Levy’s legacy

THERE was a little country town where folks had a strange diet. Strangers who stopped for lunch ended up staying for dinner,” rasps the voiceover for the theatrical trailer of 1973 film Cannibal Girls.

“Oh boy,” Eugene Levy says with obvious glee as he watches a clip of the film on my iPad.

With his small round glasses, bushy eyebrows and unmistakably Jewish features, there’s more than a little bit of Groucho Marx about him, even without the moustache.

“They just came out with a Blu-Ray version and I said to them ‘why spend the money on a Blu-Ray DVD of Cannibal Girls, who’s going to be looking at this?’. They told me that in the horror genre, the film had always done well. They said it was a cultish sort of film,” Levy explains as though confounded by the thought of his own success.

The b-grade exploitation horror was Levy’s big screen debut and his first collaboration with fellow Canadian Jew Ivan Reitman, who went on to direct Stripes and Ghostbusters.

Levy met Reitman at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where they were members of the school’s film club in the late 1960s. After working on some projects together, the pair became fast friends.
“Ivan’s the guy who gave me my first job out of school as a coffee boy on his first feature Foxy Lady.

“Every time they’d yell ‘that’s a wrap’, I’d see all the actors just get into their cars and drive home and I had another two hours work to do so I’d look at the actors going home and think ‘that’s really where I want to be’.”

While Levy recalls the early days of his career in Canada with great ­fondness, he says the film industry of the ’60s and ’70s was exclusively the domain of starving artists and idealists.

“Now it’s the new dentistry,” Levy says of modern-day filmmaking.

“Acting was not a profession that was really encouraged, but now everybody’s son or daughter wants to be a writer or a director. It’s amazing … There’s no-one left to run the world.”

Levy’s big break came in 1976 when he was cast in the Canadian answer to Saturday Night Live, sketch comedy show Second City TV (SCTV). Levy plied his trade alongside luminaries such as John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis and Harold Ramis on the show, which ran for five years and was hugely ­influential.

“SCTV was fantastic, still one of the high points. It was a great way to grow up in comedy.”

With his impressions of Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger and Muammar Gaddafi on SCTV earning him worldwide fame, Levy worked consistently as a character actor over the next 20 years before co-writing and starring in the seminal 1996 film, Waiting for Guffman.

Levy teamed with director Christopher Guest on the hilarious improvised mockumentary in which he played, ironically, a small-town dentist with designs on acting stardom. The film was a critical and commercial success and spawned Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration, all of which were co-written by and starred Levy.

“Mock documentaries are all over the place now so we’re [Levy and Guest] still trying to figure out what’s going to be a fun, exciting project that will not just be more of the same. We don’t want to do a cookie cutter thing where we just say, ‘lets do another movie and just change the subject’,” Levy said of a potential new project with Guest.

But the role that Levy credits with bringing him to the mainstream is that of Jim’s dad in the 1999 teen comedy American Pie. The film has spawned a whopping seven sequels – including, it has to be said, the odd straight-to-DVD release.

Levy was in Melbourne flogging the latest in the series, American Pie Reunion, which reunites almost all the major players from the original hit.
“What it did was open me up to an audience of 25 and under who would never have known who I was if it ­hadn’t been for American Pie. After American Pie I started getting these youth-oriented movies. Now I’m working with Lil’ Bow Wow and Lil’ Romeo.”

Regrettably, Levy says there is no shlock horror in his immediate future and while his status as “America’s Favourite Dad” will undoubtedly see him cast alongside more child rappers, here’s hoping another Guffman isn’t too far away.

American Pie Reunion is in theatres nationally.

ADAM KAMIEN