PLUME: Are there any plans for a Strange Brew DVD?

THOMAS: You know, MGM re-released the video last year, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a DVD. They wouldn’t have gone to that trouble to re-release the video unless they were getting the sales to. As I mentioned earlier, they did that letterbox laserdisc which is now an antique.

PLUME: What do you think of the state of sketch comedy today?

THOMAS: I’ve seen some funny stuff on MadTV. I see Saturday Night Live, which renews itself every once in awhile with new casts and new funny people. People will watch it and go, “It’s not as funny as it used to be!” Then some new people will come in and it will be funny again. There’s also Mr. Show on HBO. And The Simpsons, which we watch as a family still holds up. Other than that, I don’t think there is any other comedy skit stuff on. The form has been cursed by the executive mishandling of it in the development stage at television studios and networks. Even though they occasionally have it going once in awhile, it never seems to work in primetime, and I don’t know why. In Living Color was a notable exception, but it was more a kind of black “happening” than a sketch show. I thought, with the Fly Girls, the booties shakin’ everywhere and all that. And MadTV has chugged along, but Fox is always threatening to pull it. They keep the budgets down. I know people that work on that show and it’s hard work.

PLUME: Do you think it has to be this harmonious balance between the skill of the writers, the skill of the performers and the level of how hands-on or hands-off the network is?

THOMAS: Well sure, but I think that’s true of every show, so I don’t think you can isolate a sketch with that sort of analysis.

PLUME: Have there been any discussions for an SCTV reunion show? Is it difficult to do one without John Candy?

THOMAS: Yeah, I mean. Clearly. As we get older and cast members die, it makes it harder and harder to do a reunion. Even when Candy was alive – John tried to put together a couple of reunions, and it ended up being schedule conflicts. It became very clear that being a performer in a sketch comedy show was something for young people, and not people further along in their careers with contractual problems and obligations and family. It became really tough to even get together and talk about it.

PLUME: It’s odd that there wouldn’t be a retrospective show.. It’s going on, what, 25 years now?

THOMAS: Yeah. We went to Aspen to get honored. We’ve done a few of those things. We won the Earl Grey award in Canada for lifetime achievement. All the SCTV veterans went up there to get their lifetime achievement award. I remember on the way up, the pilot on the plane said to me said, “Yeah, I heard you were getting a lifetime achievement award. How old are you? You don’t look old enough to retire” I said, “Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? You get award like this at our age just for surviving!.” There was another fete at the Vancouver film festival two or three years ago where we were honored, but I think everybody has sort of agreed now that we’re happy with the work that we did back then. We’d like to leave it that way and not muddy up the water of our original work on SCTV with a bunch of old faces.

PLUME: When did you first get the idea of doing your SCTV retrospective book?

THOMAS: I got a call from these two writers saying they were going to write a book about SCTV, and that they’d already talked to Eugene and Catherine, and that they’d agreed. I talked to Eugene at one point later and asked, “Are you going to talk to those people about the book?” He said, “I never talked to anybody about that.” So then I knew they were lying, and that pissed me off, and I said, “Well, I’m not going to do that book.” When they called back to talk to me about the interview, I said, “I’m not going to do that interview with you, because you didn’t talk to Eugene, and besides, I’m writing my own book.” And they said, “Oh. Okay.” I wasn’t. I just said that really as a lie to get them off the phone. Then I got a call about a week later from Andrew Alexander, the producer of SCTV, and he said, “I hear you’re writing a book.” I said, “I just made that up t get them off the phone!” He said, “I think it’s a good idea. I got a call from a publisher who was interested, and they’d give you an advance for that.” and I said, “Oh yeah? How much?” Then next thing I know, I’m taking a call from a publisher and I’m writing it, but it started as a lie.

PLUME: And it started with those two guys, who I’m assuming never wrote their book.

THOMAS: Yeah.

PLUME: Did you enjoy the process of writing it?

THOMAS: No. It was really painful. It was very hard. I had to dig out all this stuff, and then I had to write chapters of prose, and although I tried to cut in as much interview stuff with other cast members as I could, it ended up becoming a much more massive job then I wanted to do. I didn’t do it because I had that kind of either biographer’s passion or the zeal of a writer to write something. It ended up being something that I honestly wished that I’d never started, so I was really glad when it was over. When I sent it to the publisher, it was like, “Don’t bother calling me and telling me about changes, because if you see anything that you want to change, just change it yourself!” And they did, too. They made a lot of changes without consulting me.

PLUME: Were you happy with the response once it was released?

THOMAS: Yeah, it was alright. I mean, a couple people didn’t like it. Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy were mad at me for doing it, and thought that everyone in the cast should have written the book together, which I thought was really impractical. We’ve always disagreed on that sort of thing. I don’t believe in group writing. I believe in group brainstorming, but I think that writing is something that ends up being one guy, or one girl, sitting down and typing it out. I think they also thought it was biased on inaccurate. But, in fact, I explained in the introduction, one
person’s memories of a group-cast show will by definition be biased. I refuse to apologize for that. On the other hand, Joe Flaherty read the book and said, he didn’t like everything he read in the book, but he thought it was “right on the money”. Rick Moranis felt the same way. The truth is, I don’t really care what they think. If they remember things differently, they can write their own books.

PLUME: Would you ever be willing to teach a workshop in writing a comedy script?

THOMAS: Yeah.

PLUME: Is it something that you’ve ever been approached to do in the past?

THOMAS: No. Back to the book, though, one of the things that I discovered in the book, and I used conflicting versions of the stories, is that people remember things differently.

PLUME: Often to their own advantage?

THOMAS: Yeah, but sometimes just differently, and not skewing them to their own advantage – although that does happen, and happened in a couple of places. I remember that I was in a meeting in the Old Firehall, where the concepts for SCTV were created. When I went around and interviewed. Actually, I had Bob Crane do the interviews. I started doing the interviews, but it was just long spaces of wheezing laughter and personal stuff on the tapes that we could never use, so I ended up hiring Bob to go around and interview everyone. But when I lined up all the versions of how SCTV was created, they were all different! And I was in the room! Everyone remembered it differently, so what I did in the book was that I just laid it out like that and put all these different opinions of how the show was created. It just said, “Here’s what Joe Flaherty remembers, he was there – Here’s what Harold Ramis remembers, he was there – Here’s what Andrew Alexander remembers, Here’s what I remember.” You know what I mean? I put it all down, and people like that, because it gave them an interesting take on the memory process. And it shocked me how differently, the people who were there remembered things. I don’t mean they have a slightly different take on it, they actually remember different facts! Different events! Stuff that’s so different, it’s remarkable! I had to put that in the book, because I thought it was astounding. It was really interesting. Last year, Del Close died. He was the guy who came up with the idea. Most people remembered that, although Harold Ramis said he would like to think he came up with it, but he didn’t remember it exactly. But he didn’t. Del did. I remember the sequence of events, because I’ve told the story numerous times because it was quite remarkable. Del was a director at Second City. He was originally a member of the Compass Player (a forerunner to Second City), and I think he was in the Firesign Theater for awhile. He was a really brilliant improviser and had a great comic mind. He was respected internally at Second City as one of the guys who was kind of a guru, but a nut -a former heroin addict and a lunatic in many ways. He had his wake the day before he died so he could be there. Bill Murray was there, and Harold Ramis. A whole bunch of people like that, but I couldn’t be there. I called him the day after his wake, about an hour before he died – I’m not being cavalier here – and the nurse answered the phone and she said, “No, I’m sorry.” and then I heard his voice, “Who is it? No calls! I’m not taking any calls from anyone. I’m dying.” He had a deep voice and very melodramatic. The nurse says, “It’s Dave Thomas.” and he said, “I’ll talk to him.” He got on the phone and he said, “Thank you, old friend, thank you for the full page picture of me in the book, and thank you for crediting me as the guy who created SCTV. I’m going now. I’m dying.” Then he handed the phone back to the nurse, and that was the last thing he ever said to me! He died an hour later. Pretty amazing, don’t you think? In the book, there’s a full page picture of Del and underneath, the cut line – which I wrote – “Del Close, the rambling maniac who came up with the idea for SCTV.” He was complimented with that, because he knew he was a rambling maniac, you know, but quite brilliant and quite funny. Here’s one of his jokes that he used to do in the 50’s so you can get an idea of what he was like. He used to do this conceptual stuff long before Carlin and Kline. He says, “Church keys.” you know, beer openers, “Where do they go? You buy a new one, you put one on the kitchen sink, you open one beer with it, you put it down, and then the fuckin’ thing is gone. Where do they go? Is there like a dimension, another realm, that they go to? Where do church keys go?” Then he segues right to, “Coat hangers! Where do they come from?!? You open your cupboard, there’s one coat hanger there. The next day you open it, there’s fifty! Where the hell do coat hangers come from? Well I have this theory, that the church key is the larva stage and the coast hanger is the pupa stage.” I thought that was fuckin’ great. This as in the 50’s. That’s one of Del’s bits. That’s one of his jokes.

PLUME: It takes a certain mind to come up with those associations.

THOMAS: Sure it does. Let’s face it, I think we’ve become numb now because there’s so many stand-ups who stand in front of a brick wall and say, “Have you ever wondered?” and you go, “Fuck off, no, I’ve never wondered. Get off the screen.” There’s been too much of that conceptual observation stuff, but at the time he was doing it, it was quite new and no one had done it. All the other jokes until then had been those sort of staccato set-up, punch, topper Bob Hope style stuff.

Continued below…

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Comments: None