Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 23, 1994 TAG: 9404230075
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DANIEL CERONE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Have you heard of them? They're in the final season of a TV series critics love that's been running for five years. They just got a movie deal with Paramount Pictures. They're managed by the same group that handles Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. They're currently selling out theaters on a live tour.
Still doesn't ring a bell?
If not, you're not alone. For five exhausting seasons, the five-man Canadian troupe has written and acted in more than 700 comedy sketches for "The Kids in the Hall," an absurdly funny TV series that films 10 long months a year, both in the studio and on location.
But their half-hour show, which is wildly popular north of the border in prime time, airs on a ragtag lineup of CBS stations in this country at 12:35 a.m. Fridays, one of the worst time slots in television, with virtually no network promotion. Comedy Central shows nightly reruns of the series (at 9), but the cable channel can only be seen in one-third of all television homes.
So now the Kids - Dave Foley, Mark McKinney, Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch - are choosing to end their TV series to try to make the risky leap to feature films.
"It was one of the few unanimous decisions we've ever made in our lives," said Foley recently, speaking by cellular phone on a tour bus driving from Toronto to Ottawa, with Elvis Costello blaring in the background. The performers, all in their 30s, are taking time out from TV production to do an eight-day tour with stops in Seattle, San Francisco and New York.
"More than anything, we just thought we were getting old," Foley said. "We figured we can't be the Kids in the Hall forever. We want to do some other projects before the troupe loses its will to work together. We wanted to make a movie, and we didn't think we would ever find time if we kept doing the series. The series eats up our whole lives. We don't have friends. We never see our wives."
While the Kids in the Hall may not be big names in America, neither were the six members of Britain's Monty Python when they wrapped their TV series after only 45 episodes - compared to 110 for "The Kids in the Hall." "Monty Python's Flying Circus" didn't pick up steam in the United States until after it had ceased production in 1974. The members pursued solo careers and periodically reassembled for a string of successful movies.
That's roughly what the Kids have in mind.
"You only have so many three-minute ideas in your head," McDonald said. "It's getting harder and harder to create a little world in three minutes. You have to think of a good ending every time, and that's the hardest thing. The only way to keep our comedy going is to move to the next forum, which would be a movie. Either that or opera."
Like Python, the Kids have developed something of a cult following here for their bawdy humor, and they routinely dress in drag when their comedy calls for women. They're recycling TV skits on a minimalist stage for their current tour, including one about two secretaries probing the new man in the office to find out if he is gay, and another in which five men playing poker talk about how they wish they were women.
The Kids in the Hall opened to a crowd in Ottawa who screamed and applauded when their favorite TV characters appeared throughout the show - such as the Chicken Lady, the mutated offspring of a farm boy and a barnyard fowl. The man who brought the Kids to America, "Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels, says it's that way no matter where they play, in the United States or Canada. He said more people come up to him on the street in this country to inquire about the Kids than any of the other comedians he has shepherded to fame.
"My feeling is these shows will still be watched in 20 years," Michaels said of "Kids in the Hall," which debuted in America three years ago on pay cable's Home Box Office, before moving to CBS in 1992 and becoming the second-highest-rated show on Comedy Central. New episodes will air through December before the series goes dark. "The fans tend to be very devoted. Whenever the Kids play live, it's always a sellout, and that can be in Boulder, Colo. So they must be reaching a lot of people."
The Kids have four or five vague ideas for their feature film, ranging from a period piece about beatnik poets in Greenwich Village, to a story that takes place in the middle of a jungle, to a movie involving karaoke. Two days after the TV series finishes production in July, the Kids are going to a private retreat in Northern Ontario to write the movie together.
"I don't know what's ahead for the group - that depends on how our movie does," Thompson said. "Even if it's a huge hit, I think we will have to take a break from each other. We've been together so long, and we all are itching to do solo projects. Some of us will fail, some of us won't."
Foley is the first to get a major supporting role in the upcoming movie "Pat," one of Michaels' many "Saturday Night Live" movie spinoffs.
Right now the Kids, who just flew in from San Francisco, are enjoying their tour. They started out on stage in the mid-1980s, when they were in their 20s with full-time jobs and still wrote 90 minutes of new material for a weekly stage show in Toronto.
"We haven't done this in a couple years," Foley said. "We're sort of playing hooky to do this tour. When we were talking about doing another season of the show last year, we asked production to find time for us to get out on the road again. Largely because it's fun, and it reminds us of when we started out. In a stage show, you can do anything you want at the moment, and not worry about whether you're screwing up a scene. That's kind of liberating."
by CNB