Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  But a week before Reitman was scheduled to start shooting Stripes, no one could find Bill Murray.

  Screams erupted when Dan Aykroyd, in black Ray-Ban 5022-G15s and skinny black tie, took to L.A.’s Universal Amphitheatre stage on September 9, 1978, as Elwood Blues, to the rousing accompaniment of Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” The audience, thousands deep, was split between Animal House togas, Blues Brothers T-shirts, and—in homage to Steve Martin, the top-billed act—foam arrows through their heads.

  “Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the United States of America,” Aykroyd spoke to the roar. “And indeed we have congregated here at this time to celebrate a most treasured wellspring of contemporary music . . . Tonight, assembled exclusively for your entertainment pleasure, from the music capitals of this continent, this is the hardworking all-star show from Jake and Elwood Blues. Ladies and gentlemen, these are the Blues Brothers.”

  Which is when John Belushi, with an agility incredible for someone with his physique, turned a triple-cartwheel to the microphone at center stage and started belting out “Hey Bartender.”

  Many in the audience had seen the Blues Brothers’ debut months earlier on Saturday Night Live, but most had come to behold Bluto, the unexpected overnight star of Animal House, the biggest movie in America, soon to be the highest-grossing comedy of all time. In October, Newsweek would give Belushi the cover: “Eleven years ago, in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman proved that a movie leading man need not be tall, chiseled, and dashing. Now John Belushi has demonstrated that he can even be a slob.” Weary of the principled 1960s, and the failed principles of the 1970s, the nation needed a vacation from seriousness; instead of “Revolution” it needed an animal to bash in the folksinger’s guitar and cry “Toga!” Animal House, through Belushi, gave them party politics, a demonstration in the form of a hall pass. “No one,” Ramis said, “had represented that energy and that spirit on film before and we buried the politics, which meant it wasn’t polarizing to anybody.” America wanted more.

  Hence the blank check show business wrote to Belushi and all he touched: nine sold-out nights at the Universal Amphitheatre; a Blues Brothers’ live album, A Briefcase Full of Blues; continued appearances on Saturday Night Live, and a massive deal for a Blues Brothers movie. The cross-promotional potential—known as “synergy” to the new Wall Street accountants of Hollywood—heralded a major shift in the film industry. “The 1980s,” wrote Stephen Prince in 2000, “thereby set in motion a dynamic that has yet to be arrested and a marketing logic that aimed to produce synergies between film entertainment content across a broad range of product formats and through a diverse set of distribution media.” The Blues Brothers were among the new era’s triple-cherry jackpots: on the heels of Animal House, John Belushi, at thirty, would have the number one movie, the number one television show, and the number one best-selling album in the country.

  Harold Ramis was in the audience that night. He thought: John might not survive this.

  Bittersweetly, Bernie Sahlins understood what was happening. The Belushi phenomenon brought Saturday Night Live, entering its fourth season, its best ratings ever, reflecting glory back onto Second City as it entered its twentieth Chicago year. Garnering a financial security unprecedented in the short history of improvisational comedy, Bernie’s theaters were, he sensed, fast becoming audition spaces, stepping-stones, shifting the improvisers’ focus and affecting the work. You could almost hear the laugh track. “Once you start worrying about your career,” Bernie would say, “you don’t want to take risks. Once you avoid risks, you’re hemmed in.” You’re not free.

  Prospective improvisers came prepared, with agents and glossy headshots. Bernie had to wonder: Was it Second City they wanted or Saturday Night Live?

  Improviser John Kapelos joined the Chicago touring company in 1978, at the crest of the phenomenon. “We were getting people, ‘Toga, toga, toga!’ all this stuff out in the audience,” he said. “But I think in retrospect, what happened is that Second City and by extension Saturday Night Live and all its proxies flipped from being counterculture into popular culture, so there was a sea change and I think it made it more difficult as careers went on to do comedies and do other things.”

  “Lorne Michaels is coming in,” Joyce warned Bernie Sahlins one afternoon.

  “Don’t let him in.”

  “How can I not let him in?”

  Sahlins could remember a time when people read, when, at parties, the way to get a girl was to sit in the corner and brood. When owning one of Mike and Elaine’s albums was an act of rebellion. “Neither the audiences nor the casts are as intellectually oriented anymore,” he confessed in 1979. For the shift, he blamed America’s “pernicious” misappropriation of Belushi’s talent, and also television, perpetuator of contrived laughs. “In TV comedy,” he said, “long after characters should know what’s going on in a situation, they conspire not to. In real comedy, as in real life, a character sees something right away and acts on it. He doesn’t lag behind his audience,” principles in direct violation of Sahlins’s motto number one: play to the top of your intelligence. Now they wanted, Bernie thought, “the comedy of insult and the zany.” But that wasn’t Second City. At least, it wasn’t what Second City had been. It wasn’t him.

  Tired of directing and admittedly out of touch with audiences, Sahlins turned to Del Close. But Close, bored with Second City–style shortform improvisation, turned to drugs and alcohol. When he wasn’t bored, he was sober, working with the cast on experimental Harolds. But Sahlins, ever weary of improv as a presentational art form, resisted. In the longform Harolds, he saw erratic results and limited sketch potential. Gone from Close were the Compass years of constant transformation and discovery, and back rushed the feedback loop of stifled creativity and Valium and alcohol that blurred him to the edge of oblivion. “I was likely to break down and cause serious trouble at any given moment,” Close confessed, “but I was able to continue.” Week after week, he’d come to Second City in the same clothes, smelling of cat piss and BO. “Nice work in the psychiatrist scene,” he barked at improviser George Wendt. “Unfortunately, Mike and Elaine did it in 1958.” Interrupting one of Steven Kampmann’s scenes during an actual performance, Del rushed the stage, fuming, “Now we can do better than that, can’t we?!” Out drinking with improviser Larry Coven, he switched gears into what Coven called “Devil mode.” It was the alcohol. Coven said, “He would tell me things that he did, stories about things he did with Elaine May, and things he did to twelve-year-old girls . . .” Close would call Joyce Sloane, usually right before showtime. “Joyce . . .” he’d moan. “I’ve done it again.” She’d send an ambulance. When Robin Williams came to Second City Chicago and asked to meet the Guru, he found Del Close collapsed in the greenroom. “There’s your genius,” the company told Williams.

  Early in 1979 Andrew Alexander called a meeting at his office in the Fire Hall.

  “Look,” he said to the cast of SCTV, “we don’t have any backing. We lost our distributor.”

  The conversation got heated. Among the cast, there was some sense, however misguided, that Alexander—the owner of a used Jaguar—had more money than he was letting on. He didn’t. In fact, Alexander was still struggling to keep Toronto’s Second City stage above water, trying to settle old debts—those of the Fire Hall’s previous owners—that came with his purchase of the building years earlier.

  “Would you guys consider taking fifty percent equity in the show? It would mean working for less.” Considerably less.

  The answer was no.

  “Well,” Alexander said. “It looks like we don’t have a show.”

  Alone among the disbanded cast of SCTV, Joe Flaherty was willing to make any compromise necessary to get the band back together and on the air. “I must say, I was really upset,” he said. “Everyone had bailed out. I didn’t care if the budget was low. That didn’t mean much to me. I thought we were doing good work and getting better.” He met regularly wi
th Alexander to check in on the financial end of things, and Alexander, though hopeful, always gave Flaherty some version of the same: “I’m still looking, Joe. I’m still looking.” That the rest of the cast had gone on to other things Flaherty tried not to take for abandonment. They had to work; Joe Flaherty had to do the right kind of work.

  To fill the time, he did some directing for Second City Toronto. “That was one funny show you had there,” Martin Short would tell him.

  “Hey, thanks, Marty. Thanks.”

  Fortunately for Flaherty, Alexander was a dogged producer, willing to cast his net ever wider to find investors, which is how, late in 1979, he got the peculiar invitation from his partner, Len Stuart, to meet Dr. Charles Allard, multimillionaire surgeon and part-time broadcaster, who offered to bring SCTV to his television studio in far-off Edmonton. Flaherty jumped at the offer, Dave Thomas, too, and Alexander made them head writers. But regrouping the rest of the cast was not as easy. Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy had gone to L.A. for pilot season; John Candy had his own show, Big City Comedy; Catherine O’Hara was looking to take a year off. Flaherty and Thomas got tentative commitments. The cast would do some new shows.

  To fill in the vacancies, Flaherty corralled Second City improvisers Robin Duke and Tony Rosato, and Dave Thomas found a new guy—new to Second City and improvisation. Thomas met Rick Moranis, a local DJ, at an amateur rock concert—a band of former high school friends that included Bob Dolman, then engaged to Andrea Martin—that erupted into a huge party after the show. “At the end of the night,” Dolman said, “Dave and Rick walked up onstage like they were their own band and started improvising imaginary musical instruments into the microphone. You could see these two had fallen in love.”

  Alexander hired additional writers to make up for the paucity of permanent cast members. Joining Flaherty and Thomas and the others, Martin Short’s older brother Mike and (per Harold Ramis’s recommendation) Second City alum Dick Blasucci, and Joe Flaherty’s brother Paul were brought in to the smoke-filled writing offices off Lombard Street to come up with about three hundred sketches for twenty-six episodes of comedy, or barring that, as much as they possibly could the summer of 1980, before the schedule ordered them to the burning cold 3:00 p.m. sunsets and sterile expanses of far-off Edmonton, two thousand miles west of Toronto, where they would begin filming SCTV’s third season.

  “Edmonton was flat and lonely,” Thomas said. “There was nothing to do but hang out in each other’s hotel rooms and work on the show.” Work as many as eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, shooting six days and rehearsing on the seventh.

  Banishing the SCTV ensemble to a snowy hell away from their families and locking the bunker door behind them forced the improvisers into deeper, odder reaches of their shared personality—the Bel-Air summer times a thousand. Coursing on a self-reliant, self-regulated group brain divorced from the outside real worlds of “Will they laugh?” and “Will this help our careers?,” all they had was each other and an expanding catalogue of inside jokes and obsessions encouraged onto the page, and screen, by their own laughter. The topicality of Saturday Night Live—difficult to maintain when so much of SCTV had to be written in advance—was eschewed for an intricate, insular comedy universe of satirical programming and backstage dramas, reliant as much on the shared sensibility of its creators as it was on its stable of growing characters, called upon to reappear like figures in a soap opera. In a pinch, they could fall back on, and therefore refine, or shade, a familiar character or recurring sketch. “There was never enough material,” Thomas said, “so we were relying on everyone.” As Moranis put it at the time, “We sort of guard each other.”

  Everyone’s opinion was solicited. Writers consulted set decorators; actors looked to the crew for laughs. With barely any time to rehearse new characters, improvisers had to discover their performances in the hair-and-makeup chair, moments before cameras rolled. It wasn’t until makeup artist Beverly Schechtman painted Andrea Martin’s teeth gleaming white, hairdresser Judi Cooper-Sealy fitted her with a mousy brown wig, and costume designer Juul Haalmeyer slipped her into a white blouse and plaid skirt that Martin knew who the character of Yolanda DeVilbiss was—and when Catherine O’Hara saw her in the chair, she took a look at those white teeth and suggested Martin give DeVilbiss a stutter. As in any true improvisational ensemble—even a scripted one, like SCTV—no one worked from ego. No one was that famous—yet. Ramis, watching on TV, observed, “It didn’t allow any star trips since there was no feedback. The public did not make a star out of anyone in the show, which destroyed Saturday Night in the very first year.”

  That began to change when Andrew Alexander brought the news that the CBC had requested two additional minutes of Canadian content per episode. Thomas and Moranis, as protective as anyone of SCTV’s creative bubble, shot back, “What do you want us to do? Throw up a map of Canada and sit there wearing tuques and parkas?”

  Alexander replied, “Yeah, and if you could have a Mountie in it that would be great too.”

  A map of the Great White North went up, Thomas and Moranis reached for tuques and parkas and, before a rolling camera, invented and began improvising as Bob and Doug McKenzie, ribbing just about every small-town Canadian cliché they could think of, and with the same casual, dream-easy flow they discovered in their first meeting onstage after that rock concert. In one hour of studio time, they improvised enough usable two-minute segments to satisfy the CBC. Pat Whitley was up in the control room, laughing along with the crew. “We all thought it was hilarious,” he said. Each one of them knew that this was SCTV’s version of the Blues Brothers.

  Thomas and Moranis were soon flooded with fan mail, media attention, personal appearance requests, and a record deal, and the show “no one” watched became the show with the McKenzie brothers. As it had at Saturday Night Live, the introduction of celebrity into the family cut both ways, compromising the ensemble environment that was SCTV’s secret weapon, but also raising the show’s profile both in Canada and the States, where the loserish air of Bob and Doug McKenzie fed the nation’s appetite for the anti-yuppie antics of John Belushi and Bill Murray, the humor of underachievement both grown-up capitalists and their children, the coming slackers, could relate to.

  Joe Flaherty heard NBC president Brandon Tartikoff was connecting the dots from Saturday Night Live back to Second City and onto SCTV. With their numbers improving and Tartikoff, beloved by most in the business, at the network helm, it seemed to Flaherty his moment—SCTV’s moment—was finally upon them.

  Formal recognition of Flaherty’s contribution was overdue. Though as mentor to Belushi, Radner, and Aykroyd—to his entire generation of Second City improvisers—he could take partial credit for the success Lorne Michaels had made of them, the depth and breadth of his influence was still largely a trade secret. It naturally complicated his view of Saturday Night Live. “I didn’t resent them, my friends on the show,” he said. “It was all the media attention they got. We deserved it, too.” Why was his company—by anyone’s estimation, equal (if not superior) to Lorne Michaels’s—relegated to Edmonton and an awkward, very-late time slot after Saturday Night Live?

  At the end of the season—which, once again, marked the end to SCTV—Joe Flaherty, his brother Paul, and Dick Blasucci were at Universal working on a script that couldn’t compare, at least to Flaherty, to what they had achieved, against all odds, in Edmonton.

  He looked up to Paul and Dick. “You know what? I’m going to call Brandon Tartikoff. I’m going to call him right now.”

  “Get out of here,” they said. “No way!”

  “No, I’m going to do it. Why not?”

  They watched as Flaherty picked up the phone, like it was no big deal, and dialed NBC. No one in the room, including Flaherty, knew that Tartikoff, before he had become a master of network television, had studied improvisation with Jo Forsberg back in Chicago. To him, the name Flaherty meant what it meant to Second City’s other students: master.

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sp; “This is Joe Flaherty,” the master said into the phone. “I want to speak with Brandon Tartikoff.”

  “One moment please.”

  Then Tartikoff’s voice: “Hello?”

  “Brandon? This is Joe Flaherty.” Flaherty, chuckling at his hubris, never expected an answer. “We have a show, Brandon. A show we like a lot.”

  “I know. I know about your show.”

  “We’d really like to be on NBC.”

  “Well, we’ll see what we can do about that.”

  A few days later, in March 1981, Andrew Alexander got his own phone call: SCTV was moving to NBC.

  In the summer of 1979 Belushi was back in Chicago, shooting and running away from shooting The Blues Brothers. “In L.A. or New York,” he said, “people look into the camera and forget to relate to the other performers. Here it’s family. Ensemble acting, that’s what Second City teaches you.” To an overwhelming response, he and Aykroyd would make unannounced appearances on the Second City stage, performing with the likes of Tim Kazurinsky, and John’s brother Jim. “[Belushi] was desperately searching for someone that saw his eyes, not his fame,” Fred Kaz said. “I think to a large degree he found it at Second City.” At the site of the former Sneak Joynt, Belushi’s onetime hangout across the street from the theater, he and Aykroyd set up a Blues Bar, their second. Their first, a comedown refuge after Saturday Night Live tapings, was in downtown New York; this one, restored to their attention by John Candy, served a similar purpose, to keep the gang together. They bought a jukebox, a pinball machine, guitars, amps; Belushi hired his old colleague, former West Compass Player Steve Beshekas, to tend bar; and they opened the doors to Second City improvisers thirsty for a drink, or more, after the show. “That’s one of the greatest summers of my life,” Aykroyd reflected, “because it went back to the Second City roots.” The bouncers, installed to keep the bar private, knew “Second City” was a password. Belushi wanted everyone close. He had already talked Steven Spielberg into letting Aykroyd, John Candy, and Joe Flaherty appear in his film 1941; and although he and Aykroyd had only recently shot their last Saturday Night Live, he was already pining for a reunion. “I thought it was real,” he said of one dream. “I thought everybody was together and everybody said, ‘Let’s do one more year; let’s go back.’” He craved a spot with the current company of SCTV.