PLUME: Are you surprised by the cult status that the film has developed?

THOMAS: Yeah I am, really. I mean, I wasn’t even aware of it until we would get people coming up to us, and I noticed that there were a disproportionate number of McKenzie fans, and so did Rick. Especially when I did Grace Under Fire, and that was like 30 million people watching that show, and still more people are coming up and talking to me about Bob and Doug McKenzie. Young people, not old people. Not people my age. Young people were talking about it, like they’d just seen it, you know? Then I was at Blockbuster in Malibu – I live in Malibu – and Manager there, who I know, says, “Have you seen the new McKenzie Brothers deluxe, letterbox laserdisc?” and I said, “What?!? I didn’t even know there was an ordinary laserdisc.” He said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s been around for awhile, but the new deluxe letterbox just came out.” I said, “Get out of here! Well get me one!” Obviously, MGM (or Turner I guess it was then) released “Strange Brew” on laserdisc because there was a demand for it. They don’t just make deluxe letterbox laserdiscs out of every title. And MGM (or Time Warner now) just re-released it on video again last year. A new video release. When Rick and I were trying to get a sequel going, Young and Rubicam Advertising in New York did this research for us, because we did these spots for Molson’s that appeared on the air last year and the year before. Y&R did focus groups testing recognition and likeability and found that the McKenzies tested very well. Y&R also found out from Blockbuster that “Strange Brew” is what the video trade calls an “Evergreen Title,” meaning that it’s in all the stores, usually in multiple copies, and it’s constantly out. We thought that all this meant a sequel might have some legs.

PLUME: So did they send you a certificate?

THOMAS: Yeah, but it was one of pine-scented certificates that you hang from your rear view mirror cause it smells like the Great White North. So anyway, I was taken aback by the cult status of it.

PLUME: Heck, your album even spawned a perennial Christmas radio favorite.

THOMAS: (Laughing) Yeah, I know, “Twelve Days of Christmas”.

PLUME: What was your next project after the McKenzie Brothers film, since you had quit SCTV to do the film?

THOMAS: The first thing I did was I wrote a one hour pilot for CBS about a runaway robot, called “Steel Collar Man,” and we actually shot it. Chuck Connors was in it. Charles Rocket played the robot. And I convinced Stan Winston to do the robotic effects. It was pretty cool, you know, for what it was at the time, but it was not a CBS show at all. I knew Harvey Shepard, who was the president of CBS at that time, and I had done a special for CBS in 1980, and something bizarre had happened in that special. It was called “From Cleveland,” and one of the bits that we did was I got into this boxing ring at this annual toughman fight in front of 15,000 people to do my Bob Hope impersonation, and a riot started. Now I thought they were booing at me, at first, and so did a couple of the fight promoters, but as it turned out, they were taping this and one of the cameras picked up what started it. A black guy threw a beer bottle and it hit some white guy’s kid in the head, so a riot started. Next thing I know, I’m getting booed by 15,000 people while in the middle of the boxing ring, and they started throwing stuff. At first it’s cups and bottles, but then the stakes go up and it’s chairs and much heavier shit like that. I didn’t get hit. It was amazing that I didn’t get hit. While all this debris flying through the air, his fight promoter is screaming at me, “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE RING! YOU’RE STARTING A RIOT! GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE RING!” We viewed the tape of this later in the hotel in Cleveland and everybody was laughing at how bizarre this was. I went over to the ropes to talk to the promoter, and there were Ohio State Troopers there, and this big trooper just picked me up and, literally, lifted me over the ropes of the ring and handed me to another trooper like I was a doll or something. I remember seeing Catherine O’Hara who was crying, moved by this was a horrible thing that had happened to me. I guess it was humiliating, but I was in shock. I didn’t even know what had happened. All I know is that I saw the crowd start to move and one of the cameras go over and the cue cards go down and, next thing I knew, I was being lifted out of the ring by a big state trooper. I thought I had been shot or something. So Harvey, who was the president of CBS at this time, saw this tape and thought that I was one of the most courageous guys that he had ever seen because, like a fool, I tried to keep going when the riot started. I took advantage of that to sell him the show about the runaway robot! Even though William Paley was still making the decisions about which shows they did at that time, Harvey okayed the show. It cost about a million bucks to shoot, which was a lot of money back then for TV pilot. Stan Winston designed the opening title sequence, where we peeled a skin off the robot’s face and revealed his robot head underneath. And there was a scene where the robot was attacked by a shark in the water. And we set up an entire robot lab thanks to the folks at Disney. Anyway, so I did that. That was the first thing after SCTV that I did. Then Lorne Michaels called me and said he wanted to do this show called “The New Show,” in 1983. I said, “Oh. Okay. What’s that?”

PLUME: That was during his period away from SNL, right?

THOMAS: Yeah, Dick Ebersol was producing SNL at this time, and Lorne was languishing on the sidelines wishing he’d never given the job away. So Lorne starts The New Show, and he puts together a very powerful writing room. I mean, Tom Gamill and Max Pross – two of the key guys on Seinfeld, George Myers – who was a consultant on The Simpsons for many years, Jack Handey, Buck Henry, myself, Valri Bromfield, Al Franken, Tom Davis. Steve Martin was there for a lot of the shows as a writer. It was just a great room. A great writing room. The show was offbeat and very eclectic and didn’t catch on. Steve Martin hosted two or three of the shows. The Quaid brothers – Randy and Dennis – hosted one. Kevin Kline and Gilda Radner hosted another. Real odd and interesting music guests and hosts, but it didn’t catch on so it got cancelled, and I went back to Canada. Then I teamed up with two of the writers that I met on The New Show, Gamill and Pross, I put together this thing for Orion TV called Rocketboy. Essentially, it was kind of a parody of a sci-fi show with an unlikely nerd who worked in a video store played by me. This guy is chosen to defend our quadrant of the galaxy. We did five of them for Orion Television, then something happened to Orion – it went bellyup or something, I can’t remember exactly, but the show just languished on the vine. Then the Canadian partner cut all 5 half-hour shows into a really lame hour. It was a really bad editing job, and they aired it. After that, I went back to CBS and sold them another show. I think Harvey was gone by then, so I was selling to somebody else there. This one was called B-Men, and it was about two teenagers who accidentally catch a serial killer and then decide, when they get the $25,000 reward, that they could do this as a part-time job. So, by day they’re students, and by night they open an office on Hollywood Blvd. and look for felons.

PLUME: It sounds like you were pitching concepts before their time.

THOMAS: Yeah, bad timing. It happened more than once. I sold the B-Men pilot and we produced it for CBS. Actually it was for Lorimar TV and CBS. When they announced the fall schedule that year, CBS didn’t order the show. But I was supposed to hang around and wait to see if the network would back order it (for January airing) and I just said, “Oh, fuck this.” I couldn’t wait around for that. So I took a job directing a movie for Paramount. This was The Experts with John Travolta. Again, my timing was bad. John was at the bottom of his career at that point. It was just before Look Who’s Talking, where things began to turn around for him. This was 1987, I believe. So I shoot this thing with Travolta. I didn’t write the script, but I ended up doing some rewrites on it. The concept of The Experts was that a couple of Americans are kidnapped by Russians who take them to this spy town in Russia that’s an exact replica of an American town where the Russians train their spies to infiltrate America. Everyone speaks English there, and these guys (Travolta and Ayre Gross) are brought in to update the Russians, because the town is kind of locked in the 50’s. But Travolta and Gross do their job “too well” and motivate these people to such a point where all the Russian spy trainees decide to get out of Russia on a plane. I thought it was an interesting little concept. So after I direct this movie, I have a meeting with Sid Ganis, who was Head of Distribution at Paramount at that time and he says, “We’ve decided to do what we call a ‘platform release’ on this, David.” And I said, “Oh really. What’s that?” He said, Well, that’s where, rather than release it wide and big, we start in a few narrow markets – markets where John Travolta’s movies have performed well before – and that way maybe we can get some excitement with the exhibitors.” I said, “Really. Well, let me ask you something. If the purpose of this is to get excitement with the exhibitors, and you open this in markets where John’s movies have performed well before, what will the exhibitors know – if this does well – that they don’t already know?” Sid just looked at me and said, “Well it doesn’t work like that. Look, I have another meeting, I’ve got to go.” Basically, just, “Fuck off. Get out of here. We’re dumping your movie.” That was a bummer. I simply had to figure out what to do next. I made friends with an actor I’d hired in that called Charlie Martin Smith and, next thing I know, Charlie’s directing a movie – Boris and Natasha. He wants me to play Boris, with Sally Kellerman as Natasha. I said, “Well, alright.” Now I’m acting in a movie. So I do this thing called Boris and Natasha, and it ends up being real low budget and very bizarre, and the producer is Jonathan Crane, who happens to be Travolta’s manager. During production, the movie gets sold to Orion, my nemesis, and Orion goes bankrupt, so the film ends up unfinished. (They owed scenes at the front of the movie that they never shot). Again, more bad timing. The movie sits in lawyer’s offices for two years and when it finally gets released it is evident that whoever edited it, and released it was insane because the extra footage that was supposed to be there in the front of the movie JUST ISN’T THERE. So it’s a half-completed film and it goes straight to the video market. After that I said, “That’s it for me and movies, I’m going back to CBS.” So I sold my own show, The Dave Thomas Show, as a summer series. I did a pilot for this show which was really ambitious. I rented a theater down in Long Beach, and I put an 80-foot bluescreen on the stage behind the curtains. I put a car on the stage and when I opened the curtains the TV audience saw a GIANT SET – California mountains and road going out into the desert. I entered and said “Hey, some set, huh folks? It goes forever, doesn’t it? Let’s go for a drive.” So I get in the car and start driving into my set while leaning over my shoulder talking to the audience, and some of the older people reach under their seats and get binoculars and start going, “What’s he doing now?” “I don’t know, I think he’s stopped.” Then I get out of the car to show them an armadillo I’d found on the side of the road. I was actually out in the desert shooting the elements for this, and I shot over my shoulder and cut a little square in the desert road in the distance and put the audience in there, so I was able to match that reality. Then I continue to drive. Remember that Shell commercial where the car bursts through the backdrop? Well I did that gag, where I burst through the backdrop of my own set. I fired the car, on a ram, through the bluescreen into the backstage area of the theater, with me in it. Then I had the art director come out and scream at me, “Well that’s just great. I create an illusion of a stage 35 miles deep and you, just because you’re too stupid to pay attention to where you’re going, crash through it and ruin the illusion for everybody!” And I say, “I don’t have time to talk, I’ve got to get back to the audience.” He said, “You’ll never get back there in time. They’ll get bored and leave.” I said, “Well, I’ll use the wind tunnel.” He said, “You can’t use that! It’s never been tested!” We just had this big steel door. And I said, “I don’t have time to test it,” and I get in there, and I had this suction sound sucking me into this black void. Then I did an element of myself being fired through the air, then I fired a dummy through the curtains and over the audience’s heads, and then I matched a cut of me coming up from a couple seats behind. I just messed my hair up and stood up and said, “We’ll be right back.” I had Marty Short, John Candy, Chevy Chase, Danny Aykroyd and Catherine O’Hara as guests. I did the pilot, and CBS tests everything at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax where the people from Middle America vote equally on vegetables and video, and they just looked at my show and thought, “This is too fucking weird!” So CBS said, “Either you revamp the format, or we’re canceling your summer series before it starts.” So I had to redo a much more commercial, TV type opening and format, which I really didn’t like as much at all. I loved the original format because it was really bizarre. The idea of the whole piece was that I wanted interaction between the audience and the sketches, in anticipation of the people at home who have their channel selectors ready to boot to another channel when you get the least bit boring. I wanted people to stand up in the audience and yell, “Well that doesn’t happen!” I had interruptions constantly throughout sketches and we would change the direction of the sketches and use the audience interaction to do that. I think that was something either too experimental or definitely before its time, or maybe its time hasn’t even come yet. I did six of those shows and CBS decided not to pick it up, but Ted Harbert at ABC saw those shows, and said, “Those shows are great! I want to do an overall deal with you.” I said, “Well all right.” I had primarily been at CBS up to this point and NBC for SCTV – I’d never tried ABC, so I said, “All right, let’s have some fun.” I started working on a show idea for Ted, and then Ted calls me in his office and says, “Listen, we’re having trouble on a show and we need you to go in to that show and troubleshoot for us. We’ll pay you good money.” I said, “What’s the show?” and he said, “Well, you know the show America’s Funniest Home Videos?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “We’re doing another show after it – America’s Funniest People – it’s pretty well an open field right now. You can turn it into anything you like. Just go in there and have some fun. Then we’ll do your show right after that.” So I went in there, and I ended up working with Vin Di Bona who had produced the Home Video series for ABC. Essentially, Vin and I didn’t see eye to eye on anything. Ted acknowledged later that very soon into the process he realized he didn’t want any of my new ideas, they just wanted something to follow America’s Funniest Home Videos that was almost identical to it so that they could duplicate the franchise and maybe own another half hour of audience time on Sunday nights. After thirteen shows, I said, “I’ve got to get out of here.”

PLUME: That was when you met Dave Coulier right?

THOMAS: That’s right.

PLUME: With whom you did a comedy special with around that time.

THOMAS: Right after that, I did the special with Dave Coulier, which ended up being my show commitment for ABC.

PLUME: It also contained one of the best Jack Palance impersonations I’ve ever seen. It was a parody of Unsolved Mysteries, wasn’t it?

THOMAS: (Laughing) Who else does Jack? The special was a parody of all the reality programming that was coming out on TV at that time. I wanted to start the show off with a bit of a bang. We were sitting around the writers room. We had great writers. On The Dave Thomas Show – the CBS show – I had Mike Myers, Ed Solomon – who wrote Men In Black, and Tom Gamill and Max Pross. I’ve always worked with great writers, and on the ABC special I had great writers too. I had Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley, who ended up writing for The Simpsons – in fact running the show for the last four years. Mike Scully took over this year. I think they were running it up until last year. So we’re sitting around the writers room, and I said, “You know, we gotta open this thing with something big. It’s gotta open with a bang.” One of the guys, who was an illustrator that I work with every once in awhile, said, “You know my Dad is the guy who does Jason.” I said, “I don’t want to do Jason. That’s no way to open the show.” And he said, “Oh no no, I didn’t mean that. I mean they’ll do a full burn for you for $1,500” I said, “A full burn? What the fuck is a full burn?” He said, “You know. Like, the guy will be completely on fire.” I said, “Oh, that’s cool. Wow!” We were doing a parody of all the reality programming, so I thought we’ll start out with a piece called “Stunt Crimes,” where the premise is disgruntled stuntmen going on crime binges. We had a guy completely on fire with an asbestos bag go into a jewelry store and steal jewelry, and it worked great. It’s a great way to open a show. Then he runs out of the jewelry store, smoldering black, gets in a car, and when police cut him off by putting two cars almost bumper to bumper, he puts the car up on two wheels and goes in between the two police cars using his stunt driving ability. Again, my timing was bad. This was before Cops – Too Hot to Handle or the World’s Most Dangerous Chases.

PLUME: Who knew it would get even worse?

THOMAS: Yeah, exactly.

PLUME: Which was also another show you did before it’s time.

THOMAS: Right, because here’s what happened with that show. We ended the show with a riot – a piece that Weinstein and Oakley wrote. Coulier went out and promoted the show, and then two days before the show was supposed to air, the LA. riots hit. Harbert was out of town, and ABC News got wind that there was this comedy special with a riot on it, and ABC said, “This is bad. We can’t air this.” So Susan Futterman, who was the censor at ABC, called and said, “We’re pulling the show.” I was so mad. I said, “You’re pulling the show? You idiot, the timing of the riots is all the more reason to put it on! It wasn’t a race riot our special, by the way, it was a media-incited riot. It was the media inciting a riot so that they could film it and have another reality moment and win higher ratings.” So the show was pulled and ABC aired it six months later with no promotion at all. After that, I did this thing called Public Enemy # 2 with David Jablin. This show also parodied reality programming and ended up getting reviewed by Time Magazine as one of the top 10 videos of the year. That was a piece, again, dealing with reality programming, where I played a loser actor who resembles a serial killer, and what happens is that the loser actor starts playing the serial killer in reenactments of his exploits. The serial killer gets pissed off at how he’s being portrayed and decides he wants to switch lives, so he gets the loser actor and puts him in a car and shoves him off the Hollywood hills and takes his place, but the actor doesn’t die, and he’s caught. The actor ends up going to prison and the killer ends up acting in the reenactments, playing himself. I thought that was a pretty cool twist.

PLUME: So you played both roles?

THOMAS: Both roles, yeah.

Continued below…

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