Eight years ago today, the surviving cast members from SCTV – everyone except John Candy and Harold Ramis – gathered in Toronto at the Elgin Theatre for what was supposed to be the opening scenes of an upcoming documentary. That idea seems to have slid right off director Martin Scorsese’s to-do list. Instead, individual members of the brilliant comedy troupe (including Candy last year) keep getting their own documentary salute.
For example: Netflix just premiered “Marty: Life is Short.” This salute to Martin Short is directed by long time friend and filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan (“The Big Chill”). Getting a close friend to do your documentary isn’t always the best call. Too many warts-and-all scenes and there goes the friendship. Too fawning and there goes the audience.
Kasdan delivers down the middle, however, in what is far from the usual, paint-by-numbers career account. His best resource is the deep stash of home movies and video tapes recorded it seems to help bring viewers inside Short’s private world.
The goal here is to share the inner joy. If you’ve ever wondered what those celebrated holiday parties are like at Short’s Pacific Palisades abode or up at his cottage in Muskoka, this doc’s for you. (Although, as somebody who has transferred a trunk full of my dad’s 16mm home movies, where were the Short family films stashed – in King Tut’s tomb?)
If you’ve read Short’s excellent 2014 autobiography “Martin Short I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend,” you will know that our man has had his share of dizzying highs and lows. Short was the youngest of five children in a family growing up in Hamilton, Ont. His oldest brother David, who he worshipped, was killed in a car accident in 1962 when Martin was 12. By the time he was 20, both his parents had also passed away.
That life is short – the pun in the title – was hammered home at an early age. Short jokes in the film that the family had a funeral parlor on speed dial.
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He seemed to retreat as an adolescent into a show biz world incubated in the attic of the family home, where Short, armed with a cassette recorder, would tape his own shows and make up his own schedules. They were headlined by himself as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other Hollywood A-listers. In retrospect, he really seemed to be polishing his skills for a lifetime of performance on stage, screen and television.
His big early break, as it was for best friend Eugene Levy, close pals Andrea Martin, Paul Shaffer, Gilda Radner and others, was a role in the Toronto version of the musical “Godspell.” Short and the late Catherine O’Hara look back on those days in the doc, talking about the good times and how they were all basically dating each other. Short briefly paired with Radner before falling in love with her understudy, Nancy Dolman. That union was a long and happy one. O’Hara says “Marty and Nancy” was the answer she and others gave to shrinks when asked to name the perfect Hollywood couple.
When his Godspell colleagues were called upon to launch SCTV, Short made the mistake of holding out for more of a headlining opportunity. He found himself too late when it came to catching a bus or the next big job. When the call came a few years later he jumped.
Yes, there are scenes with Jiminy Glick and Ed Grimley, two of Short’s most famous comic creations. The documentary really becomes much more about the “Short” life at home and less about the parade of characters on SCTV, Saturday Night Live, the movies and the TV shows.
Sought after invites to the Short’s holiday parties eventually spread to such Hollywood A-listers as Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, close-by cottagers Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn and others who happened to have children the same age as Martin and Nancy’s trio. There are adorable scenes in the doc with Short throwing himself into cracking up four or six kids at a time.
It wasn’t always as much fun at the movies. Short himself suggests 80 per cent of the movies he made bombed. Not so fast says John Mullany, at 43 one of the doc’s younger voices, who insists “The Three Amigos” (co-starring fellow documentary subjects Steve Martin and Chevy Chase) was formative for him and other younger comedians.
Short insists he never had a grand career plan, insisting paying off the house and cottage was all the incentive he needed. Growing up in Canada where a working actor has to bounce between commercials, smaller stages, and occasional film and TV work gave him the chops to tackle everything thrown his way.
Kasdan chooses clips sparingly. A few seconds of Short as “Clifford,” finding his voice as wedding planner Franck on “Father of the Bride,” in a tense moment from Damages, or as part of the synchronized swim team (with Harry Shearer) on SNL. Not all are chosen wisely; there is also a less funny NBC sketch scene with Short berating Paul McCartney for bungling the triangle.
A tragic loss came in 2010 when Dolman succumbed to ovarian cancer. Kasdan pulls a heartbreakingly sweet home video clip of her, weakened but still able to sing in perfect pitch, at home in the kitchen. The couple was married 36 years. Short’s older brother Michael, himself an Emmy-winning writer, worried that his kid brother had suffered enough loss.
Short’s ability to soldier on and triumph is rooted in his genuine conviction that life is short, we carry these people with us and we will soon be with them again. The very recent passing of Short and Dolman’s daughter Katherine, 42, as well as close friend O’Hara, is noted at the very end of this documentary in a simple dedication.
Did I think the film could have made more of Short’s reputation as one of the best talk show guests ever? Yes, and why not let friends such as Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien or David Letterman weigh in on that? Or his friend and fellow Canadian Lorne Michaels?
Short’s Third Act success with Steve Martin on Only Murders in the Building is celebrated, but too bad we don’t hear from Selina Gomez or other key cast members. There is also no mention of those rumours about Short and Meryl Streep. When their characters wed at the end of Season Four it was such a joyous scene and you could not help but feel happy for Short, even if it was just a plot twist in a dandy whodunnit.
We do get to hear from Andrea Martin, always funny and insightful and worthy of her own documentary. Levy weighs in of course, and says no one has ever been funnier than his friend. Steve Martin even gets moved to tears at one point. Life may be short, but professionally at least, it could not come at a happier time for Martin Short.
Now fingers crossed a distributor has been found for the Goodspell doc screened last fall in Toronto, and that profiles of O’Hara and others are next.
