexander was dubious about going into television, Sahlins had been bugging him to do it for a couple of years. Once Saturday Night Live came out Alexander changed his mind and felt they needed to, after all they didn’t want to lose all their talent to SNL. Meeting with Allan Slaight, who was the owner of Global TV, Slaight told Alexander that he could give them a studio and crew if he could come up with the rest of the money. Len Stuart became a business partner of Alexander’s and put up CAN$35000 ($5000 per episode). Stuart brought both secure financing and business acumen to Second City, apparently his motto was “no problem” and somehow the problems always seemed to work themselves out.
The premise of SCTV was a small TV station set in a fictional town called Melonville, it would follow a day’s programming on a very small and cheesy broadcasting channel. They would portray the characters working at the station, snippets of tv shows, skits and adverts. The initial cast were John, Dave Thomas, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty and Harold Ramis. Ramis was also the head writer at that time.
SCTV is where John thrived, he always looked back at this and his Second City days as the golden years, the chemistry between the cast was electric, they all supported each other and they were able to be as creative as the budget allowed. Everyone would contribute to the writing meetings and come up with new characters. Later this would cause a few problems as Thomas explained;
“When John was at SCTV he was kind of lowballed as a writer. We got our cheques one month and John said let me see what you got and I just tossed him my cheque so he could see it and it was different to his and he got really pissed off and he didn’t forgive Andrew for that for a long time. Andrew was just trying to save money and John didn’t contribute as much as a writer on one level. The irony of it, Harold Ramis, who was head writer at the time, used to say people would write their sketches and bring them in the next day and John would bring his ideas scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. But what Harold didn’t have time to elaborate in that quote was that what was on that cocktail napkin was often better than the rest of the work that the rest of the people had stayed up all night working on. John’s concepts were great, they were brilliant! For example, the idea at the beginning of SCTV of throwing all the TV’s out the window, that was John’s idea and a lot of people forget that. That was really funny, John would think of those things and it would be signature, that particular image was played on NBC’s worldwide sports because no one on television had ever seen it where you threw out multiple televisions from a high rise building. It caught on, you would call it a viral thing today. John had the ability to come up with these viral concepts that you went ‘Oh god that’s great’.”
Although SCTV had only just started, in 1976 Chevy Chase left SNL and Michaels was on the lookout for his replacement. Flaherty, Thomas and John were invited to Michaels’ hotel to meet with him, they were going to have a chat in the day and in the evening Michaels was going to see their show. Thomas remembers “Even though SCTV had started, Andrew Alexander had a responsibility to respect and service SCTV, we went and said to him, ‘Lorne is coming here to see us and steal us from your show and we really want to do it, will you let us do it?’ And he said ‘Yeah Ok.’ That’s pretty gentlemanly, I have the greatest respect for Andrew Alexander for things like that he has done over the years.
“Lorne shows up late because he always does and everybody wanted the job so much it put too much pressure on them, it was the worst improv set we ever did, it was just terrible. John wanted this job really badly, there was an aspect of John that was ‘Johnny La Rue’. Johnny was big and competitive, he ordered limos when he couldn’t afford them, he loved being a big shot. That was as important to him in many ways as the work, to be recognised for the work and be able to live the good life.
“So this was an important thing for John, and after the horrible show we went to Lorne’s table and I waited for Lorne to say something to me and he didn’t say anything, so I just said ‘well alright, thanks for coming’ and I left. Joe told me he left right after that. John stayed to talk to Lorne, and after an agonising several minutes of silence whilst Lorne just kind of stared at him, Lorne said to John ‘Don’t give up your day job’. John never forgot that, that cut John so deeply and wounded him so badly. I’m sure Lorne meant it as a joke, but John was mortified and left totally crushed. Now this is another part and another side of John, things like this would hurt John and John would carry far more of that hurt home than any of the rest of us. It was more important to him because he exposed himself and put himself on the line in a bigger way than either myself or Flaherty did. I was very guarded, I would rather give up a job than get it if it meant exposing myself. I saw that in John and it hurt me that John was hurt like that. Cut to almost ten years later, we are in New York and John came on SNL as a guest. John still remembered that, but
he was like ah yeah I guess it is time to let that go.”
This was actually where Bill Murray joined SNL: he was Chase’s replacement.
Throughout his whole career John liked fairness, everyone should be treated the same no matter who you are. He often fell out with Alexander over money, looking back Alexander was just trying to keep everyone’s heads above water, but I love the fact that John wanted everyone to be treated equally. During one of the late night shoots at Global TV the crew were served “Swiss Chalet”, John went crazy, he couldn’t believe that one of the executive producers owned a restaurant and was serving Swiss Chalet to the crew (Swiss Chalet was and still is a restaurant, at the time it was one of the few restaurants to do take away food). John was incensed as he figured the crew deserved more than run of the mill take away food (the cast were obviously being served something else of a higher quality) and showed a rare moment of anger and punched a hole into his dressing room wall. Now John wasn’t a food snob, as Jonathan O’Mara told me one of their favourite haunts when they were at school “was a greasy spoon just up from the school called The Alpine, or as we affectionately named it, ‘The Armpit’. It deserved that moniker.” But what had upset John was that the crew was being treated differently to the cast (later on John would become quite fond of Swiss Chalet as they catered a movie he was working on). When John had calmed down, Alexander drew a frame around the hole he had punched in the wall and made John sign it, it was left for years but sadly it has now been patched up.
Some of the characters John played on SCTV were Mayor Tommy Shanks, the corrupt and laidback Mayor of Melonville, Harry the Guy with the Snake on His Face, the owner of a chain of adult stores, Mr Mambo - whose reaction to all the world’s problems was to “get up! and Mambo!”, Dr Tongue , and the infamous Johnny LaRue. Johnny LaRue was one of John’s most loved and well known characters from that era, wearing his signature ‘JLaR’ burgundy smoking jacket, LaRue was a sleaze, incredibly flawed, but you couldn’t help but like him. There is actually a Christmas episode of SCTV where LaRue was doing a show called “Street Beef” - where he would rove around the streets finding out what people were up to. In the Christmas episode there was snow on the ground, the streets were deserted and the bars were shut. LaRue ends up firing the crew and doing the most amazing soliloquy on the snow covered payment. All Johnny LaRue wanted was a crane shot - but he was always told it was too expensive, at the end of his breakdown, Santa turns up and gives LaRue the crane shot he had been longing for. Juul Haalmayer remembers that night and told me how cold it was, how they had to keep John warm by giving him brandy, funnily enough John wanted a convoy of tanks for this scene, but they couldn’t afford it. John also did fabulous impressions including Orson Welles and Divine.
In the early days of SCTV John was also helping out at Second City, teaching workshops, this is where Rob Salem met him, Salem remembers;
“I briefly entertained the notion of being an actor, until I realised that I was terrible. I was taking Second City workshops and at the time Joe Flaherty and John were teaching, so it was great timing, talk about two great comedy mentors. John was really championing me, he really was a mentor and one of the few people at all that thought I had any talent. I would have done anything for him. At one point he suggested I try stand up comedy, which I think was his way of saying you don’t work well with others. But he did point me in that direction and I did do stand up for a couple of years. It stood me in great stead because I do a lot of TV and radio stuff and that kind of stand up experience, coupled with the improvisational skills I learnt from John, I could do anything. I am not afraid to be in front of people or cameras, it gave me the tools to do what I do and expanded my journalism beyond print. I got those skills from John.”
Oh, and Salem has a John and Robin Williams story!
“I will tell you how I experienced it. I was taking the workshops and this was in a period when John and Andrew (Alexander) were at odds about something so John had to leave in the middle of the class. He had brought with him to the class some guy that none of us knew, this was before Mork and Mindy, I think Robin had shot the Happy Days episode which led to the pilot for Mork and Mindy but it hadn’t aired yet. He and John had met and become friends.
“Robin was something of a small phenomenon on the stand up scene but the public hadn’t really heard of him yet. So in walks John to this class with this guy – a strange looking hairy man and said ‘this is my friend Robin from LA’. At one point when he (John) had to leave I heard him say ‘Rob take over the class’. So me and Robin Williams are standing there and we don’t know who Robin Williams is. It was that type of class that was so competitive and everyone resents everyone else. So he could have meant Rob or Robin, but we decided we would just do it together. We started demonstrating one improv exercise where you have to paraphrase, so he says a whole bunch of stuff to you and you have to paraphrase and say it back to them. So he started saying a whole bunch of stuff about himself ‘well I went to Julliard blah blah blah blah blah’ and we went from dislike to seething hatred of him, who is this asshole? Then we went onto another exercise where every line we said had to be a question and if you screwed that up you had to perform a stage death. So Robin was going to demonstrate the stage death. He started off as Peter Lorre and then suddenly gets stabbed from behind and suddenly becomes Sydney Greenstreet who stabs him, who then gets shot by Humphrey Bogart who then gets shot with an arrow through the head and it just goes on, endless impressions and characters, one after the other after the other and we went from that seething hatred to jaw dropping awe. Then he started doing his Shakespearean stuff and that was just off the wall. John was one of the first ones to see that in Robin, again he just had that knack in seeing talent in people. Six months later Mork and Mindy hit.
“John liked to surround himself with talented people, he was very much about fostering talent in other people, that is what made him tick. More so than the most magnanimous human beings, this was a key part of John’s personality. I don’t know how much of that mentoring he had in his own early life and think part of that was to do with it too.”
Something In the Water?
Let’s take a moment to reflect. So looking at the Second City crew you could be forgiven for thinking something was in the water around that time, John, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin, Gilda Radner et al, so many talented and funny individuals coming out of Canada. Well part of me thinks that there was a little bit of magic to these times, but also the cultural shifts would have helped things along.
Of course a lot of these performers and artists were Baby Boomers, i.e. part of the generation who were born after World War 2 when there was a massive increase in births. For some reason Canada’s boom was bigger than most countries, roll on 20 years and the baby boom generation are so large in numbers that they were hard to ignore. If they wanted change then people had to listen to them, and change they got.
The 60s were a time of free love, everyone was becoming more liberal. In the late 70s Toronto transitioned fast. It went from being quite a sleepy location, to an exciting, busy metropolis, alcohol was introduced into bars, people started to have a good time.
These stars grew up with TV, as TV progressed and more channels were broadcast, trends and fashions spread faster than ever. Before now a trend in America would take a year or two to bleed into Canada, thanks to TV the changes were becoming more instant. It’s not a surprise that the kids who were brought up on TV, dreaming about shows and creating their own sketches, would then go on to produce SCTV, a skit on many of their favourite shows.
It was like people had been given permission to try different things. I remember at University one of my lecturers, Phil Saxe, told us, once one of us had a little success those they hang around with would get a little success too, before you know it you are all climbing a ladder together. Well I honestly think this is true for John and his friends, they nurtured each other, gave themselves a
safe space to try out new material and if they failed they held each other up. They literally paved the way for all future Canadian comedy, what a time to be alive.
Magic indeed.
Hollywood Calling
In 1978 the writing career of Harold Ramis started to take off, and Andrew Alexander rented a house in Bel Air so the other cast members of SCTV could be close and on hand to all write together. They would write in the mornings and hang out in the afternoons. Someone had an idea to have a party at their rented house - it started off with 50 people in attendance and ended up with 500! Everyone was there, movie industry moguls, musicians, in fact most of the creative echelon from the area, including Steven Spielberg. This was the first time John met Spielberg, apparently Spielberg was waiting at the party to talk to John, John didn’t believe it, he thought everyone was just drunk. Turns out Spielberg did want to speak to John about playing a part in his next film 1941, John’s opening line to Spielberg was, “I liked your movie about the fish” (meaning Jaws). John didn’t take Spielberg seriously at all, luckily Spielberg was not perturbed. During that party the members of Saturday Night Live turned up, Chevy Chase included. John thought it would be funny to put Chase into a headlock and walk around the party with him like that, after so long Chase protested that it was no longer funny, the more he protested the longer John held the head lock - reports from party goers say Chevy was in that headlock for over 2 hours!
1978 also saw the creation of The Blues Brothers, a sketch on SNL by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, under the character names of Jake and Elwood Blues. John was cast in a film called The Silent Partner, the lead was Elliot Gould, who played a bank teller that anticipates a robbery and steals the money himself, only for the robber to then come after him. John played a small part of Simonsen, who was also a bank teller. If you watch the film notice when John is on the phone in the background, he’s apparently actually on the phone as the lines worked, placing bets during filming (he wasn’t the only one, they were all at it).
Searching for Candy Page 5