PLUME: Were you surprised that the characters caught on in the States as well?
THOMAS: Totally. We’re surprised that they caught on at all, because – you have to understand this from our perspective – we were shooting these shows in Edmonton, and we honestly didn’t think that anyone was even watching the SCTV. So when we’d get any feedback at all, it was very surprising. The McKenzie Brother segments were all improvised and they were all two minutes in length, because, as I mentioned, the Canadian shows were exactly 2 minutes longer than the U.S. versions. The tapings for these segments went like this: at the end of the production day, when we were finished doing our more ambitious television parody pieces that required multiple sets and sometimes exteriors and things like that, everyone would go home except the switcher, one cameraman, and the floor director – even the director left – and Rick and I would improvise the McKenzie Brothers sketches. What would happen is that we would improvise for about an hour and some of them would be shitty and some of them would be funny, but the bottom line is that within that hour, the producers could get maybe four or five two minute pieces from the McKenzie’s that were funny. That they could air. That became a very cost-effective production ratio of shooting time to usable content. The producers loved it. They wanted to do more. Rick and I used to sit in the studio, by ourselves – almost like happy hour – drink real beers, cook back-bacon, literally make hot snack food for ourselves while we improvised and just talked. It was all very low key and stupid and we thought, “Well, they get what they deserve. This is their Canadian content. I hope they like it.”
PLUME: At what point did they begin slipping the McKenzie brothers segments into the US broadcasts?
THOMAS: What happened was we got short of programming and some of the McKenzie Brothers got put in the half hour shows when it was on the NBC Owned & Operated affiliates back in 1980. So some of the McKenzies segments crept into the U.S. versions of the SCTV shows, and it was immediately something that the Americans responded to. It caught on faster in the U.S. than it did in Canada.
PLUME: At what point was the album deal made?
THOMAS: That was made after the third season of half hour shows and before the 90 minute shows, or just as we started the 90 minute shows. Somewhere in there. But I remember when we got the order for the 90 minute show from NBC, they specifically requested the McKenzie Brothers segments. They said, “And by the way, we got real good feedback from our O&O’s with those two dumb Canadian characters. We want those guys on the show every week.” Rick and I said, “Okay, we’ll do that, but we’re only going to do them in little two minute, improvised segments like we did last year, because we don’t know how to do them any other way. NBC said, “That’s fine. We don’t care what you do, just put them in the show.”
PLUME: Was there any envy or resentment amongst the other cast members of the show, that you two had the breakout characters?
THOMAS: Not initially. It’s odd, you know, even Rick and I didn’t think of these segments as our best work. We had other sketches on the show that we thought were much more clever. We did Cronkite and Brinkley as a duo, we did Bob Hope and Woody Allen as a duo. A number of things that we were proud of and thought were cleverly written pieces. The McKenzie’s were just improvised, pretty dumb but very accessible. I think that turned out to be the key ingredient in why these segments were successful. Later on, when SCTV started to get press and media exposure because the show was catching on in the states, there was an article in Rolling Stone about the McKenzie’s and on the cover they put “SCTV‘s Best Joke.” Now, I know that pissed off some people in the cast, and rightly so, because it wasn’t our best joke, but nevertheless, it was perceived that way by the media because of its accessibility and also because Bob and Doug reached a wider audience than the SCTV Show with the release of the McKenzie Brothers’ record. This was long before Lorne Michaels ever thought of spinning off his sketches into other media like movies or anything like that. This was a sketch that spun off into a record and movie. Actually, now that I think of it, Danny Aykroyd did it too with the Blues Brothers. So they idea did originate with us. But, back then, spinning a sketch from a TV show into other media was a relatively new idea. And the great thing was, we owned it.
PLUME: Had you and Rick been thinking about doing a movie beforehand, or was MGM approaching you what put the thought in your heads?
THOMAS: No, we had been thinking about it because the record did so well, we thought, “Well let’s try to exploit this as a movie now.” In fact, the real sequence of events was that John Candy got an offer to do this movie for Universal called Going Berserk, directed by David Steinberg, and then we started talking about doing a McKenzie Brothers script. Andrew Alexander, who was the executive producer with SCTV, said, “I have exclusive contracts with you guys. If you guys write a movie, I’m going to sue you.” So we hired a writer to write it for us. We hired a guy named Steve De Jarnatt to do the first draft of the script for us and, as it turned out, it was an ill-conceived plan because Bob and Doug were improvised characters with our comic voices, and nobody else could really write for them except us. But try telling an agent that. The agents got Steve’s script, sent it to the studios on a Friday, and we had a deal with MGM on Wednesday. It was then we realized we had a deal on a script that we couldn’t do because it wasn’t us, it wasn’t the characters, and it wasn’t the Mackenzie’s voices. We didn’t know how much of the script we could rewrite without undoing the deal. Little did we know that we could have totally rewritten the whole thing and they never would have known, because they didn’t read the script at all! They just made the deal based on the record sales and the breakout potential and the fact that it was being advertised on a television show. So I started rewriting the script without Rick. Rick got very remote. He wasn’t sure he wanted to do it at all, and I said, “Well let’s just rewrite the script,” so I started rewriting the script. I got to page 50 or so and, I remember, he came over to my house and said, “Let me see what you’ve got.” He looked at it and said, “Alright, let’s do this,” and he rolled up his sleeves. We rewrote the front of it more than the back end. We weren’t sure how far we could go, so we kept a lot of the back end. We did some rewriting, like adding the skunk dog who flew like Superman and things like that, but the opening of the movie- if you look at it texturally – is quite different than the back half, which really locks into the story of the evil Brewmaster trying to take over the world. Whereas at the beginning of the movie Bob and Doug present a little sci-fi with Rick as Charlton Heston at the end of the world picking up a miniature Statue of Liberty, and then we’re in a movie theater watching our own movie and we release moths, cause a riot, and end up having to run out of our own movie premiere. The script was far more bizarre and conceptual in the beginning than it ended up being at the end. If we had been able to rewrite the whole thing, we would have made the whole thing like that probably, but we weren’t sure how far we could go with the studio.
PLUME: Was it always your intention to base the story of the film around Hamlet?
THOMAS: We gave that initially to the writer as direction, as a sort of a springboard, saying, “Why don’t you play with that structure. That’s at least a story that works.” In the first draft, he stuck to it too rigidly. I had done a master’s degree in English Lit, and I had spent a lot of time with Hamlet. My intention was to nail “The Murder of Gozago” – the play within the play – which ended up being the movie within our movie and things like that. I said, “Bend this around a little bit. Have some fun with it. There’s a lot of structural stuff that could be fun. We’re Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and make the girl Hamlet, who’s father is killed. See what you can do with that.” Again, people give the thing credit for being smarter in its writing than it ever could be, because it was more of a collision of ideas trying to find a voice. I think we found a “tone” in the performing and I found more of it in the editing – Rick went off to do something else and I edited the picture – but there was no master plan for the screenplay. It was a true comedy of errors.
PLUME: It seems to have been filmed very quick and very cheap…
THOMAS: Yeah.
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