W-Files

Profiling Screenwriters at Work

Opening the Book on Mary Walsh

by Dimetre Alexiou

You may remember Newfoundland's Mary Walsh as an Italian mama in Mambo Italiano. Or as a warrior princess backing our nation's top decision-makers into awkward corners with a plastic sword on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Or as "the bitch goddess of Canadian political satire," as Maclean's once famously called her.

But what most don't see is Mary Walsh the writer–the role in which she actually sits down and dreams stuff up. Now that she has completed her very gradual exit from This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Walsh has been earning her keep as a screenwriter with no less than three projects set to premiere in the coming months.

"Giving up This Hour Has 22 Minutes has helped Mary become more focused these days," says Walsh's long-time colleague Mary Sexton. "A lot of people would have reacted like, 'Oh my fuck! What have I done?' Mary has responded by taking risks."

With Sexton, Walsh has formed 2M Innovations, a production company whose maiden project is Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, a one-hour comedy pilot set to air on CBC in early 2005. The show, whose pilot is written by Walsh and Ed Macdonald, follows a Newfoundland family offering wedding, funeral and ambulance services all under the same roof. Walsh had been incubating the idea ever since she first saw the phrase "hatching, matching and dispatching" written on the side of a truck in rural Newfoundland when she was a little girl. Finding it amusing, she filed it away in her brain.

"When I was a little girl I wanted to be a nun," Walsh says. "I wasn't thinking about any kind of comedy series. It's taken a long time to do because This Hour Has 22 Minutes kept going on and on."

As Walsh began to think about her next project following 22 Minutes, she began to envision Hatching, Matching and Dispatching as a situation comedy. "Then, as I got closer to screwing my courage to the sticking post, I started thinking about what my strengths were–if I had any–and that I seem to be strong at sketch," she says. "I seem to be able to write sketches, and I seem to be fairly weak structurally, you know?"

Walsh's career in sketch writing stretches as far back as 1973 when the celebrated comedy troupe CODCO, to which she belonged, first hit the stage at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille with the ensemble show Cod on a Stick.

Realizing that audiences like to love or hate continuing characters, she came upon a solution for Hatching, Matching and Dispatching that would allow her to revisit characters without stretching one plot over an entire episode's length. Weaving together episodes with sketches featuring the same characters in different settings, Walsh declares Hatching, Matching and Dispatching to be a "sketchuational comedy." She says she couldn't have done it any other way.

"All my work has been in sketch comedy, except I've written the odd screenplay," she says.

One of those screenplays is Bailey's Billion$, a children's feature slated for release in 2005. The film will feature the onscreen talent of Jennifer Tilly, Tim Curry and Sheila McCarthy. Jon Lovitz provides the voice for a dog named Bailey, who inherits billions of dollars from his master–and has to steer clear of the greedy hordes who want steal it from him.

"I won't say that Bailey's Billion$ isn't brilliant, but it's not what I'm naturally drawn toward. I'm naturally drawn towards sketch, the short form."

Bailey's Billion$ marks Walsh's first foray into writing for children. But taking on a full-length screenplay proved harder than she had thought. "It was a difficult process, the whole thing."

Remembering how she just jumped right into the project, Walsh says, "I was being so stunned… I hate to sound as stupid as I really am, but I went, 'Oh yeah, that will be a good exercise. As a matter of fact it will be easy.'"

Still, Walsh has not been deterred from further screenwriting. She is currently at work adapting Newfoundland writer Ray Guy's stage play Young Triffie's Been Made Away With for the screen, co-writing a fifth draft with Ken Scott (Seducing Dr. Lewis). She describes it as "a dark comedy/murder mystery set in Newfoundland in 1949."

And somehow Walsh still finds time to perform. A film adaptation of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs entitled Tough Luck is set to be released in theatres sometime in 2005, pairing Walsh with Jane Curtin. Don't doubt either that she is front and centre in Hatching, Matching and Dispatching. And no matter how many screenplays she takes on, always count on Walsh for more sketches.

"I don't find writing Triffie to be more ambitious as a writer. Hatching, Matching and Dispatching is like a novel that's in short stories. I don't find that lacking in ambition as a writer. I just want to write funnier sketches."