Improv Nation by Sam Wasson

Author:Sam Wasson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Harold Ramis, having completed the Animal House script, left Toronto for L.A. early in 1977 to get his next movie—Caddyshack, cowritten with Doug Kenney and Brian Doyle-Murray—off the ground. So, on the heels of SCTV’s second season, Andrew Alexander accepted Ramis’s invitation and, that summer, brought Toronto to Bel-Air, renting for his cast a five-bedroom house (John Candy snagged the master), and charged them with writing sixteen half-hour shows in seven weeks. To Ramis, “this was the best group of people I had ever worked with, and the nicest group of people, and we just had so much fun creating this stuff sitting around the table.” The day would begin around breakfast as Ramis arrived, lit a joint, and together with Flaherty, brokered an additive brainstorm directed at amusing not their bosses or sponsors—out of sight and out of mind—but themselves. Nearing lunchtime, the brainstorm naturally apportioned into pairs and trios. Those who laughed together went off to work together, seeing a good idea hatched earlier that morning through to a completed sketch. “We wrote for each other,” Flaherty said, an ethic he attributed to Del Close’s training.

By midafternoon, the improvisers would punch out, sort of. Because most were staying at the house, sleeping where they worked, the writing process never really stopped. Over billiards, or in the pool out back, the conversation continued. “It was one of the happiest times of my life,” Ramis said, “because they were all so funny and generous and talented in their work.” Flaherty, energizing them with chaos, spread a sense of happy panic to jump-start spontaneity; Ramis lassoed the ensuing good ideas and touched them up, grinning throughout.

Per Belushi’s recommendation, Lorne Michaels had offered Ramis a writing position on the show, but the stories Ramis had heard—the cocaine, the late nights, the scrambling, the competition—put him off the idea of writing for Saturday Night Live. The improvisational atmosphere in Bel-Air was more to his liking, utterly noncompetitive. “The thing about Second City,” he said, “is we all shared a technique, which was very important. So when we sat down at a table it wasn’t a competition to see who could get their piece on the air. We would just sort of build on each other’s ideas. If someone had a good idea there’d be six other people to take it one step further.”

Back in Toronto, the spirit of idea building persisted. Ignited by the notion of a Fantasy Island parody, Flaherty and Thomas seized on the broadest-possible conception of fantasy, “opening it up to our imaginations,” Flaherty said, and ran with it, using the TV show as a cheesy excuse to launch from fantasy to parodied fantasy—of Hope and Crosby, Fred and Ginger, Casablanca, and The Wizard of Oz—to build a surreal, maximalist movie-world free-for-all on the “Yes, and” logic of cross-breeding, to the edge of excess, iconic stars, and genres. The adventurous “multilayered” style of show business parody, born with the Fantasy Island episode—itself born from the additive improvisational writing techniques of

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