Lifestyles of the Rich and Funny

On the sout side of Mount Lee stands the HOLLYWOOD sign, the enduring symbol of Tinseltown. Each of its letters is 30 feet wide by 50 feet high. But to the several dozen desperate people who have used the sign as a height from which to throw themselves, the H is the only letter that has really mattered.

The sign is visible over Dan Aykroyd's left shoulder and Chevy Chase's right shoulder as they sit on a well-worn couch in an office just down the street from Ma Maison, the restaurant where the late Orson Welles ate his last meal. For no particular reason other than that it's one of the rare days when the HOLLYWOOD sign isn't obscured by a shroud of smog, we talk about the people who have taken a nose dive off the H.

"Yeah," says Aykroyd, "we used that sign in 1941. I think a lot of frustrated artists must have thrown themselves off it. A lot of frustrated people."

As talk gets underway, it's easy to detect in Chevy Chase a tinge of that frustration, a dissatisfaction with what he's done so far. Dan Aykroyd, on the other hand, comes off as someone who doesn't even begin to know the meaning of frustration. As a writer, actor, and show-biz force, he is enthusiastic, optimistic, and exhaustingly cheerful.

Whatever the emotions concerning Hollywood filmmaking, it's clear that these two guys have enjoyed the chance to work together. Sitting side by side and tossing each other cigarettes, they're as happy as a pair of comedians on a laugh jag at a comedy club. Aykroyd is comfortably dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki pants with a hole near the knee, no socks, and sneakers with Velcro straps. Chase is wearing a yellow T-shirt, green pants and gray deck shoes. While we talk, Chase plays with the Velcro straps on Aykroyd's shoes. They finish each other's sentences as if they were Siamese twins connected at the funny bone.

Together Chase and Aykroyd are starring in the John Landis film Spies Like Us. And although Chase may grouse about some of the footage that fell to the cutting-room floor, Aykroyd is convinced that everything is for the best. Maybe it's because he has successfully resigned himself to the Byzantine way in which Hollywood movies are made. Or maybe Dan Aykroyd is a happy man simply because he is Canadian.

"Canadians naturally defer to the opinion of the majority," he says. "They have no problem with that. Canadians feel very secure because of all the land they have; it gives them an unusual perspective. They like to say, 'Hey we've got plenty up here. We hope the Americans don't figure out how much we have.' As a rule, Canadians are happy. And they think things in the United States, especially politics, are very funny."

Aykroyd grew up in Canada, like several other members of the original Saturday Night Live crew (producer Lorne Michaels is also Canadian, and Gilda Radner, although she was born in Detroit, grew up north of the border). His father was a life long civil servant who wrote policy papers for the prime minister and who ended his career as Canada's assistant deputy minister of transport. Meanwhile, Chevy Chase was growing up in New York City, the scion of an old New England family. His mother's ancestors include the Cranes, who made their fortune in the 19th century by selling and installing plumbing fixtures in bathrooms throughout New England. And his father is editor in chief of New York Times Books.

Despite their stuffy-sounding backgrounds, both men grew up knowing that the ability to be funny can open the door to the best of all possible lifestyles. "We figure that humor is hereditary," says Aykroyd. "Chevy's father is a very funny guy. Apparently, both Eddie Murphy's biological father and his stepfather are funny. My father is very funny, and my mother has a great sense of humor."

"My father is an extremely well-educated man," says Chase, "but he's also a clown. Once I was writing a college essay, and I asked him what I thought the most important human quality is. He said, 'A great sense of humor. That means having a sense of perspective, of priorities, knowing what matters and what doesn't matter. And that, besides consciousness itself, is what's most important.'"

"It's important on a spiritual level, and it's important on a physiological level, too," Aykroyd points out. "There's proof that laughter causes a reaction in the endocrine system. There's a whole theory that laughter really is the best medicine." To which Chase adds, "Yeah, we do house calls and make people laugh. We do car calls too. That's what we are--laugh doctors."

These days the laugh doctors are on call at the ha-ha hospital in the characters of Austin Millbarge (Aykroyd) and Emmett Fitz-Hume (Chase), the bumbling protagonists of Spies Like Us. These are not spies who come in from the cold. Instead, they're a pair of officious State Department types who are shipped to the outer reaches of Siberia, where they're used as expendable decoys in a Pentagon-CIA-NSA plot to test a Star Wars-style weapon against the Soviet missile.

The befuddles bureaucrats flop cheerfully between frying pan and fire, a sort of latter-day Abbott and Costello. To be more precise, what Spies Like Us really is--or at least what Aykroyd and Chase really want it to be--is a revival of the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road movies. To make the connection clear, they've even pursuaded Bob Hope to play a small cameo role in the film, just for the heck of it. "It's all very Strangelovian in tone, "says Aykroyd, referring to another doctor who inspired paranoid laughter. "It's one of those movies where military people decide to use their own initiative, shut themselves away from the executive powers, and do exactly what they think is good for the country. In this movie, what we're saying is that that's wrong--things should be left up to the people."

It's always more than a little odd to hear funny people describe how serious they are about what they're doing. None of your really famous funnymen find humor a lighthearted subject. Offstage, Steve Martin is known to be a no-nonsense, low-key kind of guy, and Woody Allen leaves copies of Wittgenstein lying around his living room. True to form, Aykroyd seems very serious; he's deeply involved in the nuts and bolts of screenwriting, editing, and acting and profoundly interested in answering the ago-old question "What makes comedy so funny?" Chase is a bit more flip, but still rather subdued.

This businesslike tone creeps up in their comments about the characters they play in Spies Like Us; Chase and Aykroyd see Fitz-Hume and Millbarge as creatures filled with dreams and aspiration. "Both of them are ambitious guys who have cherished goals they want to achieve," says Aykroyd. "Each is stuck in a rut. Together they take a test to get into foreign service, and Emmett drags Austin into cheating and collusion. That gets them sent on the worst, most horrible mission imaginable. But they get through it, and at the end of the movie they achieve their ambitions. They certainly don't do it the way they thought they would, but ultimately the unusual means they employ produce the result they wanted all along."

Much the same thing can be said of the script of Spies Like Us, which traveled a roundabout path to production. It started out years ago as a series of drafts by Aykroyd, who later brought in Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of Splash) to inject extra laughs. At first, Aykroyd intended the film to be a vehicle for himself and John Belushi, who was supposed to play an Armenian named Karmissian. Belushi's death put an end to that. But Aykroyd says, "As it turns out, I'm glad the picture took this long to make, and I'm glad Chevy got to be in it. The subject is very timely now, something it wouldn't have been five years ago. Also, we had the benefit of having Ganz and Mandel come in and put in plots turns and structure, a bunch of new characters, and all the brushstrokes that were needed. I was only too happy to give the script to those guys for a fresh approach. Then Landis and I took it away and redid it another time.

"I learned a lot from this film," he continues. "When I started writing--and I'm still learning to write--I knew the first draft was always the best. I don't believe that now. Going through five, six, 10, 20 drafts, the script gets better every time. It gets more distilled as many minds concentrate on the same thing."

Surprisingly, both Aykroyd and Chase think of themselves more as writers than as peformers. Chase (who with Steve Martin and others, is currently working on the script of The Three Amigos) says that he was a writer long before he did any acting. "I wasn't sure I was ever going to be a performer, because I didn't think I was much good. For Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels hired me as a writer. But I had done some mugging in a movie called The Groove Tube, so Lorne asked me to try the news segment on the show. The others in the cast could easily outact me, but I was the only one who got to say his name every week."

For a guy who's usually perceived as being little more than an ego with legs, Chase is surprisingly self-effacing, saying that a lot of his success has been a matter more of good luck than of talent.. "All through my youth I've been involved with people who were starting things--National Lampoon, The Groove Tube, The Great American Dream Machine, and Saturday Night Live. It just happened that I was there. I wouldn't say I was a great innovator; I was just always involved with great people."

Chase and Aykroyd were original members of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players back in 1975, when SNL began its run. Since that time both men have teamed up with other graduates of the show but they haven't co-stared in a movie until now, 10 years later. The delay hasn't been deliberate, they say--just bad timing.

Chase says that when he left SNL he hoped to continue working with the rest of the Not Ready irregulars--"but everyone got very famous, and we all had big deals, and we were too busy to work together. I hadn't seen Dan for years because we were off shooting our own stuff. It took us a long time to get together."

Neither Aykroyd's nor Chase's movies have been consistent comic triumphs. For Chase the flops have outnumbered the successess; every Foul Play, Fletch, or National Lampoon's Vacation has been offset by something like Under the Rainbow, Modern Problems, or Deal of the Century. Speaking to him, one gets the distinct feeling that he's happy to be working with Dan Aykroyd, if only to have someone to lean on. "I want to do two- or three-star vehicles like Spies Like Us. I've worked enough of my own movies, and flopped in some of them. It's a lot easier to work with somebody else whom you can flop with."

Aykroyd has also experienced the it's-lonely-at-the-flop syndrome. The films in which he's worked as a top banana (as in Neighbors and Doctor Detroit) have been the less successful ones; in his most popular movies--Trading Places and Ghostbusters--he has been a piece of plot furniture moved around by the sheer comic energy of Eddie Murphy's or Bill Murray's personality. In Spies Like Us, Aykroyd says, he's back to being a mainline funny person again--for which he's grateful to Chase.

"When you hire someone like Bill Murray or Eddie Murphy, they do the comedy," he says. "I was holding up my end with his support setup. You can't score a goal without an assist, and that was always my role. But in this movie, Chevy brought me back to the real kernal of comedy--the nut, the heart--the funny faces and weird voices that we did on SNL. He brought that home to me and told me that this is what we have to do."

"Trading Places, Ghostbusters, Spies Like Us, none of those movies could exist without Dan," says Chase. "He's the utility man. He does all the writing; he delivers the most complicated speeches. A lot of guys can't do that, but he can."

"I love language," says Aykroyd with a seriousness that recalls his highbrow talk-show host, Leonard Pinth Garnell. "That's part of the support function in these buddy arrangements. I would play that kind of role again if, say, Sylvester Stallone wanted me to be the manager in Rocky V."

As a break from analyzing their own funny business, Chase and Aykroyd comment on the current state of hilarity in America. Things don't look so good. The pair discern what they see as a comedy shortage across the country. The problem: We're running out of funny people.

"There aren't a lot of comedians to work with anymore," says Chase. "There simply aren't that many funny people out there--just a core of guys like Dan, Bill Murray, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams. Even when John Belushi was still alive, there were only about 10 people in the world who were funny."

Which brings us to the burning question of how the members of this vanishing breed--Aykroyd and Chase in particular--can continue to be funny themselves. Like many comedians, they started out struggling through improv shows and forcing laughs in small-time comedy clubs. And in part, their humor was nourished by the pain of the struggle, by the frustration of not quite making it. Hunger game them an edge. Withoute that hunger, a comedian can turn into Bob Hope, who hasn't been funny in about half a century.

Since being poor and desperate again isn't an idea that appeals to either Chase or Aykroyd, both have gotten pretty good at defending the lifestyles of the rich and funny. "I don't think comedy needs poverty," says Chase, tyring not to look too affluent. "I think it needs perspective. You can stand on either side of the road, and as long as you can see the other side and understand it, it doesn't matter where you're standing.

"I remember when I first became really successful, people said I'd sold out," he goes on. "To me, the whole concept is so funny. All anybody wants to do is make a lot of money. Basically, you want to get as wealthy as you can and be able to do anything that's funny. The fact of the matter is, there's no such thing as selling out. All you're doing is getting better--and making more money."

At 33, Aykroyd is pudgier than he used to be, but he was never famous for his physique or his physical humor. The only change he notices these days, he says, is that he has "more trouble getting throught the motorcycle ice course--I can't take those turns as fast as I used to."

Aside from that, the two of them maintain that their humor hasn't changed much--although maybe they've turned the volume down a notch or two. "I'm not such a pig anymore," says Chase. "I have these two little girls, three if you count my wife. I'm not about to do a heavy-petting scene in one of my movies--I wouldn't want to see my wife kissing some guy on the screeen. My language isn't as bad as it was, and drugs are out of the question. There are things I just would'nt want my kids to see. But I'm still funny."

"Give us a piece of business to do," says Aykroyd, "and we'll do it. Total entertainment, that's still the idea."

And do they ever dream of becoming grown-up comedians, making funny-yet-serious movies like Annie Hall or Manhattan? "That's not my interest," says Chase. "That's for Woody. Essentially, what I do is physical comedy. It would be a great challenge to me to work for someone like Woody Allen in one of his movies, but I know I would only be a pawn. Id just as soon do the kinds of things I've been doing all along."

Which brings us to a perhaps inevitable question: What do Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase want to be when--and if--they grow up? The answer: Being a comedian means never having to grown up.

Chase says that if he ever did reach maturity, he'd want to be "a comedian." Aykroyd says, "Debt-free." Chase says, "A granddad." Aykroyd says, "I want to be as close to the edge as you can get without falling over." Chase breaks into a smile filled with manic glee and says, "You're there, Dan, you're there."