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Seven Degrees of the Living Undead

February 10, 2004

So I am going to have to break my word. This is something I am loathe to do at any time, but even more so here, in a public forum, where it is available for all to see, recorded for all posterity, that Shane said he would do something, and did not do it. This will bug me for months, but there’s no getting around it at this point. I said I would be doing a profile on our dynamo of a producer, Brad, but I will not. At least, not now.

It’s not for any lack of material. I think it’s more that I’ve left it too long into the process. At this point we’ve been working on Dead End Days long enough that habits have formed, and I now find it impossible to sit down with Brad without saying something like “We should make an art department list,” or “When are we calling Jay for another writing conference?” Of course, as soon as any of these things leave my mouth, the chance to interview him is gone. Dead End Days becomes a third entity in the room, one which is entertaining, inspiring, and incredibly demanding at the same time. It’s impossible to ignore. And damn if I don’t enjoy every minute it takes from me.

So, as an alternative to the Brad biopic I was going to create, I wracked my brain for something more elementary, something which our audience may have been wondering out there.

There are ten questions that I’ve heard over and over again since we started. The top nine are all variations on “What’s it like to be a zombie?” (my favourite thus far is “Would a Jewish zombie eat pork brains?”… Okay, so no one actually asked that. But it would be funny if they did.) Not knowing a great deal on the inner workings of the living dead, I moved down to number ten: “How did you all meet?” And that’s what I’ll be sharing this week.

The first of us to meet were Matt and Brad, who grew up in Calgary together, making short documentaries on the changing of diapers and ‘How to Walk’ instructional videos. They both shared a passion for film, which led them to become the close friends they are today.

Of course, not long after, Rob was born into the Fox household, and immediately began berating Brad for anything stupid he did. Matt, of course, immediately saw that they were two halves of the same coin. Like yin and yang, point and counterpoint. Abbott and Costello.

The third member of the initial DED brain trust, Jay, comes from the same roots. (I’ve begun to think that Calgary breeds more than its fair share of creative people) He had been crossing paths with Brad and Matt for years, in theatres and other capacities. Brad and Jay also discovered, some time after meeting each other, that they were in fact, long lost third cousins. Imagine the shock. [Especially as I knew Jay primarily as someone who looked dashing while dancing and singing in brightly coloured long underwear and fetching straw hats, my first meeting with him through a particularly strange piece of children's musical theatre - Brad]

Matt and Jay did not become closely acquainted until they attended the University of Calgary together. Brad, at this point, headed out to York University in Toronto, to establish what we now like to think of as “Base Camp”. From here, who knows how far we can go? London? Los Angeles? Monkey’s Eyebrow, Arizona?

Strangely enough, both Matt and Jay decided independently that Calgary was not the place to hone their skills, but Vancouver was. Matt went out to attend Vancouver Film School, and Jay took up the creative writing program at UBC.

Matt found himself in his class with a particularly talented actress named Erin Whitehead. He also happened to move into a basement suite with a young performer/playwright named Tobin Mollet, who was a classmate of Jay’s at UBC. Matt, Jay, Erin and Toby, in an attempt to stave off a career spent doing meaningless guest-star roles and screenplay rewrites, formed Laughing Day Productions together, and began work on a play to tour the Canadian Fringe festivals that summer, when they were all out of school.

They began with a short but successful run in the Vancouver Little Theatre, and began preparing for the grueling life of a traveling performer. Unfortunately, that was when disaster struck, and both Toby and Erin were pulled away from the project by a series of catastrophes. This is when I came into the picture.

I had moved from my hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to attend Vancouver Film School in the class just below Matt’s. Our interaction, to that point, had been five minutes spent together in an audition. He had struck me as a talented and intelligent fellow, but I was completely flabbergasted when, three weeks later, he asked me if I might be interested in joining his troupe for the summer tour. In fact, at that point, even Matt didn’t even really know why he was asking me. But he asked, and I said yes.

And this brought us to the second childhood connection our group had, though this one was far more strange and serendipitous. Back in their university days, the Rotherys, a young married couple, had lived in Saskatoon, and had some very good friends named the Arbuthnotts, another newly-wed duo. The Rotherys, after graduation, moved on to Toronto, then Waterloo, then finally Calgary. Along the way, the families lost touch. Years later, after a Laughing Day meeting, Jay called his parents, and told them “Someone named Shane… Astronaut, or Arbobott or something joined the cast.” Their enigmatic reply was “You mean Arbuthnott?” Meanwhile, I was having a parallel conversation with my own parents, and at the next meeting, we confirmed that at some point, our parents had been best friends. We had in fact met when we were both very young. I don’t remember the meeting, but I more than likely spit up on him.

The Fringe tour took place, starting in Montreal and moving back towards Vancouver one city at a time. Back on the west coast, a young woman named Robin sat in on a performance, and saw something particularly appealing in Mr. Hoos. They, of course, fell in love, and as a pleasant side effect, we gained a future wardrobe department, not to mention a nice ear to bend, which helps keep us all sane inside this insane endeavour.

Another Fringe tour took place (which I did not participate in, though I flyered like there was no tomorrow), and then, for a short time, we all went our separate ways. Jay holed himself up in Alberta to write. Brad remained in Toronto, trying to bring a little Braddishness to an otherwise Bradless city, and Matt, Robin and myself packed large bags and headed over to Europe, I remaining relatively contained in the UK, while Matt and Robin ran the full gamut of cultures. And in all our locations, we decided something simultaneously: it was time to up the ante. Throw our hat into the pop culture ring, as it were, and make a film.

Brad, Matt and Jay bunked down for two weeks in July 2003, and came up with the concept for Dead End Days. I flew out two months later, and we were underway. First order of business: casting.

At this point we had the first few scripts from Jay, and there were five major parts we had to fill immediately. Sam, Bridget, Bruce, Ashley and Eric all needed actors. This was no easy task. We were all in a new city (except for Brad, but the only people he knew were film students and big-wig Canadian producers), and didn’t have our usual rolodex of talented friends to call on. Luckily, one talented friend called us.

Erin had lost touch with the rest of our gang for a couple of years, but in a vast universal fit of confluence, she decided that mid-2003 was the time to track Matt down and give him a call. And let him know, at the same time, that she was living back in her hometown of Mississauga. He was calling on her to audition almost before he was finished saying hello. We had our Ashley.

In the same audition, we had three other people read for parts: myself, a friend named Eric, and an unknown factor who Matt knew from work, named Chad. Once again, Matt had just had a feeling about him when they met, and with little to no experience of him, called him in to read. He turned out to be perfect for our loveable zombie Bruce.

As is the way with these things, other considerations get in the way. We had more people lined up to read for us, but we were proposing a year-long project, and not many people had a schedule that would permit that. One by one we lost our possibilities. That’s my theory as to how I got the role of Eric, anyway.

Regardless, we had three roles filled, but still needed a Sam and a Bridget. Matt had intended to solely be director to this project, but Brad suggested that maybe he could act as well as direct, and the more we thought about it, the more it made sense. Matt would have to step in front of the camera, as well as running things behind it.

But we still didn’t have a Bridget. This was a particularly difficult role to fill. Bridget is a strange character, to say the least. She’s womanly, but with a violent streak a mile long hidden just beneath the skin. We read a few actors for the part, and all were fantastic, but we were missing that elusive ‘Bridget’ quality.

At this point, we were sweating bullets. We were already shooting the prologue, and it was less than six weeks before our first weekly episode was to be posted, and we didn’t have one of our key characters. Chad had come along to help on set, and overheard us discussing it between takes.

“I have a sister who’s an actor,” he said, with his usual understated aplomb. We all stopped, and shared looks, and set up a meeting with this mysterious ’sister’ immediately, before we continued filming. It somehow had that feeling of serendipity again. A week later, we met Brooke.

It wasn’t so much an audition as a seminar. We read through scripts a few times, and Matt and I could hardly contain our excitement. Brooke had that Bridget air to her when she read; not mean, not cold, but potentially dangerous if she needed to be. It was fantastic. We ended up discussing our plans for the project for two hours with her and Chad, and then shaking hands and walking out the door. In the hallway of their apartment, in low whispers, Matt and I decided we had found our Bridget.

Since then, we’ve had a huge windfall of helpful people. A friend of Brook’s, Lindsay McKnight, came on as our key makeup artist, to make sure our zombies look as good as we imagined them. Chad’s girlfriend, Jennie Reichert, has been an invaluable asset behind the scenes, as grip, assistant script supervisor, makeup artist, and just about anything else you could imagine. And, much to my delight, we’ll be having one of the actors we initially read for Bridget, Joanne Cope, appearing in future episodes. Even my brother, Chris (coincidentally, he is also the fianc

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