Wrong Guy's in Right Place
Courtesy of the Toronto Sun
Dave Foley's happy in Hollywood
By JIM SLOTEK
Wednesday, February 25, 1998
Kids In The Hall aficionados may recall a skit that sounds a lot like the plot of Dave Foley's new movie The Wrong Guy.
"Guys-on-the-run is a theme I always toyed with for some reason," says the affable Foley, who with his sitcom NewsRadio is the most "Hollywood" of the former Kids. "I wrote a sketch called On The Run, about a bunch of prison escapees and they're eating in a diner and the cops who are chasing them are in the diner. Just sort of an absurd set piece."
Kids trivia note: The skit also marked the birth of one of the Kids' most popular segue bits, with Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney as a pair of do-nothing doughnut-eating cops. "That was the first time Mark and Bruce played cops," Foley says. "We had weather delays and they liked the characters so much they went out and improvised a lot of little 'blackouts.' "
Foley's The Wrong Guy -- written with TV writers Jay Kogen and David Higgins, and directed by David Steinberg -- stars Foley as Nelson Hibbert, an accountant who's cheated out of a promotion by his boss (Ken Welsh) and who figures he's got to be the prime suspect when the boss is murdered. In fact, the real murderer (Colm Feore) was caught on camera. But Nelson flees, and ironically keeps accidentally bumping into Feore and into the cops who aren't chasing him.
"There's kind of a nod to The Fugitive, more the TV show than the movie," Foley says. "And in terms of structure, I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, the old Paul Muni film."
Oh yeah, '30s star Paul Muni, we say -- there's a reference that'll sell that movie to the youth market. "What?" Foley laughs. "Surely the kids remember The Life Of Emile Zola?"
But if the movie's protagonist is the victim of a lot of unlucky accidents, so too was the movie -- which was shot in Toronto almost two years ago and has sat on a shelf since. Actually, it was shown on airplanes before it started playing in theatres last weekend. So what gives?
"Jay, Dave and I wrote it and tried to sell it, (Canadian producer) Jon Slan wanted to make it, and Disney decided they wanted to distribute it. And then they changed their minds," Foley says with a shrug.
"Actually what happened was (Disney's) Hollywood Pictures shut down while we were in production and re-opened with a new president and our film kind of fell in the cracks. So we're looking for a U.S. distributor, and meanwhile our Canadian distributors were saying, 'Look, release it anyway!' "
After all that, the film's been savaged critically. But Foley -- who is almost inhumanly busy these days -- is philosophical about the film. "It would be nice if it did well, but whatever happens, we made the movie we wanted to make and wrote what we wanted to write. And it was fun to play an idiot."
The upside was the summer he spent at home, in a film filled with friends. Local comic actors in The Wrong Guy include Joe Flaherty, Dan Redican, Boyd Banks, Mike Wilmot, fellow Kids McKinney and Kevin MacDonald, and Lindsay Leese.
"And my good friend Paul Irving -- one of the funniest guys around -- was my stand-in. David Steinberg was up here casting, and I'd be like, 'Oh yes, that's a friend of mine, hire 'im.' "
Foley is finishing taping the last batch of episodes of NBC's NewsRadio with co-stars Andy Dick and Phil Hartman, and bouncing between there and the set of Blast From The Past, a comedy starring Brendan Fraser as a guy who's spent his entire life in a bomb shelter.
"Chris Walken and Sissy Spacek play the parents, and Alicia Silverstone is the love interest," Foley says. "I play Alicia's gay roommate ... I figured it was time to stir up rumors of my sexuality again." (Foley, who's now separated from wife Tabitha, was the only married Kid. He has two boys, ages 5 and 2.) You can also see him in April on The Movie Network playing astronaut Alan Bean in the Tom Hanks-produced series From The Earth To The Moon.
These are glory days for Foley, you'd think. But this is the time of year when he worries about the fate of NewsRadio. "NBC moved us again," he notes, "to Wednesday. It would be nice to be in one spot and enjoy some security. But I spent five years on Kids In The Hall thinking we were cancelled every year -- and we usually were. Everybody was always cancelling us and then changing their mind."
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