Episode 477 - Kevin Macdonald / Kevin McDonald
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fucksables?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:I'm going to end on what the fuckadelics.
Marc:You dig?
Marc:I am Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:This is an interesting show we got going today.
Marc:Interesting show.
Marc:Interesting story.
Marc:I think you'll learn something about me.
Marc:I think I learned something about me.
Marc:It was a real what the fuck event that happened in my life.
Marc:It's sort of documented here in this first story.
Marc:But before I get to that, I'd like to again thank everyone for coming out to my shows.
Marc:As some of you know, I'm doing every Tuesday in March.
Marc:I'm riffing through stuff to find an hour.
Marc:It's the flounder and find an hour.
Marc:The flailing, floundering, soul wrestling workshop hours at the Steve Allen Theater at the Trippany House.
Marc:You can go to trippanyhouse.org to see if there's anything available.
Marc:I believe on the 25th, the lovely Moon Zappa will be opening for me.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:She can tell some tales.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:Look out.
Marc:I just shit in my pants.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop.
Marc:Available at WTFPod.com.
Marc:Haven't heard that one in a while.
Marc:That's a classic.
Marc:So, what else is happening?
Marc:I got my niece in town.
Marc:And we're going to go do California things.
Marc:She's never been here.
Marc:She seems to be somewhat of a rocker, a hipster.
Marc:I'm not sure what, you know, I'm not going to, I don't know.
Marc:It's hard.
Marc:I've never spent time with a 15-year-old girl, not since I was 15.
Marc:And she's my niece.
Marc:So we're going to go do things.
Marc:I took her to UCB last night to see ASCAT.
Marc:That was great.
Marc:She lives in Phoenix.
Marc:I mean, let's be honest.
Marc:What can she really see in Phoenix?
Marc:I mean, it's not my brother's fault, but not a lot of options.
Marc:Today, I think she wants to go to American Apparel.
Marc:And it just so happens, I think I know where the original American Apparel store is.
Marc:Not that that's going to be a big deal.
Marc:But, you know, it did start here, I believe.
Marc:Then we'll take a picture at the Hollywood sign.
Marc:And then I'm going to take her to Hollywood Boulevard and show her that mess.
Marc:And then I'm going to take her to Venice Beach eventually.
Marc:I think I'm going to take her to Wacko, that great store.
Marc:I'm going to take her maybe to Melrose.
Marc:But that seems a little weird.
Marc:Probably the Grove.
Marc:I mean, the kid likes to shop.
Marc:And then tomorrow, I think we're going to Venice.
Marc:Why am I telling you all this?
Marc:So why is today's show a brain bender?
Marc:Well, I'll tell you why.
Marc:It's a somewhat traumatic experience for me.
Marc:On the show today, we have two guests.
Marc:There are two guests on the show.
Marc:The first guest is Kevin MacDonald.
Marc:He will be the first portion of the show.
Marc:The second half of the show is Kevin McDonald.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:Are you starting to get that there could be a bit of confusion?
Marc:You know, they're two very different people.
Marc:Very different people.
Marc:And quite honestly, I had no idea who one of them was.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I'll just tell you the story.
Marc:So my assistant, my then assistant, Sam, asked me if I want to interview Kevin McDonald.
Marc:And I'm like, yeah, I want to interview Kevin McDonald.
Marc:I love kids in the hall.
Marc:You know, I like all those guys.
Marc:I'd like to interview them all.
Marc:I've had Foley on and I'd like to start sort of knocking out the rest of them.
Marc:Would love to interview Kevin McDonald.
Marc:So she sets it up.
Marc:And then the day comes where I'm supposed to interview Kevin McDonald.
Marc:Now, you know, I'm working on the show.
Marc:You know, we're writing, I think, at the time.
Marc:And we're doing it in the morning, you know.
Marc:And so I'm waiting for Kevin McDonald to show up.
Marc:Someone shows up at the door.
Marc:I have it open the screen.
Marc:It's a woman.
Marc:And I go, hi, how you doing?
Marc:She goes, yeah, hi, I'm the publicist.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, wow.
Marc:So I'm thinking, Kevin McDonald's got some shit going on.
Marc:Because usually publicists only come with, you know, heavy hitters, people who have shit going on.
Marc:And I'm like, oh, well, great.
Marc:Yeah, come on in.
Marc:And she goes, did you get to see the movie?
Marc:And I said, I did not get a screen.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:And then I said, what does he play in it?
Marc:And she goes, no, no, he he he directed it.
Marc:And I'm thinking, wow, that's great.
Marc:Kevin's got a lot of stuff going on.
Marc:I'm thrilled for him.
Marc:You know, honestly, I'm like, that's great, you know, because I hadn't heard about what he was doing or where he's been.
Marc:And, you know, he's directing a movie.
Marc:That's fabulous.
Marc:And I go, well, where is he?
Marc:And she goes, well, he's about five minutes out.
Marc:I'm like, OK, he's coming in a separate car.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:And and then I just we wait a few minutes.
Marc:It wasn't five minutes.
Marc:It's like three minutes.
Marc:And someone a man shows up at the door and I let him in.
Marc:And, you know, they're both looking at me and I realize, holy shit, this is Kevin McDonald.
Marc:I don't know who this Kevin McDonald is.
Marc:I don't know what he does.
Marc:I've never seen him before in my fucking life.
Marc:But he's here to be interviewed because we scheduled it.
Marc:I did not know.
Marc:This is Kevin McDonald.
Marc:This is Kevin MacDonald showed up in my house.
Marc:M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D.
Marc:Not M-C-D-O-N-A-L-D.
Marc:So I literally have no fucking idea who this guy is.
Marc:I know he's got a movie that he's plugging.
Marc:I know it's called How I Live Now.
Marc:But that's really all I got to go on from the publicist.
Marc:So they are a few minutes early.
Marc:So we go out to the deck.
Marc:And I say, you know, you're a couple minutes early.
Marc:You mind?
Marc:I got a couple tech things I got to do, and then I'll come out and get you.
Marc:Now, I don't know if they knew the terror in my face and in my heart.
Marc:I couldn't say, hey, man, who are you?
Marc:What's up?
Marc:You're not who I expected.
Marc:I want to be respectful.
Marc:This guy made the trip.
Marc:He's obviously a guy.
Marc:He's a guy who has a publicist.
Marc:It means he's something.
Marc:So I'm just going to wing it.
Marc:I'm going to just...
Marc:Play the part.
Marc:I'm just going to act like everything's copacetic.
Marc:So I don't know what I was exuding, but what I was feeling was pure panic when I came into my garage and quickly went to IMDb and quickly went to Wikipedia to find out that this Kevin MacDonald was a pretty big Scottish film director.
Marc:All right, this is the guy that directed Marley.
Marc:He directed a lot of things.
Marc:Most of them I had never seen.
Marc:I'm going down this filmography.
Marc:The Making of an Englishman, no.
Marc:Chaplain's Goliath, no.
Marc:The Moving World of George Rickey, no.
Marc:Howard Hawks, American Artist, no.
Marc:Okay, so now I know he's a documentary guy.
Marc:All right, so he makes documentaries one day of September.
Marc:Won an Academy Award.
Marc:I got an Academy Award winner on my deck who I'm supposed to interview.
Marc:No fucking idea.
Marc:No idea.
Marc:Humphrey Jennings, A Brief History of Earl Morris.
Marc:Don't know.
Marc:Being Mick.
Marc:Don't know, but it's about Mick Jagger.
Marc:Fine.
Marc:Touching the voice.
Marc:The Last King of Scotland.
Marc:The Last King of Scotland.
Marc:The Last King of Scotland.
Marc:I saw that one.
Marc:I saw The Last King of Scotland with Forrest Whitaker.
Marc:He plays Idi Amin.
Marc:I saw that one.
Marc:I saw that one.
Marc:Oh, thank God.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So I got to weigh in.
Marc:Marley, I know, is popular.
Marc:I didn't see any of that.
Marc:I didn't see the new movie.
Marc:I didn't see it.
Marc:Last King of Scotland.
Marc:Got it.
Marc:Got it.
Marc:In documentaries.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I can do this, man.
Marc:I can do this.
Marc:I can fake this.
Marc:I try to get focused, and I bring him in.
Marc:I bring Kevin MacDonald, whose plug-in movie I've not seen, but I've seen one of his films, and I know that he did a documentary on Mick Jagger.
Marc:That's what I got, and I know he's Scottish.
Marc:That's what I got to work with, and I'm thinking, dude, you can do this.
Marc:Don't freak out.
Marc:If you don't get a full hour, it's okay.
Marc:You just play it straight, be respectful, and maybe he's not going to notice.
Marc:That was my play.
Marc:So I bring Kevin MacDonald in and the first thing he sees is I got this large Gimme Shelter poster.
Marc:The Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter.
Marc:The Maisels brothers, you know, they're documentarians.
Marc:I knew he was a documentarian.
Marc:Okay, so we're off.
Marc:We're off.
Marc:We're off, you know, on Jagger because he made a doc on Jagger.
Marc:I'm like, great.
Marc:Let's just, in my mind, I'm like, let's just stay in this and anything but the movie he's plugging.
Marc:for as long as possible because this is interesting stuff and uh maybe i'll get to know him and things will evolve
Marc:So let's go now to my completely spontaneous interview.
Marc:Spontaneous, not in the way that you, I know I pay a lot of lip service to not preparing that much, but generally I have a sense of the person I'm about to talk to.
Marc:I do a little bit of overview stuff or I appreciate their work.
Marc:I had none of that.
Marc:So let's go now to me flying by the fucking seat of my pants with a complete stranger in my garage who is an Academy Award winning director, Kevin MacDonald.
Lock the gates on these fuckheads!
Marc:Kevin MacDonald.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:You've made some pretty dark movies.
Marc:Is that my reputation?
Marc:I hope not.
Marc:No, I know.
Marc:I know.
Marc:But I mean, I haven't seen a ton of them, but The Last King of Scotland was heavy.
Marc:Yeah, it's a heavy film.
Marc:Life is heavy.
Marc:You don't have to tell me, man.
Marc:You're preaching to the choir on that one.
Guest:But where did you grow up exactly?
Guest:I grew up in Scotland in the countryside north of Glasgow near Loch Lomond.
Guest:The famous song, The Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.
Guest:You know that song?
Marc:Well, I don't know how famous it is here, but I'll roll with you.
Marc:So when you first started doing movies, you told me you liked Gimme Shelter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I started making documentaries.
Guest:I wanted to be a journalist, and then I couldn't get a job as a journalist when I had graduated from college.
Guest:And I started just for fun, being unemployed, making little documentaries on a home video camera.
Guest:right with my brother yeah and uh one of those got seen then one day by somebody the BBC you know the broadcaster in UK the public broadcaster and they commissioned us to do a little five-minute thing and then that developed in my early 20s oh so it wasn't like you're like a 15 year old no I wasn't
Guest:the prodigy not documentary project so then and then I and then I got really into the documentary and I made quite a few of them and started getting interested in feature feature documentaries so I made I made three or four of those sort of you know for the theater what was the first one you did
Guest:Well, the first one I did was a very small one called The Ultimate Performance.
Guest:And it was about a filmmaker, painter, poet, seer, sage called Donald Camel, who is best known for being the co-director of a film called Performance with Mick Jagger.
Guest:Mick Jagger.
Guest:That's a crazy movie.
Guest:It's a really crazy movie.
Guest:He was a crazy, crazy guy.
Guest:He was the guy who taught, according to legend, taught Mick Jagger how to dance.
Guest:I heard it was Tina Turner.
Guest:No, I don't think so.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And he's the guy who introduced all the stones into the world of kind of high society London.
Guest:oh right he was kind of a late 60s yeah yeah mid 60s 60s and took them to morocco and introduced into drugs and all that kind of stuff that's the guy just a cool guy and he ended up and he ended up blowing his brains out in in the hollywood hills um in really 1996 and so i made a film about him he was a peculiar interesting what's it what's it called uh it's called the ultimate performance is it available i don't think so no
Guest:my god everyone wants to see it they can get in touch with me but then I made a film then I made a film which was the film that got me kind of noticed which won the Oscar for best documentary in 99 which was called one day in September which is a film about the Munich Olympic Games massacre and it was kind of investigative film okay we called it a thriller documentary it was a documentary which was an investigation and a kind of detective story and cut and cut to music and we're in a way a bit like a little bit like a thriller
Guest:Very influenced by JFK, the Oliver Stone movie.
Guest:Right, which is not a documentary.
Guest:Which is not a documentary.
Guest:Very definitely not.
Guest:So this was the documentary version of that.
Guest:And it was compelling, I think, and it won lots of awards.
Guest:And that was the thing that got me going.
Guest:And then I made another film called Touching the Void, which is a mountain climbing film, which is a great story about survival.
Marc:So you were able to actually pursue journalism, despite the...
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Despite the fact nobody would give me a job.
Guest:I had to do my job, find my job myself, like you, here.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:In your podcast.
Marc:I mean, tell me about this.
Marc:I'm a little fascinated with this guy, Donald Camel.
Marc:I mean, I know it's not your job to tell me his life, but what was it that fascinated you about him?
Marc:I mean, because this is sort of a very specific character.
Marc:Well, I don't know if you remember the film Performer.
Guest:But it's a really fascinating, extraordinary, weird, weird film.
Guest:Very.
Guest:And it always really interested me.
Guest:And one of the aspects of that film is that the character played, he's called Turner, played by Mick Jagger, ends up killing himself.
Guest:And you see this bullet's eye view as it goes into his brain.
Guest:I should remember that.
Guest:And what caught my imagination was when he died, when Camel died, I mean, this is a dark story, talking about dark stories.
Guest:When he died here in Los Angeles and he hadn't made a film for a few years and he, I think, was creatively unsatisfied.
Guest:And he...
Guest:killed himself in the same way as the character in performance had.
Guest:And he'd studied how to shoot himself in such a way that he would slowly bleed to death and have a supposedly ecstatic experience during his death.
Guest:There's apparently a spot, if you hit it with a bullet, you're going to have a- Got to be a real marksman.
Guest:You're going to have a pleasurable experience.
Marc:A specific type of marksman.
Guest:And he's a guy who always had a fascination with guns and he wanted to kill himself from his early age.
Guest:And he waited until he was 60 or something.
Guest:but uh he was friendly with marlon brando he was up in the canyon yeah he was he um uh he's just one of those guys who was had a finger in every kind of pie every situation very very curious and you unusual interesting he made a film called demon seed with julie christie in the 70s remember that is that's his movie that's his movie yeah um do you think he might have been satan he certainly was fascinated by satan
Marc:Because it seemed like, you know, as you talk about all the pivotal parts of his life, that it seems like it seemed like his job was to move things into, you know, certainly the Bacchanalian.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:Do you know, I don't know if you know who Aleister Crowley is.
Guest:I do.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So, well, Aleister Crowley.
Guest:Do what thou will.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Aleister Crowley was his godfather.
Guest:And his father, Donald's father, wrote the first biography of Alistair Crowley and was a great, great friend.
Guest:His father was at one size the richest man in England.
Guest:And he owned the biggest shipping and sort of coach works, bus and trains they made and stuff like that and ships called Camel Laird.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then in the great crash of 29, he lost practically all the money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there's photos of him with literally 19 Rolls Royces outside his house.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And then he pretty much lost everything.
Guest:And then he became very interested in the occult and in Crowley.
Guest:Gotta save yourself somehow.
Guest:Befriended Crowley.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Guest:Yeah, so he was born into it.
Guest:He was born into devil worship.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Interesting guy.
Marc:Crowley's an interesting guy as well.
Marc:I never was able to really wrap my brain around it or make it work for me.
Guest:Yeah, some people's lives, when you look at them, and one of the things I love about doing documentaries about people, about biographical things, is that
Guest:There seems to be a kind of almost fiction-like kind of poetry to what happens in their lives and things that connect up as though they'd been written by somebody.
Guest:So in his case, one of the things that interested me was that he was born in Edinburgh in an ancient building, a tower in the Royal Mile of Edinburgh, which is called the Outlook Tower.
Guest:And he died here in Los Angeles on Lookout Mountain.
Guest:And I thought, that is weird.
Guest:And he prophesied his own suicide.
Guest:And he prophesied his own suicide in this movie that he made, which is one of the great kind of 60s weirdy movies.
Marc:It is.
Marc:I don't understand that movie.
Marc:Who is the British lead?
Marc:Who's the lead in that?
Marc:What's this guy's name again?
Guest:There's James Fox.
Guest:James Fox.
Guest:And he lost his mind making the movie.
Guest:He did?
Guest:He lost his mind.
Guest:And so that was another aspect of the documentary movie.
Marc:Why isn't this documentary available?
Marc:I know we're plugging another movie, but I need this documentary.
Guest:Well, look, you know what?
Guest:I'm going to send you a DVD of it.
Guest:Will you?
Guest:Yeah, I should make it available.
Guest:It's a really weird, interesting, strange story.
Marc:And that was your first documentary.
Guest:That was my first feature documentary.
Guest:I made things for TV before that.
Guest:um you look like you're 25 years old oh thank you i moisturize um i uh um so i made i made that in 96 or something like that and then um and then made uh uh one day in september and various other documentaries and um one of them which was called touching the void which is about mountain mountain climbers yeah
Guest:made a lot of money.
Guest:And because it made a lot of money, somebody asked me if I wanted to make a feature film, a drama film with actors.
Guest:And I thought, oh, why not?
Guest:I might get another good opportunity.
Guest:So I made a film that was The Last King of Scotland.
Guest:And then since then, I've kind of alternated between doing fiction films and doing documentary films.
Guest:I kind of do both.
Marc:Well, it seems like I see now that not only do you like this movie, Gimme Shelter, but you're a Stones guy.
Marc:You did.
Guest:I made a film with Mick Jagger, yeah, which was an experience.
Marc:What did you do?
Guest:What did you do?
Guest:Well, I made this very heavy documentary about the Munich Olympic Games massacre.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And when the movie came out, it was really controversial with the Germans, with the Palestinians, with the Israelis.
Guest:What was the flack?
Guest:What was the backlash?
Guest:I got Israelis writing articles about how it was pro-Palestinian.
Guest:I got Palestinians writing articles saying it was pro-Israeli.
Guest:Did you have an agenda?
Guest:I had no agenda.
Guest:I wanted to tell a great story.
Guest:You didn't think about those things.
Guest:No, obviously you think about them, but I think anyone who's been involved with anything to do with Arab-Israeli question knows that you cannot win and steer clear.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Anyway, so I was probably a bit naive, to be honest.
Guest:Anyway, so I...
Guest:uh, I'd made that.
Guest:And then I got phoned up and, you know, I just won the Oscar for documentary and Mick Jagger phones me up and says, are you interested?
Guest:I'd met him because I was making the Donald camel film.
Guest:I'd interviewed him and met him briefly.
Guest:I want to make a film about myself.
Guest:He said, and I was thinking that sounds like the most frivolous, fun thing you could ever possibly do.
Guest:I'm going to do that instead of, you know, doing something where I get shouted at by Israelis.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, um, and so I, um, I, I spent a great six months touring the world with a little camera, uh,
Guest:with Mick Jagger in the back of his car, flying around with him, going to all sorts of places.
Guest:I think I saw parts of that, yeah.
Guest:It didn't turn out to be a great documentary.
Guest:It was a great life experience.
Marc:No stones, though, just Mick.
Guest:Yeah, a little bit of the other stones.
Guest:They appeared briefly in it, but it was mostly about Mick.
Guest:It was called Being Mick, and it was trying to be inside his head, sort of live life, see how someone like that actually lives their life from the inside.
Guest:And, you know, it was a pretty fascinating experience.
Guest:What did you learn about Mick Jagger?
Guest:I learned that it's very, very hard to get inside his head, actually.
Guest:It is, right?
Guest:He's incredibly secretive.
Guest:I think when you've been in the public eye and one of the most recognizable faces on the planet for 50 years, an eye on 50 years now.
Right.
Guest:You know, you have so many layers of protection.
Guest:It's very hard to get at.
Guest:I'm not even sure he knows who the real Mick Jagger is anymore in a way.
Guest:It's so hidden and so deep down.
Guest:He's a very pleasant guy to hang around and, you know, very affable and friendly.
Guest:And, you know, I stayed in his house, his chateau in the Loire Valley.
Guest:I was there when 9-11 happened.
Guest:We watched 9-11 Towers come down together.
Guest:You and Mick Jagger.
Guest:Mick and his dressing gown.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah, so that, so, you know, so many amazing memories of people I met and places I went with him.
Guest:It was extraordinary.
Marc:But you didn't, you felt like.
Guest:But the film, I never found him.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Which is frustrating.
Guest:You were not, did you say that in the movie?
Guest:You couldn't really because he was sort of.
Guest:No, I couldn't really.
Guest:I couldn't really.
Guest:I couldn't really.
Guest:But yeah, that was the truth.
Guest:The thing about him is, you see, he wants to, he has fun all the time.
Guest:It's kind of like he's still living the rock and roll lifestyle.
Guest:He's just jet setting around.
Guest:He's going to park.
Guest:Parties, hanging out with beautiful girls, you know.
Guest:Well, that's good.
Guest:Yeah, he's having fun.
Guest:He's loving it.
Guest:But I sort of think if I'd been doing it for 50 years, I would be thinking, you know what?
Guest:I'm not that interested in reading J-Lo tonight.
Marc:So you think there's something in there.
Guest:Some lonely man, maybe.
Guest:Well, you know, who am I to... But I've got my theories.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I mean, I think, you know, you've got to be...
Guest:I mean, are you running away from something or are you running towards something?
Guest:Well, I think if he's running towards something, he's there.
Guest:You would think so.
Guest:He's a fascinating guy.
Guest:And in real life, quite conservative, you know.
Guest:That I believe.
Guest:You know, I remember, you know, on the plane, he would get out his copy of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:That's high level.
Guest:Which is like real highbrow kind of policy stuff.
Guest:And he's sitting there reading about the Syrian question.
Guest:That's kind of quite unexpected.
Marc:Well, I guess if you're like, you know, a billionaire or half a billionaire, you have some social responsibility to sort of see how the world is running.
Guest:Yeah, he's very interested.
Guest:You know, he's interested in the world.
Guest:And I think that's something that I think a lot of the really successful performers that I've met have in common, which is, you know, whether they be actors or musicians, is that they're actually really interested in the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're not living in a complete bubble, you know.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, then, so he's not completely infantile in his rock and rock.
Marc:No.
Marc:Did you ever read the book about Dean Martin by Nick Toshis called Dino?
Marc:No.
Marc:Well, that's sort of an interesting examination of... Having fun all the time.
Marc:Well, having fun all the time, but not being accessible.
Marc:And the supposition is either there's nothing in there or there's just an isolated man inside there somehow.
Guest:Yeah, that's the question I suppose that this film asks in a very oblique way.
Marc:Do you prefer documentary over a narrative?
Guest:No.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:I really genuinely love both in different ways.
Guest:And it's something like a palate cleanser after you've done a fictional film, a dramatic film, and all the problems associated with that, all the money, all the studio stuff, and then to go and do a documentary where you don't have to answer to anyone in a way, and it's low key.
Guest:And it's really fun.
Guest:And also just engage back again with real life and real people.
Marc:Moving from a documentary sensibility into basically a sort of over-the-top biopic, but a biopic, it's sort of tricky, isn't it?
Marc:Were you concerned in sort of capturing?
Marc:I guess nobody has a real...
Marc:point of reference for Idi Amin in the way that's sort of like, he's not like him.
Guest:Well, the thing is, it's heightened.
Guest:It's definitely heightened, but it's not as heightened as you'd think.
Guest:One of the best decisions I ever made when doing that film was to film it in Uganda, in the country where it happened, where Amin was the dictator.
Guest:And that meant that we met so many people who had worked with him, who had suffered under his hands, whose family had been killed, whatever, all these things.
Guest:And we even had people on our crew, on the film crew.
Guest:We'd have hired local people, you know, local electricians who'd never been on a film before came and were electricians on our film.
Guest:We hired local hairdressers.
Guest:And the people on the film who were working on it had known Amin and had suffered Amin's hands.
Guest:So they were able to say to us, they would say, no, it's not right.
Guest:He wouldn't say that.
Guest:He would say it like this.
Guest:And that was incredibly good.
Guest:And also, Forrest Whitaker was so committed to the part.
Guest:He came out a month before to Uganda, before we started shooting.
Guest:To kill people?
Guest:To learn how to kill people.
Guest:Now, he came out and he was eating only Ugandan food, hanging out with Ugandans, learning some of the languages or bits of the languages that Amin spoke, the tribal languages.
Guest:And, um, he got so inside his head and so empathized with him that I remember one day we were taking a taxi together just before we started shooting.
Guest:We might have just started shooting and we were, we were going out to dinner and, um, Forrest was telling me how wonderful in the back of the taxi, how wonderful Lydia Amin was and how, um, you know, he was misunderstood.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:And the taxi driver stops the taxi and goes, look, I'm sorry.
Guest:I can't let you talk like this.
Guest:You know, my parents were both killed by me, and I was left as a baby, you know, to cry in the dust of my village on my own, and I was rescued by someone.
Guest:And I hear you talking like this.
Guest:You know, I just can't take it.
Guest:And so Forrest and I went, oh, God, it's a bit embarrassing, and got out of the taxi.
Guest:And Forrest was walking down the street, and he turns to me and goes, okay.
Guest:Do you trust that guy?
Guest:I mean, he was a baby after all.
Guest:How does he know Amin killed his parents?
Guest:So that's the level of empathy that he managed to reach.
Marc:Were you concerned at that point?
Guest:I talked to Forrest's wife afterwards, who was more concerned.
Guest:I think she said I had to stop talking to him on the phone because he would phone me up at Zidia Amin.
Guest:And it took him a long time to come out of it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So now this new movie, I'm assuming it's a departure for you in that it seems like you're focused on somewhat appealing to younger people and making a large movie.
Guest:Well, it's not a large movie.
Guest:It's quite a small movie in a way.
Guest:It's an independent movie, and it's based on a young adult book.
Guest:Well, there you go.
Guest:And so, yes, it is.
Guest:Well, I mean, it's odd.
Guest:The book, because the book, it's called How I Live Now.
Guest:And the book came out in like 2002, 2003 in Britain.
Guest:And it's become a kind of bit of a classic in that teen kind of young adult world.
Guest:But it was a book which appealed to adults as well as the teen market.
Guest:And they published an edition of it with an adult cover and all of that.
Guest:So it's a kind of crossover book, and that's one of the things I liked about it.
Guest:But the cast is entirely kids and teenagers.
Guest:There's a couple of adults in it that have a day or two of filming in it for the most part.
Marc:And it's like a rite-to-passage love story?
Guest:It's a love story, but it's a love story which is very, very unconventional because...
Guest:it's a love story and you think okay this is this is um i see where this is going she's going to be you know she's going to be transformed by love then halfway through the movie yeah it takes a radical left turn and the third world war breaks out
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And it becomes a very different kind of film and quite a dark dystopian thriller, I suppose.
Guest:And the boy and the girl are separated.
Guest:The girl has her young cousin with her who's 10 years old and the two of them have to sort of find their way back across the English countryside in war to get back together with the boy.
Guest:And so it's a film about the teen experience and about love, but it's quite an adult film.
Marc:Well, yeah, it sounds heavy, but it's interesting because it's also a film that could have been, you know, set in a reality of World War II.
Guest:Exactly, it is.
Guest:And I think, you know, it's interesting to me why these sort of stories of apocalypse, of dystopia, why are these things so popular at the moment?
Guest:Why do you think that is?
Guest:Why are we harking back so much to that kind of World War II experiences?
Guest:I think because we live in an age of anxiety, you know, we're all kind of constantly... We want some kind of closure?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, no, we're nervous.
Guest:We're constantly nervous because we're told anyway by the media that we're under constant threat of being blown up or of the financial system collapsing.
Guest:We're six hot meals from apocalypse or whatever the saying is.
Guest:That, I think, pervades people's mentality these days.
Guest:I think we're all very neurotic and paranoid about, you know, is that person sitting next to me on the plane?
Guest:Are they going to blow it up?
Guest:And I think that... I suppose we're all in art.
Guest:We're sort of relating to that general sense of anxiety that there is in society.
Marc:Well, what's interesting to me is that...
Marc:That makes sense to me, because even with like the The Walking Dead or the zombie movies, I think that in the type of fear you're talking about, which is fairly unique because we're talking about a generation that has not seen real warfare or had to deal with, you know, cities of rubble in Europe like they did in World War Two, that like it's almost filling the place that comedy used to.
Marc:There's a relief to it.
Marc:That, you know, when you're in that much stress and you see, you know, human spirit transcending these apocalyptic scenarios, you know, it's sort of like... I think that's so true.
Guest:And I think also, I mean, it's interesting because when I made this film about mountain climbers, high altitude mountain climbers called Touching the Void, one of the questions I kept asking myself is, why do people do this?
Guest:Because I went up in the mountains in the Andes, up pretty high and, you know, told this story.
Guest:And...
Guest:It's so unpleasant up there.
Guest:It's just no fun being at high altitude.
Guest:Your nails are falling out.
Guest:Your teeth fall out.
Guest:You can't breathe.
Guest:You can't piss.
Guest:It's just horrible.
Guest:And I think, why do people do this?
Guest:One of the theories I came up with was that people do it because their parents' generation went through so much.
Guest:They went through the war.
Guest:And here in America, they went through the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Guest:But the younger generation who didn't have that sort of feel inadequate in some way.
Guest:And feel they want to find a way to test themselves.
Marc:Yeah, where's my fight?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And we have to create those fights.
Guest:So that's why people do these crazy marathons where they run for three days and all that.
Guest:Some sort of testing yourself.
Guest:Anyway, that's one theory.
Guest:Anyway, one theory I've got.
Marc:No, but I think it's interesting because the primary difference between America and most of the world...
Marc:in relation to these wars is they weren't here.
Marc:I mean, you know, in Britain, I mean, there were people, your grandparents' generation, you had to climb out of rubble and hang out in sewers not to get destroyed.
Guest:Yeah, and some way we want to test ourselves and see whether, you know, could we survive?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Would we survive?
Guest:But I think it also is about the culture we live in is a paranoid culture.
Guest:You know, in the 70s,
Guest:There was all that sort of series of American films, the sort of Parallax View and all those sort of things.
Guest:Manchurian.
Guest:Oh, yeah, Parallax View.
Guest:Manchurian Candidate and all those paranoid films, yeah.
Guest:But I think that comes out of the Cold War and out of a feeling of, you know, who can you trust, being spied on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And also of, you know, we may be destroyed at any moment.
Guest:Bias.
Guest:By a specific entity.
Guest:By a specific entity, which is, I think, less frightening, but it did make, it was still frightening.
Guest:I remember growing up and having to, at school, go and do sort of duck and cover practice and all this stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Being told, you know, this is what you do in the event of emergency of a bomb.
Guest:You'll have six minutes.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And all this stuff.
Guest:And when you're a kid, that's frightening.
Guest:Horrendous.
Guest:To be told that this could happen.
Guest:Today, it's not as specific.
Guest:It's much, and I think, therefore, it's more frightening.
Guest:There's a sort of ambiguity around it.
Guest:Yeah, it could be that guy.
Guest:It's not the Russians.
Guest:It could be him.
Guest:And I don't understand why he wants to kill me, but he wants to kill me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that's really frightening.
Guest:And I think that permeates society.
Guest:Everything.
Guest:I think that permeates everything.
Guest:And that's what this book, How I Live Now, and what the film of the book is, I think, keying into.
Guest:I wanted to make a film which was about kind of how children see conflict and how children see war and...
Guest:You think that that's going to be an entirely terrifying negative thing and children are going to be traumatized.
Guest:But actually, I think what happens in war is that kids can actually find normality in it and kind of magic in it.
Guest:The happiest time for the kids is when the world around them is collapsing and the nuclear bomb has gone off in London and chaos is reigning and the apocalypse is coming.
Guest:And they're on their own in the countryside living in this farmhouse in my film and they're falling in love and having a great time.
Guest:And there's that idea of the freedom that warfare gives you as well.
Guest:There's a great movie by John Boorman called Hope and Glory, which is a really autobiographical movie about him growing up during the war in London.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And in that movie, it ends with his school being destroyed by a bomb.
Guest:And you'd think that would be a terrible thing, but all the kids turn up and they're like throwing their books in the air.
Guest:Like, yes, thank you, Mr. Hitler.
Guest:No more school.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it's also interesting, too, because they can't really contextualize it in... No, it becomes normality.
Marc:Yeah, in a broad sense.
Marc:Like, you know, the implications of it immediately are different.
Guest:But also, the interesting thing for me about all those films is that they... Because they're from a kid's point of view, they don't try and make sense of things.
Guest:And I think that what happens in war is that things cease to make sense.
Guest:You can't really understand why that person's doing this and why this person survives and that person doesn't and...
Marc:none of it really makes sense right and kids just accept that they accept the world that's around them i think later on in life you start to you know make sense and look at the geopolitical situation but when you're younger you don't yeah and maybe as you get older you might sense that there was trauma but at the moment it doesn't feel like that yeah exactly well i'm excited and uh i'm glad you came by i think this went well you yeah that was fun thank you nice to talk to you i i feel i need to go back to bed now
Marc:You do?
Marc:How long are you in town for?
Marc:I'm here till Friday, actually.
Marc:Well, I'm glad we got a chance to chat.
Marc:Thanks for coming in, Kevin.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:All right, so that went okay.
Marc:Quite frankly, it was a good interview.
Marc:It was probably longer than the interviews he was used to doing.
Marc:He didn't seem to know my show, so it was fine.
Marc:I think he left me a feeling like, all right, well, I'm glad we did that.
Marc:Now, granted, the movie, How I Live Now, has probably been out and has already gone, but whatever.
Marc:I mean, it is what it is.
Marc:The problem with it is...
Marc:is that i couldn't release that interview as it is do you understand there was no releasing that and in my mind because it was too short it wasn't a full-length wtf so my mind is like there's only one way to release this and that's to track down the kevin mcdonald that i thought i was going to interview and and do that you know and put and release them together all right so here's what i do
Marc:I contact kids in the hall, Kevin McDonald.
Marc:I have his email because I believe we had reached out to him before and I tell him what happened.
Marc:I said, dude, I thought I had you booked, but I had the Scottish film director, Kevin McDonald, booked and had a very tense conversation with him.
Marc:And I want to interview you and I'd like to I'd like to to perhaps release them together.
Marc:He's like, dude, that's happened before.
Marc:But it was a it was a more harrowing story.
Marc:We do talk about it, but I mean, but he has been confused with this Kevin MacDonald before.
Marc:But thank God, this is all fucking coincidence.
Marc:When I'm doing my dates at the Tripany house, and I go on the schedule there, and it turns out he's there for a night, so I know he's in town.
Marc:So I scramble, I'm like, dude, we gotta talk, we gotta do this.
Marc:I wanna talk to you, and I wanna, you know...
Marc:kind of weave it into this other story he's like all right well i'm good just i'm here let's do it so he did it he took a car out here and then you know we talked and i i love him i i think i think this is a very fun conversation and he's a very sweet guy and there's a lot of good kids in the hall stuff in here in this talk and i drove him back i drove him back to where he was staying and uh but a really sweet guy so so here is me talking to
Marc:The person I thought I was going to talk to initially, kids in the hall, Kevin McDonald.
Marc:Kevin McDonald.
Marc:Yay.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:Are we the same age?
Marc:I'm 52.
Marc:I'm 50.
Marc:I, uh, I'm 52.
Marc:You're 52.
Marc:I'm 52.
Guest:How's it feeling?
Guest:Um, well, I'm lucky enough that I'm childish enough that, uh, that you feel young.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Uh, but, uh, it's starting to, uh, like, it's starting to get more aware of it.
Guest:Uh, like in the old days when I go, that's an old person.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I say, oh, they're 12 years younger than me.
Guest:yeah that's right because I still have my young eyes yeah I still think that I still think I'm the young guy yeah it's weird when you start to look in the mirror and start going like oh it's happening it's happening it's happening and if I think the word nap one more time you do do you nap I don't I just think I'd go nap would be nice yeah
Guest:Do you have children, though?
Guest:Well, my girlfriend has two kids.
Guest:We all live together.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Up in Winnipeg.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:You're in L.A.
Marc:You don't have a car.
Marc:You don't rent a car.
Marc:Is this the interview we started?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Oh, excellent.
Guest:Yeah, I have a car in Winnipeg.
Marc:You didn't want to rent one here, or is it a pain in the ass?
Guest:I just thought that I was in a place where I could walk to everything, and then this wonderful show happened.
Guest:Though in Winnipeg, I'm not a strong driver, and it's ice.
Guest:We just broke the record.
Guest:We.
Guest:I'm saying we.
Guest:No, be a team.
Guest:Thank you, Winnipeg.
Guest:Please allow me to be a we.
Guest:What record did you break?
Guest:The we.
Guest:Sorry, I broke the record for the most days in a row, the 30 Below, I think.
Marc:Look, I was up there briefly that one time when I saw you up there for that comedy festival.
Guest:I met her.
Guest:You were there at the party where I met Paula.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, you were at the party, yeah.
Guest:Did I have anything to do with it?
Guest:Maybe my presence shifted.
Guest:In a way, I was talking to her first.
Guest:You came and I said, Mark, Paula, Paula, Mark.
Guest:And that's where it all turned around for you.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Oh, that's sweet that you met somebody at least in town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In town.
Guest:In town in Winnipeg.
Guest:When I drive, though, a lot of people honk and complain because I go too slow.
Guest:Are you a nervous driver?
Guest:I'm a nervous driver.
Guest:And then I open the window and I say, hey, I was nominated for three Emmys, which doesn't really help.
Guest:It just doesn't help?
Guest:That'll give you a pass?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's me from The Thing.
Guest:I had a show in the 90s.
Marc:In the 90s.
Marc:Yeah, remember the 90s?
Marc:I had a show.
Marc:That doesn't help out, huh?
Marc:It doesn't help a lot.
Marc:Did you grow up in Winnipeg?
Marc:Why would you stay there?
Marc:No.
Marc:I don't want to be condescending.
Marc:All right?
Marc:I know that there's culture and lovely people in Winnipeg.
Guest:Winnipeg's an amazing arts place.
Guest:Guy Madden, the director.
Guest:John Pays, art scene, dance.
Guest:Paula's a dancer.
Guest:Amazing.
Marc:What kind of dancer is your girlfriend?
Marc:Modern dance.
Marc:I just saw some modern dance.
Guest:Well, there you go.
Marc:How do you feel about modern dance?
Guest:I love it.
Guest:To me, it's like sketch comedy without the comedy part.
Guest:It's like ideas.
Guest:It's a physical movement, manifestation of ideas that who's ever choreographing.
Guest:Paul is an excellent choreographer.
Guest:I can't pronounce the word.
Guest:Choreographer?
Marc:Choreographer, sure.
Marc:Choreographer.
Guest:choreographer.
Guest:Yeah, why not?
Guest:And she has brilliant ideas and the best in them have great ideas and then it's shown a movement and you feel something.
Guest:I think, oh, that was like a John Lennon song.
Guest:I felt this.
Marc:No, I had that experience.
Marc:I mean, I had the experience when I was watching it where I was feeling emotions and actually teared up.
Marc:But I'll tear up generally if there's a lot of people on stage doing something in unison, like a musical or something.
Marc:If there's a lot of people singing on stage, I'm fucked.
Marc:Yeah, it just chokes me up.
Marc:I don't even know what it is.
Guest:Did your dad cry?
Guest:My dad cried, and I'm finding I'm crying.
Guest:I remember my dad crying in a dog food commercial, and I'm sort of becoming that guy now.
Marc:Your dad was a sensitive guy?
Guest:He was a very sensitive guy, I think.
Marc:My dad used to cry sort of inappropriately.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, a dog food commercial's nice, but my dad would get very depressed and cry.
Marc:It sounds like your dad emoted, not at the right time, but at least he was being triggered by something tangible.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He cried.
Guest:When he was horrible to me, he didn't cry.
Marc:How did that go?
Marc:What was horrible?
Guest:Well, my dad, as is in my one-man show that the 12 people who have seen it know, was like an alcoholic.
Guest:Like an alcoholic?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:I'm saying like he was an alcoholic, dental equipment salesman.
Guest:An alcoholic dental equipment.
Guest:Like that's a category unto itself.
Guest:Yes, there is.
Guest:He's number three on the list of alcoholic dental equipment.
Guest:What did Willie Loman sell?
Marc:I don't remember what he sold.
Marc:Did they even say?
Marc:I don't know if they did say.
Marc:Now that's an investigation.
Marc:So you did a one-man show called...
Guest:called uh hammy and the kids hammy being the nickname for my father because his name is hamilton and the kids being the kids in the hall it's about my 20s um when my dad was sort of living in the salvation army and uh the kids in the hall were like um this like the mid 80s where we were actual kids struggling to become a uh a comedy troupe well no we were coming true wait your dad was living in the salvation army
Guest:He did for a year.
Guest:I make it say he did for a year where he lost everything.
Guest:He moved into Salvation Army.
Guest:And I remember telling me that he was sober that year, but his roommates were like drinking Drano and stuff like that.
Marc:So your dad, alcohol took him way down.
Guest:Took him way down, then he got back up again.
Guest:Then he started drinking again, but it never got as bad.
Guest:He just got a little cranky and miserable.
Marc:So what, you grew up with erratic alcoholic behavior your whole life.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:How many siblings do you have?
Marc:I have one sibling, a sister.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:So, like, do you... Because, like, there's certain characteristics of people that grow up with that, with that weird kind of erratic emotional inconsistency.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you find that you were sort of...
Guest:panicky oh yeah like if someone just raises their voice even if i overhear it i sort of do this i don't know i know it's a radio show i'm put your hands up i'm putting my hands yeah protect my eyes for some reason i'm obsessed with protecting my eyes you don't want to lose those hit me in the throat you don't want to lose your young eyes yeah not my young eyes when did you wait what what was your mom's role in all this just put up with it
Guest:She, yeah, I guess the myth that we created, the family myth was, I don't really know what was like possessing her, like her demons were.
Guest:She was a wonderful woman, but the family myth was that she didn't move because she didn't want to hurt the kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Now that I'm older and thinking about it, I don't really know why.
Guest:Maybe she was too afraid to.
Guest:Finally, we had no choice.
Guest:When I was 19, I was about to go to college for acting.
Guest:My dad was so bad, we moved to an apartment, but we didn't want to tell him to enrage him.
Guest:So every night when he collapsed on the stairs, we'd move a couple boxes at a time.
Guest:We'd step over him.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:That's horrible.
Guest:It's sad.
Marc:It's funny.
Guest:I mean, I get it.
Marc:So he had gotten to the point where he couldn't function.
Marc:He couldn't work.
Marc:He couldn't.
Guest:Yeah, that was when he had bought him.
Guest:And it was after that that he woke up one day and realized we were gone, lost the house that we were living in, and then ended up in Salvation Army.
Marc:And that's when you were 19?
Guest:I was 19, going to college.
Guest:How did that play out for you, though?
Guest:Were you an angry guy?
Guest:There's anger in me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you are Canadian.
Guest:But I am Canadian.
Guest:So, good point.
Guest:Because of that, it becomes passive aggressive.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Ask Dave Foley how passive aggressive I am.
Guest:Yeah, I had Dave in here.
Guest:Dave, do you think it's a good idea if, knowing full well what I really think, do you think it's a good idea if we do that scene?
Guest:No, I'm just asking.
Guest:Oh, you're that guy.
Guest:Passive-aggressive question asker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I'm fine.
Guest:I'm good.
Guest:If you want to do... No, no, no.
Guest:We'll do Sherlock Holmes.
Guest:We'll do the Sherlock Holmes sketch.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Oh, no, no.
Guest:No, I'm good.
Guest:I'm just wanting to know you.
Guest:You're good in doing it.
Guest:You're good?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay, good.
Marc:We'll do it.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So how did that dynamic play out with the rest of the guys?
Marc:I mean, I know Dave.
Marc:He was on my TV show, and he did a very touching WTF in here about his marriage.
Guest:It's one of your most famous broadcasts, I would think.
Marc:Well, it's a big one because it got him a lot of attention, I think, in Canada of his plight at the time.
Marc:And I think it seems like things have eased up for him since then.
Guest:Yeah, and I think in a way, because he shut it all out here.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I think in a spiritual way, we can be spiritual for a second, I think that he opened the door for things getting a little better.
Guest:We all knew, of course, but no one else knew, and so they came.
Guest:And I think almost in the past five years, that's the most famous kid in the hall thing that's happened.
Guest:Is that horrible?
Yeah.
Guest:Your show, David being on your show.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're all okay with each other?
Marc:You talk to each other?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We get along really well now because, can I say swear words?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I love Can't Prevent Beethoven.
Guest:Remember them?
Guest:I love them.
Guest:I love them.
Guest:I love them.
Guest:And when they had a comeback a few years ago, I think they were famous for fighting.
Guest:And they asked the violinist, I'm sorry, I forget his name.
Guest:Segal?
Marc:That's it.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Jonathan Segal?
Guest:I think it's Jonathan Segal, actually.
Guest:That's totally it.
Guest:And they said, do you guys fight anymore?
Guest:So we're in our 40s now.
Guest:When you're in your 20s and you work together, it's your job to be an asshole.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But when you're 40s, you have to sort of concentrate more on the work.
Guest:And the thing is, at Kitchen Hall, we were sort of friends first, and we're like brothers, but not in the hokey sense, because brothers fight.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:But brothers always fight somebody else for you.
Guest:It's like a complicated thing, brothers.
Marc:You didn't fight that much as a group?
Guest:We fought a lot.
Guest:I regret the first year of the Kids in the Hall show because you think that you're about to be canceled any second.
Marc:When you were just in Canada.
Guest:When you were just in Canada, the first year of our show.
Marc:Because a lot of things only last a couple of seasons, right?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So you become individualistic for a second, and you fight for your scenes more than you have a team picture.
Marc:So you have a career after.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I think it was subconscious in all our parts, but that's what you're doing.
Guest:No, my scene, Billy Dreamer is the scene that should be in this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's an actual fight I had, a scene called Billy Dreamer.
Guest:Did that make the cut?
Guest:It did make the cut.
Marc:I'm trying to remember the sketch.
Guest:It's sort of like, you know, Billy Liar, where I fan, when I think about it, it's comedy A1.
Guest:But I was in my mid-20s.
Guest:It was where I'm an office guy, and I dream.
Guest:I have dreams, but instead of big dreams, my life's only a little bit better.
Guest:Like my desk is slightly bigger.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you and Dave get along good?
Guest:Dave and I are best friends.
Guest:We were the first best friends of the troupe.
Marc:Wasn't there some mix and match with women at some point, too?
Marc:Did Dave say that?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:uh yeah there was like in any group it's like uh like i can't remember what it was i can't either was it your girlfriend that went with him and then went well yeah first uh yeah dave and then uh and then eventually we started dating not dave and i oh oh well that's good and that'd be big news this would be the biggest the new biggest kids that would be like yeah i'm trying for that i want this show to be uh to open my life up the way that dave did
Marc:Dave, I'm in love with you.
Marc:Finally.
Marc:The word is out.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But McKinney seems like kind of the wild card.
Marc:He's an oddball.
Guest:Well, because he's a brilliant character comic, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the way he seems like an oddball is because the way that Peter Sellers was.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or I have no idea, because I don't know him, but the way that Christopher Guest might be.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And these are my favorite kind of comic actors.
Guest:For some reason, my favorite kind of comic actors is always the kind of people that do things that I can't do.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I think with Peter Sellers, sometimes people have trouble finding the real Peter Sellers.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I think that's what happens.
Guest:Oh, similar with Mark?
Guest:Well, when we all, and I love Mark, and he's my favorite actor of the group, we always had a little trouble when we had to play ourselves in a scene.
Guest:He wasn't quite sure how to do it.
Marc:Oh, interesting.
Marc:And Bruce seems pretty solid.
Marc:Bruce is very solid.
Marc:He seems like a grounded, consistent little fellow.
Guest:He is.
Guest:If Mark is the best actor of the troupe, Bruce is the best writer.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what were you the best at?
Guest:I think, like, Dave is the best at jokes.
Guest:Scott is the best at his personality sort of, like, got the group, like, known.
Guest:Because we were just four of us, and we were, like, being funny at the back of the stage, and no one could hear us.
Guest:And Scott, for Scott's personality, it's like, there's no one I know.
Guest:I once heard Joey Ramone say there's no one I know like Dee Dee Ramone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's no one I know like Scott Thompson.
Guest:And I think we wouldn't have got famous without Scott Thompson.
Guest:Everyone is good at something.
Guest:I think I'm just good.
Guest:Just generally being funny.
Guest:It's vague.
Guest:I think my gift is vague.
Guest:Everyone else has a specific gift.
Marc:In a lot of the sketches, you had sort of a funny kind of floaty role in a way.
Marc:There's something uniquely yours, and you did the girls pretty well.
Guest:I did, but not as good as Dave.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dave, the first time we did it in season one, before the crew knew who we were, and Dave just came dressed as a prostitute, the hooker characters that him and Scott did, some crew guy asked him out.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:He did, true story.
Yeah.
Marc:All right, so let's go back then.
Marc:So you're grown up in this chaotic home of progressive alcoholism.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And you go- Not progressive rock.
Guest:That would be a little better.
Marc:There was a little bit of progressive rock.
Guest:Genesis was around back then, yeah.
Guest:I had a few Genesis covers.
Marc:And where'd you go to college?
Guest:The lamb lies down on Broadway.
Guest:Humber College.
Guest:I went for acting.
Guest:It was a community college.
Guest:Because my father went bankrupt, we get a college grant.
Guest:So I got paid for me.
Guest:But I got kicked out after three months for being a one-legged actor.
Marc:What does that mean?
Guest:That I could only do comedy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And the dean who kicked me out, he was actually a one-legged actor.
Guest:A lighting grid had fallen on his leg during a production of Pippin.
Guest:And I remember him limping around the office telling me that I was a one-legged actor.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:True story.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:This is interesting.
Guest:Wait a second.
Guest:They told me that.
Guest:I was leaving after three months.
Guest:I had to take three buses and two subways back to the suburbs of Toronto to tell my mother that I was failing.
Guest:But my improv teacher ran after me, and he said that I was really good at improv, and he gave me the phone number to Second City, and that's how I got started and met Dave.
Guest:But this is mildly interesting, if you're boring, which I am.
Guest:The guy who...
Guest:His name is the teacher.
Guest:He was an actor.
Guest:His name was William Davis, and he was the smoking man in the X-Files years later.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was the guy who led you?
Guest:That's the guy who convinced me not to quit and gave me the phone number.
Marc:So you went to Second City in Toronto?
Marc:Second City in Toronto, yeah.
Marc:Who was there when you were there?
Guest:Well, the very first class that I was in, I was 19.
Guest:Everybody else was over 30 because they were actors, except for one kid who was 17.
Guest:It was his first class, and his name was Mike Myers.
Guest:Really?
Guest:We were in our first class together.
Marc:I love that stuff because it's interesting with the Groundlings and with Second City in both Canada and in Chicago, just how many people were around and how many people kind of...
Marc:you know, made it or stayed the course.
Marc:I mean, I know a lot of people didn't, but it's interesting that people, you like hearing that.
Marc:I like hearing that.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And when you met Dave, I mean, did you become friends immediately?
Marc:Immediately.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I'm not even lying.
Guest:Like Mike, I knew that right away Mike Myers was probably funnier than me.
Guest:I was like, I'm sort of underconfident and an egomaniac at the same time.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he was the first guy in my life that I thought was, that could be possibly funnier than me.
Guest:And I could see that he was brilliant right away.
Guest:But Dave, I didn't think in terms of that, we just like, it was sort of like love at first sight in a way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In the very first class, Dave, because Dave started a year later, so I had been there for a year at Second City, and Mike Myers had already been discovered.
Guest:He was already in the Second City Touring Company.
Guest:Yeah, he was so good.
Guest:Usually you didn't get into like, 24 was the youngest, I think, before that, and he got in at 18.
Guest:He was just so good.
Guest:He was, like, I was like raw potential.
Guest:He came formed.
Guest:As good as he is now, he was like that good back then.
Guest:then and how did how did he shine and did you guys so it's similar to the second city in chicago there was a main stage and they were yeah so he was sort of the star of the main stage yeah yeah eventually uh like he had a complicated route like he did the touring company he actually did a few kitson hall stage shows dave and i sort of wanted him in but um he's sort of smarter than us more ambitious he quit second city went to england and did malarkey and myers for a year the economy thing the i didn't know that
Guest:Got very big, but then he wanted to come back home, so he went home and asked if he could go to Chicago Second City, and he went right to main stage, and then he got discovered by Lorne Michaels.
Marc:As did you later.
Guest:Yeah, it happened in the same time.
Guest:You're making me think of things that are interesting to me but boring to people.
Marc:No, they're not.
Marc:You'd be surprised.
Guest:Uh, Lauren Michaels had us in the, he flew us to New York and we signed the papers to do our pilot.
Guest:And then, uh, we went in the hallway.
Guest:We were like excited.
Guest:The elevator doors open and Mike Myers was coming.
Guest:He said, guys, what are you doing here?
Guest:So we decided to do a pilot.
Guest:He said, what are you doing here?
Guest:I'm talking to Lauren.
Guest:I think he's going to hire me as a featured player in Saturday Night Live.
Guest:That was the moment.
Guest:That was, yeah.
Guest:That was like so weird that we had no idea that he was like, uh, up for Saturday Night Live.
Guest:We hadn't seen him for like a year cause he was in Chicago.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And he was there going there to meet Lauren.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, we were leaving, and he was coming to meet Lorne.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:Lorne was having his Toronto comic meeting.
Guest:It's Canada Day.
Guest:It's Canada Day.
Guest:And he's from Toronto, of course.
Marc:Yeah, he's a Canadian, and I didn't know until recently that he did perform comedy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:He had a CBC in Canada.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Guest:He had a CBC show in the 60s.
Guest:He had a comedy team.
Guest:They were called Lorne and the Heart, and it was called the Lorne and the Heart Terrific Hour, and it was pretty hip.
Guest:You see the seats for the early Saturday Night Live.
Guest:You really see the seats.
Marc:I'm mildly obsessed with him.
Guest:Yes, I know that.
Guest:We love him, of course.
Guest:I was a movie usher one day, and then the next day I was calling in the movie We Were Discovered, and the next day I was calling my movie theater saying, I have a phone meeting with Lorne Michaels.
Guest:You were working as an usher in a movie theater?
Guest:Dave and I were movie ushers.
Guest:We were a stage troupe for a year.
Guest:The five of us had performed our sketches.
Guest:We did new sketches.
Marc:Okay, so let's take it back.
Marc:So you meet Dave at Second City.
Guest:Dave at Second City.
Marc:You stayed in Second City how long?
Guest:I was in Second City because then Dave and I stayed another year.
Guest:I think we were there for two years.
Guest:And then where did you meet the other guys?
Guest:Because our hope, we didn't want to be stand-ups.
Guest:The day it started like that, we wanted to be sketch comedy.
Guest:It was only Second City.
Guest:That was the only thing.
Guest:But we were told that we were too weird for Second City.
Guest:So the very first workshop I met Dave, right away we were supposed to do the mirror exercise together.
Guest:And right away we sort of disrupted the class and we ended up in the fetal position and rolling on the floor.
Guest:And at the end of the class, I was sort of the funny guy in my improv and he was in another group and he was really funny.
Guest:And I knew that I could work with him and that he was funny.
Guest:So I went to him and I said, I have a comedy troupe.
Guest:Do you want to join it?
Guest:I didn't know his name.
Guest:I didn't have a comedy troupe.
Guest:And he said, yes.
Guest:And then I called my friend Luch, Luciano Casmeri.
Guest:He said, we got to start a comedy troupe because I have a guy that's perfect.
Guest:Who was the guy you called?
Guest:Luciano Casmeri, who's now like a writer.
Guest:The original kids in the hall were Luch, Dave Foley, and myself.
Guest:That was just three of you.
Guest:It was just three of us.
Guest:And that's when you started performing?
Guest:That's when we started performing at a thing called Theater Sports in Toronto.
Guest:That's an improv place.
Guest:That's an improv place where you sort of compete against each other.
Guest:And that's where we started performing for the first time in front of paying audiences.
Guest:They didn't really like us at Theater Sports because they cared more about the sports, about winning, but we would lose on purpose.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was it improv based completely?
Guest:It was totally improv.
Guest:And we would do, you have to challenge the other team to games.
Guest:And I remember once we did one game that after the show, we hid behind the curtains and people were complaining, the kids all can't do this.
Guest:And what the game was, we challenged the other team to best scene until Kevin gets an asthma attack.
Guest:Because I had asthma.
Guest:So it was a big theater at Harborfront.
Guest:And I'd run around.
Guest:Dave and Lucha would start a scene.
Guest:I'd run around.
Guest:As soon as I started wheezing, they had to end the scene.
Guest:And then I had to run around for the other team.
Guest:But the joke was I was already wheezing.
Guest:So as soon as they started, they had to end it.
Guest:So the joke was we'd always win.
Guest:But they complained that he's endangering his health.
Guest:Oh, those babies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Again, we were 16 when the Sex Pistols came out.
Guest:So we sort of thought of ourselves, pretentiously or not, as punk comics.
Guest:Did you like the Sex Pistols when they came out?
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:And I always had enough of a history to know that two things were happening, that what they were saying I never heard before.
Guest:It was revolutionary.
Guest:But also, the music was like Chuck Berry.
Marc:Yeah, it was just basic rock and roll.
Guest:It was basic rock and roll, a little quicker.
Guest:If you hear now, it doesn't sound slow, but a little quicker.
Guest:So it was both the best worlds for me, that it was just rock and roll, but they were saying things I never heard before.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I've been listening.
Marc:I got that first Sex Pistols album in there, and I just got a Ramones.
Marc:I've been listening to a lot of records lately, and it's interesting to listen to that stuff when we were kids that had such a profound impact to feel how small or how large it stays in terms of the impact.
Marc:But the Sex Pistols, actually...
Marc:In my memory of it, it was like, what is going on?
Marc:But you listen to it now, it's like, that's not that hard to understand.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:It was just the tone of it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because people had been angry before, but they were angry in a way that nothing matters kind of way.
Guest:Nihilistic.
Guest:Nihilistic, exactly.
Guest:Which was really different back then.
Marc:I just listened to the first two Who records, which I had not really listened to.
Marc:That was like punk rock.
Marc:Kind of.
Marc:I mean, some of it really was.
Marc:But I didn't realize they had this weird R&B streak.
Marc:I mean, there's some straight up James Brown song on there.
Guest:Yeah, I think Pete Townsend was influenced by a lot of stuff.
Guest:And jazz, of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just read his book.
Guest:But I think, if I can continue being boring for a second, I'll stop.
Guest:1965 was sort of a punk rock here.
Guest:The Who with My Generation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dylan.
Guest:Michael Rolling Stone.
Guest:Rolling Stone's Satisfaction.
Guest:That, to me, is like the first year of punk rock.
Marc:The whole shift in rock and roll is happening from the 50s.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I Can't Get No Satisfaction is like a direct cousin, I think, to Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bullocks.
Marc:Yeah, it's all there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's just an evolution.
Guest:Wasn't it great back in those days where actually the best song did go to number one?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's what I want to live again.
Marc:I don't know what the charts are anymore.
Marc:I don't know how it works.
Marc:I don't know anything.
Marc:There seems to be a lot of them.
Marc:Are there even singles?
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:Is it a made-up thing in the bottom rolling stone?
Guest:Oh, something's number seven.
Guest:But what are they number seven on?
Marc:Yeah, no, they have the charts still.
Marc:I don't know what they are.
Marc:I don't know who's involved.
Guest:And how do you do it?
Guest:Do I call in and vote?
Marc:I imagine it's still based on sales of some kind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I figured, like for my own personal taste, the last time that something was great and deserved to be number one was Nirvana.
Guest:Really?
Guest:That was the last time?
Guest:That I remember.
Guest:That's probably something I'm forgetting.
Marc:Well, that was pretty big.
Marc:I remember when that came out.
Guest:And it was great.
Guest:It was the greatest rock album, and it actually went to number one.
Marc:And you couldn't avoid it.
Marc:It was everywhere.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was it like 90, 1990, 92?
Guest:The sad thing is that it got overplayed.
Guest:What it should have been was our little secret.
Guest:This is so good.
Guest:I wish other people could hear this.
Marc:Yeah, nothing ever stays that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So initially it was you, Luciano?
Guest:Luciano Casimari and Dave Foley.
Guest:We were the Toronto Kids in the Hall.
Marc:And then how did it evolve?
Marc:So you guys were doing the theater sports and you got pushed out because they were- Well, no, we kept doing it.
Guest:We didn't get pushed out because we needed some place to perform.
Guest:Now in Calgary, that's where theater sports started, Calgary.
Guest:And Mark McKinney and Bruce McCullough and three other guys were all brilliant.
Guest:We're in a trip called The Audience.
Marc:In Calgary.
Guest:And we're hearing things that, though they were a couple years older than us, that they were doing things like we were doing.
Marc:You heard that across the country.
Guest:Across the theater sports grapevine.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Like these guys were like, you wanted to meet these guys.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then in 83 was the great Calgary exodus.
Guest:All these comedians and musicians, including the group that later became the shadowy men from a shadowy planet who did all our music and our theme song.
Guest:They moved to Toronto because they were all the biggest thing in Calgary, but it was Calgary.
Guest:So they moved to Toronto, which is like the big smoke in Canada.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we started working with them.
Guest:They were like...
Guest:they were more accomplished than us.
Guest:They were a couple years older, and there were five of them, so we sort of, they liked us right away, so we became featured players in their shows.
Guest:Okay, so it was Mark and Bruce and... And Gary Campbell, who was brilliant.
Guest:Norm Hiscock, who became the head writer of the Kids in Hall, probably one of the best sketch writers ever.
Guest:I met that guy.
Guest:He's brilliant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes, you have met him.
Guest:Yeah, I have.
Guest:He did Saturday Night Live, King of the Hill, Park and Recreation.
Guest:Now he's on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Guest:Is that what it's called?
Marc:Oh, is he?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So he's like a big dude.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He really is one of the best writers ever.
Marc:Well, did you guys all write initially?
Guest:Yeah, we all wrote.
Guest:That's when people say, who's Lennon McCartney?
Guest:And I say, this is just my opinion.
Guest:I don't speak for the rest of the troupe.
Guest:I say, Bruce is probably the best writer of the five of us.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But we all write.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so, okay, so these guys come to Toronto and they're letting you feature.
Marc:What does that mean?
Marc:So there's five of those guys.
Marc:Yeah, three of us.
Marc:Three of you.
Guest:And we're allowed to do, we come in and do some, like, smaller parts.
Marc:Were you playing at the, this was at the theater sports still?
Guest:No, they had bigger dreams than we ever thought of.
Guest:They booked a theater, like a real theater in Toronto, and they would do a Saturday midnight show.
Guest:And nobody came at first.
Guest:This was before we got our regular club, the Rivoli.
Guest:It was actually a...
Guest:People started quitting because they got really great jobs.
Guest:Who?
Guest:Gary Campbell and Frank Van Keeken.
Guest:Norm never came to Toronto.
Guest:Norm stayed in Calgary for a bit.
Guest:He was getting married.
Marc:So he wasn't there yet.
Guest:He wasn't there yet.
Guest:He moved a few years later when we had the TV show.
Guest:And then it sort of became regular guys.
Guest:So they were running out of people.
Guest:They were running out of people.
Guest:The kids in horror are basically the losers that couldn't get work.
Guest:Or chose to stick by their guns.
Guest:Yeah, if you want to be heroic about it.
Guest:Was everybody trying to get work?
Guest:Yeah, well, like, what sketch comedy troops make it?
Guest:Even Python, they weren't, like, best friends.
Guest:They'd all worked together for years, but it wasn't as some TV executive said, oh, you two should work with you two and get idle.
Guest:There's not any real sketch troops who were friends first that really made it, I don't think.
Guest:Marx Brothers were brothers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's close.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:SCTV, they all auditioned for Second City and worked their way up to SCTV.
Guest:So we just thought that sketch comedy was a thing that you get friends, you do it, and then you get conquered and divided.
Guest:You get hired to be either in Second City or TV shows or as writers.
Guest:Or I'll do commercials to make a living.
Guest:That's what we thought.
Guest:We didn't think a whole troupe who were friends from scratch could make it.
Marc:So when you guys all started doing the bit parts in the other guy's show, you became friends with those guys.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And soon we were like equal.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And everybody got along right away.
Marc:Everyone got along right away.
Marc:And you must have impressed each other with your approach to things or your wit.
Guest:Well, we had the same mindset.
Marc:Which was what exactly, do you think?
Guest:Oh, I wish I could define it.
Yeah.
Marc:Like, what did you say no to, I guess, would be an easier way to answer that.
Guest:Well, we thought a lot of things would be hokey or cheesy.
Guest:I guess the word we used a lot then now seems pretentious was hip.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We sort of had the same definition of the word hip.
Guest:I think it had something to do with being ironic and meaning it at the same time.
Oh.
Marc:Right, but also, like, I think you guys sort of invented a type of, um, a sort of sketch that wasn't, it didn't, like, there's certain sketches you guys did, I think that SNL eventually started doing, where it was completely driven by the absurdity of the thing.
Guest:Yeah, well, like, I always think they were a combination of Andy Kaufman and the Carol Burnett Show.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Because we do, um, whereas Monty Python really, um, screwed around with the form, that they could, they could end a sketch halfway through, or, um... And jump somewhere else.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:Well, a lot of that...
Guest:We were like beginning, middle and end.
Guest:We were like very in that way.
Guest:Anything weird we did happen within the normal structure of a sketch.
Marc:But it seemed like I don't know much about Python, but it doesn't seem to me that initially they were a live show.
Marc:I mean, it seemed like they were doing things with film and doing things on location and doing things with genres and things within film almost.
Guest:Well, they were like us.
Guest:The one thing we copied was their structure of the TV show.
Guest:I think they were like 70% in front of a live audience and 30% in front of film.
Guest:And their first couple of years, it doesn't seem like it's in front of a live audience because they had the old BBC old ladies that they bussed in.
Guest:So no one really laughed.
Guest:They didn't know who they were at first.
Guest:It wasn't until their third or I guess second or third season where they got their audience.
Marc:So you guys were on a soundstage.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, we were on a soundstage.
Guest:Again, we wanted to be hip.
Guest:We didn't have a warm-up comic to warm up the audience.
Guest:We had our rock band, The Shadowy Men.
Guest:We made a giant pedestal, and they were literally on a pedestal, and they would play.
Guest:And then when they finished their small 20-minute concert, we'd start taping the show.
Marc:Now, okay, so when you guys all started hanging out together and the group started to form, was there some sort of mission statement?
Marc:Was there an agenda?
Marc:I mean, like you saw these other guys getting work.
Marc:Did you guys make a commitment to each other or were you still sort of like, look, if I get work, I got to go?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At one point, we quit for a second.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:After the other guys quit, everybody quit?
Guest:Well, no one was coming to these theater shows.
Guest:The big theater, not the Rivoli.
Guest:The big theater.
Guest:The Rivoli hadn't happened yet.
Guest:Then I remember Mark walking me, uh, coming to my apartment and said, let's go for a walk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we walked along Lake Ontario and he said, I'm thinking that we should try again, try smaller, like go to the club, the Rivoli, which we had played a little bit and, uh, rent it out, try to get a night a week and do new sketches.
Guest:Um, before I asked Bruce and Dave, um, what do you think?
Guest:It's, oh yeah, I'm a movie usher.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, that's what I want to do.
Guest:And Scott hadn't joined yet.
Guest:For some reason, Mark was obsessed there should be five people.
Guest:Maybe he was thinking Monty Python.
Guest:And Mike had already left Mike Myers.
Guest:So Dave and I were thinking of a comic named Tim Sims.
Marc:Wait, Mike was working with you?
Guest:No, Mike was already, he had moved together.
Guest:Because he had done a few scenes with us before.
Marc:At Second City.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you were thinking, like, maybe we could hire that guy.
Guest:Yeah, we want a fifth guy.
Guest:He's obviously like a comedy genius.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That would be the guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I think Mark and Bruce thought that that area was covered by Dave and I already.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we wanted a guy like Tim Sims, who was very funny.
Guest:But again, his area was covered by Dave and I. Mark was obsessed with Scott Thompson, who we met through Theater Sports.
Guest:Actually, we were at the theater show I'm telling you about, The Midnight Show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We found this out years later.
Guest:We did a scene at the end where it was a bad scene.
Guest:It was a mad scientist who discovered jelly donuts or something stupid like that.
Guest:And what we had done...
Guest:before the audience came in, was tape jelly donuts underneath the seats.
Guest:And then at the end, Gary Campbell, who played the mad scientist, said, and there's jelly donuts for everyone in the audience.
Guest:Look under your seats.
Guest:And the show was so bad, they started throwing donuts at us.
Guest:I remember crying, being covered with powder and jelly.
Guest:And we found out later that the guy who started that was Scott Thompson.
Guest:Started the jelly donut thing?
Guest:He started throwing jelly donuts at us.
Marc:Really?
Guest:And he said later, as he was throwing jelly donuts, he said, this was the worst show ever, but I have to join them.
Guest:And somehow he became the fifth guy, and that's when we started the Rivoli.
Marc:Mark was obsessed with Scott Thompson because of his performing?
Guest:Yeah, he had an energy that we didn't have.
Marc:Where'd you see him?
Marc:He was part of theater sports.
Guest:He was part of theater sports.
Guest:He was in a group called the Love Cats.
Guest:There were three of them.
Guest:They would play the Cure's Love Cats, which was current back then.
Guest:And they would wear one piece, like pajama things.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And that was their hook.
Guest:Like union suits?
Guest:Certainly, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he became... The fifth kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The fifth kid, he just kept coming because of Mark, but Dave and I were prejudiced against him.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Well, Scott would say, it's because I'm gay, isn't it?
Guest:And we'd say, no, it's because you're an actor.
Guest:We couldn't stand the idea of an actor doing comedy.
Guest:Years later, I thought, oh, Tom Hanks is as good as a comedian, but back then I was like, prejudiced.
Guest:You're either a comedian or you're an actor.
Guest:I was kicked out of acting college.
Guest:Because I'm a comedian.
Guest:Because I'm a comedian.
Guest:They did the right thing.
Marc:All right, so there was no real leader.
Guest:There was no, if you really explored, the guy who does the most leading is like Bruce.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But there's no like official leader.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:He's the most organized and the smartest and the business guy.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So he all just took that for granted that you like that.
Marc:He's going to take care of that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:When I think about all the things I didn't do in the early days, like Mark got the posters going, Bruce booked the things, and I just took it for granted.
Guest:Mom was going to clean the kitchen.
Guest:Did he ever get angry about it?
Guest:Once Mark got angry at me because he always, like for our Monday show, during our supper break, like a few hours before it started, he would staple the curtain because there was no curtain.
Guest:It was a rock club that we were playing.
Guest:And then one day he said, I'm sick of this.
Guest:And he put a stapler in my, he gave it to me, like he hit me in the chest with it.
Guest:And he said, I'm going out to eat.
Guest:You staple the curtain.
Guest:And of course I was crying, stapling the curtain.
Guest:I was useless.
Guest:And the very first scene, someone comes out and the curtain comes falling on them.
Guest:He was right.
Guest:Like I said, I took things for granted.
Guest:Things were just being done for me.
Guest:I was pulling my weight with the comedy part of it, but they were the things that I never even thought about.
Marc:Now, when you guys started at the Rivoli, were you writing all the sketches, or were they just a loose framework?
Guest:We wrote the sketches.
Guest:We didn't write it on a piece of paper.
Guest:We'd work on Saturday and Sunday.
Guest:I made sure that I wasn't ushering until Saturday night or Sunday night.
Marc:What kind of theater was it?
Marc:Was it just a regular movie theater or was it a revival house?
Guest:It was an art house.
Marc:A lot of French movies.
Guest:And Dave worked there too?
Guest:Dave worked there for not as long as I did, but for a shorter time he worked there.
Guest:I got him like a few movie usher jobs because I went from one theater to the next, but that was the big one.
Marc:You liked movie ushering?
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I was like the funny usher.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you could watch all the movies.
Guest:And I could watch all the movies.
Guest:And you could, as long as you brought your own cart in, you could have free popcorn.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:That was great.
Marc:I lived on popcorn for a while.
Guest:The perks.
Guest:Yeah, the perks.
Marc:So your show was every what night?
Marc:Every Monday night.
Marc:So Saturday and Sunday you guys would work?
Guest:Yeah, we'd bring our premise ideas and then we would sort of- To someone's house or?
Guest:To actually a basement in a church next to the Salvation Army that my dad had just left.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So now are you going to visit your dad?
Marc:What's the relationship at this point?
Guest:Yeah, I visited him every ... I felt bad for him, and he'd rented a one-room apartment, and he'd got a job.
Guest:He was the greatest salesman ever.
Guest:He didn't immediately get back to the dental equipment world, which he did eventually, but he was at a local downtown Toronto flower shop selling flowers.
Marc:And trying to stay sober.
Guest:And trying to stay sober.
Guest:And he did for like a few years.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:And like I said, even when he drank again, instead of like two bottles of vodka a day, it was like three or four bottles of beer.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So he was like, you know, two bottles of vodka.
Marc:He was like, it must have been hard to come off of that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I remember.
Marc:You had to strap him down probably.
Guest:Well, during the few years that he was sober, I remember him like changing color.
Guest:Like the color was coming back to him.
Guest:Like he was sort of yellow.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Before.
Guest:And I remember the yellow slowly fading from him.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Is he still alive?
Guest:No, he died in 2004.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:And your mom?
Guest:She died in 1997.
Guest:They both died of aneurysms.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There's something in their brain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So every time I have a headache, which I don't very often, I panic.
Marc:Is that a genetic thing?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't even want to research.
Guest:I don't want to know.
Marc:Don't Google that.
Marc:I don't want to know.
Marc:So you're rehearsing in the church basement next to where your dad just checked out.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So was it emotionally loaded for you?
Marc:I mean, was there like a pain?
Guest:It was like the very first Saturday we did it.
Guest:And then maybe for the first few minutes every Saturday.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But then it just became about the work.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you would just improvise through stuff?
Guest:We would write through improv, we'd talk about the premises, and then we'd work on each scene for an hour or two, all the way Saturday, Sunday, Monday, until the show started.
Guest:We usually had, for some reason, 11 scenes, and then anything we needed to fill in, we would improvise a couple times.
Marc:And when did it start taking off?
Marc:I mean, how?
Guest:Well, okay.
Guest:So we started the fall of 84 and the first, that whole part of 84, there were only 12 or 13 people in the audiences, but there was like word sort of spreading out.
Guest:And then in, I remember late January 85, there was the biggest blizzard ever to hit Toronto.
Guest:Things were closed down.
Guest:It was also the day of the famous Air India disaster, I remember.
Guest:And it just didn't feel like a comedy day.
Guest:And we knew nobody was coming.
Guest:And that was the first time.
Guest:And then from then on, there were lineups around the block.
Marc:What do you mean?
Marc:You guys did a show for nobody?
Guest:Until that point.
Guest:But that night, it was sold out.
Guest:It was standing room only.
Guest:For some reason, people started coming that night.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:After the air disaster and the blizzard?
Marc:Yeah, and the blizzard.
Marc:They needed some relief.
Guest:I guess so.
Guest:And ever since then, I mean, until the summer of 85, we were sort of becoming a local called Toronto thing.
Guest:And then one day, Mark McKinney said, in the summer of 85, we do new sketches every week.
Guest:There's some good ones.
Guest:Why don't we rent a theater out and do a best of?
Guest:And so we rented a theater called the Tarragon Festival.
Guest:And all that week, we sort of became a Toronto sensation.
Guest:We got great reviews.
Guest:We got on Much Music, which was Canada's MTV.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Great reviews.
Guest:And this is what happened.
Guest:It was the exact month that Lorne Michaels, who had just taken five years off Saturday Night Live, had decided to come back to Saturday Night Live.
Guest:So he was sending...
Guest:over all the comedy cities in the world, Boston, New York, San Francisco, LA, Toronto.
Guest:And on our very last show, the guy, he said, got there just as the show was starting.
Guest:And that was, so that morning when I woke up, I got a phone call that we were going to go to Pam Thomas's office.
Guest:She was the biggest agent in Canada.
Guest:She was Dave Thomas's wife, STV, and she had a pipeline of Lauren Michaels.
Guest:Lauren Michaels wanted to talk to us and then she wanted to sign us.
Guest:and then you met what was the meeting with Lauren you all flew down to New York no there were too many of us they didn't want to waste money so they flew Franken and Davis down to Toronto and we did a private show at the Rivoli our audition was a private show at the Rivoli with Franken and Davis for your own series no he didn't have that idea yet okay it was just to see Franken's funny
Guest:Franken is so funny.
Guest:For a senator, he must be hilarious.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:No, I think he keeps it in check.
Marc:I think he's really earnest about it.
Marc:And, like, I was talking about that with someone the other day.
Marc:Because, you know, before he was, he's just very dryly and brilliantly funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it must be difficult when, as a senator or as a fan, you're sort of kind of waiting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Here it comes.
Marc:For the funny part.
Marc:I loved his radio show that I saw.
Guest:Was it on IMC?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:On Air America.
Marc:Air America.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I love that.
Guest:And also, Frank and Davis, their sketches in the Frank and Davis show.
Marc:He passed away, I think.
Marc:Did Davis pass away?
Marc:I think so, yeah.
Marc:What was his first name again?
Guest:Tom?
Marc:Yeah, I think he did.
Guest:The sketches they did, the Frank and Davis show sketches, was one of what, when I was a kid, what I labeled as hip.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:No, they were cool.
Guest:That was like the hippest, like one of the hippest things, I think, in the 70s.
Marc:Yeah, he hung around Saturday Night Live forever.
Guest:Yeah, he was always right.
Guest:Lord Michaels is like so loyal.
Guest:I think he's an amazing guy that way that you always know you have a job.
Marc:Yeah, no, I think he was real good to him, you know what I mean?
Marc:Alright, so they come, they show up.
Guest:Yeah, they show up, and I remember then afterwards, we went to the cafe part of the Rivoli, and I remember Franken saying, you guys are so good, but we can't hire all five of you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So they hired the two oldest ones, Mark and Bruce, who were probably the best writers at that time, writing the most stuff.
Guest:So they worked on the Anthony Michael Hall year for Saturday Night Live.
Marc:As writers only.
Marc:As writers only.
Marc:Right.
Marc:For like a year, right?
Guest:For a year.
Guest:And then Lauren Michaels at 86.
Guest:But every time they had a week off, because you always get a week off every month in Saturday Night Live, they came back to Toronto.
Guest:This is the amazing thing about Mark and Bruce.
Guest:They didn't think they'd gone to the next level.
Guest:They were still thinking of themselves as kids in the hall.
Guest:So they'd come back to Toronto and we would do a Rivoli show.
Guest:And some of our scenes that later made the TV show, some of our most famous scenes were created that year during their shows.
Guest:Which ones?
Guest:Salty Ham, Dr. Seuss Bible.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Simon and Hecubus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'll remember some more later when I'm later at the hotel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll call you.
Marc:I'll tell you.
Marc:But why?
Marc:Because they were just so in the groove of writing and so prolific?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they weren't satisfied in Saturday Night Live.
Guest:Saturday Night Live was just starting again with the Lorne Michaels year.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was a different kind of writing.
Guest:And the stuff they really wanted to write, they could do with us.
Marc:And years later, McKinney became a cast member for a while, right?
Guest:Ten years after that, yeah.
Marc:Bizarre.
Marc:All right, so you go back.
Marc:They're writing for the year.
Marc:And then how did the deal with Lorne sort of materialize to put the show on?
Guest:Well, Pam Thomas, our manager, kept pushing that we should be doing a TV show.
Guest:And so Lorne Michaels came.
Guest:We rented another theater out, Factory Lab, I think.
Guest:And we did another week's show.
Guest:And Lorne Michaels came and saw us.
Guest:And then he promptly fired Mark and Bruce from Saturday Night Live and signed us to a deal to do a pilot.
Guest:It was slow.
Guest:It took a couple years to get the pilot going.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:A couple years?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:First, a year later, Lorne flew us to New York to write the pilot and to, in his words, toughen us out, which meant performing in front of New York audiences.
Guest:And it did toughen us out.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:87?
Guest:That was 87.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And then we, I remember we were writing the pilot in the Brill Building where Lauren's company is, but we had to share- Broadway Video.
Guest:Broadway Video.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had to share, it was sort of like a large closet, but we had to share the office with two taxmen who were auditing Broadway Video.
Guest:I remember they were like little, like Weasley guys with glasses, but I remember I was thinking of funny stuff and you could hear the two little Weasley guys giggle every now and then.
Guest:That's funny.
Guest:That's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right, so it took two years to put the pilot together, and then it was produced on Canadian television.
Guest:Well, it was always an HBO show first.
Guest:Lorne Michaels talked HBO into doing it.
Guest:But then, because we had these apartments for six months in New York, midtown Manhattan, and it was taking so long for us to figure out what the show was, they ran out of money.
Guest:So then it was HBO didn't know what to do.
Guest:They were running out of money.
Guest:So Bruce McCullough said, well, CBC would probably love to be in business with Lorne Michaels, even if they don't know who we are.
Guest:And it was like Bruce's idea to get CBC involved.
Guest:So it became a joint production.
Guest:And that's how we had enough money to do a TV show.
Marc:It's very interesting to me to hear the dynamics of it because, I mean, I think few sketch groups have had the impact that you guys have had.
Marc:I mean, and your fans are legion and loyal and they're always excited to hear about you.
Marc:And I don't know that everybody knows this.
Marc:I don't know that a book was written, was it?
Guest:No, we keep talking about it, but it never happens.
Guest:I would like to do it.
Guest:So somebody has to put together the history.
Guest:I guess it's my job.
Guest:I guess so.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Guest:Well, let's write a book.
Guest:You guys write the book.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Where does Mark live?
Guest:Mark lives in Toronto.
Guest:Bruce and Dave are in Los Angeles, as I was, until I moved to Winnipeg.
Guest:And then Scott and Mark are in Toronto.
Guest:Okay, Scott, Mark in Toronto.
Guest:Kevin, literally in the center of North America in Winnipeg.
Guest:And then Dave and Bruce are here, yeah.
Guest:All right, so how many shows did you do?
Guest:How many TV shows?
Guest:We did five seasons of 20 shows a season.
Marc:So you did 100 shows.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because I remember when I was working at Comedy Central, we would run them.
Marc:They were very popular, and that must have been the second run, because that was 1980.
Marc:Well, maybe not.
Marc:I mean, I was there in 92, so they'd all run already.
Guest:By season four, HBO, after season three, they were...
Guest:Sort of done with us.
Guest:So then Lauren Michaels talked CBS into buying us like late night.
Guest:But you're correct.
Guest:Like all cult things, it took a while and it wasn't really to the Comedy Century.
Guest:Comedy Century.
Guest:Comedy Central repeats got our fan base because they ran it all the time.
Guest:And apparently for like most of the second half of the 90s and the early part of the 2000s, the number one rated show on the Comedy Central was Saturday Night Live repeats and we were the number two.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's where we got our, like, we took four years off after the movie Brain Candy, and then we did our comeback tour, and it was crazy.
Guest:We were, like, selling out, and it was, like, a successful tour, and we had no idea, because we were in our own cocoon.
Guest:We didn't know that our repeats were, like, snowballing in popularity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The kids came around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it happens every year.
Guest:Something happens, like, repeats, or then YouTube, or now Netflix.
Marc:Is it all on Netflix now?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:And that just happened?
Guest:That happened a year or so ago.
Marc:That's a big deal.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So, like, there's always young people at our shows.
Marc:Now, how often do you tour?
Marc:I mean, you guys, what, you went out last year?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:How many cities did you do?
Guest:We toured 2008.
Guest:We're getting together now to do a new tour.
Guest:Nowadays, to keep it interesting, our last two tours, and this one will be, as well, all new material.
Guest:So we're meeting in different cities.
Guest:We just did Toronto.
Guest:We did sneak shows after writing new stuff like the old days, meeting, talking about premises.
Marc:How did it go?
Guest:It went very well.
Guest:And now we're doing Austin.
Guest:So we're going to have enough stuff for a tour soon.
Guest:You're going to Austin for Moon Tower?
Guest:Yeah, that's it.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Are you going to be there?
Marc:I'll be there.
Marc:Oh, excellent.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:We should see each other's shows.
Marc:I'll do it.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:I have to write some new material too.
Marc:Excellent.
Marc:But I'm just by myself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now writing by myself, I have to kid myself that I'm collaborating.
Guest:I take an hour off and I come back with a different attitude.
Guest:Or sometimes I think, what would Dave say?
Guest:And I know him so well, sometimes I can come up with something.
Marc:So that's going to be the first shot at the new material in Austin?
Guest:The second shot.
Guest:We did Toronto in December.
Marc:Right.
Guest:The second shot.
Marc:And you guys, you're all getting along.
Marc:But when you go out on tour now, like when you went out in 2008, how many cities did you do?
Marc:We usually do about 30.
Marc:And you sell out?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, the first time we super sold out, and then the second time it was a little less, and the third time it got a little less, and now it's starting to build again because... Netflix.
Guest:Netflix, and it's like a circle.
Guest:We saw them already, and now, oh, we've got to see them again.
Marc:Do you do any sort of encore sketches, like the oldies?
Marc:Do you ever do oldies?
Guest:Our first few tours were, and now we're discussing...
Guest:Should we do something like oldies?
Guest:It's not like we're a rock band where we have to play Stairway to Heaven.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because they sort of... I think what's sort of exciting about us... You never know what the answer is.
Guest:They're excited about seeing new sketches, but they'd be disappointed not to see Chicken Lady.
Guest:But if we just showed old sketches, they'd be a little disappointed and there's nothing new.
Marc:Right.
Marc:How has it changed, though?
Marc:I mean, you're all middle-aged guys.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So how does that inform the thing now?
Guest:Middle-aged, we live to 100.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah, well, you know, I'm just saying.
Marc:So you're, okay, you're more than halfway done.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Okay, but how does that inform the writing?
Marc:I mean, do you play to that at all?
Guest:Oh, yeah, like we don't consciously talk about it, but like the last tour, for example, there were a lot of scenes, the guys were writing about having children.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And having like seven or eight-year-olds now.
Guest:And now there are a few scenes thinking about death in the end.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:You know, just like Bob Dylan albums.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Getting dark.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Like it sneaks in or like retirement.
Marc:And do you guys have fun?
Guest:Yeah, it is fun.
Guest:I wish I could find a way to say it without sounding phony, but it's the most fun.
Guest:When I was doing the TV show, Kids in the Hall show, those five years, I read an article from Dave Thomas and the Toronto Sun.
Guest:They were interviewing him and he said, you know, when I was doing SCTV, I wish I'd realized this was going to be the best time of my life.
Guest:I was doing what I wanted with my friends.
Guest:And that influenced me.
Guest:So I constantly went around enjoying myself, like enjoying the moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I knew it wasn't going to last.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we're lucky enough that we have this factory called the Kids in Hall that we can get back to every few years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But SCTV never really did.
Guest:So I know I'm really lucky.
Guest:Because it's what Dave Thomas said.
Guest:I get to write what I want with my best friends.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's still a blast.
Marc:And it's still a blast.
Marc:Now, what do you do when you're not doing Kids in the Hall stuff?
Marc:Well, I'm in Winnipeg.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm sort of like going around.
Guest:I've been out of the Hollywood scene for a few years.
Guest:I'm bit by bit reminding them of me.
Guest:And I'm touring.
Guest:I've started stand-up.
Guest:I'm not really stand-up.
Guest:I sort of play a character of a guy who has trouble doing stand-up.
Guest:For an hour you do that?
Guest:The best I could do is 35 minutes.
Marc:I can't think of a 36th minute.
Marc:Yeah, it's hard.
Guest:I can't think of 36.
Marc:But once you do, you're going to go all the way to 50.
Marc:All the way to 50.
Guest:I guess so.
Guest:That's the next portal.
Guest:So you're doing comedy clubs with this guy?
Guest:I do comedy clubs.
Guest:And I also am teaching workshops of what I described, how we wrote, writing through sketches through improv.
Guest:I just did one this week.
Guest:I get them to create sketches.
Guest:And then there's a show at the end.
Guest:How was it attended?
Guest:uh very well uh because of this cult kid in the hall thing this factory that i'm but do you do you find that you're a good teacher do people resonate with the yeah surprisingly um like i know that sometimes i get so excited i stutter but i think overall like um they seem to um it does seem to resonate i get nervous at first because they all come out with their big eyes and they have pen and paper and they're ready to write oh my god i gotta say something writing worthy yeah where'd you do the workshop
Guest:I did it here at I.O.
Marc:in Prop Olympics.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And like young kids?
Guest:Yeah, it's all young kids.
Guest:Well, there's some young kids in their mid-30s, but there's some... It's a lot of young kids.
Guest:Here in L.A., it was like what young kids?
Guest:It would have been like me and Mike Myers, I guess, when we were 17 and 19.
Marc:And is your structure... Is that unique to write premises and then improvise and then go back to the writing and then perform it?
Marc:Is that...
Marc:I don't think so.
Marc:I think every sketch troupe ever started that way.
Guest:The unique thing is that we kept building and we never quit, that we first learned how to write that way.
Guest:And then we had a TV show where we had to use this new thing called computers in the late 80s.
Guest:Thank God it wasn't typewriters.
Guest:That would have been so hard.
Marc:I don't know how people did it.
Guest:I would have quit because right before the TV show, I tried typewriting, but you can't rewrite, you can't delete something and write it right away.
Guest:So you have this whole page of a mess that you don't like.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So you got to rewrite, retype the whole page again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like there's no way, just logistically, I don't think I would have been interested in writing as I am, as interested as I am, if it stayed as typewriters.
Marc:I don't know how people did it without cut and paste.
Guest:Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Guest:Neil Simon and Woody Allen still use the typewriter.
Marc:All of them.
Guest:Woody Allen still uses the same typewriter that his first one from the 50s.
Marc:Yeah, I guess it's a ritual.
Marc:It's a magical instrument.
Guest:I guess, but you see, like, I saw the documentary on him, and he has a lot of cutting and pasting.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You see, like, I'm a workaholic when it comes to writing, but when it comes to logistical stuff like that, I'm not, like, a cut-a-paste workaholic.
Guest:I need a computer.
Marc:And do you go out on auditions?
Marc:You did some animated stuff.
Marc:I know that.
Guest:Yeah, I still do cartoons from Winnipeg.
Guest:There's always someone with a headset on in an L.A.
Guest:studio, and there's a blizzard outside the window.
Guest:You're doing funny stuff?
Guest:I'm doing a funny fish voice.
Guest:I did a one-man show in Montreal just for laughs.
Guest:I saw you there, too.
Guest:You saw the kids in hall, too?
Marc:No, but I saw you in Montreal.
Marc:That was the last time I saw you, I think.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:It was just this last year, wasn't it?
Marc:We see each other at festivals a lot.
Marc:Yeah, we do.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:What was that one-man show?
Guest:That was the same one, Hemi and the Kids.
Guest:I haven't done it for a couple of years.
Guest:But I was in Montreal, and I did the show.
Guest:And then afterwards, some guy came up to me, and he said... It was kind of like I was tired.
Guest:It was the last show, the week festival, me doing it for a week.
Guest:And he came up, and there was a parade going on outside.
Guest:Montreal always has a parade happening on St.
Guest:Mark Street.
Guest:And the guy came and said, Your dad, he sold dental equipment?
Guest:Did he have gray hair?
Guest:Did he like the yellow sweaters?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I said, well, I was a bartender down the street.
Guest:And I remember now, he told me about his son being a famous comedian and how proud he was of you.
Guest:And he did have, you're right, two or three beers and he'd leave.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And of course, I'm crying and there's a parade going on.
Guest:And I said, he said he was proud of me.
Marc:It was like an ending of a bad movie.
Marc:So is that the new ending of the one-man show?
Guest:It should have been, but no.
Yeah.
Guest:I gotta make sure that it doesn't get like hokey right yeah I gotta sort of do with a little a little bit of soul and a little bit of sense of attachment or else it's like every comedian has a show but a drunk father it's a tricky thing one man shows not to make it hokey yeah yeah so when do you go back to Canada
Guest:Well, I'm flying back in a couple days to Winnipeg, but then I start going out again in my workshop comedy tour.
Guest:I do workshops during the days and perform comedy at night.
Guest:Well, I'm glad you're doing well.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Guest:That's very nice.
Marc:This was so much fun.
Marc:It was?
Marc:I love talking.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're a good talker.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:Well, I told you what had happened with the other Kevin MacDonald.
Marc:Yes!
Marc:That was hilarious.
Guest:That was hilarious.
Guest:And I told you what happened, right?
Guest:That I always get his mail and the IRS demanded that I... Did I tell you this?
Guest:IRS demanded that I pay $350,000 of... Hold on.
Marc:Now, let me just set this up a little bit because I don't know how I'm going to put the show together.
Marc:But I'll tell you exactly what happened.
Marc:Is...
Marc:My assistant booked Kevin McDonald.
Marc:She said, do you want to talk to Kevin McDonald?
Marc:I'm like, yeah, I want to talk to all the kids in the hall.
Marc:I like Kevin.
Marc:She's like, okay.
Marc:She books Kevin McDonald.
Marc:Then the day that you're supposed to come to my house, a publicist shows up.
Marc:I'm like, hi.
Marc:She's like, yeah, Kevin's real excited.
Marc:I'm thinking, what's Kevin McDonald doing?
Marc:He's got a publicist showing up.
Marc:And she goes, you haven't seen the movie, right?
Marc:I'm like, no, what movie?
Marc:No, I remember.
Marc:I said, what is he playing the movie?
Marc:She goes, no, he directed it.
Marc:I'm like, wow, he's directing.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:And she says, you should be here in a few minutes.
Marc:And then someone comes to the door and walks in.
Marc:And I realize this is Kevin MacDonald.
Marc:I have no idea who he is.
Marc:None.
Marc:None.
Marc:I don't know the movie.
Marc:I don't know who he is.
Marc:I don't know where he's from.
Marc:I know nothing about him.
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:No, he doesn't look familiar, it's ridiculous.
Marc:He has an accent?
Marc:Yeah, I know nothing.
Marc:And then I'm like, I'm gonna need a few minutes, you guys are a little early, and I come in here and I panic, and I Wikipedia the guy, and thank God I saw Alaska in Scotland.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If I hadn't seen that, I would have been lost.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But I saw that, and then I got the name of the movie that he was plugging, but I still was not prepared in any way to have a conversation, I was so thrown off.
Marc:And I didn't tell him.
Marc:I didn't tell him.
Guest:Oh, I was going to ask that.
Marc:I did not tell him.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So you've had problems with this.
Marc:Because he spells it M-A-C.
Guest:Yeah, M-A-C and I'm M-C.
Guest:But still, we're both in William Morris.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:And so I once got asked to have lunch with Steven Spielberg.
Guest:I was asked to direct a movie of a spy book.
Guest:But the biggest thing was the IRS demanded that I pay the $350,000 I owe.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:And it wasn't his fault.
Guest:It was coming to my accountant who was ignoring it for some reason.
Guest:So he was in trouble too, I guess, because he didn't know about it.
Guest:And it took me six months to convince the IRS that they had the wrong Kevin MacDonald.
Guest:Really?
Yeah.
Marc:So how come it took that long?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:You think about social security numbers and addresses and things like that, but I guess they just want to be extra careful.
Marc:Have you ever met the other Kevin MacDonald?
Guest:I haven't.
Guest:I guess it's due.
Guest:That's too much, man.
Guest:I guess I was disappointed because I let the phone call go a little bit more about directing the spy novel.
Marc:Yeah, maybe I could do it.
Marc:It seemed intriguing.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But you had to tell them that you weren't that guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I felt like a jerk because I let them talk to me the whole phone call.
Guest:Well, I guess I should let you know that I'm Kevin MacDonald, the comedian.
Guest:I beg your pardon?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kids in the hall.
Guest:Is this Kevin MacDonald?
Guest:No, I'm Kevin MacDonald.
Guest:And they were very polite, but I'm sure they were saying, why don't you let me talk to you for an hour?
Yeah.
Marc:That's too much, man.
Marc:Well, I think you're going to be on the same show with him.
Guest:Oh, excellent.
Marc:I think we're going to do the Kevin McDonald's.
Marc:Oh, that'd be excellent.
Marc:I think that's the plan.
Guest:I would be very excited to do that.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, thanks for talking, man.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Marc:Sweet guy.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:A very unique WTF featuring Kevin MacDonald, the Academy Award winning Scottish film director and Kevin MacDonald, a member of the kids in the hall.
Marc:All right.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Go to WTF pod dot com for all your WTF pod needs.
Marc:You know, if you're going to comment and then I make a comment about it.
Marc:and then you're going to be upset about that, then you probably shouldn't comment because a comment is a public forum, and I'm going to react to them if I actually read them occasionally.
Marc:I like the comments, but, you know, if it's out there, it's a public fodder.
Marc:I understand your position.
Marc:I know I'm talking in code, but not necessarily to the person I'm talking to, and I appreciate your emails.
Marc:So, look, do what you got to do.
Marc:I'm going to go take my niece to...
Marc:to get a picture with the Hollywood sign because I live in Los Angeles, California.
Marc:Boomer lives!