Dr. George Maitlin, the popular radio sex therapist, is having a nervous breakdown. He needs a psychiatrist--to replace him on the air. John Burns needs a new identity. He recently fled a Cicero, Illinois, prison mental facility, assuming the identity of his psychiatrist--and tormentor--Dr. Lawrence Baird.
When "Dr. Baird" arrives in Los Angeles, to take over Maitlin's microphone, only one person suspects that he isn't the savant he claims to be. Donald Becker, crusader against cruelty to trees and plant life, recognizes the "doctor's" yellow-striped pants and the look in his eyes. Or as Becker puts in bluntly, cutting himself in on the scam, "It takes one to know one."
To a vast listening audience, however, the substitute dial-a-shrink is a revelation. Even Maitlin's conservative colleague, Dr. Laura Rollins, is impressed by the candid counsel he crams in between commercials. Who else would prescribe repairing the crankshaft of a Dodge Shift-O-Matic as a cure for premature ejaculation? Or encourage a repressed houswife to indulge her fantasies--on a tea shoppe table top? Or come up with a concept like mass-transit therapy, as well as the busses in which to conduct it?
Dan Aykroyd, Charles Grodin, Donna Dixon and Walter Matthau as Donald Becker star in "The Couch Trip." The tale of the escaped mental patient who hides out where everyone can find him was produced by Lawrence Gordon and directed by Michael Ritchie from a screenplay by Steven Kampmann, Will Porter and Sean Stein, based on a novel by Ken Kolb. Gordon Webb is co-producer.
Richard Romanus, David Clennon, Mary Gross, Victoria Jackson and Arye Gross co-star in the contemporary comedy, released by Orion Pictures. The musical score marks the motion picture debut of the acclaimed classical quintet, the Canadian Brass.
When producer Lawrence Gordon read--and optioned--the novel by Ken Kolb, author of "Getting Straight," he knew that its development as a movie could take a long time, "Then again, so does psychiatry," Gordon points out.
"The challenge was to have fun with the subject without making light of other people's real problems," says director Michael Ritchie. "There's a thin line between good-natured satire and mental cruelty. Larry stuck with the 'The Couch Trip' through several treatments, none of which struck the right balance."
Finally, Second City alumni Steven Kampmann and Will Porter, in collaboration with first-time screenwriter Sean Stein ("...a major novelist whose work, unhappily, has gone unnoticed, says Ritchie) took a fresh approach. "It was their notion to make the book's central character, the talk show therapist, an escaped 'lunatic.'"
That, at least, is the official diagnosis by the state of Illinois of computer hacker John Burns (DAN AYKROYD). But Dr. Lawrence Baird (DAVID CLENNON)--the real Dr. Baird who heads the prison mental facility--sees method acting in Burns' madness. He suspects that faced with the choice of four years at Joliet or the comparitive safety of a psychiatric ward, Burns blew his natural bravado into a convincing display of dementia. But that's all right. Baird knows how to deal with a mental malingerer.
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Dr. George Maitlin (CHARLES GRODIN) is losing his grip on reality. Years of absorbing other peoples' complants--on the couch and over the air--have taken their toll. If he hears one more petty penis problem, he's going to become violent. He does--and slugs a waiter who takes exception to a shabby tip. Lawyer Harvey Michaels (RICHARD ROMANUS) urges Maitlin to take a stress-free sabbatical in Europe. Meanwhile, Michaels will scour the country to find an inept nonentity, a professional "bum," to hold the psychiatric fort.
The call goes out to Lawrence Baird. It's answered by John Burns. The dashing figure in the stolen tweed jacket, woman's scarf, institutional trousers and tennis shoes who bounds off a plane from Chicago isn't precisely what his hosts expected. He demands $200,000 in cash, up front, before he'll turn a tonsil to the troubled folks out there in drive-time land. He shares his Bel-Air Hotel Suite with derelict Donald Becker (WALTER MATTHAU), who otherwise hangs around the airport, in a cleric's collar, collecting funds to save vines from vivisection.
Despite the careful coaching of Dr. Laura Rollins (DONNA DIXON), "Baird's" on-air repartee is laced with erotic fantasies and four-letter euphemisms for the same acts. The station manager expresses "teensy tadpoles of concern," bordering on panic. But the ratings skyrocket. Los Angeles has a new media idol.
In London, Dr. Maitlin is attempting to crawl out of his funk--without much success. He's outraged that the "psychiatrist nobody" hired to replace him is holding him up for $200,000. He's shocked to discover that his wife, Vera (MARY GROSS), has been having an affair with Michaels. But when he accidently meets the real Dr. Baird at a psychiatric convention, his synapses snap. Gun in hand and Dr. Baird in tow, he boards the Concorde, obsessed with revenge.
Michael Ritchie, whose connection with comedy dates back to Harvard, where he staged his first production of classmate Arthur Kopit's "Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad," compares "The Couch Trip" to a classic French farce. He points to the work of Georges Feydeau and other French humorists "whose characters always seem to be pretending to be someone--or something--they're not. The audience is in on the set-up. But the other characters are completely confused."
Such Gallic mischief, he says, "is usually built around sex. bedroom doors banging open and shut, wives posing as mistresses and vice-versa. While our premise is different, the challenge is similar. In terms of plotting and timing, every character must function like a part of a Swiss watch movement. They have to mesh perfectly. That requires actors with the style to pull it off."
Ritchie as been an admirer of Dan Aykroyd's work since "Saturday Night Live," he continues, noting the "chutzpah" of such characters as "the late night TV pitchman selling fish blenders, the Czech playboy brother Dan did with Steve Martin, even his Richard Nixon. But he also has a vulnerability...a romanticism...which the role of John Burns required."
Aykroyd, for his part, was fascinated by the subject matter. The grandson of a Canadian Royal Mountie, he's spent four years studying criminology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, working part-time at the Canadian Penitentiary. Early in his career, he confronted the insecurity of his profession by making back-up plans to return to college--and criminology--then follow in his grandfather's hoof-steps. According to one friend (quoted in "Saturday Night," a chronicle of the NBC showcase), "Danny's perfect fantasy would be to rob and bank, then arrest himself for it."
There was, however, one stumbling block. Aykroyd was filming "Dragnet" on a schedule which threatened to overlap the start-date of "The Couch Trip."
"We kept our fingers crossed and held our breath," says Ritchie. "Dan literally went from Friday on 'Dragnet' to Monday on our set."
Curiously, by that point, Donna Dixon (Mrs. Aykroyd in real life) was deep into her role as Laura Rollins, the psychiatrist whose suspicion of John Burns grudgingly gives way to affection and conspiracy.
"Donna read for me for 'Fletch,'" says Ritchie referring to the comedy-mystery starring Chevy Chase (a cameo contributor to "The Couch Trip"). "It wasn't the right role for her, but I was impressed and made a mental note that she was someone with whom I wanted to work. This was the first opportunity."
Walter Matthau, on the other hand, is working with Ritchie for the fourth time, an association that began with the memorable TV version of John Kennedy's book, "Profiles in Courgage." More than a decade later, they joined forces on the hit comedy, "The Bad News Bears." While the director was hesitant to offer Matthau "anything less than a film's central role," the actor was delighted by Donald Becker, the seedy irascible "garden variety misfit" who puts the palm on passersby with words of wisdom like: "No man stands so tall as when he stoops to pet a plant." In Matthau's own analysis "all shrinks are phonies. That's not a put-down. Almost everyone's a phoney including actors. That's why I love actors so much; at least they know they're phonies. As for psychologists who give out free advice over the air, they're almost as reliable as astrologers and race-track touts."
Completing the comedy's co-starring quartet, Ritchie tapped Charles Grodin as the manic depressive Maitlin because he was so sincere as Dr. Hill in 'Rosemary's Baby,' he had me half-convinced he was a real doctor. I figured that twenty years later, he was entitled to have some fun--and risk his license." Joining the group therapy session, filmmaking division, were David Clennon as the bewildered Dr. Baird who discovers in London that he's making a killing in Beverly Hills; Richard Romanus (oddly enough, an ex-law student), as the shameless shyster, Michaels; "Saturday Night Live" alumna Mary Gross as round-heeled Vera Maitlin; current "Saturday Night Live" trouper Victoria Jackson as Burns' "escapist" accomplice, Robin; and Ayre Gross as Michael's oily flunky, Perry Kovin.
To create the atmosphere of the Cicero County Corrections Mental Facility, Ritchie turned to a unique service which provides rehabilitated ex-convicts as extras. While more traditional background players were chosen to participate in "mass transit therapy," each extra was interviewed beforehand ("a costly but necessary process") then assigned his or her own "aberration." The sequence stems from Burns' on-air promise of free counseling at Maitlin's offices. When thousands turn up to have their psyches plumbed, he combines a bull horn, a fleet of articulated busses and a block of bleacher seats at the ball park into a Jung-at-heart field trip.
When the extras gathered on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, life and art enjoyed a minor collision. Ritchie realistically chose a site in front of a building largely occupied by psychiatrists. "Dan Aykroyd took up his bull horn, directing the extras to their assigned busses...Oedipal conflicts in one, fetishes in another, nymphomaniacs in the 'lead' bus with him, and so on," explains Ritchie. "Meanwhile, the real psychiatrists upstairs were complaining to the cops that the racket in the street was disturbing their practice. As one doctor complained 'How can I persuade my patients to free associate when some nut down below is screaming through a megaphone about penis envy?
We completed the scene and moved on to the freeway--and the ball game--as quickly as possible.,"
As complex as that sequence was, it was dwarfed by the film's finale whick finds Aykroyd and Matthau perilously perched atop the famed "Hollywood" sign while helicopters hover overhead and cops and reporters mingle below.
"If you've ever seen the sign close up," says Ritchie, "it's obvious that no civic authority in its collective right mind would let an actor, however foolhardy, anywhere near the top." Without going into the intricate trickery that made the illusion realistic, he notes that "among the benefits of doing a picture that doesn't present itself as a special effects movie is that the special effects become more credible.
"The audience is caught up in the story instead of admiring the hardware."
To Dan Aykroyd, not the least of the pleasures of "The Couch Trip" was returning to the microphone, to lampoon the kind of call-in segments and commercials he'd done as a youthful radio personality before joining Second City.
"What I like about John Burns is what advice he gives his listeners is not only free, it makes a lot of sense," says Aykroyd. "In a funny way, that's why it shocks everyone around him."
Aykroyd also shares Michael Ritchie's enthusiasm for maintaining a loose and relaxed set. Harking back to his origins in improv, he observes that "Comedy comes out of freeing up restrictions and inhibitions." Adds Ritchie: "Even with the strongest script, it's those spontaneous chaotic moments, when the cast and crew isn't quite sure what will happen next, which sometimes gives you the most inspired takes."
It is no surprise that John Burns is variously a convicted computer hacker, a mental patient with a flair for flamenco dancing on Thorazine and a psychiatric soothsayer whose professional rating is surpassed only by his Nielson. Dan Aykroyd, who portrays him, has been splitting his personality among inventively comic characters since he made the leap from Second City to the "Saturday Night Live" first string.
Born in Ottawa and raised in Quebec, Aykroyd is the son of a Canadian government official whose reverence for the work ethic fell on deaf ears. After being thrown out of some of Canada's finests schools, including a seminary, young Aykroyd graduated from Carleton University at the age of 20 (with a degree in criminology), but promptly turned to comedy, first as a radio personality, then as a member of the Toronto Company of the Second City improv troupe.
It was when he joined the original Second City company in Chicago, however, that he caught the eye of SNL's producer Lorne Michaels, who cast him as one of the new program's Not Ready For Prime Time Players. Aykroyd stayed with the show for five seasons, during whick he won a writing Emmy as well as international recognition. (As "Couch Trip" director Michael Ritchie points out, "To think that the same actor could do Tom Snyder and a Czechoslovakian nerd is extraordinary. Those creations, and the idea to play those parts, came from Dan's own fertile mind. It wasn't a casting director who said 'Try this.'")
With colleague John Belushi, Aykroyd formed the Blues Brothers, first as a send-up skit for SNL, then as a successful recording duo whose album, "A Briefcase Full of Blues," sold over three million copies and won three Grammy nominations. The pairing also spawned the hit film "The Blues Brothers," which Aykroyd wrote with director John Landis. Released in 1980, the year after Aykroyd's motion picture bow in Steven Spielberg's "1941," it was followed by "Neighbors," "Dr. Detroit," "Twilight Zone--The Movie" and "Trading Places," the 1983 comedy smash in which he starred with another SNL alumnus, Eddie Murphy. From there, Aykroyd moved 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-SNLs Bill Murray and Harold Ramis. He most recently played Sgt. Joe Friday's thickheaded nephew in the updated comic version of "Dragnet."