Rick's New Place
Rick Mercer drops his anti-Ottawa rhetoric for pyramid scheme
The Ottawa Citizen, October 3, 1998
By Tony Atherton
Rick Mercer, loath though he might be to admit it, is a creature of Ottawa. This is not merely because he makes a living skewering the parliamentary parade each week on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, nor because you'll often find him on the Hill setting up politicians to look foolish on videotape.
That's a large part of it, of course. Mercer would not be what he is today -- a 28-year-old author of three hit stage shows, and winner of half a dozen Gemini awards -- if certain seasonal inhabitants of our fair burg were not so eminently skewerable.
But the Ottawa connection goes much deeper: Mercer was invented by an Ottawan specifically for an Ottawa audience. OK, to be tediously accurate, Mercer and his now famous distemper technically did exist before he was discovered by Gerald Lunz, the Ottawa actor turned co-op-theatre impresario. But if a rant is made in a church basement in St. John's, does it really make a sound?
It was in such obscurity that Lunz found Mercer more than 10 years ago. Mercer's blazing talent was only slightly diffused by the teenage comedy troupe, Cory and Wade's Playhouse, who he was performing with at the time.
"They were young performers, raw and fresh and not really tight enough yet to be effective, but there was an amazing bit of writing there. It was brilliant," says Lunz, who went backstage and found that 80 per cent of the writing was done by one troupe member, a skinny kid named Mercer.
"He was politically hot over Meech Lake, and he yelled and screamed about everyone going to hell in a handcart," says Lunz. "So I went to him and said, 'You're a pretty lippy young fella, and you can certainly make them laugh here, 2,000 miles away from the (political) centre. But I got a proposition for you. Do you think you're brave enough to take that attitude, and bring it into Ottawa and drop it right in their laps?'"
"He said, 'Damn right.' So I said, 'Well, that's what we'll do.'"
At the time, Lunz had only recently moved from Ottawa to St. John's at the urging of CODCO, the ground-breaking Newfoundland comedy troupe for whom he had occasionally produced touring shows. He had an eye for talent (he had booked Sandra Shamus into her first real theatre), and an unofficial commission from the National Arts Centre. The NAC wanted to mount a series of one-person stage shows, and was looking for a likely candidate from Newfoundland.
The Arts Centre's programmers wondered about the wisdom of giving a raw kid a solo spotlight on the official national stage, but accepted Lunz's assurances that Mercer had the real goods. During six months, Lunz helped Mercer put together a clever, vitriolic response to the orgy of post-Meech Newfie-bashing. Show Me The Button and I'll Push It, or Charles Lynch Must Die was a major hit in Ottawa, went on a national tour, and was extended so often at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille that its current-affairs satire threatened to become historical farce.
The stage show begat two NAC-produced sequels which begat, obliquely, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, all produced by Lunz. And Rick Mercer became an ex-officio Ottawan, the leader of Her Majesty's Lethal Opposition.
All of which leads one to wonder what happens when Mercer's link to Ottawa is severed, as it will be in his new six-part comedy series, Made In Canada, premiering Monday night at 8:30 on CBC. How funny can he be when you take away Preston Manning and the gang?
The answer is devastatingly, diabolically funny -- and for longer than two minutes at a time.
Made in Canada is the realization of a concept that Mercer, Lunz and Michael Donovan of Halifax's Salter Street Films have been kicking around for years. The idea was to cast Mercer in a comic homage to Shakespeare's Richard III, to create a satire of office politics in which one ambitious man manipulates and schemes his way to power. He stomps over everyone in his way, but subtly, letting no one know about his ambition -- except the TV audience in a lot of Shakespearean asides.
"(Made in Canada) has got that Dilbert reality," Mercer said in a recent interview. "I think that anyone who works at Pitney-Bowes, or wherever, understands that certain people get ahead using that suck-up, kick-down philosophy, and that some people are very manipulative and don't care who they hurt along the way to the top."
Given Mercer's Ottawa antipathy, one might have assumed he would set his satire in the federal bureaucracy. And Mercer admits that the thought crossed his mind. There was only one problem.
"I've never worked at the Department of Fill-in-the-Blank," says Mercer. Bureaucratic Ottawa was a comedy concept to him, not a reality.
"The first rule of satire is write what you know, or at least have some sense of authority on. So then, through the jigs and the reels, we decided to set it in a TV-film office."
CBC liked the idea -- and the people behind it -- so much, that it approved a six-part series last April without a single page of script having been written. The project has gone from a network green light to broadcast in a record six months, with Mercer and comic Mark Farrell (part of the creative force behind The Newsroom) writing scripts even while the casting was going on.
The six-part series follows Richard Strong (Mercer) through his meteoric and murky rise from script reader to second-in command at a Toronto film and television production company called Pyramid.
In the first episode, Richard masterminds the messy self-destruction of his immediate superior and brother-in-law (Ron James) and steals his best idea, a plan to get Pyramid's reluctant sword-and-sorcery action-hero (Alex Carter) to sign a new contract.
By Episode Two, Richard has manipulated the company's recently snubbed production advisor (More Tears' Leah Pinsent) into scorching and burning the careers of his new boss and his too-capable assistant.
And so it continues, the body count rising at every serpentine twist in Richard's grand design.
"As in Shakespearean reality, Richard has to kill people," says Mercer. "In this business, that means he has to take their job and destroy their reputation ... because otherwise they could go across the street and become the competition."
While everyone seem oblivious to Richard's machinations, Richard is not shy about sharing with the audience his ambitions, schemes and his unapologetic rationale for both. His character addresses the camera directly, even as scenes proceed around him.
Mercer sees the device as a natural evolution from his weekly rants on 22 Minutes, or his monologues at the NAC.
"It was something that appealed to us because of the Richard III sensibility, and we thought I could probably pull off because I'd been sticking my beak in a camera for so long."
"I like it because it's risky," he says. "Whatever you do in television people want to know what it's derivative of. (Made in Canada) is not something that anyone in Canada has done and ... plus it's something you're not supposed to do. It's breaking the fourth wall."
Mercer says that while much of the humour could be applied to any office setting, some is specific to the entertainment business. He didn't begin the series with any particular score to settle with the industry, but "as I was writing it, that passion bubbled to the top, because it's so much fun."
"Once you put (the concept) in a television-film company, you realize the industry is worth skewering. There are so many overblown, pompous egos, and people take themselves so bloody seriously. They're producing a cooking show, or Lassie VI, or whatever the hell they're making, but they walk around like they're curing cancer all the time."
Peter Keleghan, best remembered as The Newsroom's vacant anchor, plays Pyramid's egotistical CEO, a petty tyrant with "a pathological obsession with having the largest yacht at each year's Cannes Film Festival." There are also cameos by actor Nicholas Campbell and actor/author Ann Marie MacDonald playing rough approximations of themselves. Gordon Pinsent appears as "Canada's best-loved star," an ubiquitous veteran actor whose claims to fame are that he once met Marlon Brando and guest-starred on an episode of Columbo.
After six years of skit work, writing fully dimensional characters in a story that continues for six episodes has been a delight for Mercer after years of skit work, he says. He can't wait to begin working on the next season of scripts that CBC has already approved.
Work on the news series has forced a sabbatical from 22 Minutes and after January, Mercer will disappear from the show's anchor desk, although he hasn't ruled out dropping in now and then with a rant, just to keep the bile from clogging his system.
"22 Minutes was always set up so people could come and go and work on other projects. Now, I chose never to leave, I never missed a show once. But I really enjoy writing (Made in Canada) and I don't want to be in a position where I only get to write one or two, and a lot other people get to write more."
"The nice thing about 22 Minutes is that it's a lot bigger than any one individual and it could easily fly with three people on the desk."
Writing more episodes seems like a challenge, given that be the end of these first six, Richard will have climbed to the top of his personal Pyramid. Where does he go from there?
"Oh, well, what goes up up must come down," says Mercer, "and then attempt to get back up again. And when you have the type of person for whom basically world dominance is their goal, reaching the top of one ladder, they just see another ladder they have to get on."
Other ladders to climb? World domination? It sounds like Mercer might soon be sharpening his barbs for Ottawa again.