Twitch City Czar Hits The Streets One More Time
Story by Karen Hill
Photography by Anne Levenston
It's the final day of shooting for Twitch City and Don McKellar is in character. He's unshaven with a pretty decent case of bedhead, wearing a t-shirt nearly transparent from wear, cords and a long-sleeved shirt, untucked. While it's unclear whether he has any scenes, his appearance is a stark contrast to the nattily-attired man-about-town he's played over the last year. He's been checking in at festivals and awards ceremonies, picking up hardware for everything but childhood home movies.
It's been quite a ride for the 35-year-old writer/director/actor: the 1998 Claude Jutra Award for his feature film directorial debut, Last Night, as well as the 1998 Prix de la Jeunnesse at Cannes. And the 1998 Genie Award for Best Screenplay for Red Violin, co-written with director Francois Girard with whom he also wrote 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. These days, you can't swing a cat in this country without hitting a Don McKellar production.
But today his appearance mirrors his iconoclastic devotion to Toronto's Kensington Market, a down-at-the-heels neighbourhood that's home to artists and musicians, anarchists and thieves. It's the setting once again for the second cycle of Twitch. McKellar is spending this, his last day at the production office, sweeping papers off his desk, watching scenes, and plying visitors to the set with Pez and Twizzlers from a plastic bucket.
He slouches his way down to the edit suite, checking out footage from episode five guest starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. McKellar says it's her first television appearance "in something like 20 years" as a psychopathic grad student interviewing Curtis (McKellar) for her thesis on television viewers. The scene is vintage McKellar: holding forth as Curtis on a Gilligan's Island episode in which a giant spider terrorizes the islanders. It's a post-modern riff on viewers and their engagement with the story.
Twitch City focuses on Curtis, the television-addicted agorophobe, his uptight roommate, Nathan (Daniel MacIvor), and Hope (Molly Parker), who falls for Curtis while Nathan languishes in jail. Callum Keith Rennie plays Newbie, a convenience store clerk and Bruce McCullough is Rex Reilly, a Springer-like talk show host. It's a motley collection of characters, all whacked out in their own particular way.
The Shadow Shows/Accent Entertainment production will feature seven new episodes to air later this fall on the CBC. Miraculously, considering the schedules of the cast and director Bruce McDonald, they managed to chisel out enough time to assemble everyone to give it another whirl. Odd, McKellar says, because he didn't think they were going to get another crack at it.
Getting McKellar to talk about his writing feels like tearing the wings off a fly-mean just for the sport of it. A voluble and talkative interview when speaking generally about themes or working with a partner, he recoils when asked specific questions about his process. Off come the glasses, furious polishing ensues, and then back into the breast pocket they go.
But he tries.
"When we did get the go-ahead for this cycle, it was such a small window in which we were able to fit it in terms of availability of everyone," he says. This time out, seven shows were made in order to easier package the show for international sales with the existing six. McKellar says it didn't take much arm-twisting to get him on board for another cycle.
"I was still very much in promotional mode for Last Night and Red Violin," he says. "I thought it would be good to break me out of that routine and force me to start creating again, but there wasn't much time at all. I'm not a very fast writer. "
McKellar says the key to grinding out the latest cycle was to pair up with a writing partner from his theatre days, Bob Martin. The pressure of a deadline and a cacophony of folks calling for pages helped push his writing forward. A solid career in the theatre as a writer and performer prepared him well for the tyranny of the deadline. Longing for the days of theatre past, a writing team was the most attractive way to beat the usual isolation of the writing process.
"I wanted to try writing more like TV-more collaboratively. I had the story lines pretty clear in my head and we worked it out in Dick Van Dyke-like meetings. Through that, we came up with plots and Bob translated them and I wrote from that. We went through each one. I knew the outline, I knew the overview."
Martin would write the scripts based on the story meetings. Then they would end up back in McKellar's hands where things would tend to slow down. He sometimes spends hours in front of the computer changing one word or sentence back and forth, much to the consternation of his creative partners. And while McKellar lept into this cycle, excited about the challenge of writing in such a tight time frame, it was tougher adapting to the constraints of television.
"There seems to be a lot more problems this time out fitting it into TV structure with those commercial breaks," he says. "As I was trying to change things and try different ideas, I tended to write things longer. I tended to break away from commercial placement. It was harder to fit it into that model this time. I had done it and I loved playing with it, but I wanted to do other things this time out."
Writing collaboratively, too, helped him get motivated and actually grind out the stories. There's no bible: "It's moving so fast, anyway. Why bother?" There's no strict adherence to structure guiding his writing, no compulsion to have tidy resolutions at the end of the half-hour. Mostly, he says, the characters drive the plot and not vice versa. "It usually comes from some sort of alchemical combination of character and a vague sense of plot or an idea or a theme, such as Last Night, character-plus-the-end-of-the-world," he says. "That's what it tends to be. I have never started out with a plot. I've thought of ideas, places and themes and character.
"It takes me a long time to know what the scene is about before I can write anything. I can't write unless I know what the characters want. If I'm in a bad state, I can spend hours just going back and forth, adding 'likes' or 'you knows.' What I'm really trying to do is find out where the scene is going, but I can get bogged down easily."
The writing process is a linear one for him, the trajectory straight-forward. Unsurprisingly, for someone who isn't too keen on talking about how it all comes together, McKellar spends a whole lot of time in his head before banging out stories on the keyboard. No patchwork of scenes strung together for him.
"I don't know how people do it, writing scenes out on cards," he says. "That's totally foreign to me. I wouldn't know how to do that.
"I think for a long time and wander around and there's nothing on paper. Sometimes I'm working through scenes in my head. And then I start writing from the beginning. I try to figure out where I'm starting from, where the characters are. I have to have a clear sense of that before I start writing."
The interplay of acting, directing and writing has informed his screenwriting. He says he doesn't set out to write roles for himself or specific actors, but it's tough to think who else could have played Curtis.
"I've never written a part for anyone, though there may be some exceptions in this Twitch City series," he says. "I think it's too restrictive. I always feel when I am writing for myself that means there's some of me in all the characters. I think through dialogue, I speak it to myself. I read everything out loud, again and again and again."
This time out, McKellar says, people were lobbying to get on the show. After Three's Company star Joyce DeWitt appeared in the "I Look Like Joyce DeWitt" episode of the first cycle, John Ritter wanted in. And Al Waxman was hoping to reappear-having been killed off by Nathan in the first episode-as a ghost. But it was not to be. Too many stars, not enough time.
McKellar says this time out, he can feel the difference in the show. "I think it's freer. There are more extremes than before." Neo-nazis pop up and Lucky the cat conspires to take over the universe. The stories venture a little further afield than the cramped interior of the nasty little apartment. And the relationship between Curtis and Hope finally blooms.
He sinks back into the chesterfield and smiles. "I've worked out some angst."
Karen Hill is the editor of Canadian Screenwriter.
