Original-Cin Chat: Chris and Jennifer Candy on their dad John, Mortality and Memories
By Jim Slotek
John Candy was in more than 30 movies in his short 43 years, plus Second City and SCTV. He co-owned the Toronto Argonauts, toured the country promoting the CFL and burned the candle at both ends in many other ways.
It is suggested in John Candy: I Like Me, the exhaustive documentary that was last night’s gala opener of the Toronto International Film Festival, that his frantic pace was partly fueled by his father’s death at age 35, when John was 5.
His unspoken motto: “I only have so much time.”
Chris and Jennifer Candy
John’s son and daughter, Chris and Jennifer Candy are co-producers of I Like Me, and generally agree with the assessment.
But having been children of a father who died young, who in turn was the child of a father who died young, doesn’t mean they share the sentiment.
A very young John Candy
“No, I think there are unknowns in life,” Chris says, in a sit-down with his sister at Toronto’s Second City (in the John Candy Box Theatre no less).
“The only thing I know is that I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t sit around thinking about a clock. I think that comes from dismantling fears I had as a kid and realizing those are childish thoughts.”
More than 31 years after John Candy died of a heart attack on the set of the comedy Wagons East, the family is finally facing his loss in an in-depth way. Directed by Colin Hanks, and produced by Ryan Reynolds, I Like Me has a lengthy parade of friends and family, from his childhood in his East York Toronto neighbourhood through to stardom – the latter including the likes of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Mel Brooks and Macaulay Culkin.
But the real spine of the film is the plethora of archival material, from his school days, his high school football days, his earliest stabs at comedy, backlot photos from movies and TV, etc.
“With our mother, we had all the footage, photos, early on. Long before anything was even greenlit, we got out boxes of old Super 8 footage and started digitizing everything to see what was on them,” Chris says.
Jennifer adds: “My mom and I were always in her office, we were always digitizing photos and putting them into categories. Movies, what era it was. We’ve been working on this for what seems like our entire life. Whether we knew it or not we were leading up to this moment.”
In those 31 years, there were some slapdash attempts at biographies of John, including some where the writer clearly never got access to anyone close to the family. “Unfortunately, there were a couple of them where you go ‘Who was that (talking about my dad)?’” she says.
For their part, Chris says, “we were spending time growing up, and it would have been a big undertaking to do a documentary of this size.”
“But the evolution of documentaries changed,” Jennifer says. “Back then, an A&E documentary is what you did when somebody died.”
The seed of I Like Me came eight years ago when Ryan Reynolds made an online John Candy tribute piece. After a meeting with the family, Jennifer says, “We were like, ‘Okay, maybe it is time we showed all this to the world.’”
Growing up primarily in Los Angeles, the Candys maintained a connection to their father’s celebrity friends (they often vacationed with the family of John Hughes, for whom Candy made 12 movies, including Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck and Only the Lonely).
“We’ve stayed tethered to the majority of people that were in this documentary,” Chris says. ”And it was really great to listen to some of their more deep dives and conversations.”.
“We were fortunate to be on set for some of the interviews. And we look at it as like listening to two-hour long podcasts on our father, hosted by Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin, and getting the inside scoop on who our dad was.”
After his death, both siblings gravitated to acting and performance, Chris in particular getting improv training from places like L.A.’s Groundlings theatre. “My dad was a wild creative, and we grew up in a very creative household. So, it gives you a boost of confidence to not feel embarrassed or shamed when you have to do something wacky on camera.”
(Next Wednesday, Chris is hosting An Evening with John Candy at Second City. “It’ll be a small improv show with some monologue, with stories about our dad and some improv from them. It’s exciting and it’s just a treat to be able to do a show in the John Candy Box Theatre here.”).
Says Jennifer: “In high school, I always knew that I liked to make people feel good and laugh. And I kind of just stumbled into the television world and worked behind the scenes and learned. That was one of the things our dad said was, ‘Learn about everything, learn about everyone.’
“So if I wanted to be in front of the camera, I had to learn about everything that went on behind the camera.”
For Jennifer, John Candy’s legacy lives on with her six-year-old son. “He knows his grandfather as Papa Candy, and he’s on TV and he plays Barf (the half-man/half-dog John played in Mel Brooks’ Star Wars spoof Spaceballs).
“We have a picture of him on our stairway, and he brings it in for family day at school and says, ‘This is my grandfather.’ And it’s a picture of Barf.”