Chapter 9

GOING BERSERK

During a hiatus from “SCTV” in the summer of 1982, John Candy returned to Los Angeles to shoot the first Hollywood movie to give him the starring role. It had begun as a script called Drums Over Malta, written by several SCTV people. But the movie that was actually released by Universal in the fall of 1983 under the title Going Berserk had few traces of Drums Over Malta, and it turned out to be one of the most disillusioning experiences of Candy’s career.

Candy, Levy and Flaherty were brought to Universal by Montreal producer Pierre David. With fellow SCTV writers Paul Flaherty (Joe’s brother) and Paul Belucci, they wrote a spoof roughly patterned after Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

At first executives at Universal waxed enthusiastic about the script for Drums Over Malta, but they dragged their feet about proceeding with it, partly because Gene Wilder had made a similar movie called Hanky Panky. The next thing Candy and colleagues knew, David Steinberg had been assigned to direct the project, and outside writers had been hired to do a second draft—which, as it turned out, retained almost nothing of their material.

Steinberg was no stranger to the SCTV gang. A fast-talking, ambitious operator from Winnipeg’s North End (where he was known as Duddy), Steinberg had studied at the University of Chicago, going through an eclectic series of apprenticeships—first a young rabbinical student, then a literary scholar sitting at the feet of Philip Roth, then a budding Second City satirist picking up pointers from Elaine May, Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin.

Several members of the SCTV group had worked with Steinberg during his short-lived CTV series. By the late 1970s Steinberg had landed in Hollywood doing stand-up comedy on the one-night touring circuit and then becoming a favoured substitute for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” Now he was determined to build yet another career as a director of Hollywood comedies.

Steinberg liked to think of himself as a kind of godfather, and of the SCTV kids as his Canadian farm team. Candy sometimes stayed at Steinberg’s guest house during his California sojourns. And one night in 1979 Steinberg had a kind of family reunion on the CBC’s ill-fated late-night talk show, then called “Canada After Dark.” Appearing as guest host, he welcomed Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Dave Thomas to the show.

What got Andrew Alexander into a flap were press references to Going Berserk as an SCTV movie. He thought he had the problem straightened out after he ran into Steinberg at the NBC studio in Burbank and asked him not to encourage such misconceptions. A couple of weeks later Alexander turned on his TV and found Steinberg as guest host on “The Tonight Show.” Asked what he had been doing lately, Steinberg said he’d just finished “a movie with SCTV.” Alexander lost his temper.

Steinberg wanted to use other SCTV performers besides the three who appeared in the movie, but several turned him down. Levy wanted to get out of the project but was advised not to break his contract. Steinberg kept promising there would be changes but Flaherty, for one, became more and more disenchanted as shooting progressed.

“David is very smart, and he loves the idea of being a director,” said Flaherty. “He keeps talking about the shot and the location. We kept saying, ‘Yeah, but what about the content?’”

Going Berserk was an especially painful experience for Candy because he had by far the largest role. Afterward he described it as a learning experience, because it taught him what not to do when making a movie.

For all his talk about the shot and the location, Steinberg would seem to be, judging by the movie that reached the screen, somewhat lacking in the instincts that Sergei Eisenstein called “the film sense.” The craftsmanship of Going Berserk is poor; the film is so ineptly shot that Candy, Flaherty and Levy hardly have a chance to get any comedy rhythms going; they are done in by choppy editing. The problem is so fundamental that in any given scene, the camera never seems to be in the right place.

As for the script, it’s a bewildering shambles. Candy plays a part-time limousine driver engaged to marry the daughter of a notorious U.S. congressman. Alley Mills plays the bride-to-be and Pat Hingle plays her father, who is trying to destroy a religious aerobics cult (whose leader is played by Richard Libertini). Flaherty plays Candy’s partner.

Eugene Levy somehow manages to be entertaining as a sleazy film-maker who also runs a celebrity look-alike service on the side. He shows a few amusing clips from his biggest success, Kung Fu U, and he carries around a picture of his wife in the form of a centrefold from a porn magazine.

Candy and Flaherty don’t come off as well, though Candy does have a couple of funny moments. In one sequence, a spoofy rehash of the Tony Curtis/Sidney Poitier dilemma in The Defiant Ones, Candy is handcuffed to a large black man who happens to be an arsonist and an escaped convict. In his funniest scene, Candy is on one side of a closed door while the man to whom he is handcuffed has athletic sex with a woman on the other side of the door. In another scene, as the drummer for a nightclub dance revue, he fends off a small army of sex-crazed women rampaging onto the stage.

The most original scene in Going Berserk could have been lifted straight out of “SCTV.” The cult leader tries to brainwash Candy by forcing him to watch an episode of the squarest of all 1950s TV shows, “Father Knows Best.” In this version, Jim Anderson (originally played by Robert Young and portrayed here by Flaherty) is a sadist who tricks his children and assaults his wife. (To the delight of nostalgia buffs, Elinor Donahue, who originally played one of the daughters, takes the role of the mother originally played by Jane Wyatt.) In the most surreal touch, reprising one of his classic SCTV sketches, Candy pops up as Beaver Cleaver, blood-spattered in this case.

And blood-spattered was the way Candy felt by the time he was finished making Going Berserk. Universal opened the film without press screenings, and it immediately sank like a stone. Looking back at the debacle a few months later, Candy insisted that the original Drums Over Malta script was funny even if Universal didn’t think so. According to Candy, Universal kept asking for Porky’s and Animal House, though Drums Over Malta was not remotely like either of those gross-out youth comedies. With bitter sarcasm, Candy would mimic the Universal executives: “You’re TV people. You don’t know films yet. And you’re Canadian. You’ll learn. Norman Jewison has learned.”

*   *   *

The same year Going Berserk was released, Candy had a tiny but delightful cameo in a movie that was more favourably received by the public: National Lampoon’s Vacation. This was an amiable, episodic road movie directed by Harold Ramis, with Chevy Chase as the upbeat patriarch of a family from a middle-American suburb on a car trip from Chicago to California. Their destination: the Wally World theme park (read Disneyland) outside L.A.

The movie is a relaxed, softheaded social satire, at times aimless and bland but with a number of amusing highlights along the way. John Candy has only a few minutes of screen time, right near the end, but he manages to be wonderfully funny as a nervous security guard at Wally World.

Candy didn’t realize it at the time but National Lampoon’s Vacation was the beginning of one of the most important relationships of his life. The script was written by a fellow from Chicago named John Hughes, who only a few years later would give Candy a role that would change his life, in another comedy about travelling across America—Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Eventually, “SCTV” exacted a kind of revenge for Going Berserk. It took the form of a sketch in which various actors who didn’t get the part—including Jack Klugman and Stewart Granger—are shown auditioning unsuccessfully for the Paul Newman role in The Verdict while the director, Sidney Lumet, looks on. Martin Short does a wicked lampoon of David Steinberg, turning the lawyer in The Verdict into a world-class whiner.

Waving his arms, he goes on about how upset he is to have lost his star witness. Then he implores the judge: “Why don’t you like me? What did I do to you? I’m charming, I’m cerebral, I dress well.” Finally he adds, using a favourite laugh-getting phrase from Steinberg’s old comedy routines: “All I have to say to you, judge, is … BUGA BUGA!”

In an aside, Steinberg/Short whispers: “Mr. Lumet, I couldn’t resist adding that last line. I really do think it will play.” Which was no doubt what Steinberg said on the set of Going Berserk when cast members questioned the dreadful dialogue.

This did put Steinberg’s career as a movie director on indefinite hold, but in the mid-1990s, he achieved success as the regular director of the hit TV sitcom “Mad About You.”

After shooting Going Berserk, Candy returned to Ontario to spend part of the summer with Rose and Jennifer. The three of them, along with Keema, their yellow Labrador, had moved into what Candy envisioned as his dream house. The property included a pond and a barn, and was set on ten acres of farmland near the village of Queensville, about an hour’s drive north of Toronto.

Candy had been combing the real-estate ads of the Toronto papers for months when he began shouting to Rose: “Honey, I found the place! I found the dream house!”

He went to see it without an agent, and immediately agreed to pay the asking price.

What happened after that became material for one of Candy’s favourite anecdotes.

“I couldn’t figure out why the ground was so soggy,” Candy would explain. “It was squishy even when the weather was real hot. So I said to my neighbour: ‘Is yours like this?’ He said: ‘No, you live in the swamp area. You knew that when you bought it, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, of course I did. That’s why I bought it.’”

To solve the problem, Candy had the entire property trenched. While the work was being done, he felt as if he were living in a mudhole. It must have seemed like making Stripes all over again. When the job was done, he was thrilled with the result but had to come to terms with the fact that he would not be able to recover all the money he’d spent on the rescue operation if he ever decided to sell the property.

Before long, a few special Candy touches had been added. There was a satellite dish to pull in as many TV signals as possible on Candy’s giant-screen set. There was a pond stocked with trout to make fishing a gratifying experience. And, most distinctively of all, there was a big barn occupied by old cars—every vehicle John Candy had ever owned and driven in his life.

*   *   *

In September, 1982, “SCTV” won the highest honour in commercial U.S. television—the Emmy. The award was for comedy-variety writing, and the feat would be repeated a year later. Eighteen people turned up on stage to accept the first Emmy—more, indeed, than there were in the SCTV skit about “Hill Street Blues” winning an award.

Later that night, after the telecast was over, the extended family of “SCTV,” including writers and cast members, gathered in a posh suite in the Century Plaza Hotel. Quite a lot of California wine had been swilled back by the time Michael Short (one of the show’s regular writers, and the brother of Martin Short) organized a parlour game with the combative air of “Firing Line.”

The half-willing victim of the game was Andrew Alexander, who found himself pinned against a conference table and ordered to give truthful answers to the questions being fired at him from the floor.

One of the queries was: “Which one of us do you like best?” Another was: “When are you going to marry Diane?”

Diane Titmarsh, Alexander’s long-time girlfriend, was not present and had not been consulted, but under pressure, Alexander, trying to bluff his way out, replied: “Next June.”

The next morning, he was somewhat surprised to learn that Titmarsh had been besieged by congratulations from witnesses to the interrogation. In fact, the couple decided to go through with the wedding the following summer.

Winning the Emmy gave “SCTV” a sense of being officially recognized by the U.S. television industry, but it didn’t solve the problems Andrew Alexander was having with NBC. Alexander and the performers were desperate to move out of their 12:30 a.m. Friday-night time slot into the 11:30 p.m. Saturday slot occupied by the long-running but seriously troubled “Saturday Night Live.”

The press could hardly have been more positive about “SCTV.” “Smashingly funny, audacious and needlingly accurate,” wrote James Wolcott in New York magazine. And the Los Angeles Times referred to it as “the best comedy show on TV—maybe the best one in TV history.”

But sometimes it seemed to the people doing the show that the critics were the only ones watching. In fact, about five million U.S. viewers tuned in regularly, but few of them stuck it out until the show ended at 2 a.m. In Canada on the CBC the show had 400,000 loyal viewers.

Alexander’s goal was to persuade NBC to let “SCTV” alternate with “Saturday Night Live.” But he was caught in a catch-22 situation. “SCTV” was a bargain for NBC compared to other programs, but given the relatively small number of people willing to stay up until 2 a.m. to catch it, it was still too expensive for the numbers it delivered. Everyone agreed “SCTV” deserved a better time slot, but negotiations for a different arrangement dragged on for months without a happy resolution.

Peter Calabrese, an NBC vice-president, remarked in a published interview: “We know we’ve got the best comedy show on television. We’ve got to find a way to move it so it will be seen.” Calabrese went so far as to suggest to the press that “SCTV” could indeed alternate with “Saturday Night Live.”

That infuriated Dick Ebersol, executive producer of “SNL,” who was also the producer of a rock show hoping to replace “SCTV” in its late-late Friday slot. Ebersol and his friend Brandon Tartikoff, NBC programming czar, took a dim view of Calabrese’s comments. “SNL” was considered part of NBC’s family, while “SCTV” was very much an upstart and an outsider.

Not long afterward, Calabrese left NBC. “SCTV” had lost its strongest supporter at the network, and its fate was sealed. Not even Guy Caballero could have botched matters as thoroughly as the high-paid jugglers at NBC who were letting TV’s most original comic creation slip right through their fingers.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, “SCTV” was still on the air, having endured the departure of three of its stars—Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis and Catherine O’Hara.

Candy was in top form that autumn, doing some of the best work of his career, and clearly energized by the show’s new recruit, Martin Short. In one of the most brilliantly surreal sketches ever done on the program, a kind of time warp occurs in the SCTV control room where Short as Ed Grimley, while operating switches, is confronted with a vision of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, ranting about that blabbermouth, Alice’s mother. It is, of course, John Candy in a role he was born to play. Understandably confused, he mistakes Grimley for his pal Ed Norton, as the layers of illusion keep piling up.

Some of Candy’s most marvellous work can be glimpsed on episodes of that most self-congratulatory talk show of all time, “The Sammy Maudlin Show.” It hardly matters whether viewers ever saw the source of this scathing takeoff on the original Sammy Davis, Jr. talk show of the 1970s. Sammy Maudlin is a perfect satiric explosion of all overblown celebrity egos ever let loose on TV.

The Sammy Maudlin routines began on the original Global series of “SCTV,” but they got better and funnier in the show’s last years. The shamelessness of showbiz inspired Flaherty (as Sammy), Eugene Levy (as Vegas-style entertainer Bobby Bittman) and Candy (as Sammy’s self-effacing second banana William B. Williams) to dizzy new peaks of excess.

What gave the Sammy Maudlin sequences their cutting edge was the cast’s daring habit of choosing targets that came close to their own experiences. In one episode, a jovial William B. makes reference to Sammy’s drug-abuse past, then introduces a film clip of a congressional investigation into drug use. Clearly rattled, Sammy looks as if he would like to throttle William B. on the spot.

William B. emerges as a whimpering, pathetic buffoon when he leaves Sammy’s show after twenty-three years (“I had to go—I was dragging the ratings down”) to star in his own. William B.’s show turns out to be such a humiliating fiasco that scheduled guests leave early rather than wait for their appearance. Laughing nervously, poor William B. has to endure a condescending lecture from a crusty eighty-five-year-old songwriter named Irving Cohen (played by Martin Short as a composite of Irving Berlin and Jule Styne).

“You never should have left ‘The Sammy Maudlin Show,’” the pontificating Irving Cohen tells William B., chomping on a cigar with tremendous self-satisfaction and pronouncing every syllable as if it were intended for court records. “It’s a mistake you’ll live to regret. It’s your funeral.”

When William B. goes crawling back to Sammy Maudlin, Sammy greets him with a big phony smile and warmly explains: “You’re back doing what you do best—setting up more talented people like myself.”

These episodes constitute some of the most brilliant satire of show-biz ego ever created, in the same league as Sullivan’s Travels, the 1941 Preston Sturges movie, or Singin’ in the Rain, the 1952 musical about the traumatic effect the introduction of talkies had on Hollywood. They can be savoured even if you don’t know anything about the career histories of SCTV performers. But a familiarity with the saga of John Candy’s defection to “Big City Comedy,” and his subsequent return to “SCTV” gives this cycle of Sammy Maudlin shows that much more edge. And they seem just as fresh when you watch them more than ten years later as they were at the time.

More and more, however, John Candy felt the time had come to take his final leave from “SCTV.” The all-consuming grind of writing and performing the show was getting to him. With Thomas, Moranis and O’Hara gone, he felt under more pressure than ever to come up with new material. Yet Candy didn’t even have time to watch TV, and he felt that to do a show satirizing TV without actually watching TV was a form of cheating. The troupe had to rely on recollections of shows they had seen in years past. Sometimes they would even find themselves satirizing shows that many of them had never seen.

Besides, Candy was frankly discouraged by NBC’s handling of “SCTV.” “We would have taken anything other than that 12:30 time slot,” he told one interviewer. But what really annoyed him was NBC’s way of putting together “best-of” SCTV shows. According to Candy, NBC wrecked the material by imposing disastrous running orders. “You can’t just take a fifteen-minute piece over here and slam it next to another fifteen-minute piece over there. Each show was well thought out.”

With Candy’s departure added to those of O’Hara, Thomas and Moranis, “SCTV” had a smaller stable of stars, and that was one more argument used by NBC against Andrew Alexander. The fate of “SCTV” was so clearly precarious that in the spring of 1983, more than one hundred hardcore SCTV fans staged a rally outside Rockefeller Plaza urging NBC not to kill the show.

NBC offered a prime-time slot at seven p.m. on Sundays but Alexander felt it was a suicide mission. The show would be competing with “60 Minutes”; anyway, “SCTV” was designed for a late-night audience, not an early Sunday-evening audience. After an exhausting series of proposals and counterproposals, Andrew Alexander and NBC gave up on one another; “SCTV” had come to the end of the line on the network.

*   *   *

A few months earlier, there was a gathering of the clan when Andrew Alexander and Diane Titmarsh were married in Toronto. Andrea Martin, the compulsively punctual member of the family, was one of the first to arrive at the church. Joe Flaherty flew in from Los Angeles and showed up in a rented tuxedo, with the dignity befitting the super-responsible eldest brother of a large, eccentric family. Rick Moranis, whose feud with Alexander had become so blatant he wasn’t invited to the wedding, was conspicuously missing. Among the familiar faces in the pews were Martin Short, Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas. John Candy and Catherine O’Hara, the usual punctuality-challenged members of the family, straggled in after the ceremony was under way.

“There’s deep water running there,” said Dave Thomas. “We grew up together, and when there are weddings and funerals in the group, we’ll all show up at the church.”

Afterward the celebration moved to the Boulevard Club, where everyone had a swell time and tried to overlook the fact that some of the most famous guests had hired lawyers to extract residual payments from the groom.

A week after the wedding, members of the old gang turned up again at the Old Firehall for a tenth anniversary bash for the Toronto wing of Second City.

Having made the break from “SCTV,” Candy finally turned up on the show from which he had been notably absent. He was the guest host on the October 22, 1983, edition of “Saturday Night Live.” Afterward he would tell friends how amazed he was that he could hardly walk a block in New York without being stopped by fans, whereas in Toronto, his home town, no one seemed to know who he was. That same season Candy became a frequent guest star on an NBC program called “The New Show.”

In the fall of 1983 “SCTV” limped into a final season by moving to Cinemax, a U.S. cable channel. Cinemax had a modest 2.5 million subscribers and was unavailable to many of the people who might have been willing to pay for it in such areas as Brooklyn and most sections of Chicago.

SCTV’s days at this point were clearly numbered. But when it was all over, there was enough material to be repackaged as 185 half-hours, which would move into the lucrative afterlife of syndication. “SCTV” was still on the air, sort of, but now group gatherings seemed like exercises in nostalgia for a phenomenon that was about to move into the past tense.