PLUME: There’s recently been a resurgence in the visibility of the McKenzie Brothers, most notably with the Molson’s ads. Who approached whom on that? Was that the ad agency coming to you?

THOMAS: Yeah. they went to Rick, actually.

PLUME: Was he reticent to don the tuque again?

THOMAS: Yeah, a little bit, but, I mean, I think he didn’t mind that because it was short and painless. He’s definitely reticent to do a movie, which would be longer and more painful.

PLUME: He’s been out of the spotlight for quite awhile now.

THOMAS: By his own choosing. He’s literally turned down just about everything that’s been offered to him, and he’s been writing articles. I don’t know if you know this, you can pull them up on the net, but he’s written articles for The Washington Post, The New York Times, a national magazine in Canada, and The LA Times ran one of his pieces. Just sort of little odd, eclectic comedy pieces, observational pieces, satirical pieces. So that’s what he’s been up to. I probably keep in closer touch with him and Marty Short than any of the other SCTV guys.

PLUME: Was it easy for you and Rick to get back in the groove, as it were, with the McKenzies for the ads?

THOMAS: Oh yeah. Sure. We had some major laughs.

PLUME: Were they constructed in the same way the original sketches were, or were they scripted?

THOMAS: A little of both. There was some improvising. Here’s a behind-the-scenes story. We were shooting one piece, and the premise of the piece was fly fishing. Their joke was, we’re fly fishing and we’re like, out there, on a lake, in hip waders, and we’re catching flies instead of fish. That’s the joke. Ha ha ha. I didn’t think that was real funny, but it was all right. It was a place to start, but I talked them into adding a scene at our camp, where we’re sitting around and we’re frying up the flies like fish and eating them. We had a plate, and we had a cutting board where Rick says to me, “Do you want a wing, or a leg?” and I lean back in my chair and wipe this black fly goop with bread going, “Oh, I couldn’t eat another fly. I’m stuffed.” We shot this, and then the client comes by the set just as we’re shooting this and blows his stack. He said, “These spots will never air.” And we’re like, “What?” He says, “You’re associating the taste of our beer with eating flies!” I’m an former copywriter and I was going for the joke and completely forgot that the product must come first in advertising. And I wrote for beverages too, specifically Coca-Cola, so I should know better. Anyway, Rick and I walk away from the set while the client and the guys from the ad agency are arguing and I started laughing so hard, because we looked at the line of trucks that were there – this was a day that cost Molsons a couple of hundred grand, and I had talked them into shooting us eating flies! We were laughing so hard we both fell down. When you can have a day when you laugh like that, life is good.

PLUME: And it never saw the light of day.

THOMAS: No! It did! It aired! The joke was that this executive from Molsons, who was the lower guy down on the chain… Here’s the deal…. There’s the Molson Group, and Molson was distributed by Miller in the US. The head guy at Miller, Rich Lally, had a much better sense of humor. We heard that when the Ad Agency originally pitched the McKenzies to the Molson guys, the Molson guys said, “No. They make fun of Canadians” But Lally said, “Bullshit. It’s funny and that’s exactly what we need. Let’s hire them.” So the Miller guy overruled the Molson guy. So when they showed this spot to the Miller guy, he said, “Yeah, that’s funny! Air it!” And he aired it.

PLUME: So they believed in your instincts, as well as the continued popularity of the characters?

THOMAS: Young & Rubicam, which is the ad agency in New York, researched it first. They did focus groups, where they went out tested first to see if people knew the characters, and then if they like the characters, and they found that we had a very high recognition level and further, they also researched with Blockbuster sales and found out that we were an “evergreen title.” They did their homework before they hired us.

PLUME: When did you begin thinking about doing a sequel to Strange Brew?

THOMAS: After that. Once you have the research in your hand, it was like, “Oh, alright. Let’s see if we can do this.” So I wrote a script with Rick and Paul Flaherty. We tried to get it financed this past year and it fell apart.

PLUME: What are the road blocks you’ve run in to?

THOMAS: The roadblock was purely financing. We had a deal up in Canada with this company to finance it and they ended up. Actually, there’s a lawsuit involved, so I’m kind of limited to what I can say, but basically, it fell apart. I financed most of pre-production and ended up losing $750,000 . Not only did I not get paid, I lost money on that one.

PLUME: It was supposed to start filming last July, right?

THOMAS: Yeah, that’s right.

PLUME: What can you tell me about the recent rumors about Todd McFarlane taking an active role in the production?

THOMAS: Well he was going to do that, and then it kind of fell apart. I haven’t talked to him in months, so I assume that that’s a dead issue. When you’re looking for financing and they don’t call you back, you pretty well just have to move on.

PLUME: Do you still think that there’s a very viable chance that it will still get made?

THOMAS: You know what? I don’t know. I really don’t know, because it’s really become an issue of getting financing. Rick had a streak of blue ribbon hits that he did. A lot of movies that did real well at the box office, but mainly – and especially with these characters – we’ve always been sort of like outside the system. I don’t know if this is a mainstream studio picture or not. We never even took it to a major studio. Correction. We had Rick’s lawyer take it to MGM, because we knew that the people that were running it were not aware of any of the research, and we got them to say no because we didn’t want MGM to release the sequel. All of their movies bomb except the Bond movies. And we didn’t approach any other studios. We just felt that there would probably be no appetite for it because they’re only making Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey and Mike Myers movies right now. That’s what they’re making. I think it’d be highly unlikely that they would look at our script and go, “Oh yeah, we want to do this with those old characters.”

PLUME: Do you think the bleak reception of pics like Blues Brothers 2000 might lead to that opinion of non-viability?

THOMAS: Well, the big studios always paint bleak pictures of the profit of their pictures, probably so they don’t have to pay anyone profit participation. The fact is Blues Brothers 2000 will make money for Universal because of foreign sales and home video. Not to mention pay TV revenues and then free TV. What people forget is that every movie that gets made keeps making money for somebody FOREVER,

PLUME: A McKenzie sequel can’t be too expensive to make.

THOMAS: I don’t know what that cost, but I think Blues Brothers 2000 made 20 million or something. It was a John Landis movie, so it wasn’t cheap. When we were putting our sequel together, it was like 9 million dollars. That was our budget.

PLUME: That’s rock bottom nowadays.

THOMAS: It’s pretty far down there, yeah. I think that it’s possible with the Saturday Night Live franchises, using that as a model. They try to keep those budgets under 15 million, and I’m talking Superstar, Stuart Smalley. All those. The average take of those SNL movies worldwide is 95 million. That’s something that the studios don’t like to talk about because as I said they never want to pay anybody any profits. Remember the Art Buchwald versus Paramount case? There was a case where they ended up having to admit publicly that they use Mafia-style bookkeeping, but then they managed to kick it under the carpet and make everybody forget about it within two weeks. It’s really amazing. If any other business had been investigated like that, it would have been overhauled big-time by the federal government, but in the film business it’s just sort of accepted. What I find to be a really interesting paradox in the film business is that, from the private investment community, films are regarded like investing in a restaurant, but in actual fact, films make money. If films were a bad investment, the big studios that were founded 60 years ago would not still be in business. The fact is films do make money. they make a lot of money. They make enough money to build billion dollar theme parks. But the studios use their publicity machines to honk off about their losses so loud because they want to project, at least to the entertainment community, that they’re a money losing business. “Don’t try to audit us, “’cause man, we got nothin’. We’re broke.” It’s amazing. The reality of it is, when you look at these pictures, like Superstar, I think that a McKenzie Brothers sequel is as viable as that. That if you look at that model, and say, “Okay, 15 million. What’s it going to make theatrically? If they put some push behind it, 30 million. Then you do a video sale. Then you do an HBO sale. Then you do a free TV sale. Then you do a foreign sale.” By the time you add all those up, you’re so far into the black it’s ridiculous!

PLUME: And you and Rick are still behind doing it should it ever move forward?

THOMAS: Well, yeah. It depends on how long it takes! There will be a point where we’ll be too old to even think about doing this. When we looked at the commercials that came out, we thought, “Okay, we’re older, but we don’t really look that bad.” It’s not like two bald guys with canes coming out trying to revive their old characters, and there was something perverse about waiting that long to reappear that we kinda liked too, you know?

PLUME: Perfect for the characters.

THOMAS: Yeah, I think so. We wrote a script that didn’t try to project them as the youthful characters that could stop the “take over the world” plot. This was a script about a bunch of old losers, of which Bob and Doug number two quite prominently. We tried to place them in their right age range – Stupid but old, and still losers. But I think there will be a day when we won’t be able to entertain doing the brothers in any shape or form – probably because of our shape and form!

Continued below…

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