I don’t remember whose idea it was to do this show. It may have come from Andrew Alexander, the CEO of Second City. But I do remember that, pretty quickly, we had an offer from Bell Media (CTV) in Canada. And then Andrew set about looking for a U.S. partner to fund the show. That led to Netflix. And Martin Short got involved here because he was already doing a Netflix special with Steve Martin – a video taping of one of their live concert shows that they have been taking to different cities around the country for the past couple of years. Marty had become friends with Ted Sarandos in the process of doing that special for Netflix and so when he broached the idea to Ted, suddenly Netflix was in the game.
Creatively, where we couldn’t all agree on what specifically the SCTV Reunion should look like (like one of the early ideas based, in part, because SNL had just celebrated being on the air for 40 years, we thought maybe it would be funny for SCTV to celebrate being off the air for 34 years), we did agree that we needed a director. Pretty quickly, Martin Scorsese’s name came up. Catherine had done a film with Marty Scorsese and he had told her that he was a big SCTV fan. Martin Short had a connection to Scorsese through a mutual friend, and within a couple of weeks the two Martys got together to discuss the show. Next thing we all know, Marty Scorsese was “in”.
In January of 2017 we all met with Martin Scorsese in New York. Before the Scorsese meeting, the cast got together for a dinner at Orso’s in New York City. It was the first time the entire cast had been together in some time. There are some photos here of that meeting. The next day we met Scorsese and discussed what exactly we would do.
The idea of a stage show where we would all be interviewed in front of an audience came out of that meeting. There would also be old clips, maybe some new stuff – we weren’t all in agreement about that. But we all agreed that Jimmy Kimmel was the best choice to interview us. So planning that part of the show went into high gear and soon, we had a date – May 13, 2018 – and a venue, the Elgin Theater in Toronto.
There are some photos here taken backstage at the Elgin Theater on May 13, 2018. There is also a photo of the crane Scorsese’s crew used to mount one of the 14 cameras that covered the live event. The camera crane operator was the same guy who operated the crane in the infamous Street Beef Christmas Show scene with John Candy as Johnny LaRue back in 1982 and he painted “Johnny LaRue” on the crane for the event in memory of John.
(MORE TO COME)
