Mike Myers claims he hasn”t set out to become one of the most prominent regurgitators of pop culture.
“I don”t know; I just write stuff,” said the 33-year-old actor-writer with a shrug while chatting in a dark booth in the Gold Coast”s Zebra Lounge last week. “It”s just nice to have a job.”
OK, fine, but his movie track record still could take as its theme song the Cars” “Hello Again.”
“Wayne”s World” (1992) was steeped in old TV references and brought back the mid-“70s adolescent punctuator “Not!”
“So I Married an Axe Murderer” (1993) featured a cop who longed to be on “Starsky and Hutch.”
“Wayne”s World 2” (1993) parodied chop-socky flicks and more old commercials (“Ancient Chinese secret, huh?”). It also revived the Village People”s “YMCA” and thus can be blamed for those current dancing-bear soft-drink ads.
“I love that commercial by the way,” the one-time Chicagoan said. “I love bears, as it turns out. I think they”re sweet.”
The latest cultural flotsam to be recycled by Myers is “60s escapist entertainment, which gets the spoof treatment in the new movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which opens Friday.
Myers wrote himself two parts in “Austin Powers,” the title swinging London secret agent who”s frozen in the “60s and revived in the “90s, and his nemesis, Dr. Evil, a photocopy of Donald Pleasence”s Blofeld from the 1967 James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice.”
The opening few minutes include nods to Bond, “A Hard Day”s Night,” “Blow Up,” “Sweet Charity” and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” whose author, Roger Ebert, sprang out of his seat at a screening to proclaim, “I wrote that!” after Austin oozed, “It’s my happening and it freaks me out.”
No, Myers said he didn’t insert that line to kiss up to the influential film critic. “That (film) was a big influence on the movie,” he said, eagerly pointing out other homages to “The Tenth Victim,” “Casino Royale,” “The Ambushers” and “In Like Flint.”
Then there are Austin’s inevitable catch phrases, like “Groovy, baby!,” “Oh, behave!,” “Saucy!” and various uses of “shag” as a retro-Brit euphemism for having sex. Mitchell Goldman, New Line Cinema’s president of marketing, said the MPAA thought the “shag” references were so saucy that “we had to take a couple out” to maintain the PG-13 rating.
New Line is hyping Austin’s lingo in the hope that it will catch on like Wayne’s “Party on!” “Sure, we want people to come out saying, `Groovy, baby,’ ” Goldman said. “If Jay Leno or David Letterman says it on the opening monologue next week, it will help us.”
But Myers insisted that no calculation was involved in the conception. “The characters that I do have their own language,” he said. “That’s the way I’ve always done it. I never try and think of what a catch phrase is. I don’t have a laboratory with 25 17-year-olds with electrodes attached to their bodies and try and figure out what’s going to work.”
Instead, he said, he draws the characters from his own life: Wayne echoed Myers’ teenage heavy-metal pals in suburban Toronto, and “Saturday Night Live” staples Linda Richman (host of “Coffee Talk”) and German film critic Dieter were based, respectively, on his mother-in-law and a pretentious Toronto waiter.
And if someone were to base a character on Mike Myers, what would he be like? On this day at least, they’d get an untall guy with short-cropped, reddish-brown hair that matched his lightweight suede jacket, a lilting nasal voice that sounded vaguely like Sammy Davis Jr., and a penchant for earnest introspection.
When a photographer took aim, Myers would flash that familiar goofy smile that enlivened Wayne and, with the addition of some horsey teeth, Austin. But as he talked about what he’s been doing since “Wayne’s World 2,” his face turned decidedly straight.
“Eight years ago I lived above a grocery store in Toronto,” he recalled. “And then I was living here for nine months (to act at Second City and ImprovOlympic), I’d gone on `Saturday Night Live,’ I did three movies, three prime-time specials for NBC, three MTV specials, wrote a book that became a No. 1 bestseller–the `Wayne’s World’ book–and in that time my father passed away, my wife’s brother got killed in a car accident, we got married, and my wife and I only got like a five-day honeymoon. . .
“I got into a `What’s it all about, Alfie?’ (mode)” he continued, quoting the refrain from a popular ’60s movie title song. “I just didn’t want to do anything. It was like six years of being strapped to the front of a rocket. I just needed to start a nest.”
So he and wife Robin Ruzan bought a house in Los Angeles and three dogs, and he took “power skating” lessons and played pick-up hockey four times a week. He also tried “to just resonate the passing of my father and what it meant to me. I was very, very close to my father.”
His parents had moved from Liverpool, England, to the Toronto area before Myers was born, causing some confusion in the wee son’s mind. “I always thought that I was related to the Beatles,” he said. “A child psychologist, when I was about 3, had to have a picture of my father and a picture of John Lennon and say, `This is John Lennon, and this is your father,’ because nobody I knew spoke like that except the Beatles and my dad. . . .
“My dad loved comedy, loved Peter Sellers, loved (Monty) Python. He would wake us up at 11:30 because there was a good Peter Sellers movie on, and the four of us–me and my three brothers–would sit in our jimmie jams and watch the Pink Panther movies or `The Party’ or `I Love You, Alice B. Toklas’ or any of those great movies.”
Thus began the formation of Myers’ pop culture data base. “I was a feral child raised by television, there’s no question about it,” he said. “I loved movies and I loved TV. Those are the fairy tales of my childhood.”
So when he was driving home from hockey practice a year ago and Dusty Springfield’s version of Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love”–as featured in the 1967 Bond spoof “Casino Royale”–came on the radio, a flood of associations poured in.
“I just thought of what that whole movie evoked, the whole swinger thing, and I started to talk to like a swinger: `Hey baby!,’ ” Myers said. “I went home and talked to my wife: `Let’s go and swing! Let’s go in the back and shag! You’re a very sexy bird,’ and that stuff. My wife thought that was amusing for the first three days and then told me to shut up and write it down.”
Myers said he pondered having missed the sexual revolution and “wondered what it would be like to have a ’60s guy with his views on sex meeting a politically correct girl from the ’90s. He’s a sexual Rip Van Winkle. And I say Rip Van Winkle because `winkle’ sounds vaguely dirty.”
That “winkle” quip, by the way, was a reference to a Monty Python routine.
Myers reported cranking out the first draft in three weeks, selling it to New Line and enlisting co-star Elizabeth Hurley and first-time director Jay Roach. The filming went by with such merriment that “the last day of shooting, I found a quiet corner of the studio and gave silent thanks and shed a tear. It was like the last day of camp.”
Myers dons heavy-duty disguises for his dual “Austin Powers” roles, as he did as the father in “Axe Murderer” (another movie with two Myers roles) and Wayne. What’s with all the costumes and makeup?
“It just happened that way,” he said. “I have no master plan. As an actor you are at the whim of the universe. It’s not like I said, `I’m 24, isn’t it time I was on `Saturday Night Live’ by now?’ “
OK, so the disguises are just a coincidence? “You know what? Being an actor and being employed is a coincidence,” he responded.
But one obviously must enjoy physical transformations or one wouldn’t keep writing them into one’s characters, right? “I do,” he acknowledged. “It’s fun. Halloween was always my favorite time of the year ’cause you got to dress up and be somebody else, and you got rewarded with candy. So that’s kind of how comedy’s been for me.”
Myers’ movie protagonists also tend to smile a lot–a trend Myers said he never noticed. “Is that true? You’d make my mum very happy to know that, because my mum has always said, `You don’t smile enough.’
“I always loved Bugs Bunny. I like people who are happy survivors. James Bond and Bugs Bunny are happy survivors. They’re the kind of characters that do stuff that you would only do if you had like five beers in you, have that sort of charisma and courage. I’m naturally an introvert, and I love the fantasy of being an extrovert.”
Myers said he has written another script and was also just offered a “nice” movie role, though he wouldn’t divulge details about either. He also couldn’t identify the next aspect of his past that’s ripe for artistic plundering, though his interests extend beyond his own lifetime.
“You know, the time I wished I’d grown up in is World War II,” he said, noting that his parents were both in the British service. “Just that sense of the whole country pulling together, you wouldn’t have felt alienated. You must have felt a sense of community . . . I would love to make a World War II movie.”
He said he also would consider a return to television.
“God, yeah, I’d love to,” he enthused. “I’ve only done four movies. It’s not like `It’s cute what those kids on TV are doing.’ If anything’s good, I would do it. The best writing’s on TV.”
As for how “Austin Powers” performs at the box office, Myers said he feels no pressure. “I’m an artist,” he said. “My artistic license is paid in full.”
The important part, he added, is to continue being able “to do cool stuff.
“Somebody said to me once after `Wayne’s World,’ `You’ll never have to work again.’ And I said, `You don’t get it. I want to work until the day I die.’ “
MIKE MYERS’ CHICAGO LOVES
Mike Myers owes a lot to Chicago, since the city provided him with valuable comic training at Second City and ImprovOlympic–as well as a wife.
It also taught him that service doesn’t have to be as sluggish as it is in Toronto, where Myers lived before relocating here. The lesson came soon after Myers met actress and future wife Robin Ruzan in a bar across from Second City.
“We moved in together really quickly, so we had to get a new bed. So my wife ordered a bed that was to be delivered within an hour, and then we also ordered ribs from The Fireplace. And the mattress beat the ribs. The mattress came, we set it up, the food came, we ate on the mattress and watched TV, and I thought, `God bless America.’ “
