How two projects maintain his living heritage

If there is a scene that best sums up the tragically abbreviated career of John Candy, it is not necessarily that of his passage in the series of sketchs “SCTV” or films like “Stripes” or “Uncle Buck”. It is a moment of the dramatic comedy of 1987 “planes, trains and cars”, where his reluctant roommate Neal Page (played by Steve Martin) spent several minutes reprimanding him for his relentless narration.

With his throat knotted, the injured character of Candy, Del Griffith, replies that he is proud of whom he is. “I like myself,” he says. “My wife likes me. My customers love me. Because I am the real article: what you see is what you get.”

This moment turns out to be crucial for two new projects which retrace the life and work of Candy 31 years after the death of the actor of a heart attack at the age of 43. The actor would have been 75 years this month.

A biography, “John Candy: A Life in Comedy”, written by Paul Myers (published by House of Anansi Press on Tuesday), and a documentary, “John Candy: I ​​Like Me”, directed by Colin Hanks (published on Friday on Prime Video), are both based on friends, family members and Candy’s colleagues to help tell the story of his ascension empty left by his death.

In their own way, the book and the film show how Candy – even if he was not devoid of his demons – was loved by the public for his fundamental and authentic sympathy, and why he is still cried today for the potential that he could never fully achieve.

Explaining why it was always important to commemorate Candy all these years later, Ryan Reynolds, the star of “Deadpool” and producer of the documentary, said: “When it is something that is desperately lacking in people, but they do not know that they are missing, it is a beautiful and rare thing. John Candy is a person who has desperately missed.”

Since his death, Candy’s immediate survivors: his widow, Rosemary; Girl, Jennifer Candy-Sullivan; And his son, Chris Candy-weighed the advantages and disadvantages of sharing his life with the public and the impact that it could have on them (the three are executive co-producers of the film). “It’s a balance exercise,” said Chris Candy. “You want to live your life and you also want to honor theirs.”

In recent years, Candy’s children have said they had been encouraged by documentaries like “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” “By Morgan Neville, on the children’s television channel Fred Rogers, as well as by the Hanks film” All Things Must Pass “, on the retail chain Tower Records.

Hanks, whose father, Tom, played with Candy in films like “Splash” and “Volunteers”, said that he had harm at the beginning to find a convincing way of telling the story of Candy, who had an apparently charming and controversial actor career, first in his hometown of Toronto, then in Hollywood.

But Hanks said he was attracted to Candy’s story by a particular detail: the fact that Candy’s own father, Sidney, died of a heart disease at the age of 35, just before John was 5 years old. “It doesn’t take much to think how traumatic it can be for anyone, at any age,” said Hanks.

Myers, a musician and journalist who wrote books on the group Barenaked Ladies and the Troop of Kids in the Hall, said that he was attracted to Candy as a Canadian compatriot and the embodiment of the national comic spirit.

“If you are Canadian like me, you don’t stop thinking about John Candy,” said Myers. Having grown up in the Toronto region, Myers said that he and his brothers and sisters – including his brother Mike, the future star of “Shrek” and “Austin Powers” – were fervent fans of sketch shows like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Saturday Night Live”.

But “SCTV”, which launched stars like Candy, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, meant even more for them. “We looked at him from the first day and we applauded them a little stronger because it was as if they were shooting the spectacle with a few houses from home,” said Myers.

Reynolds, who was born and grew up in Vancouver, said that Candy’s essential Canadian spirit was essential to his success as a comic actor.

“In comedy, Canadians are generally not hit,” said Reynolds. “It is rather an erased humor. Their favorite target is themselves. And John did it. On the screen, I felt his will and his joy in an erased humor which has never really turned to the humor of self-disgust.”

Candy used her repertoire of “SCTV” characters – satirical media personalities like Johnny Larue and real celebrities like Orson Welles – to make support of them in successful films like “National Lampoon’s Vacation”, “The Blues Brothers”, “Brewster’s Millions” and “Spaceballs”.

His inclinations for drink and tobacco were well known and unusual at that time; They rarely embarrassed Candy’s work and, in at least one notable case, seem to have improved it: the documentary and the biography tell how Candy gave himself to a night fuck with Jack Nicholson before getting up the next morning to shoot a scene in “Splash” where his character gropes, struggles and smokes to make a way through a part of racquetball.

“This is his work ethics,” said Candy-Sullivan. “He showed up and he made the scene.”

Candy obtained main roles in comedies like “Summer Rental”, “The Great Outdoors” and “Who’s Harry Crumb? “, And he found a soul mate from the scriptwriter and director John Hughes, who helped provide Candy some of his most durable roles in films like” Aircraft, trains and cars “,” Uncle Buck “and” Home Alone “.

But out of screen, Candy was struggling with anxiety and he was sensitive to people’s judgments on his size – remarks that often came directly from television interviewers who did not hesitate to ask him directly if Candy was planning to lose weight.

When he and his sister looked at archive images of these interviews in the documentary, Chris Candy said: “It was, for the two of us, uncomfortable. I did not know what he supported and how he was doing mental jujitsu in and out of these conversations. He became more and more dry on this subject, and you can see him in the interviews.”

But these psychic wounds did not make Candy a cruel or nasty person; He simply absorbed the injury and redoubled his efforts to be a great artist.

“If you are looking for the darkness in John Candy’s story, it is simply internalized pain,” said Myers. “His own adaptation mechanism was a radical kindness towards everyone: to establish human ties so that he has a community and that he has the feeling of improving things.”

In the early 1990s, Candy seemed to work constantly. He appeared in five different feature films just in 1991, a year which included failures as a “troubled goal” as well as a small role potentially transformer in the drama “JFK” of Oliver Stone, where he embodied the flamboyant lawyer Dean Andrews Jr. He was preparing his own first film, a telefilm entitled “Hosage for a Day” in which he played with George Wendt. Candy has also become a co -owner and a member of an individual encouragement team for the Argonauts in Toronto, the Canadian Football League team.

Finally, the many requirements and stress of his life have reached their climax. During an exhausting shooting for the Western “East Wagons” in Durango, Mexico, Candy died on March 4, 1994. He had private funeral in the Los Angeles region, followed by a public memorial in Toronto which caused a national wave of sorrow in Canada.

“He represented the best of us,” said Myers. “He was a person centered on humanity. He brought vulnerability and humility to his characters, which we do not usually see in the big comedies.”

Candy’s films continue to be broadcast on television and streaming – “planes, trains and cars” and “Home Alone” have become essential to the end of year celebrations. But for the people involved in the chronicle of Candy’s life, there is a crawling feeling that the actor’s inheritance will not take care of himself and that the generations that have not grown up with Candy may need reminders of what made him a memory.

Hanks remembers a story of the shooting of “i like me” where he and some colleagues dined in a restaurant where the hostess asked them what they worked on.

“We said we would make a documentary,” said Hanks. ” ‘Oh really?’ She leaves. “Who is it?

Part of his interest in making a film on Candy, said Hanks, lies in “the desire to present the man that people love and to remind them why they loved them”.

But there is also the simple pleasure of presenting Candy’s work to people who have never seen her before. “If you are lucky,” said Hanks, “you can, hope it, make them say: ‘My God, I want to see these films. I want to go watch’sctv.'”

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This story was initially published in Los Angeles Times.