PWAC Victoria: Jeff Bateman, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

Larry Sanders North?

by Jeff Bateman © 2000

Backstage with the Global Television series Big Sound. This was the lead feature in the Vancouver Sun's weekend Mix section on Aug. 5, 2000.

The writing is already on the wall for Big Sound, the music business sitcom that's just two weeks into its five-month production run in a former paint factory off Terminal Avenue. "It's funny, it really is. Stay true. -- Melissa Etheridge, July 21, 2000," reads the handwritten message scrawled prominently in the studio's cafeteria. Much of the free world already knows that the A-list American rock star has a sublime sense of humour given her choice of David Crosby as test-tube father to her first-born. Etheridge enjoyed her self-deprecating cameo role in the opening two episodes enough that she's asked to be written into a script later this year. To the cast and crew, that's an encouraging sign that big laughs will greet Big Sound when it debuts on Global Television in late October.

Conceived by local music mogul Sam Feldman and loosely based on the management side of his heavyweight booking agency S.L. Feldman & Associates, Big Sound is that rarest of departures in the Vancouver TV production game: a half-hour, Larry Sanders-style adult comedy created by a predominantly Canadian team of actors, writers, directors and producers. It's not, in other words, a sci-fi fantasia or action drama scripted and cast in Los Angeles, then shipped here for a cost-effective turnaround by a B.C. union crew.

It's that kind of work-for-hire scenario that has turned Vancouver into "Mexico north," argues Tim Gamble, president and founder of series producer Peace Arch Entertainment. He wants to foster an indigenous TV market here by developing projects from the ground up, retaining full creative control and then selling his copyrights to the world. "Sam and Bruce Allen have done precisely that with Canadian musicians," reasons Gamble. "There's no reason we can't be equally successful at exporting a Canadian musical comedy." The announcement of a U.S. sale to a major music video channel is expected soon.

Gamble was first pitched on the concept three years ago while holidaying in Hawaii with his golfing partner Feldman. After developing a solid base with its own syndicated programs (First Wave, The Immortals, Dead Man's Gun), Peace Arch was looking to expand its reach by getting into comedy. "Vancouver has been so service-oriented as a production centre that we've never really developed the creative, above-the-line side of the business," says Big Sound executive producer Michele White. "Comedy is not about action or special effects or location, it's about writing, acting and directing. A show like this one is a real shift in the way our system has evolved up here."

White then locked up a marquee name in David Steinberg, the Winnipeg-born comic who coined the deathless phrase "ooga booga" back in the '70s before evolving into an Emmy Award-winning writer/director in Los Angeles with numerous episodes of Mad about You and Seinfeld to his credit. Steinberg wanted to try his hand at directing and acting in a smart, edgy situation comedy that's shot on 35mm film and flies without the safety of a laugh track or studio audience.

Writing Rosie O'Donnell's gags for the Grammy Awards convinced him the pop milieu was ideal comic fodder. "The stars are nuts, the agents are nuts, the egos are out of control," says Steinberg of an industry that sees aging, perma-tanned music executives working alongside hormonal boy bands, gun-toting rappers and prima-donna divas. "Everyone is basically so far out there that it's surreal."

Steinberg's participation plus an initial batch of scripts penned by his Mad about You colleague Frank van Keekan convinced Global to commit to 22 episodes at a cost of $850,000 per half hour. For a domestic comedy that's both an unprecedented order and a more than decent budget. The fact that Big Sound can grow and evolve for at least one full season is a refreshing change from how things work nowadays in Burbank, where new shows rarely make it past their third episode.

Steinberg was also eager to shoot a plot-driven comedy in Canada, which over the years has specialized in sketch shows like SCTV, The Kids in the Hall and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. "I get asked all the time why Canada never does this kind of sitcom," he says. "Well, they don't do it in New York or Chicago either. It's an art form that was devised and refined in L.A. But what we're doing here is creatively more satisfying and ultimately harder to pull off. And when you consider the wealth of comedians who keep coming out of this country, it's really only logical that we start making more of our own sitcoms."

Sam Feldman has occupied a ringside seat in pop music's theatre of the absurd for 35 years, originally as a doorman-cum-bouncer in Kitsilano and now as the manager of class acts Joni Mitchell, The Chieftains and Diana Krall. In his role as one of the show's clutch of producers, he's vetting the scripts to ensure as much authenticity as possible. The show's writers are keeping a tight lid on their plotlines, though Feldman says hot-button issues like Napster, corporate consolidation and the teen pop explosion will be addressed to varying degrees. "My initial idea was that the show would be a lot closer to exactly what happens in the business, but the reality is you can't get so inside that you lose the viewer. The stories are about the interaction of artists and managers, and that part is absolutely on the money."

One of Feldman's tasks is to use his connections to book Big Sound's real-life clientele. In the opener, Etheridge exercises her creative perogative and insists that her new album cover be ultraviolet, a colour that can evidently only be seen by bees. Manoeuvring and in-fighting all the way, her management team scrambles to keep their client happy while placating her bewildered record company. Randy Bachman dropped in late last week for episode three. Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas is cited wishfully in one working script, Sting in another. Our Lady Peace, Jann Arden and Chantal Kreviazuk have all expressed interest in poking fun at themselves and the business at large. The show is aimed primarily at mainstream viewers with MuchMoreMusic/VH1 tastes, so the likelihood of guest shots by Nashville Pussy or the Chemical Brothers is disappointingly slim.

The set is a remarkably accurate simulation of Feldman's sleek Granville Island headquarters. The snazzy glass, metal and wood decor is essentially the same, and the walls are similarly adorned with posters of the Barenaked Ladies, Tara McLean, Bif Naked and Amanda Marshall. VIP laminates and other paraphernalia supplied by Feldman staff are artfully strewn around the offices of their Big Sound counterparts. Rather than a view of English Bay, however, the painted exteriors feature the north shore mountains as seen from Bryan Adams's Warehouse Studio in Gastown (where the show's recurrent opening clip will be filmed). As for the gold and platinum album awards hanging in Big Sound's hallways, they're as fake as the names of the acts who earned them: Eskimos Diablos, Spaz Moberry, The Sticklebats, Urban Militia, Katharina Zoot and Road Wenches, among others.

Feldman insists that the show's central protagonist, the disillusioned and stressed-out senior manager Bill Sutton, is in no way his alter ego. "All we've got in common is that he looks just like me." He pauses, waits a beat, then laughs long and loud. "Seriously, this guy is so good-looking he should be hit with a stick. It's absurd. He's me in my dreams 10 years ago."

Primetime comedies do not fall under the category of "reality television." Greg Evigan, perhaps best known for starring opposite Buddy the chimp on the cornpone series BJ and the Bear, is tall, lean and blindingly handsome--just what's required of the lead in a program that will likely be slotted by Global into the slipstream of a hit import like Friends or Frasier. Evigan started out in musical theatre doing Jesus Christ Superstar and Grease, cut an album in the early '80s with Letterman sidekick Paul Shaffer, and has plugged away at his own music ever since.

"The back story is that Bill Sutton was a musician himself, then got into management when he started a family and had to make some serious money," says Evigan, New Jersey-born but a landed immigrant since moving to Toronto for the sci-fi series TekWars in the early '90s. "Now he's in his late 30s, divorced and with a daughter. He has to deal with all these eccentric artists, and he's constantly under pressure at work. Inside he's a good person, but he's got a definite hard edge about him. He'll cut a throat when it needs to be cut. It's not easy to get a read on him, and that's where the fun lies."

Authenticity is as important for Evigan as it is for Feldman. "There's enough of us with music backgrounds that we're catching the little slip-ups here and there," he says. The boxes of reel-to-reel tape in the otherwise modern demo studio, for instance, will have to go. "Yeah, that's a little off. But it's comedy, it's real loose and funny and that's what matters. People in the business will buy it."

On a humid Tuesday last week, Big Sound #103--first season, third episode--was in day two of its four-day, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. production cycle. Steinberg is dressed in the obligatory power-broker uniform of black Armani suit and cream-coloured shirt buttoned at the neck. He's directing the action while playing the part of Gabe Moss, the company's Machiavellian head man. As the scene opens, he's riffing on the theme of blood-letting as practised by a species of Galapagos Island bird. With a thin smile, he tells Sutton and the shark-like junior manager Nick Keester (Colin Cunningham) that there's too much deadwood on staff and that each of them has to fire somebody by day's end. Just as he's done during rehearsals, Moss/Steinberg then turns to his laptop and starts reading his emails. But instead of the scripted lines, he flows in an ad libbed joke about fellatio. The crew cracks up at this clear signal that the director wants another take, a loud buzzer sounds, and everybody gets busy with the set-up.

Uncensored gags will be one thing that Big Sound won't have in common with an industry that stickers a fair share of its output with parental advisory warnings, "It's network comedy, not cable, so you can't go down that road," says head writer van Keekan, a Kids in the Hall alumnus who has spent much of his career doing stand-up. "The music people I know swear pretty routinely, but we can survive without it. True subversion flies well below the radar of any broadcast standards issues. The idea is to create a quality show where the stories feature believable characters who viewers care about and relate to on some level."

The high-energy van Keekan has assembled a team of seven writers, all Canadian, all with a wide range of experience. Neil Levy was a talent coordinator for Saturday Night Live. Several others have written for The Tonight Show. North Van's Gary Jones has a lengthy background in improv with Theatresports locally. Jennifer Cowan started out as a pop culture journalist, directed the quirky documentary Douglas Copeland: Close Personal Friend ("he wasn't then, but he is now, so I guess he liked it") and spent the last two years as story editor on Traders.

Have they succeeded in making Big Sound genuinely funny? Melissa Etheridge may think so, but everyone involved is adopting a wait-and-see attitude. "It's a mystery dance, you can't control it," says van Keekan. "You just go with the flow and crank out the shows. The great thing is that the people will speak, they always do, and they're always right. You're not going to hoodwink John Q. Public."

Jeff Bateman
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Last updated: August 10, 2003 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/batemn04.html