Chapter 6

“SCTV IS ON THE AIR!”

John Candy finally got a chance to reach a large audience with his best work when “SCTV” made its debut on the Global television network in the fall of 1976. By then, Andrew Alexander had his back against the wall. The Second City stage shows were a magnet for fresh young talent, but with its low budgets and small audiences, Second City was an institution writer-performers were happy to graduate from as soon as they sniffed the opportunity for bigger audiences and larger paycheques.

Alexander’s company would soon be grossing more than one million dollars a year at the Old Firehall but he knew he wouldn’t be able to hang onto his gifted young performers unless he could make a breakthrough into television. This was especially true now that Lorne Michaels had developed the equivalent of a Second City troupe on network U.S. television, thus giving his performers the advantage of exposure to a huge weekly late-night viewing audience.

Alexander was being pressed by Bernard Sahlins, the Chicago Second City founder from whom Alexander had purchased Toronto’s branch plant. Sahlins thought the time was right to get onto TV. Alexander had hardly any TV experience, but he agreed to give it a try with Sahlins as his partner. Sahlins came to Toronto to help develop the TV show, bringing two of his most trusted Chicago associates, Sheldon Patinkin and Harold Ramis, with him.

The obvious home for “SCTV” would have been the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The publicly owned CBC dominated production of Canadian shows. But Alexander had run into endless frustration trying to interest the CBC, which during that period was obsessed with current affairs programming (including “90 Minutes Live”), and somewhat committed to drama (especially while the prominent stage director John Hirsch was head of drama) but weaker in the comedy and variety area.

Jack Craine, then director of programming for the public network, says with regret: “I wish the CBC had embraced ‘SCTV’ from day one, but we had not yet gone through the change that led us to seek independent production.”

In those days, given its restrictive union contracts, the CBC was prepared to handle only shows it produced on its own. Andrew Alexander was proposing something else—that the CBC provide its facilities for outside producers in exchange for rights to broadcast the show in Canada. The CBC did not find a way to accommodate that request.

Global was hardly even a real network. It was licensed to broadcast only in Ontario, and operated on a shoestring. It made its money by simulcasting U.S. shows. It produced little original programming, and did so on the cheap, doing the bare minimum to meet the Canadian-content rules of government regulations.

For Alexander, going to Global was a desperation measure. He knew he couldn’t hold onto his rising comedy stars with only a small stage show. Two of the most popular members of the Toronto Second City cast, Radner and Aykroyd, had already moved to NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

Unable to negotiate a good television deal, Alexander decided that a cut-rate deal was better than no deal. The shows were taped at Global’s Toronto studio on a ludicrously small budget—initially $35,000 per half-hour episode. Alexander needed Global to get the shows produced, but once they were in the can he knew he would be able to sell them to independent stations in U.S. markets—and if it was any good, the show would eventually catch on, find an audience, and pay big dividends.

There would be thirteen half-hour shows for the initial season in 1976-77 and then another thirteen episodes for the 1977-78 season.

Six of the performers chosen for the TV show had worked on Second City stage shows at the Old Firehall: John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara and Dave Thomas. The seventh, Harold Ramis, was brought in from Chicago and functioned at the beginning as the show’s head writer. (Ramis would be the first cast member to leave the show and move to Hollywood.)

At first production values were ragged. “I guess they thought we were going to walk out there with a few lights and bentwood chairs and improvise for half an hour,” Candy recalled sarcastically. But the performers turned the show’s cheapness to their advantage, making it into a comment on the sleaziness of TV in general.

“Our producers found the cheapest studio and made the cheapest deal possible,” Candy explained in an interview some years later. “Being the simpletons that we were at the time, we accepted their offer.”

The genius of Second City on television was that instead of merely putting some of the more successful cabaret sketches in front of a camera, the show took as its landscape the self-contained world of TV itself. It was during a meeting in Alexander’s office at the Firehall—attended by Sahlins, Patinkin, Ramis, Flaherty and Del Close—that the idea emerged of presenting the broadcasting day of a small TV station.

The concept was to satirize TV itself for baby-boom audiences. But the breakthrough, freewheeling format of the show emerged almost by accident.

According to Patinkin, who worked on the show as an associate producer and writer, “‘SCTV’ originally was intended to be a little show in which all the pieces were tied together with a running plotline, as they would be in a conventional sitcom. The first episode was about the crack-up of Johnny LaRue, and featured a backstage rampage. But we were really pressed for time and short of money, and we had to shoot the material one segment at a time. After a while we realized that the bits spoofing TV could work on their own and we didn’t really need the plot connection stuff.”

The original notion, Sahlins explains, was to develop a parody of television with a continuing story set in a small-town TV station. “We had written a script which was connected and characterized,” recalls Sahlins. “John played a has-been star returning to his home town. Gene Levy was the station’s security guard. Harold played the owner of the station. But when we got through shooting the first show, we could tell it wasn’t working. After three days in the editing room we tried taking out all the story elements. Suddenly, it worked great.”

The sensibility of the program came almost intuitively from the age of the multichannel TV converter. Viewers got samples of various lunacies flourishing all over the TV schedule, but they were delivered as punchy, fragmented flashes, just the way they would be if we happened to be sitting impatiently in front of our TV sets with trigger-happy fingers always jumping from one channel to another.

Structurally the show was laid out with brilliant intricacy, bombarding the audience with a whole range of promos, previews, commercials and commentaries—which all seemed to be interrupting one another and played off against one another. The sense of a continuous schedule was achieved by the repetition of certain features and characters—including such regulars as Joe Flaherty’s Sammy Maudlin (the self-congratulatory talk-show host), Eugene Levy’s Bobby Bittman (the world’s most obnoxious stand-up comic), Catherine O’Hara as Hollywood gossip columnist “Rhoda” Barrett and airhead starlet Lola Heatherton, and Dave Thomas as Bob Hope and Art (“Women Say the Darndest Things”) Linkletter.

When “SCTV” did a movie parody like Grapes of Mud, Lust for Paint or Murder on the Sandwich Express, it wasn’t only the movie that was parodied. It was also the local yokel at your station who introduced the movies, and the banal plugs that always seem to break into a film just when you get hooked.

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All the performers were supposed to be involved in writing material, but some were more prolific than others. Flaherty was a workhorse and an ideas man. Candy did not like to write, and would do anything to put off writing. Yet he was the one who came up with the idea (used in the opening montage) of heaving TV sets out an apartment window. And some observers could tell very early on that Candy was destined to become an audience favourite and was the best bet to break through to stardom.

“Joe was a better actor,” says Sahlins, “but he hid behind his characters. John Candy took the limelight, as did Andrea Martin, because his vulnerability was right out there, and no matter what character he was playing, he was always John Candy. The audience knew who he was and loved him and responded to that vulnerability.”

Candy made a specialty of spoofing hefty male celebrities including Orson Welles, Jackie Gleason, Babe Ruth and Luciano Pavarotti. In one episode, Candy played a role that was deliciously right for him—Elvis Presley in his obese Las Vegas phase. But the sketch had to be dropped when Elvis suddenly died before it could be aired.

Candy also created certain regular characters, such as Melonville’s pipe-smoking Mayor Tommy Shanks, the nearsighted, formally attired Peter Lorre lookalike Dr. Tongue and a sleazy huckster by the name of Harry who would paint snakes on his face or wear a satellite dish on his head to promote his products. But none was as cherished by viewers as Candy’s Johnny LaRue—who could always be counted on to let his nasty habits and bad temper come out.

George Bloomfield, who was brought in as director after the first season, says that Candy was the “grand master” of the group. “He had an instinct that everyone in the group trusted. He wasn’t the most prolific writer, and there were others who brought more brain power and analysis to the material. His special talent was for what he could do in lifting something off the page. He could take something that didn’t seem that funny when you read it and turn it into something hilarious. He was the most predictably unpredictable member of the cast.

“John would always extend a sketch beyond what you anticipated, and I got into the habit of telling the cameramen not to stop when I called ‘cut’ because so often John would do something brilliant after he thought the scene was over. My credo was that if I laughed it was funny, and if I didn’t laugh it wasn’t funny. Sometimes John made me laugh so hard I would go home in pain. Once I fell off a chair backward because of what he did when he was playing the Incredible Hulk.”

Wearing a deliciously tacky slime green monster suit, this Hulk grunts while Andrea Martin, playing a shrink named Cheryl Kinsey, says:

“I’m not going to be able to help you unless you tell me a bit about yourself.”

In a ferocious rampage, the Hulk throws her paintings, plants and filing cabinet out the window. After she gives an interpretation of his hostile behaviour, the Hulk throws Cheryl out the window, too.

Historically, the Chicago Second City had a reputation for cerebral, literary humour, but it was only occasionally that “SCTV”—influenced by Flaherty—slipped in a Chekhov skit on Masterpiece Theatre or a vaudeville version of Molly Bloom from Ulysses. More typically the show zeroed in on the low-brow vulgarity of TV itself. Certainly that was the turf on which Candy, who was sharp-witted but not intellectual, felt most comfortable.

Watching the show, you got the sense that the performers were not playing down to the audience but felt a natural affinity for the medium in which they were working. Mind you, the SCTV gang weren’t accepting, uncritical boob-victims; they were genuinely steeped in TV’s hype, its images, its rhythms, its vocabulary, its idioms. Their jokes naturally assumed a pop frame of reference, encompassing old B-movies, used-car hucksters and self-promoting celebrities. This was not the kind of satire intended to improve the world; rather, it was a celebration, mocking and loving at the same time, of the most insane excesses in a media-stoned world. At its highest level, “SCTV” achieved a wacky surrealism.

The satire was so good-natured it was hard to get offended on behalf of any of its targets, but several early sketches caused trouble. The B’Nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League was not amused by “Match Unto My Feet,” a spoof of a Sunday-afternoon series on Jewish topics. There were also complaints about a “Sunrise Semester” episode on which Andrea Martin delivered a guideline for women on how to fake orgasms. And a skit about vasectomy was dropped from the U.S. version.

The show included itself on its list of fair-game satiric targets. In one of the standing film clips that introduced the show every week, the show’s regular performers were seen taking their hot idea for a TV series to top programmers at NBC, CBS and ABC—and, in escalating slapstick episodes, they get the boot at each of the big networks. As a last resort, they start their own network—SCTV.

This was not so far from the truth. Though “SCTV” in its early years had a small and devoted following, it was inevitably compared to “Saturday Night Live.” Connoisseurs might recognize “SCTV” as the superior show—one of the greatest achievements in the history of television comedy, on a par with “Your Show of Shows” in its salad days. Yet “SNL” was a hot show and “SCTV” was not. It remained that little underground show from Canada that hadn’t been given a tumble by any of the major networks. When Freddie Silverman, a celebrated U.S. network programming czar, dismissed it as “far too intelligent,” the backhanded compliment sounded to some ears like a death knell.

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Prior to the arrival of Bloomfield, “SCTV” was directed by Milad Besada, who was on the Global staff. There were some major accomplishments that first season, but in bringing on Bloomfield the idea was to improve the show by involving someone who had a track record in weekly television drama and comedy shows. Bloomfield had worked with Jim Henson of the Muppets, and had been a guest director on “King of Kensington.” He had also done many CBC dramas, and had worked with some of the SCTV performers on other projects.

The members of the cast were comfortable with Bloomfield and they didn’t even seem to mind that he was getting paid much better than they were. In making his deal with Andrew Alexander, Bloomfield set stiff conditions and basically put Alexander in a take-it-or-leave-it situation.

During the period Bloomfield was directing the show, it was routine to tape three half-hour shows a week. The shows were taped at the Global studio outside Toronto after rehearsals in a hall near the Firehall. During the writing phase, the troupe would be closeted with one another, and Bloomfield would be marginally involved. Often he would see sketches on paper and find them not so funny—only to discover later that in execution, the material became hilarious.

Bloomfield’s ambition was to develop a career as a movie director, and he regarded “SCTV” as a temporary diversion. But when the SCTV group began to do parodies of movies such as Grapes of Wrath it provided a delicious challenge for Bloomfield. It gave him a chance to be a stylist instead of a technician and traffic cop.

At the end of Bloomfield’s first thirteen-episode season, both Harold Ramis and Sheldon Patinkin left “SCTV.” According to Patinkin, the tension within the show was oppressive. “There was friction between everybody and everybody. It was more conflict than I cared to deal with. There was a lot of anger and competition. Not that we didn’t like each other, but it just got too competitive. Gruelling fifteen- or sixteen-hour days were routine, and it wore people down.”

Ramis got a head start in the inevitable defection of SCTV members to Hollywood. Ramis—the guy with the sweet smile and the Harold Lloyd glasses who played the owner of the SCTV station—got an offer he couldn’t refuse from Ivan Reitman, the toothy hustler from Hamilton who was on the verge of becoming one of Hollywood’s most successful producers. Ramis was one of the screen writers for Animal House, which turned into the runaway hit of the 1978 movie crop. Though he continued to work as a part-time writer and occasional guest star for “SCTV,” his move to Hollywood was permanent. There he would became a kind of godfather for his old SCTV colleagues, getting them involved in such movies as Stripes, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Club Paradise.

While George Bloomfield was working on “SCTV,” he began what became an ongoing friendship with John Candy. Early on, Bloomfield became aware that in Candy, he was dealing with someone who had opened himself in a trusting way.

“He wanted to improve,” recalls Bloomfield. “Because I had come from the world of drama and his focus was comedy, he welcomed the coming together. His approach to comedy was character. I could see he was very inventive. That came out of something in his nature. On a personal level, John’s generosity was striking. When he threw a party it was not just hot dogs. There would be some people from work there, and then there would be a whole pile of other people who had nothing do with show business.”

Bloomfield soon met Rosemary Hobor and came to the conclusion that she was exactly the right woman for Candy. “He was drawn to real people rather than the showbiz crowd. That’s where he would get his ideas and characters … people walking through the malls. Rose was an earth mother. She was a potter, and he was proud of the work she did. For him it was a plus that she had nothing to do with the entertainment business.”

Candy took a childlike joy in spending his money. For a while Candy fixed up old Mustangs. Then as soon as he could afford it, he bought an eight-year-old Jaguar which he proudly showed off to his colleagues.

“Whatever John earned he would spend. He was like Johnny LaRue with a cocktail. It never occurred to him to worry about the next job or to think that he might need some of his money for later. On the surface he was a happy-go-lucky guy but he struck me as extremely complicated—someone who felt everything very deeply. I could see he was vulnerable, and there was a lot of pain there.”

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John Candy’s pain and anger became most visible in his relationship with Andrew Alexander, and George Bloomfield got a close-up view of it.

“What went on between John and Andrew was sort of a running gag,” Bloomfield recalls. “It had to do with the fact that Andrew was making piles of money and these performers weren’t. That’s the bottom line. They started as kids who had been playing at the Firehall for less than $200 a week. All of a sudden they were in TV where they were making what seemed like a lot. Then after six months they realized they were hardly making scale for TV actors. As the show became bigger and more successful, they wanted something more akin to what they felt they were worth to the show. That didn’t happen.”

One source of continuing friction was John Candy’s discovery that his pay-cheque was smaller than the one Dave Thomas was getting. Someone had told Alexander that Candy, O’Hara and Martin were not writing sketches, and on that basis he paid them slightly less than Ramis, Flaherty and Thomas. Candy took it as evidence that he had been betrayed and was being treated unfairly. This became a grudge that lasted for years and resulted in a lawsuit that Candy eventually launched against Alexander and his partners.

Bloomfield used to hear the cracks the performers would make about Alexander in the hall where the rehearsals were held. Alexander had the only walled office; the rest of the space was open. The SCTV gang used to shout barbed comments that were meant to be heard on the other side of Alexander’s office wall.

“The remarks were not subtle. The kids knew they were a hit, and they felt they had some clout. These remarks were humorous but they weren’t only humorous.”

Candy’s comments went further than those of his colleagues, and he became a ringleader in the fight with Alexander. Because he had more movie offers, he seemed to be in a stronger position, and there was a sense that he was fighting on behalf of others as well as himself. When Alexander asked the performers to sign away future royalties for what seemed like a very modest sum, the others complied but Candy balked. This drama was incorporated into an episode of the show when Guy Caballero, the bullying president of the station played by Joe Flaherty, tries to force Johnny LaRue to sign some documents and a tearful LaRue resists the pressure.

According to Bloomfield, it was possible to see Candy’s behaviour as self-destructive, given that Alexander was his employer. And the breach was about to become public. At the end of the third season, Global abruptly pulled the plug on “SCTV.” Alexander made another deal which involved producing the show in Edmonton. Candy bowed out.

He was spending more time in Hollywood where he seemed on the brink of a movie career. Candy was so eager for work he had even gone to Edmonton to appear in a TV movie about a boy and his dog, produced by Jon Slan for NBC. Candy had only a small role in Kavic the Wolf Dog, as Pinky the gas station attendant, but audiences began to laugh as soon as they saw him. For years afterward, Slan would tease Candy by asking him why Kavic the Wolf Dog never appeared on Candy’s résumé.

When Candy returned to weekly TV comedy, more than a year after defecting from “SCTV,” it would be to front a show that was in direct competition with his former colleagues.