Young Drunk Punk a throwback
A few weeks before production began on the Calgary-shot sitcom, Young Drunk Punk, lead actor Tim Carlson sent in a request to the costume designer, Jennifer Haffenden.
He had been leafing through some old photos and found one of The Who from the late 1970s.
“One of the guys has a sweet leather jacket,” says Carlson. “It’s got the big frills on the arms. It was a real cowboy jacket. I thought it was too perfect. I sent it along to her and she emailed me back the same day and said ‘You won’t believe this. I just bought that same jacket.’ ”
On set today, Carlson, who plays Ian McKay in Young Drunk Punk, is wearing a giant brass ring depicting the head of a leopard.
“It’s like my totem,” Carlson says with a laugh. “When we were first picking the costumes they had a box of rings. I tried it on and said ‘Yeah, that’s the one for sure.’ I have it on all the time. It’s kind of flashy but it’s brass, it’s not any kind of fancy material. It’s subtle. It’s like a working man’s ring in a way.”
As with everything on the set — a shutdown school in the suburbs — the clothes were chosen with an eye for period detail. The period is 1980. But it’s 1980 in the somewhat fashion-lagging city of Calgary. Which means much of it is from the 1970s.
“Um ... tacky?” says actress Allie MacDonald, who plays Ian’s sister Belinda, when asked to describe her wardrobe. “It’s all about sequins and sparkles and tight clothing and big jewelry.”
Young Drunk Punk, which airs Wednesday on City, is based on Kids in the Hall Bruce McCulloch’s memories of his post-high-school days, when fashion taste and music were key calling cards for outsiders trying to separate themselves from the braying masses (in the pilot episode, Ian accuses his fellow graduating class of being “sheep”).
The series follows the adventures of Ian and his best pal Shinky (a very funny Atticus Mitchell), who are drifting into young adulthood with big plans but no real means to implement them.
McCulloch and his wife, actress Tracy Ryan, play Ian’s parents, Lloyd and Helen, who live in a townhouse complex called Brae Vista. Part of the first season was shot in Brae Glen, where McCulloch grew up. The home is based largely on McCulloch’s memories of the decor of the time: overflowing ashtrays, dinner trays, old TVs, a massive humidifier, a primitive microwave and a peculiar attachment to decorative owls. Even Lloyd and Helen’s LP collection, while more or less hidden from sight, is meticulously put together with an eye for period detail and middle-of-the-road musical tastes: Nana Mouskouri, the Urban Cowboy soundtrack and a few K-Tel compilations.
McCulloch admits he is a bit of a stickler when it comes to these things.
“It hearkens back to when I would create this type of character for Kids in the Hall,” McCulloch says. “Much to the chagrin of the production designers, I would say ‘Nope. That wouldn’t be here. That wouldn’t be here’ and be ripping posters off the wall. When you go into Shinky’s basement it has to feel right.”
However McCulloch didn’t want Young Drunk Punk to be a collection of jokes about the ’80s.
“There’ll be a Rubik’s Cube at one point and we are doing a whole episode about Space Invaders,” McCulloch says. “But we want it to be organic in the narrative and not be ‘Ah, that’s so funny!’ So some of the stuff is subtly in the background. It’s not like people are hilariously eating whatever food people ate in 1980 and talking about it. We are trying not to use it as a reference so you have to get it right because it’s going to be in the corner of something. When I’m looking at something I like to say ‘What’s that on the wall?’ You can kind of see but it’s not in your face. It has to be right.”
And it requires a lot of work.
To put together the wardrobe, Haffenden mixed research — poring over Sears catalogues, Life Magazines, Rolling Stone archives and pictures of Calgary — and simple treasure hunting.
“You name it, we’ve sourced it,” she said. “You have to be creative. I found a broach for Helen at a nice vintage shop in Toronto and it wasn’t cheap. I found the very same broach in Value Village for $4.99 in Calgary. Now we have doubles.”
Adding to the challenge is that many of the items of this vintage — TVs, old VCRs, arcade video games — are collectors’ items.
“The people with money right now are the people who remember all this stuff,” says set decorator Paul Healy. “So a lot of this stuff that five years ago was practically being given away is hundreds of dollars now. It’s unbelievable. It’s quite shocking.”
The Space Invaders arcade game, for instance, was tracked down in Halifax through Kijiji. But things like TV monitors and Betamax machines have become increasingly rare and expensive.
Of course, interior sets can be controlled. It’s much harder to control the look of the city. Calgary is a modern place, which means finding locations that match McCulloch’s memories also proved difficult.