PLUME: What was the atmosphere like, during the stage show days?

THOMAS: Oh, it was great. By atmosphere, do you mean what was the atmosphere of the club?

PLUME: Well, the club, the interpersonal relationship between all the performers. I mean, you hear everyone talk about how tension-filled the atmosphere behind the scenes of SNL could be. What was the dynamic like at SCTV?

THOMAS: Well, there’s always some in-fighting, because it’s competitive, and because people are trying to get laughs for themselves, and they’re performers. Performers, by definition, are usually selfish. A certain amount of that is inevitable, but, like, Danny and I became really good friends instantly. Not competitive at all. I realized that he did stuff that I just couldn’t do. Plus he was really into making money and so was I. We had to augment that miserable $145 a week salary somehow. That connected us for sure. And I had all these connections from my stint in advertising, so we started writing ads for local retailers and CBC scripts for television shows while we were doing the stage show. Typically, we would work all day writing and then do the show at night. The show became kind of an afterthought to our other entrepreneurial efforts. I was disappointed when Danny got scooped for Saturday Night Live, because I lost a great writing partner, and I knew that when you get out of sync with a creative partner like that, sometimes you never do get back in sync. Actually, we did get together again because we wrote a screenplay together in 1976 that that didn’t get made, and then we wrote Spies Like Us together, which Danny ended up shooting with Chevy (Chase) several years later. Anyway, after Danny left, I ended up doing a lot of stuff on stage with Catherine O’Hara. We did a lot of insane husband and wife bits and things like that. Then the SCTV television show started. The producers, Bernie Sahlins and Andrew Alexander pulled the cast from their second City Alumni list. They brought Harold Ramis up from LA. – he was a Chicago Second City grad, and they brought Joe Flaherty from Chicago, and they picked Candy, Levy, Catherine, Andrea (Martin), and myself from the Toronto cast. I was the newest addition to the Toronto stage cast, so I was very flattered to be included. I found out later that the reason they picked me was not so much that I was a great performer, but because I was a writer, and they knew they would need writers.

PLUME: Now at this time, neither Martin Short nor Rick Moranis were involved, right?

THOMAS: That’s right, Marty was doing cabaret shows in Toronto at that time.

PLUME: Was he approached for the initial cast?

THOMAS: No he wasn’t, and I honestly don’t know why. Probably because he hadn’t been in the Second City stage show at that point, so the producers didn’t know his work. They sort of raided the TV cast from the Second City stage show only. So there we are back in 1976, starting up this television show with a very low budget, syndicated sales in the States only, and Harold Ramis was head writer. After the first season, Harold left because he was writing Animal House during the first season with Doug Kenney, and Chris Miller. When Harold left, Joe Flaherty and I ended up becoming the head writers of the show as we went into our second season. Later that job fell entirely on my shoulders because Joe didn’t want the responsibility. It was very difficult for us as a cast, because Saturday Night Live, at that point, was a big success, and our show was this little cheesy syndicated show with no budget, no money to do things, lousy sets and yet, big dreams. Harold Ramis championed the notion that cheapness was part of our charm, but I don’t think anybody else in the cast really bought into that except Harold. So we limped our way through the second season and did some interesting, inexpensive, cheap-looking, fun stuff, then the show went down for a year because we couldn’t get financing. This would be around ’79. ’78-’79, somewhere in there. So I went down to California and wrote a screenplay for Columbia Pictures – on the same lot where John Candy and Dan Aykroyd were shooting 1941 for Spielberg. Somewhere in there, either the year before or the year after I did Stripes for Ivan Reitman. I only had a small part, and Candy and Harold (Ramis) were in it too, and they had a big parts. Harold wrote it. Then the SCTV producers found financing for another season of the show, but not everyone in the cast was behind it. Candy went off and did his own show, called “Big City Comedy” for a Canadian network called CTV. Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin went to California to get work in sitcoms. Catherine took a year off. Eugene and Andrea eventually said, “Okay, we’ll do part time. We’ll give you two weeks.” So we had to put the show together with partial commitments from Gene and Andrea, no commitments from Catherine and John, and that was when we hired Rick and Tony Rosatto and Robin Duke. So Moranis came into the company, and brought all kinds of new energy. He was a great writer. Very prolific.

PLUME: What had Rick been doing up until then?

THOMAS: Rick had been writing for the CBC and performing stand-up in nightclubs in and around Toronto. I met him at a party and I instantly clicked with him. I thought he was very funny and I went to Andrew Alexander and said, “You have to hire this guy,” and he agreed. At that point, Joe Flaherty and I were co-producing the show for Andrew, so as producers they gave us some flexibility. Joe hired Robin and Tony Rosatto and I hired Rick. So that became the cast for that season. Then Brandon Tartikoff at NBC took a liking to the show and decided to pitch it to the NBC O&O’s, and it got picked up in the third season by the O&O’s and it did quite well. After that, the network (NBC) decided to give it a shot as a 90 minute weekly show on Friday nights, figuring they already owned Saturday nights, so let’s try to own Friday nights. But they put us on very late. I think we replaced something called “The Midnight Special,” which was essentially a rock show, and a low budget show. It was basically just 90 minutes of rock acts, performing for free, promoting their albums. So SCTV replaced that, and our show ran from 12:30 till 2:00 on Friday nights. Then it started to get notice. It started to get press notice, and industry notice – we got nominated for Emmys and won. Rick and I did the McKenzie Brothers, and that kind of broke out. We ended up doing an album for Polygram that went Gold and then Platinum, and then we got an offer from MGM. So Rick and I decided to leave the show to do the movie.

PLUME: What can you tell me about the formation of the McKenzie Brothers? I’ve heard it was in retaliation for the Canadian Content laws.

THOMAS: And that’s exactly true. There were two versions of the show – the Canadian version and the US version. This was in the third season when it was a half hour, before it became 90 minutes. The Canadian version was two minutes longer because it had less commercial content. It was being broadcast at that point on CBC, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation specifically requested that the two minutes of difference between the shows be allocated to Canadian content material. Now we found this irritating. I never thought entertainment was an issue of nationalism, and it really pissed me off that the CBC was trying to bully us into doing some kind of Canadian content. So mockingly, when Andrew Alexander, the producer came in to give us this news, Rick and I suggested, “Well what do you want us to do, put up a map of Canada and sit in front of it wearing toques (Canadian ski caps) and parkas and cook back-bacon and ‘Talk like dis, eh’?” And Andrew said, “Yeah, and if you could have a Mountie in there, that’d be even better.” So that’s what we did, and ironically, it ended up catching on, and we ended up making a fair bit of money from the record and the movie, and it was done really as a mean-spirited joke to mock the incessant demands for Canadian content programming..

PLUME: You’ve created the ultimate stereotypical Canadian for most people. When they think Canadian, they think Bob & Doug.

THOMAS: I know, I know.

Continued below…

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