Chapter 12

PLANES, TRAINS AND JOHN HUGHES

An untitled script sent by John Hughes in 1986 seemed to John Candy like the answer to his prayers. As soon as he read the script, Candy’s hopes were suddenly revived. He felt sure this was exactly what he had been waiting for.

“I just cried with laughter when I read it,” Candy remarked several months before filming began. “It’s like it was written for me, which makes a big difference. I could just see the movie in my mind.”

For once Candy’s high hopes turned out to be well founded. Hughes, the prolific independent producer/writer/director from Chicago, had made a name for himself with a string of popular brat-pack comedies but Planes, Trains and Automobiles wasn’t about kids. This was a comedy about two mismatched business travellers, both trying to get home for a holiday weekend, who share a disastrous trip from New York to Chicago—with a long, unplanned layover in Wichita, Kansas.

Candy was to play the role of Del Griffith, a compulsively talkative salesman of shower curtain rings. Steve Martin was cast as Neal Page, a snobbish advertising executive who loathes being forced to spend time with a lowlife like Del. The script basically had only one joke but it was a shrewd one: with Planes, Trains and Automobiles, John Hughes had borrowed the premise of The Defiant Ones (Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier handcuffed together) and turned it into a comedy—except that in this case it was class rather than race that divided the characters, and there weren’t literally any handcuffs keeping them together—just psychological handcuffs.

Before starting work on the Hughes picture, Candy had to fulfil a commitment to Mel Brooks by playing a weird creature in Spaceballs. This was a sendup of Star Wars written and directed by Brooks, who was trying to repeat the huge success he had enjoyed in the 1970s with two other spoofs, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

Candy plays a creature named Barf who is half man, half dog—a faithful sidekick to Lone Starr (the Han Solo clone played by Bill Pullman). Mel Brooks takes the dual role of President Skroob and Yogurt, and Rick Moranis is a childishly menacing figure known as Dark Helmet. The film is likeable, harmless and silly, but its wit is feeble.

The amount of money Candy was being paid for Spaceballs was the source of a running gag on the set. The way Candy liked to tell the story later, “Mel had never paid anybody except himself and his wife (Anne Bancroft) that kind of money. It was tough for him to part with it. He’s actually a generous man, but he talks like Jack Benny.”

Candy, who operated Barf’s tail with a pushbutton hidden in his jumpsuit, prepared for the role by consulting his own yellow Labrador, Keema. With moveable ears that seem to be an extension of his upswept hair—suggesting built-in curlers—he looks a bit like Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd and a bit like Bert Lahr playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. But this time, he’s all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Candy was hardly ever known to sing, but the way he looks in Spaceballs makes you feel there should be a song coming on. If only Mel Brooks had given him a great silly music hall or vaudeville number like the one Lahr sang while on his way to ask the great Oz for some courage, perhaps Candy could have supplied Spaceballs with a much-needed blast-off.

*   *   *

Unlike Mel Brooks, John Hughes was the same age as Candy; they were both in their mid-thirties when they made Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Audiences might have guessed Hughes was even younger, because he specialized in contemporary comedies about self-absorbed teenagers in middle America, and reinforced the prejudices of his target audience by caricaturing adult authority figures, especially parents and teachers.

Hughes was a hard-driving former advertising copy writer who had been remarkably successful in staking out his own turf. Four years earlier, Candy had an entertaining cameo role in one of the first movies made from a John Hughes script—National Lampoon’s Vacation. In fact Hughes had done a kind of apprenticeship writing for the National Lampoon magazine. It was the success of the Lampoon movie and of another Hughes-written movie, Mr. Mom, that positioned Hughes to produce and direct his own projects. Seizing the opportunity, Hughes quickly built a small empire.

Movies that Hughes not only wrote and produced but also directed included Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And though no one talked about John Hughes as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, Hollywood was mightily impressed with his apparent Midas touch.

Typical Hughes characters were teenagers living in the kind of comfortable, all-white Chicago suburbia where no one ever ran out of milk and cookies. They were the indulged, precocious children of baby boomers, less concerned with the world’s most pressing political and economic issues than who was taking whom to the prom, and what to wear. Hughes seemed to have little use for anyone over nineteen.

While Hughes could be criticized for sentimentalizing and pandering to his constituency, and for falling back on facile conventions, he did show flashes of talent and a fresh way of looking at familiar situations. Hughes had a great ear for lingo, catching the way these kids really talked when they were hanging out at the mall. He also had an instinct for finding and shaping young talent, notably Molly Ringwald. And the knowing selection of music on his soundtracks augmented the feeling of authenticity.

Perhaps it would be stretching things to compare an early Hughes movie to such classics about adolescent groups as Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni or Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine-Feminine, but at first there was reason to hope that John Hughes might be capable of painting a truly original and resonant portrait of middle-class American teen life in the 1980s. However, after only a couple of years Hughes movies began to seem like sausages coming off an assembly line—a midwest precursor of “Beverly Hills 90210.”

Hughes was a workaholic who churned out movie after movie quickly and often glibly. Perhaps because his life experience was too narrow to provide material for his prodigious production schedule, Hughes began repeating himself and relying on trite formulas. He wrote so many scripts that he couldn’t direct them all and so developed protégés—Howard Deutch and Chris Columbus—to direct them for him. A weakness for puerile dramaturgy became distressingly evident in films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Besides, there was so much recycling from one Hughes film to another that the entire Hughes organization began to seem like an exercise in cultural self-cannibalization. The Hughes machine would reach a kind of crescendo a few years later, when, by dropping the age of his central character from teen to subteen and putting a gimmicky new spin on his familiar tale of the stress that travel causes within an ordinary American family, he would create the most lucrative comedy in Hollywood history. The title—Home Alone—was proof of his marketing genius if not his film artistry.

*   *   *

The story of Planes, Trains is a travel nightmare. A Chicago-bound flight is diverted to Wichita. Stuck in a blizzard, passengers are obliged to rely on other means to reach their destination. Given the holiday squeeze, these two unlikely companions are forced to share a motel room. After thrashing around in the same bed for a night, they rent a car, then wind up on a bus. Getting to Chicago has never seemed so perilous.

Covering his loneliness by chattering on and on, while cracking his knuckles as if to punctuate the clichés coming out of his mouth, Candy’s Del Griffith is a relative of Tom Tuttle, the Peace Corps engineer who latched onto Tom Hanks in Volunteers. But this time Candy’s cuddly pest—sporting a K-Mart wardrobe and a Charlie Chaplin pencil moustache to offset his mountainous flesh—is placed at the centre of the movie and programmed to win the hearts of the audience, especially when he sings a rousing version of the Flintstones theme song on a crowded bus.

Given the storyline of PTA, as it was nicknamed by those working on it, the movie had to be shot in a variety of locations, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and various points along the way. Cast and crew spent weeks on the road. Filming took place from February to May. Paramount planned to release the film in late November for the 1987 U.S. Thanksgiving weekend. Hughes was on such a tight schedule he had to delay the release of a movie he had shot previously, She’s Having a Baby, until 1988 because he didn’t have time to edit it.

According to Andy Lipschultz, the unit publicist on PTA, Candy was extremely gregarious and very popular with cast and crew alike. Seemingly tireless, he could do take after take after take of the same scene without complaint. One night Lipschultz was playing the saxophone in his motel room when there was a knock at the door. It was John Candy, who had to know who was playing the sax, and wanted to share the experience.

Candy earned the goodwill of almost everyone who worked on the movie, from journeymen technicians to his celebrated costar. Despite being clearly the more established performer, Steve Martin did not seem to mind letting Candy walk away with the picture. The script invited the audience to side with Candy’s character, and Martin was remarkably generous about playing second banana in this case, despite his top billing.

Speaking after Candy’s death, Martin told Janet Maslin of the New York Times that in the course of making the film, the two lead actors did a lot of ad libbing. A decade later, Martin was still overcome by the brilliance of one touch Candy came up with.

He was referring to the moment at the end of the film when Martin goes back to the train station and finds Candy there alone. Candy explains that after his wife died, he would just travel around and attach himself to people during the holidays. “But this time I couldn’t let go,” he confesses.

Steve Martin’s eyes filled with tears as he told Maslin this story about his deceased co-star.

The material isn’t much more than a thin, artificial formula for gags, but Candy and Martin establish such an engaging Laurel-and-Hardy chemistry that even those who notice the limitations of John Hughes and his world-view may find themselves succumbing.

“This is Candy’s bustout performance, the one where he puts it all together,” wrote Hal Hinson in the Washington Post. “Candy has never been more boisterously cracked.”

But Candy wasn’t merely funny in PTA. For a change, he had an acting showcase, and he delivered a touching performance. What makes the picture special is that Candy goes way beyond formula comedy to create an affecting and memorable portrait of a blabbermouth so desperate to be liked and accepted that he worms his way into the lives of strangers.

To create this character, Candy daringly drew on an element of his own personality—the part of him that loved being on film sets because it was a way of meeting new people and turning them into friends. These co-workers became appreciative audiences for Candy’s celebrated private comedy monologues, which were even more wildly hilarious than his public performances.

You can’t help sympathizing with Candy’s Del when, after a particularly awkward night sharing a motel bed, his snobbish room-mate tells him off. However, some of us may cringe when Candy retorts with a speech about the dignity of little people that even Frank Capra, that shameless master of populist manipulation, might have considered excessive. It was as if Hughes wanted to persuade someone that this wasn’t just a light comedy, it was his own personal Death of a Salesman.

There were a few dissenting critics, but even David Denby, who panned PTA in New York magazine, admitted: “The movie has one bright, nasty insight going for it: that someone like Martin’s executive, who has fought his whole life for status and defines himself by his taste, would experience sudden intimacy with a social inferior as an unspeakable violation of everything he stands for.”

Whatever the critics thought, Planes, Trains and Automobiles was embraced by the movie-going public from the moment it opened on screens across North America on November 25, 1987—taking in ten million dollars at the box office during its first five days in release.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles proved to be a milestone for Hughes. It demonstrated that he could make a film about adults and still have a hit, and thereby liberated him from his self-created teen ghetto. For John Candy it proved to be even more of a benchmark.

This was the movie that changed Candy’s life and made him, at long last, a genuine Hollywood star. At first, Candy was thrilled about this development. But within a couple of years, the pressures of stardom would begin closing in on him, causing a major strain. For a while, it would be great to have the recognition and the money he had always craved. But then it would no longer seem so great, and he would come to feel that the best times of his life were the days when he and his sharp-witted pals were unknowns working at Second City for a couple of hundred dollars a week.

After PTA, John Candy’s life would never be the same. It wasn’t just that he had become at last what he had always wanted to be—a movie star. It was that he was a particular kind of movie star. Millions of people who thought of themselves as ordinary slobs adored him, because this overwhelmingly unglamorous guy was one of them, making their kind of life count for something by putting it up there on the big screen.

Creating a common-man hero as lovable as Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Candy had accorded validation to a lot of people who went to see this movie in suburban malls. They recognized themselves in his performance, which made them want to honour Candy and be a part of his success. They felt connected to him, as if he were a close personal friend. But this kind of adulation, though Candy had always dreamed of it, was as hard to handle as neglect.

After playing Del Griffith, John Candy could never go out in public without being mobbed by devoted fans. Movie-watching America had fallen in love with him, and not even a string of third-rate movies could shake that allegiance. From the moment PTA opened, John Candy had a big new problem to cope with: the consequences of getting what he had spent much of his life wishing for.

*   *   *

Shortly before PTA opened, there was a high-spirited evening at Candy’s Brentwood home. The guests included Graham Chapman, of Monty Python fame, who had flown in from England to discuss a film he and Candy were planning to make together. The film, which Chapman had written in collaboration with Monty Python colleague John Cleese, was called Ditto. It was a comedy about a man who throws himself into a duplicating machine and copies himself. Chapman wanted to direct the film with Candy in the leading role.

Candy, who was again in a Pritikin phase, loved to cook for friends, especially pasta, and on this night he and Rose whipped up an elaborate but healthy pasta dish of which Candy was very proud. Present at the dinner besides Chapman and Candy’s two children, Jennifer and Christopher, were Catherine McCartney, who had come from Toronto to help negotiate the deal, and Jon Slan, president of Paragon Films (who like Candy had recently moved his family from Toronto to L.A.).

Slan was a prospective producing partner. That Canadian connection gave Candy a rationale for getting McCartney involved in the deal. Long after moving to Hollywood and hiring high-profile Hollywood agents and managers, Candy continued to give her a piece of the action, as a gesture of loyalty to someone who had helped him get started in show business.

There were a lot of funny stories told that night. Candy was doing his best to cheer up Chapman, who seemed depressed. It wasn’t clear until later that Chapman had been terminally ill at the time. At the end of the evening, Candy screened Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Several of those interested in working on Ditto felt it needed a rewrite, and Bob Dolman (an SCTV writer who had until recently been married to Andrea Martin) was brought in to work on it. But the project wound up on indefinite hold because Chapman didn’t like Dolman’s suggested changes. By the fall of 1989 Chapman would be dead, a cancer victim at the age of forty-eight.

*   *   *

After the phenomenal success of PTA, Candy developed a close ongoing relationship with John Hughes. Even before the film was released, he had done a cameo appearance (uncredited) for Hughes in She’s Having a Baby, which was released in early 1988. And Candy became a kind of good-luck charm for Hughes, as if even a token involvement by Candy was a good omen for any project.

The Great Outdoors, a Hughes movie directed by Howard Deutch, reunited Candy with his old friend Dan Aykroyd. (This was the third of four movies Candy and Aykroyd made together.) Allegedly based on the recollections by Hughes of a camping trip he once took to Wisconsin, this was thin material that seemed to recycle National Lampoon’s Vacation (a Chicago family on an ill-fated holiday) and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (two incompatible guys forced to be together).

Shot in the fall of 1987 near Bass Lake, California, and released in the early summer of 1988, The Great Outdoors was at best a family programmer for a broad constituency seeking innocuous hot-weather diversion.

Candy and Aykroyd are teamed as antagonistic brothers-in-law getting on one another’s nerves during a family vacation at a lakeside resort. Candy plays a sweet, slightly dopey guy named Chet, who brings his brood from Chicago for a getaway in the north woods. Aykroyd is the obnoxious Roman, who arrives uninvited (in a Mercedes sedan with the licence plate ROMAN 1), bringing his entire dysfunctional family—and ruins everything.

Chet loves rural serenity; Roman sees every acre of unspoiled nature as a potential condo development or toxic-waste dump. The level of cute humour is epitomized by a running gag about raccoons, with their grunts translated into humorous English via subtitles.

Leeches get into the rowboat, and a bat gets into the cabin. Candy gets to tread water and fool around on water-skis. His most memorable challenge, though, was playing a scene with a 1400-pound grizzly bear named Bart.

“It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life,” Candy confessed when the filming was over.

The scene required Bart to run after Chet. In order to get him to do that, Bart’s trainer stood in front of Candy with food. Candy was wearing a green parka; all the bear could see was this big green thing in front of him blocking his food.

“I know I impressed a lot of the film crew,” Candy joked. “They didn’t know I could run that fast.”

When the movie came out, there were those who thought Candy should have run fast after he read the script.

“The raccoons will have a better time than the audience,” quipped the New York Times.

*   *   *

Hot to Trot, a Warner Brothers comedy also released in 1988, featured the voice of John Candy but not his face. That’s because Candy shared acting duties with a sleek four-legged creature in the role of a talking horse named Don. Why would Candy consent to be in a feeble barnyard sitcom? No doubt he had fond memories of Donald O’Connor in the Francis the Talking Mule movies.

Besides, Candy was shrewd enough to realize it would be less time-consuming and less taxing to star in a movie if you didn’t have to worry about make-up, costume and hair. He wouldn’t have to show up on shooting days; he just had to go to the sound lab and record his lines and hope that the animal trainers had taught the horse to move its lips when words were supposed to be coming out.

Comedian Bob Goldthwait plays Don’s owner, a stupid stockbroker who relies on Don for hot tips, and has a troublesome stepfather played by Dabney Coleman with horsey buck teeth. Among the big jokes: Don’s horse family hangs a human shoe over its door; and when Don introduces the family to his human pal, one of them wants to know what it’s like having sex facing your partner.

Candy does a good job of humanizing Don, but Variety summed it up brutally: “Hot to Trot is dog food. Box office should be nil.”

Thanks to Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Candy was free to choose his projects carefully. His price per picture had climbed to three million dollars. The mystery is: Why did he go on appearing in so many bad movies if he could afford to say no?

Some people in Hollywood blamed Candy’s agent, John Gaines of the Agency for Performing Arts (who would die of AIDS in 1993). But Candy read the scripts and in the end decided which movies to do and which movies not to do. He was restless when he was between projects, and didn’t really want time off. He felt most truly at home on a film set; he thrived on long hours and enjoyed the camaraderie with cast and crew. Besides, the shadow of his father’s early death gave him a need to build up a nest egg for Rose, Jennifer and Christopher in case they had to go on without him.

Then, too, each fresh project was like a new toy in which Candy could invest his hopes. When a movie failed, it was a depressing blow, and to get out of his funk, Candy needed a new challenge to pour his energy into. Starting a new movie was like the up phase in a manic/depressive cycle.

Candy was especially optimistic about Who’s Harry Crumb?—filmed in Vancouver in the spring of 1988 and released in February, 1989—because he felt it represented a turning point in his career. In many of his Hollywood movie experiences, Candy had felt frustrated and powerless. Scripts that had seemed good when he read them were rewritten several times, and movies that had seemed promising turned into embarrassing fiascos.

Who’s Harry Crumb? was supposed to be different. It was being produced by Arnon Milchan, whose credits included such reputable movies as Once Upon a Time in America, The King of Comedy and Brazil. Candy and Milchan had become friends, and the movie was being tailored to Candy’s talents.

Crumb was to be filmed in Vancouver, and Candy would be working with many old friends. The director was Paul Flaherty (an SCTV alumnus and Joe Flaherty’s brother), and the cast included Joe Flaherty, Valri Bromfield and Stephen Young. And with a credit as executive producer, Candy had a hands-on role.

During his stay in Vancouver, Candy was in a buoyant mood. For once he was doing a movie where he had some control and his input was welcome. When Catherine McCartney paid a visit, Candy took her to a little restaurant he had discovered. When they arrived, there was hardly anyone in the place, but within half an hour the place was packed with other customers who seemed more interested in John Candy than what they were having for dinner.

Candy was feeling gregarious, basking in the enhanced celebrity status PTA had brought. After a while he moved into the kitchen, and took over cooking and bringing out orders. The party went on well past the normal closing time, at which point Candy invited the staff of the restaurant to his hotel suite, where the talking, laughing and drinking continued into the night.

When Who’s Harry Crumb? was finished, it turned out to be a serious letdown. It’s an amiable comedy with Candy as a bumbling detective who thinks he’s a brilliant sleuth, and comes up with all the wrong answers while trying to foil a gang of rogues who have kidnapped an heiress. Candy has some mildly entertaining moments, and he gives a graceful performance, but the film suffers from having only one main character, and it never gets past being a Pink Panther knockoff.

There are too many gags about broken furniture, booby-trapped cars and Harry’s dimwittedness. It would take a better director than Paul Flaherty—who shows little evidence of comic energy or precision timing—to make sparkling comedy out of this tame, derivative script.

Trevor Evans, the CBC producer who had hired Candy in 1974 to appear in children’s shows, was with Candy and McCartney the night Candy wound up cooking in the restaurant kitchen. CBC executive Carol Reynolds had asked Evans a year earlier if he could get Candy to star in a TV special. Candy had come up with a concept: He wanted to entertain Canadian Army troops in Germany or Malta, in the style of Bob Hope. He would do sketches on war subjects, like having people during the War of 1812 go to Buffalo to shop. He would use Canadian guest stars such as k.d. lang and Michael J. Fox.

But the project was too costly for the CBC, and discussions dragged on for more than a year. By then the CBC was no longer underwriting shows on its own but working with co-producers. Evans delivered the news that Candy would have to bring in a U.S. co-producer or put up a large portion of the budget for the show from his own company.

Candy resented what he took as a rebuff, and went so far as to tell Evans he would never work for the CBC again. But six months later, he would host a gala evening at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, which was produced as a CBC special. And Candy continued to have friendly dealings with Carol Reynolds.

“John Candy Entertains Canadian Forces Abroad” wasn’t the only TV special dreamed up by Candy but never produced. For several years he worked at getting the old SCTV gang together for one last show, and in 1986 he told Brian Linehan he was optimistic about doing a one-hour reunion special to be aired on CBS in prime time. Candy called all the old cast members and asked if it would be possible. Most said they would never want to revive the series but would like to do a one-time event.

But when they began discussing details, the arguments began. Candy had already promised some of SCTV’s old writers they could be involved, but Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara felt strongly if it was going to be a one-occasion, one-hour show, the performers should do all the writing themselves. Candy was irritated by their attitude. Besides, trying to co-ordinate schedules was an exercise in frustration.

The SCTV reunion was beginning to look like the impossible dream, as wistful and impractical a notion as the widespread yearning for one more Beatles concert. Those cheeky kids who used to regale us tweaking the nose of the show-business establishment had long since staked their separate claims in the system they used to lampoon, and it was too late to get back to where they once belonged. They had ventured too far down that long, winding road—the one that led to the gigantic letters spelling out the name of the entertainment capital against the backdrop of the Hollywood hills.