Chapter 10

ALL ABOUT SPLASH

When Splash opened to critical acclaim in March, 1984, and immediately became Hollywood’s box-office hit of the season, John Candy finally got the break that had been eluding him for years. Produced by Brian Grazer for Touchstone (a new division of Disney) and directed by Ron Howard, the movie delivered a romantic comedy with a novel twist.

A mixed-up young New Yorker named Allen Bauer—played by skinny, wide-eyed Tom Hanks—falls in love with a mermaid. The sea nymph, played by the spectacularly gorgeous Daryl Hannah, is a slinky, athletic-looking creature with long blond tresses. And despite winning performances by those two appealing stars, Candy just about steals the picture as the hero’s goodhearted, wisecracking older brother, Freddie Bauer—a bon vivant bachelor who savours every unhealthy moment of his hedonistic lifestyle.

As Pauline Kael gleefully proclaimed in The New Yorker: “Ron Howard has a happy touch, and he’s the first film director who has let John Candy loose. This gigantic, chubby Puck has been great in brief appearances, but the role of Freddie the playboy is the first role big enough for him to make the kind of impression he made in the SCTV shows.”

After the nightmare film shoots Candy had experienced, his work on Splash was almost unbelievably smooth, painless and fast. The director was easy to get along with, and the star could not have been more pleased to be teamed with Candy.

“I was thrilled when I found out I was going to be working with the legendary John Candy,” recalls Tom Hanks. In the late 1970s while in Michigan with a touring Shakespeare company, Hanks turned on the TV in his hotel room because he couldn’t get to sleep. That’s how he discovered “SCTV.” It happened to be an episode in which Candy gave one of his most celebrated performances, as the title character in a parody of “Leave It to Beaver.” “It was like hearing the Beatles for the first time,” Hanks remarked years later.

The experience of working on Splash with Candy was so much fun, according to Hanks, that it hardly seemed like work at all. “It was just a gas.”

Candy and Hanks would sit around Ron Howard’s dining-room table reading the script and finding out where the laughs were. When improvements were needed, Candy assumed the actors would have to rewrite their own scenes. To his happy surprise, Candy found that as soon as a problem was identified, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel—who had been associated with Howard ever since their days as head writers of “Happy Days”—came up with a solution. They never failed to provide variations, alternatives and new jokes. Candy was dazzled.

Freddie was a wonderful extension of the John Candy known and loved by friends and co-workers—the jocular, debonair party boy who cheers everyone up and always wants to tell one more funny story and have one more drink. When Freddie goes to the gym to play racquetball with Allen, he takes along a cooler of beer, and appears on the court holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. (The gag is borrowed from Johnny LaRue, who posed as SCTV’s resident exercise expert and worked out with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.)

The story of how Splash reached the screen is almost as frenetic and cartoonlike a chase story as the plot of Splash, which features a mad scientist played by Eugene Levy who wants to perform sadistic experiments on the heroine. It began in 1978, when an inexperienced young producer named Brian Grazer got some development money from United Artists for a romantic comedy about a mermaid, and the noted satirist Bruce Jay Friedman was hired to write the script.

By the time the script was finished, United Artists was being run by Steven Bach, who liked the script and approved hiring a director. But Bach happened to be the guy who approved Heaven’s Gate, Hollywood’s most notorious flop ever, and he was fired before the mermaid movie could get out of the water.

Grazer’s difficulties escalated when he learned that a much more powerful and famous producer, the veteran Ray Stark, also was planning a comedy about a mermaid. Stark’s project was rumoured to be a vehicle for Bo Derek, and after a couple of scripts were drafted and rejected, Stark hired the most celebrated screenwriter in Hollywood, Robert Towne.

Grazer was having his own script problems. After ordering a rewrite of the Bruce Jay Friedman script, the new regime at United Artists got one it liked. The only problem was this version wasn’t at all what Grazer had in mind. Grazer parted company with UA, and also parted company with Stan Dragoti, who had been chosen as director. Bizarrely, the way the dispute was settled was that each side retained the rights to its own version of the material.

When Grazer produced his first feature, Night Shift (1982)—a comedy about two guys trying to run a call-girl operation from a morgue—he got along so well with Night Shift’s director, Ron Howard, that Howard became interested in directing Splash. Grazer and Howard together approached Alan Ladd, Jr., of the Ladd Company (whose independent productions were released through Warner Brothers). Ladd gave the project a go-ahead. Grazer and Howard then hired their Night Shift writers, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, to do a rewrite of Friedman’s script.

It was all going smoothly until Alan Ladd learned that Ray Stark had signed Warren Beatty to star in his mermaid picture and Herbert Ross to direct it. Ladd decided to bail out. Instead of giving up at this point, Grazer hired agent Jeff Berg to pitch Splash to the studios. Berg had to convince one of them that Grazer and Howard—who gained credibility when Night Shift became a hit—could make their mermaid movie fast enough to beat Ray Stark to the screen. Berg made a deal with Disney, Splash went into production, and within months the film had been shot and edited.

Meanwhile Ray Stark spent a couple of million dollars on his mermaid movie but while Robert Towne was doing one rewrite after another, Warren Beatty and Herbert Ross went on to other projects. With the cameras rolling on Splash, Stark realized it was time to pull the plug.

Ron Howard had started acting as a child and was best known to TV watchers as Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show” and Richie Cunningham, the Fonz’s sidekick on “Happy Days.” Since the late 1970s, he had been making the transition into directing. He and Grazer would go on to form Imagine Films, one of the top independent production companies in Hollywood, and collaborate on many big movies, including Cocoon and Apollo 13.

Before Splash, some people were inclined to dismiss Howard as a lightweight, perhaps identifying him too closely with the character he portrayed on “Happy Days.” But unlike some of the other directors Candy had worked with, Howard had a sure instinct for comedy timing. He knew how to set up a scene so the jokes would pay off.

When Howard sent Candy the script of Splash, Candy wanted to play the lunatic scientist. But Howard talked Candy into playing Freddie, and accepted Candy’s suggestion that his pal Levy play the scientist. Candy transformed what could have been a straight man into a wisecracking, high-living cartoon—a sweeter-tempered version of Johnny LaRue.

Working with Howard and Hanks, Candy had a chance to show off the kind of intuitively sharp comic timing he had developed on “SCTV” but rarely had a chance to demonstrate in the movies, where the director rather than the performer is in control of the rhythm. Pauline Kael pinpointed a moment when Hanks says something and the audience is waiting for Candy to answer. Kael wrote: “His hesitation—it’s like a few seconds of hippo torpor—is what makes his answer funny.” Kael described Candy as “Falstaff at fourteen” and commented: “He doesn’t add weight; he adds bounce and imagination.”

Splash is not as consistently wonderful as its best sections make you hope it’s going to be, because the enchanting romance gives way to emotional murkiness, and the slapstick chase elements become tiresome despite Eugene Levy’s inspired nuttiness as the villainous scientist. But the movie still manages to leave you in a good mood—and eager to see more of John Candy. Unfortunately, in most of the roles he subsequently took, Candy would be unable to live up to the standard set by Splash.

Candy himself was rather incredulous about the film’s achievement. Prior to its release, in an interview with Adele Freedman of the Globe and Mail, he spoke of it fondly but with oddly understated enthusiasm: “It’s a harmless movie, a gentle little picture, a nice attempt by Ron.”

Even after Splash earned great reviews and popular acclaim, Candy shrugged it off when I interviewed him for Toronto Life. “It wasn’t Willy Loman (in Death of a Salesman) or King Lear,” he told me. “People said ‘Wow, you can really act.’ Hell, I was just doing what I had been doing for years on ‘SCTV.’”

That may have been true, but Splash was the Hollywood breakthrough Candy had been waiting for. As a result of its success, he signed a development deal with Disney’s new Touchstone division that promised him a chance to create and control his own projects. The contract called for Candy to develop three projects a year in the capacity of writer/performer/creative producer.

Candy regarded the deal with a certain skepticism. “To develop, that’s easy,” he told Adele Freedman. “Now, if they’d guarantee me three to shoot, I’d be ecstatic. Development deals like this are a dime a dozen, really.”

Still, Candy had hopes that at last he would be able to bring in some of his friends from “SCTV” and that they would be able to work with something like the creative freedom they’d had there. In the past, he was aware, their intelligence and need to work in their own way had made studio executives uncomfortable. Often the executives would treat them with a certain condescension. Their view seemed to be that the SCTV performers knew about TV but were inexperienced in movies; and that there must be something second-rate about them because they weren’t as famous as their counterparts on “Saturday Night Live.”

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Candy was now on the verge of making serious money. His fee for Splash was $350,000, and his Disney development deal specified that he was to get $350,000 per film. As well, Candy hungered for the power over his own destiny that he sensed could go along with big fees. He liked to think that with his new clout at Disney, he was the guy who could finally spearhead the dream movie the old gang had always aspired to create together.

Around the time the Disney deal was being made, Ivan Reitman, who had hired Candy for Stripes and Heavy Metal, offered him a key role in his next movie, Ghostbusters, working alongside Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the magnificent Sigourney Weaver. Things progressed so far that Candy even appeared in a Ghostbusters video. But Candy demanded a fee of $350,000, matching his Disney price. Reitman balked, and they had an unpleasant parting of the ways. Candy would never again work in an Ivan Reitman movie.

Reitman hired Rick Moranis to play the part originally meant for Candy, and Ghostbusters (which opened in the summer of 1984) went on to become one of the biggest-grossing comedies ever made. It might have looked in retrospect like a tremendous missed opportunity but Candy claimed a few years later that he had no regrets.

“Rick did a nice job with the part. Of course it would have been different with me, but I don’t think it would have been right for me to lower my price for Ivan and then go back to Disney and collect a higher fee.”

In the end, Candy’s skepticism about the Disney deal turned out to be well founded. The company underwent a major transformation after Michael Eisner took over as Disney CEO in late 1984 and installed Jeffrey Katzenberg, his former cohort at Paramount Pictures, to run the film studio.

Almost any new Hollywood regime typically distances itself from the arrangements put in place by its predecessors. Moreover, it was part of Katzenberg’s modus operandi to maintain absolute control of every detail of every project, and to give as little creative freedom as possible to writers, actors and directors. Candy’s development deal was doomed the day Eisner and Katzenberg walked through the door. None of the films Candy planned for Disney would ever be made.

During this period NBC hired Candy as head writer for a new variety show pilot planned by Brandon Tartikoff. Tentatively called “Night Life” and described as a cross between “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” the pilot was scheduled to be telecast in Saturday Night Live’s time slot in early June. It was said that Tartikoff was thinking of cancelling “Saturday Night Live” and replacing it with “Night Life.” However, nothing came of the idea. “Saturday Night Live” would survive into the late 1990s, and John Candy would never again return to the grind of a weekly TV show.

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After the release of Splash, Candy checked into the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica (on the ocean, just west of L.A). The more successful he became as an overweight comic, the more often Candy was compared to his deceased friend, John Belushi. Added to this was the constant shadow of his father’s early death. At thirty-three, John Candy was fast approaching the age at which Sidney Candy had a fatal heart attack, and his older brother, Jim, had already had a serious heart attack. John Candy feared he would not reach the age of forty if he kept up the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed.

“I suddenly realized I didn’t want to be known as the guy I really tied one on with the other night,” he told Susan Swan, who was writing a profile of him for Toronto Life.

Nathan Pritikin, the gaunt guru who ran the centre, was a true believer and a bit of a tyrant—a former engineer, who after being told he had terminal heart disease, invented his own radical method of clearing clogged arteries. His solution was a high-fibre, low-fat diet that included vegetables, vegetables and more vegetables.

Pritikin’s rules were absolute: no meat, no caffeine, no alcohol, no tobacco.

Visitors to the Pritikin Center were expected to take long walks by the sea. For their dedication they saw fast results: not only weight loss but a significant lowering of their blood pressure.

Pritikin’s followers were like born-again zealots, willing to spend hours reading labels at the supermarket and chopping peppers at home. The program became so fashionable among the prosperous and overweight that pilgrims flocked to the Pritikin Center, eager to pay a fortune so they could learn how to eat like starving peasants.

Nathan Pritikin’s critics called him a fanatic and a lunatic, but his prediction that his findings would eventually be embraced by the American Medical Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration turned out to be largely true.

Candy not only spent a month at the Pritikin Center; he also convinced his mother and his brother to visit the Pritikin Center. For a time, at least, the experience changed the habits of the entire family. Thanks to his new regime—healthy eating and no drinking—Candy lost seventy-five pounds in a matter of months. In the past he had rationalized his weight by saying that his fans might not like him if he were thinner. Now he was adamant that he could be funny without being fat. He need not have fretted. The reality was that even with his weight substantially reduced, Candy was always going to come through as a performer of a certain bulk.

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While Candy was at the Pritikin Center he got a phone call asking whether he would like to make a film with Richard Pryor, whose daring concert films had made him the most revered of all stand-up comics. The director was Walter Hill, who had earned praise for such action movies as The Warriors and 48 Hrs.

“When?” asked Candy.

“The end of next month,” was the answer.

“I’ll be there,” said Candy.

Brewster’s Millions is a comedy with a one-joke structure. Brewster, played by Pryor, stands to inherit a huge fortune from a long-lost relative, but there’s a catch. He has to spend a smaller fortune in thirty days without giving it away and without telling anyone the secret. He brings in his buddy Spike (played by Candy) to help him but does not explain to Spike what’s really going on.

The material goes back a long way, to a novel by George Barr McCutcheon which had been turned into a stage play in 1907, and had been the basis for six earlier screen versions. The most recent was a 1945 movie with Dennis O’Keefe as a war hero returning to wed his home-town sweetheart (June Havoc).

What possessed Universal Pictures to commission a new version in the mid-1980s? It may have been the fact that a comedy with a similar plot gimmick, Trading Places, had turned out to be a surprising box-office winner in 1983. Brewster’s Millions seemed like a startling departure for Walter Hill, who was known as an action director, but Hill had mixed action and comedy in 48 Hrs., and the result was a big hit.

The producers probably assumed that a reliable old vehicle could be successfully updated as long as they could get the most popular and gifted funnymen of the moment to appear in it. But Richard Pryor has the kind of genius that doesn’t emerge unless he is turned loose, and as Brewster, Pryor is kept on a tight leash in the form of a contrived and not terribly plausible story.

Whereas Dennis O’Keefe had to spend a mere $1 million, Pryor is obliged to spend $30 million. That’s inflation for you. The premise could have been given new satiric relevance if Brewster had been reconceived as a Hollywood player financing a movie, but the screenwriters (Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris) made the hero a minor-league relief pitcher who is also stuck (sigh) in the minor leagues of life.

The role of Spike, the hero’s partner on and off the field, is such a feeble second-banana contrivance that Hill—a follower of “SCTV”—was surprised Candy was eager to accept it. When Candy came to visit him on the set of Streets of Fire, Hill told him: “I’d love to have you in the picture. I’m afraid the way the script stands there isn’t much for you to do. But I’ll do my best to expand the part for you.”

Candy brought as much zest as possible to the underwritten role of the bewildered Spike, the catcher on Brewster’s baseball team, who perceives his old friend’s behaviour—renting and redecorating a palatial suite at the Plaza Hotel, investing in a scheme to carry water from the North Pole to the Sahara, hiring the entire New York Yankees team—as a series of wild pitches.

Candy had proved adept at playing the hero’s funny sidekick in Splash, and here he fares better than Pryor, bringing a bit of bouncy euphoria to the strained proceedings. He conveys a wonderful kid-in-the-candystore spirit that must have been familiar to anyone who had ever been entertained by Candy on a film set or at a party. There’s a delightfully silly moment where Candy gets to do a little dance up and down the steps of Brewster’s Plaza suite. And the succession of expensive outfits draped over Candy’s ample frame is a hoot.

But Candy couldn’t save the movie. Pryor seems awkward, as the writers fall back on stale conventions—a subplot about corrupt politicians and a tiresomely moralizing speech from the hero’s love object (Lonette McKee) explaining the importance of using money to help people. Hill tries to fill the void with crowded backgrounds and frantic activity, but the effect is exhausting rather than exhilarating. In the end, Hill felt Candy’s part had not been sufficiently developed to take advantage of his talent, and he wasn’t satisfied with the movie. But Hill and Candy became friends anyway.

“John Candy was a genuine person and a hell of a guy,” says Hill, “and that’s unusual. A lot of big movie stars aren’t such likeable people.”

In late July, Brewster moved to New York for location shooting. To celebrate the end of filming, Hill and Candy had dinner at a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. For Hill it was an unnerving night.

Hill was very aware that Candy had been fighting to keep his weight down, following the Pritikin gospel all summer. So Hill was startled when Candy began ordering drinks. But he decided not to mention it. Candy was in a mood to celebrate. Both men had a few drinks, and Candy was in such entertaining form he had Hill laughing uncontrollably. After dinner they moved from one bar to another, and when they parted around four in the morning, Candy was flying high.

Afterward, Hill wondered whether he should have stopped Candy, but later when he mentioned it, Candy said he had already decided not to stick with the Pritikin regime. However, over the next couple of years Candy did return to the Pritikin fold at least for a while.

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Candy’s appetite for work was as voracious and excessive as his appetite for food and drink. If he had refused to work in any movie that wasn’t up to the standards of Splash, he could have spent much more time at home with Rose and Jennifer and saved himself a lot of professional heartache—but inactivity made him too nervous. He felt insecure and incomplete when he was not working. He found it hard to say no, especially when there was a chance to work with people of note. No doubt this clouded his judgment and made him too quick to approve flimsy scripts.

Candy set a personal record by appearing in four Hollywood movies released in 1985, and for a while it seemed as if you would encounter him everywhere you went.

In the first of these movies to open, Candy had a cameo that took up only a couple of minutes of screen time. The film was Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird—a road movie for five-year-olds in which Big Bird moves to Illinois, where he’s placed in a foster home with a family of dodos. Then, deciding to get back where he belongs, Big Bird sets out to hitchhike back to New York.

This is a weird movie in which Jim Henson muppet creatures interact with human beings played by actors such as Chevy Chase, Sandra Bernhard and Paul Bartel. The juiciest roles belong to two of Candy’s SCTV colleagues, Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty—as a pair of goofy redneck villains scheming to capture and exploit Big Bird for profit. Candy plays the state trooper on a motorcycle who busts them and thereby secures Big Bird’s safe passage. Candy even gets to say “Tell it to the judge” to Thomas and Flaherty, prompting Flaherty to burst into tears.

Candy returned home to enjoy the last part of summer, 1984, at the family farm. He and Rose were awaiting the birth of their second child. Christopher Candy was born that fall. And Candy found a way to stay close to home for a few months without giving up work.

In September, Candy and Eugene Levy got together to write the script for a one-hour TV comedy special, “The Last Polka,” which was shot in various Ontario locations, including Kitchener during Oktoberfest and the Music Hall theatre in midtown Toronto (the site of the Shmenges’ final concert). It was a way for Candy and Levy to go on working together, and it was also a way for Candy—who often put Levy’s well-being near the top of his list of priorities—to help snap Levy out of the funk he had been in since the termination of “SCTV” the preceding spring.

“The Last Polka” is a mock documentary which purports to tell the tale of the Shmenge Brothers and their illustrious career playing “The Happy Wanderer” and other polka favourites. And this farewell bash for two legends who have decided to hang up their lederhosen also works as an entertaining send-up of The Last Waltz, in which Martin Scorsese used the occasion of The Band’s melancholy farewell tour to look back on the history of a legendary rock ’n’ roll group.

The joke in “The Last Polka” is that the same sort of attention is given two talent-challenged yokels—Yosh the clarinet man and Stan the accordion player. (The casting isn’t arbitrary: Candy learned to play the clarinet in high school, Levy the accordion.)

“The Last Polka” traces the career of the Shmenges from their origins in the fictitious middle European country of Leutonia. We learn how they were influenced by Lionel Hampton and his vibraphone, how they spent their early years in Leutonian vaudeville, and how they got a break on a bowling show. Early in their careers, it is revealed, they were exploited by a shady impresario known as Colonel Tom Collins who took seventy-five per cent of their earnings. (Could this perhaps be a reference to some of the businessmen Candy had worked with as well as to the famous Colonel Tom Parker, who handled Elvis?)

The Shmenges, in turn, exploit other immigrant entertainers—such as a lounge lizard in folk garb, played by Rick Moranis, who sings truly horrendous renditions of old Jim Morrison songs. At the peak of their careers, Yosh and Stan Shmenge star in their own weekly TV polka show and acquire spinoff enterprises including a travel agency and a cabbage-roll take-out joint.

Then there’s the group of three female singers, known as the Lemon Twins (Catherine O’Hara, Mary Margaret O’Hara and Robin Duke) whose link with the Shmenges has a whiff of scandal, not just because the Shmenges spent so much time with women other than their wives, but because there were three of them.

The big unanswered question is why the Shmenges are retiring. No one seems to know the answer except Yosh and Stan, and they aren’t telling. But it could have something to do with their ill-fated attempt to win new fans by putting on Day-Glo jackets and staging a rock concert. The event, which had to be called off for lack of an audience, is referred to as “the Plattsburg disaster.”

If you’re feeling glum, “The Last Polka” can cheer you up. It’s a tickling demonstration of how Candy and Levy could come up with fresh and funny material even in an enterprise that sounded like an occasion for recycling old gags. On its own terms the show is a real achievement—proof of how funny these two guys could be without spending a lot of money as long as they had a free hand.

Yet there’s a melancholy subtext, because we know it isn’t only the Shmenges who are breaking up. There’s a bitter-sweet sense that what we’re really watching is the story of two old friends, Candy and Levy, trying to get back to the innocent good times they shared in their early days, trying to stay true to themselves and close to one another despite a lot of external forces driving them apart—especially the fact that one had become a movie star and one had not.

“The Last Polka” would not, as things turned out, be the last time John Candy and Eugene Levy worked together. It would, however, mark the last time they collaborated on a project they could both feel proud of.