If there's one scene that best encapsulates John Candy's tragically abbreviated career, it's not necessarily from his time on the sketch comedy series “SCTV” or from films like “Stripes” or “Uncle Buck.” It's a moment in the 1987 comedy-drama “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” when his reluctant roommate Neal Page (played by Steve Martin) has spent several minutes berating him for his relentless storytelling.
With a lump in his throat, Candy Del Griffith's wounded character responds that he is proud of who he is. “I liked it,” he says. “My wife likes me. My customers like me. Because I'm the real thing, what you see is what you get.”
That moment is fundamental for two new projects that return to Candy's life and work some 31 years after the actor died of a heart attack at the age of 43. The actor would have turned 75 this month.
A biography, “John Candy: A Life in Comedy,” written by Paul Myers (released by House of Anansi Press on Tuesday), and a documentary, “John Candy: I Like Me,” directed by Colin Hanks (released Friday on Prime Video), both rely on Candy's friends, family and colleagues to help tell the story of his Ascent, his success and the Void for his death.
In their own ways, both the book and the film show how Candy, though not without his demons, was loved by audiences for his fundamental and authentic likability, and why he is still mourned today by the potential he never fully fulfilled.
A family photo of John Candy and his son, Chris, seen in “John Candy: Like”. (main video)
John Candy, left, and Steve Martin in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” (Paramount Pictures)
Explaining why it was still important to commemorate Candy all these years later, Ryan Reynolds, the “Deadpool” star and producer of the documentary, said: “When it's something that people desperately miss, but they don't know they miss it, it's a beautiful, rare thing. John Candy is a person they desperately miss.”
Since his death, Candy's immediate survivors: his widow, Rosemary; daughter, Jennifer Candy-Sullivan; and son, Chris Candy — have weighed the pros and cons of sharing his life with the public and the impact it could have on them (all three are executive producers on the film). “It's a balancing act,” Chris Candy said. “You want to live your life and you also want to honor his.”
In recent years, Candy's children said they were encouraged by documentaries such as Morgan Neville's “Ain't He My Neighbor.” “, about the children's television station Fred Rogers, as well as Hanks' film “All Things Must Pass”, about the Tower Records retail chain.
Hanks, whose father, Tom, starred with Candy in films such as “Splash” and “Volunteers,” said he initially struggled to find a compelling way to tell the story of Candy, who had a seemingly charmed and uncontroversial acting career, first in his native Toronto and then in Hollywood.
But Hanks said he was drawn to Candy's story because of one particular detail: the fact that Candy's own father, Sidney, had died of heart disease at the age of 35, just before John turned 5. “It doesn't take much to think about how traumatic it could be for anyone at any age,” Hanks said.
Chris Candy, from left, Jennifer Candy-Sullivan and Colin Hanks, who directed the feature video documentary “John Candy: I Like It.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Myers, a musician and journalist who has written books about the band Barenaked Ladies and Comedy Glupe The Kids in the Hall, said he was drawn to Candy as fellow Canadians and an embodiment of the national comedy spirit.
“If you're Canadian like me, you never stop thinking about John Candy,” Myers said. Growing up in the Toronto area, Myers said he and his siblings, including his brother Mike, the future “Shrek” and “Austin Powers” star, were avid fans of sketch comedy shows such as “Monty Python's Flying Circus” and “Saturday Night Live.”
But “SCTV,” which launched stars like Candy, Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy, meant even more to them. “We watched it from Day 1 and cheered a little more for them because it was like they were shooting the show away from our house,” Myers said.
Reynolds, who was born and raised in Vancouver, said Candy's essential Canadian spirit was crucial to his success as a comedic actor.
“In comedy, Canadians generally don't punch,” Reynolds said. “It's more of a subdued humor. Their favorite target is themselves. And John did that. On screen, I felt his willingness and joy of a subdued humor that never veered into self-completing humor.”
Ryan Reynolds at the Los Angeles screening of “I Like Me” earlier this month. The actor was a producer on the film.
(Todd Williamson / January Images)
Candy turned his repertoire of “SCTV” characters, satirical media personalities like Johnny Larue and real-life celebrities like Orson Welles, into supporting parts in hit films like “National Lampoon's Vacation,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Brewster's Millions” and “Space Balls.”
His inclinations for drinking and smoking were well known and hardly out of the ordinary for that time; They rarely impeded Candy's work, and in at least one notable case, they seem to have enhanced it: Both the documentary and the biography tell how the candy was handed out to a late-night voice actor with Jack Nicholson before getting up the next morning to film a scene in “Splash,” where their characters sway, jiggle and squirt through a round of bacebol.
“That's his work ethic, right there,” Candy-Sullivan said. “He showed up and made the scene.”
Candy graduated to directing roles in comedies such as “Summer Rental,” “The Great Outdoors” and “Who's Harry Crumb?”, and found a kindred spirit in writer-director John Hughes, who helped provide candy with some of his most enduring roles in films such as “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “Uncle Buck” and “Home Alone.”
But off-screen, Candy was holding up anxiously and was sensitive to people's judgments about her size, comments that often came directly from TV interviewers who didn't think to ask her point-blank if Candy planned to lose weight.
When he and his sister watched archival footage of these interviews in the documentary, Chris Candy said, “It was, for both of us, uncomfortable. I wasn't familiar with what he was enduring and how he would mentally go in and out of those conversations. He got cheesier and cheesier about it as time went on, and you can see it in the interviews.”
But these psychic wounds did not make Sweet a cruel or unpleasant person; He simply absorbed the pain and redoubled his efforts to be a genius artist.
“If you look for darkness in John Candy's story, a lot of his internalized pain,” Myers said. “His own coping mechanism was radical kindness to everyone, making human connections so that he had community and felt like he was making things better.”
In the early 1990s, Candy seemed to be running non-stop. He appeared in five different feature films in 1991 alone, a year that included the likes of “Nothing But Trouble,” as well as a small but potentially transformative role in the Oliver Stone drama “JFK,” where he played flamboyant lawyer Dean Andrews Jr. He was preparing his own directorial debut, a TV movie called “Danger for a Day,” in which he was opposite Gege Whendt. Candy also became a co-owner and one-man PEP team for the Toronto Argonauts, the Canadian Football League team.
Finally, the many demands and stresses in his life came to a head. In the middle of a grueling shoot for the western comedy “Wagons East” in Durango, Mexico, Candy died on March 4, 1994. She was to have a private funeral in the Los Angeles area, followed by a public memorial in Toronto that sparked a national outpouring of grief in Canada.
“He represented the best of us,” Myers said. “He was a person focused on humanity. He brought vulnerability and humility to his characters, which is not something you usually see in a broad comedy.”
Candy's films continue to play on television and streaming, with both “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” and “Home Alone” becoming holiday staples. But for people involved in the chronology of Candy's life, there is a creeping sense that the actor's legacy will not tend to itself, and that generations who did not grow up with candy might need reminders of what made him worth remembering.
Hanks recalled a story from the making of “I Like Me,” where he and some colleagues were having dinner at a restaurant where the hostess asked them what they were working on.
“We said we're making a documentary,” Hanks said. “'Oh, really?' She goes. This is John Candy. I have no idea who it was.
Part of his interest in making a movie about Candy, Hanks said, is “wanting to show the man that people love and remind them why he loved them.”
But there's also the simple pleasure of introducing Candy's work to people who haven't seen it before. “If you're lucky,” Hanks said, “hopefully, hopefully, 'God, I want to see those movies. I want to go see 'SCTV.'”
