One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the movie is towards the end, when Neal has left Del at the Chicago train station - they have done their final farewell and Neal is finally on his way home. Neal’s first thoughts go to his family and the delicious dinner he will be home for, then replaying his trip in his head he laughs to himself as he remembers the journey, the adventures and troubles they had over the last few days, when all of sudden he realises by reading between the lines that something is not right. He makes a beautifully realistic link between his own family, Del and the conversations they have had about their wives, all of a sudden things don’t make sense. Neal goes back to the station and finds a very forlorn Del sitting there. When Del is confronted he finally confesses to Neal that he doesn’t have a home, that his wife has actually been dead for eight years.
Agalsoff recalls, “My favorite memory of John was the day we were shooting at a small train station in Pasadena. We had been doing comedy for three months, and suddenly he was called upon to do a poignant, heart wrenching scene. It was a side of him that I hadn't seen before, and I am tearing up when I think of the effort he put out (sic) and the incredible result we witnessed. When I saw the film, the edited version just didn't do to me what it did to all of us that day. John wanted so badly to get a juicy dramatic role. If I recall correctly, he went to do a reading for a very serious role, and was quite nervous about it. He was very disappointed when he didn't get the role (it went to Brian Dennehy). If memory serves me, I believe the director was Sidney Lumet.
“I didn't really hang out off set with John, but there was an occasion that stands out in my mind. While on location, he invited a large group of us over to his suite and made a huge pot of spaghetti and salad for everyone, with plenty of beer for all. We then watched a screening of a film that I believe he acted in, Cannonball Run III".
You cannot beat John Candy’s hospitality, his ability to look after people and make them feel comfortable was consistent.”
A slight but interesting tangent...
An incidental story I am going to tell you (but everything will become clear much later) is from when they were filming in St Louis, doing one of the airport scenes. So bear with me as this will make sense later…
Ken Tipton was the owner of six very successful video rental shops in St Louis at the time of filming. Now when video rental shops first came out, Hollywood didn’t like the idea of them as they thought they would lose them money. Turns out Hollywood was wrong and back then, video rental ended up bring in more than three times the revenue of the movie theatres, so after a while Hollywood started to treat video rental shop owners very nicely. Tipton’s distributor had mentioned to him that he was a friend of Hughes and that they were going to shooting a film called Planes, Trains and Automobiles nearby, he asked Tipton if he would like to run a competition for his staff where they could win places as extras on the movie. So in fact a lot of the people in the background in the scene where Martin comes into the airport carpark and also in his “I want my fucking car” scene in Lambert Airport were many of Tipton’s staff, of course Tipton also wanted in on the action.
“It was shot in the winter of 86, but we had some really weird weather that was messing things up on set. So the first Assistant Director (AD) came over with my distributor and I immediately hit him with “I’ve been a fan of John’s forever and I always wanted to be an actor” I was a heavyset guy. I was really busting the chops of the first AD, he said well hey you are heavyset, you look a bit like John Candy’s younger brother, how would you like to be John Candy’s stand in? I was like “hell yes!” I didn’t know what it was but it sounded good to me.
“Basically what it is, all the snow you see in the scene is fake snow that they bought in - in a truck from Illinois where the snow hadn’t melted yet. So basically they put this plastic tape on the ground, in the shape of a T it was called a marker. So I would stand there whilst they would set up the lights etc. in other words being a stand in is boring, you just stand there, but it’s helpful that you look like the actor as they can get the right light, sound readings, sound checks, so 45 minutes of setting this stuff up, they drag me out of place, John comes out of his trailer, does four minutes of dialogue, cut, John would be back in his trailer, then they would put me back on the marker to film another cut. The only had two cameras, so they would shoot a long master, then a medium, then they would go for an over the shoulder shot. So basically 8 hours of me standing on a yellow marker and not getting to meet John at all which was really starting to piss me off.
“So at one point we did break for lunch or dinner, this time I could go eat in the big people’s tent. I could see Steve Martin and Edie McClurg, but John wasn’t there. So I see a production assistant, loading up a tray and this PA must have weighed about 90 pounds and there was no way that the amount of food on this tray could have been for this PA. I had the idea that maybe this was going to John. So I followed the PA and they started heading towards the big trailers and sure enough heading for John’s. So I thought what the hell and I interrupted the PA and said, ‘Hi I am Ken, I am John Candy’s stand-in, John wants me to deliver his food for him’ the PA doesn’t know anything anyway, they are so low on the list, so if anyone tells them anything they’ll do it. So the guy gives it to me and I ask which one is John’s and he said ‘the one that says John Candy’.
“I knocked on the door and I said ‘Here’s your lunch Mr Candy’, and he said ‘Oh come on in’. So I went in and I said ‘this is a nice trailer, nice trailer’, he was sitting over on the right hand side and there is a table and a couch area and he was looking over the script of what he was going to be doing later that day. So I set it all down and said ‘Hi my name is Ken Tipton’, he says ‘Hi’, I say ‘I’m your stand-in for today’, and he says ‘oh, how are you liking it?’, ‘Oh yeah it’s fine, but it’s not what I thought it would be, I thought I would at least get to meet you at one time’. And you could tell at that point he was like ‘oh shit this guy’s not going to leave is he?’ So I don’t remember what he said but it opened up to ‘oh yeah I’m from here and I’m an actor and do stand-up comedy and improv’, then I slowly kind of sat myself down.
“Now I look back at it I realise what an asshole I was. This guy is a working actor, he’s trying to learn his lines for his next scene and he has this doofus in front of him, yammering about this that and everything and I just sat there and rambled whilst he ate. And he’s eating and looking at the script and he was so sweet to let me sit there and be a fool, it lasted a good twenty minutes if not longer. He finally put his script down and he’s eating and he’s looking at me and he says, ‘Well you know Ken that’s very interesting, you know what, you need to stop though, I get what you mean.’ Then I said ‘I’ve been an idiot I’m sorry’, I have never been in this situation with one of your actual heroes sitting in front of you eating lunch and I tell him that what he does is what I would love to do. He said ‘if you’ve got the passion, if you’ve got the passion for doing it you just have to follow it, but more importantly you need to realise that this is hard, it’s not just fun, it’s a lot of hard work, there is a craft to it. Just like there is a craft to be carpenters and plumbers and everything else, there is a craft to acting, it’s not something you just do, you’ve got to train for it, you’ve got to rehearse, you’ve got to practice. People have no idea how much work actors do at home and behind the scenes before they actually stand in front of a camera and deliver some lines, and all the other technical things, how to hit their marks right, make sure the key light is hitting them properly, that you’re not blocking other people and that you’re not talking over people, and on top of all that you have to give a believable performance.’
“So he gave me this little pep talk about how it’s not totally what people think it is and he was so nice about the way he let me down, not let me down but brought me down, ‘ya know what I totally understand you, everybody starts from some place, I was in the same position as you, I started in Toron
to and did this and that and grew’, and luckily he’s now getting to do what he loves to do. So with that we left on very cool terms, I thanked him, he said ‘ya know if you ever get serious about your acting and you’re in Hollywood give me a call, I’ll see what I can do to give you some advice, so you don’t make all the mistakes I made’. I thought, wow, that was cool, and it was so genuine the way he did it, now in Hollywood people say give me a call but they don’t want you to, they just want to get rid of you, but you could tell was actually genuine. I left there feeling good, I did my stand-in stuff and I didn’t talk to him again that day. So at that point I didn’t think I would I would ever become a professional actor, I was happy with my family in St Louis”.
Hold on there readers, remember Ken Tipton, for we will come back to him later.
That Will Leave a Mark
Released in 1987, Spaceballs is a parody of Star Wars, and the brainchild of Mel Brooks. Brooks got permission for the go-ahead from George Lucas, "As long as they didn’t make any Spaceball action figures”, Lucas’ main concern was it would affect the profits from Star Wars merchandising. John was cast as Barfolomew, a ‘Mog’ half man half dog “I’m my own best friend”, based on Star Wars’ Chewbacca. Alongside John co-starred Bill Pullman as Lone Starr (Han Solo/Luke Skywalker), Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet (Darth Vader), Daphne Zuniga as Princess Vespa (Princess Leia), Mel Brooks as President Skroob (an anagram of Brooks, the character is a version of Emperor Palpatine) and Yogurt (a skit of a merged Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi) and both Lorene Yarnell (mime artist) and Joan Rivers (voice) as Dot Matrix (C3-PO).
The film was given mixed reviews at box office but has since become a world-loved cult classic.
Mel Brooks always saw John as Barf: “nobody else could be that funny and quick”. He gave Brooks a lot, including ad-libs, a couple were kept in the movie. “There was one ad-lib where they have a crash landing in the desert and he goes forward and back, and he says about his seat, ‘well that’s gonna leave a mark’. After I said cut he said ‘I am sorry about that’, I said ‘sorry about it? It’s in the movie!’ I left it, it was beautiful.”
“I liked him a lot, he was an incredibly dear sweet guy and it was really an incredible tragedy for such a young, vital person like that to pass away. We liked him so much, my late wife and I would go out with him and his wife. One night we went out with them, we did a picnic basket at The Hollywood Bowl, a big outdoor event – equivalent in London would be Proms at the Palace, that kind of thing. We saw Pavarotti and John was so funny, Pavarotti had a big white handkerchief, and after he sang he mopped his brow with it, and he took a bow and waved this enormous white handkerchief in the wind and Candy turned to me and said, ‘Oh look! He is surrendering’.
“He was quick and funny and it wasn’t just using writer’s words and free play jokes but his quick wit was always there and always ready. You never had to explain. There are few guys in my life that could do that, John Candy, Gene Wilder and Rick Moranis was very quick too. Guys like that I wouldn’t have to write a script out I would just say ‘this is what the scene is about’. It’s called commedia dell’arte, it was used in the 16th and 17th Century. They didn’t write out things completely, they just wrote the skeleton and the actors would add the feelings and the extra words and John could do that. I always said John you could do commedia dell’arte.
“That was Spaceballs. At that time I was really dead set on my own movie career and I was starting Brooks Films, with movies like the Elephant Man and Frances. So I was working 24 hours a day, I wasn’t very social at that time, I had very little time so I couldn’t go out for dinner with John, but he was adorably funny. We had a lot of laughs on set. Moranis would say to me ‘What’s the big guy doing?’ I would say ‘God knows, go to his trailer and stop him from whatever he is doing’. He would be eating a turkey leg. From what I understand he was a very, very good husband. He didn’t drink much, I poured some wine and I think he had a beer or coke, he didn’t like wine. He was always a pleasure on set.
“I was kind of on his tail, I was kind of the food police for a while. I would go through his trailer I would search it for candy and stuff like that, sometimes I would find a great big Hershey bar and ham and I would get it out of there and he’d cry (Brooks joked). I made him vow, pledge, that he would not eat French fries and ya know drink beer or do anything that would put on extra weight."
Although Barf seemed to come naturally to John as a role, there was a lot of preparation to take place before a day’s filming could commence. John had to go into make up for hours before he could do anything, Ben Nye Jr. who worked with John on a regular basis would do John’s make up to transform him into Barf along with prosthetics makeup artist Ken Diaz. There was also the case of the wonderful animatronic ears and tail John donned.
In steps the wonderfully talented Rick Lazzarini who worked on Spaceballs after being recommended by Diaz as he explained to me (there was no point to me breaking up this interview, I have left Lazzarini to tell the story)…
“My ‘in’ on Spaceballs was Ken Diaz. Ken Diaz was working as a Prosthetics Makeup Artist on the film, and we had previously worked together at BOSS Films, one of the leading FX houses at the time (Ghostbusters, Die Hard, Multiplicity), creating aliens and creatures there. I was one of the lead animatronics designers and creature puppeteers at BOSS, having previously been an Animatronics Supervisor over at Stan Winston Studios, where I had designed, created, and puppeteered the internal head animatronics and darting tongue of the Alien Queen, as well as the Running Facehugger, and the Opening Egg (from the movie Aliens).
“Ken said that he was working on this Mel Brooks film with John Candy, and that John's character, a Half-Man, Half-Dog, needed a pair of very expressive ears. I was excited at the chance to work with Ken again, and…Mel Brooks? John Candy? Sign me up!
“I was a HUUUUGE fan of John's. I love, love, LOVED SCTV, and there was a slight connection; he was lovable and funny as Wink Wilkinson in Little Shop of Horrors, which was shooting at the same time as Aliens, at Pinewood Studios in England. So I would wander those sets, help out in the foam room occasionally during the making of the huge Audrey 2 puppet, and just felt a very thin, but very special connection to that project. And so, knowing all the brilliant characters he'd played, I had to try and not make a fool of myself by gushing all fan boyish when I met him. Which took considerable self-control!
“My first meeting with John, it was just great. Here is this larger than life guy, both in celebrity status and actual appearance, because he was tall, and big, but he was just so down-to-earth and friendly. His smile was so open, so beaming, so welcoming, you could not help but feel happy and tickled, just because he was there. "Whattya gonna do to me, Rick? They got this crazy makeup I gotta wear." I told him that I had two versions of the ears I was going to make, one where I would operate with cables, and one where I would operate them remotely. We eventually used the remote ears exclusively.
“So, Ben Nye Jr. and Ken were doing a makeup test on John, a toned-down one, as the previous version had covered up too much of John's face. As John put it: "Mel said: 'What's with all this rubbah? I can't see his face! What am I paying him a million dollars for? If you're gonna cover up his face, I might as well hire CHUCK MCCANN!" And John's chuckle, the way his eyes would almost tear up at that, was infectious.
“And so it got established that I would be in the makeup room with John, Ben, Ken, Dione Taylor, and Melanie Levitt, They would do his facial makeup and hair, he would don the ears, and then he'd get his hair coiffed and costume on.
“Oh, my God, working with John was like a dream. A happy, fun dream. I and everyone else in the world have had jobs where it's a chore and a drag to get there. Working with John, you looked forward to the day. It was like skipping to school. You got to work with this magnanimous, warm, funny, FUNNY man.
“One day, his Agent (or his Manager, or someone in a similar capacity) was going to come into the makeup room and meet with John. J
ohn said: "This guy, he's always so dapper. And he wears these super-expensive shoes! So I want you guys to find ways to like, step on his toes! It'll drive him CRAZY!" Okay! Sounds fun! So we did. This fella came in, very Hollywood, silk shirt, brusque, and very uninterested in the ‘little people’ there. Ken ‘accidentally’ stepped on his toes. ‘Excuse me!’, ‘Sorry about that’. Then I stepped on his toes, a little later. ‘Hey, watch it!’ ‘Pardon me, I apologize’. Then Ken found another opportunity to besmirch this guys' Tanino Crisci's, or whatever the hell they were. ‘GOD DAMMIT!’ The guy blew up. ‘WHATS WITH EVERYBODY STEPPING ON MY FEET TODAY?!?’ And John was CRYING. Bawling. LAUGHING in tears, his shoulders shaking. You could see he enjoyed seeing this kind of pretentious guy taken down a few pegs.
“Then, another time, some Producers wanted to meet me. Gorillas in the Mist was in pre-production, and, as Hollywood types are wont to do, these guys wanted to ‘hit the theaters earlier’ with a competing film. But I was working, daily, on Spaceballs, so I asked Ben, and Ken, and especially John, for permission to have them meet me in the makeup room, where John and I both agreed might add a little ‘BING!’ and star-power to the presentation.
“Except, when they came in, they acted like John Candy wasn't even there. And they were…well, kinda sleazy. I wanted this big gorilla movie gig, so I was letting things slide. But John didn't like them, didn't like the way they were acting, didn't like their attitude. After one weird request from them, as I was trying to think of how to diplomatically respond, John said: ‘You know what? Get the fuck out. Yeah, you guys. Get the hell out of here. Rick, you don't need these guys.’ And so they slunk away.
"’I don't wanna ruin a gig for you, Rick’, said John. ‘But those guys are just no good. I can tell. You're better off without them’.
“And so, I appreciated that. he was looking out for me. He'd been screwed over by people before and didn't like to see it happen to someone else. And It just made me love him even more.
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