Dan Aykroyd Biography: The Couch Trip

From the moment he talks a fellow inmate out of leaping from the ledge of a mental facility, then executes a nifty swan dive out himself so as not to disappoint the waiting firemen below, the inspired lunacy of Dan Aykroyd is off-the-wall and running in Orion Pictures' "The Couch Trip."

As computer hacker John Burns, he has talked his way out of Joliet Prison and into the comparitive safety of a psychiatric ward. As "Dr. Lawrence Baird" (an identity borrowed from the prison shrink), he presents himself as California's newest, most outrageous--and soon to be most popular--radio sex therapist.

While Donna Dixon as Dr. Laura Rollins is shocked by his explicit mike-side manner--and controversial concepts like "mass transit therapy"--only one person suspects that the ding-a-ling dial-a-shrink is a Freudian fraud. Walter Matthau as Donald Becker, an airport panhandler who solicits alms for abused plants, knows a con (and an ex-con) when he sees one.

"John Burns' outlook on life is to live it as fast as you can and don't get caught," says Aykroyd of his character. "He's determined to get rich any way he can. And when he discovers that by pinch-hitting for a disturbed psychiatrist he can walk off with a fast $200,000 in small unmarked bills, he's delighted to perform the public service. But by the end of the picture, he's had his eyes opened. He recognizes, to his own dismay, that he actually cares about other people. It' s a nice 180 degree shift."

After a brief stint as a radio personality, he joined the Toronto Company of the Second City improv troupe, performing nightly while he spent his days seeking work in television. He finally landed a role as a regular on "Coming Up Rosie," a children's comedy show for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, then segued to a Toronto cable station which hired him as a fast-talking pitchman. (He would later parody the breed to perfection on "Saturday Night Live," selling among other gadgets the unforgettable Bass-O-Matic fish blender.)

Rounding out what was left of his nights, Ayrkoyd and a couple of friends also ran an after-hours bistro--"the best bootleg booze joint that there ever was in Canada"--called the Club 505.
It was when he joined the original Second City company in Chicago, however, that he caught the eye of "Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels, who was scouting the troupe in search of gifted young comics who could potentially change the tone of television humor. Michaels wanted to create a show of and for the disaffected "Woodstock generation," and he wanted performers who could create contemporary characters, satirized the establishment, even parody television itself...and do it every week.

Aykroyd fit. As "Couch Trip" director Michael Ritchie points out, "Dan's chameleon-like quality made it possible for him to play a video range of characters. To think that the same actor could do Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Jimmie Carter, a Czecholslovakian nerd and Beldar, the Conehead paterfamilias, is extraordinary. Those creations, the idea to play those parts, came from Dan's own fertile mind. It wasn't a casting director who said, 'Try this.' Dan's work was spontaneous, yet it contained all the depth of a performance which had been polished for years."

In creating those characters during five seasons on the Emmy-winning series, Aykroyd called on his lifelong interest in motorcycles, cars, criminology, architecture, armaments, aeronautics, harmonicas and mysticism, as well as his trained sense of observation. He himself won an Emmy for writing in the show's second year.

When he and John Belushi created the Blues Brothers as a sketch, it cartwheeled from "Saturday Night Live" to a national renown. A cross-country tour and the album ("A Briefcase Full of Blues," which sold three million copies and won three Grammy nominations) led to the film "The Blues Brothers," which Aykroyd wrote with director John Landis. It was released in 1980, the year after Aykroyd's motion picture bow in Steven Spielberg's "1941." Next came a fresh teaming with Belushi as "Neighbors" of the film's title--a super-square suburbanite (Belushi) and the nut case next door (Ayrkoyd). "Dr. Detroit" and "Twilight Zone--The Movie" were followed by "Trading Places," the 1983 comedy smash in which Aykroyd starred with another SNL alumnus, Eddie Murphy.

From there Aykroyd moved on to one of the most successful motion picture comedies of all time--as co-star and co-writer of "Ghostbusters," in which he shared acting honors with ex-SNLers Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. He most recently played Sgt. Joe Friday's thickheaded nephew, taking off where is staccato-voiced uncle left off, in the updated comic version of "Dragnet."

That "The Couch Trip"'s John Burns a.k.a. "Dr. Baird" is at once wilier, glibber and more hyperkinetic than many of his screen characters clearly pleases Aykroyd. "At Second City I always thought that abberant behavior is the spice of life," he points out. "There are negative deviants, but that's not what I'm talking about. Comedy is based on freedom from restriction and inhibitions. You can't be funny when they've got you in a straitjacket."
Then again, maybe you can.
"The Couch Trip" is a Lawrence Gordon Production of a Michael Ritchie Film, starring Dan Aykroyd, Charles Grodin, Donna Dixon and Walter Matthau as Donald Becker. The comedy was directed by Michael Ritchie and produced by Lawrence Gordon from a screenplay by Steven Kampmann, Will Porter and Sean Stein, based on a novel by Ken Kolb.