Corner Gas gang happy to be reunited and serving up a movie
Kickstarter campaign led to feature-length film that opens Wednesday at select Cineplex theatres
It took some doing, but Brent Butt stands back behind the pump on the Corner Gas set.
Butt says he knew he’d return to Dog River “from the minute I said, ‘Let’s wrap this up’ ” on the TV series. He didn’t want to wait “too far down the road, because then we’d all be old and weird and creepy, but not too soon either, because, what’s the point?” It’s been 5 1⁄ years since the series ended but Butt
2 and his cast returned to the set last June and July to make Corner Gas: The Movie.
The feature-length film opens for five days starting Wednesday at selected Cineplex theatres. It moves to television Dec. 8, premiering on the Movie Network. The broadcast premiere airs Dec. 17 on both CTV and CTV Two and finally it hits the Comedy Network Dec. 22. There will also be ondemand and DVD releases before Christmas and if you hum the catchy “Not A Lot Goin’ On” theme into your Bell cellular device, it might pop up there too.
Everyone is back, including Gabrielle Miller, Eric Peterson, Fred Ewanuick, Janet Wright, Lorne Cardinal, Tara Spencer-Nairn and Nancy Robertson. The large, illuminated Corner Gas sign hanging outside in front of the faux gas station had to be retrieved and flown in from CTV’s Queen St. office in Toronto, where it had been displayed since the series went off the air.
“It’s very cool, but the weird thing about it is it really doesn’t feel like that much time has passed,” Butt says. “It really feels like we were kind of gone three weeks and now we’re back at it.”
Ewanuick likened it to a high school reunion. Director David Storey agrees.
“It’s like putting on an old suit or pair of shoes,” he says.
Miller seemed a little dazed, as if stuck in a time warp. “In my mind, something didn’t fire correctly,” she says, slowly realizing that the familiar Ruby Café interior set she had walked back on to had been magically transported from Regina to Rouleau for the movie.
Corner Gaswent off the air in April 2009 with a finale that drew over three million viewers — still a record for a Canadian scripted series episode. Since then, several have tried but nobody has been able to craft another hit Canadian sitcom — including Butt himself. His followup series Hiccups, starring wife and Corner Gas mate Robertson, lasted two seasons.
What set Corner Gas apart? Back when the series launched, the big buzz word used to launch most new comedies was “edgy.”
Butt, however, says he was going more for “authentic.”
“I always thought we didn’t have an agenda, really,” he says.
“We wanted our show to be good and we wanted it to be funny. We also didn’t think anybody was going to watch.”
Butt says he and his co-producers always felt like they’d tricked CTV into letting them make 13 episodes. “We were going to do this one season and then we were going to go our separate ways.”
Funding rules back then helped set the series in Saskatchewan, Butt’s home province.
That distance from Toronto probably helped shield the series from network pressure to appeal to a certain demographic or fulfil any other agenda.
In short, Butt and company got to do that rarity in Canadian television — the show they wanted to do. “I think we were all blindsided by its success,” he says.
Peterson feels Corner Gas benefitted from what he calls “the synchronicity of personality,” the right people just creating the right show in the right place.
“Saskatchewan was this little secret place,” he says.
“Then there was a kind of humour, a structure like Seinfeld surrounded by character. A notion where you make what’s trivial and mundane important.
“As a result, we came from a very authentic place,” says Butt, “and I think people pick up on that authenticity. People can tell when they’re being sold. And we weren’t selling anything other than, this is a comedy and we’re trying to be funny. But beyond that, we weren’t trying to be cool or hip.”
That lent a certain timelessness about the show, a quality that helps when you try to revisit a series five or six years later.
“One of the themes of the show is, not much changes,” says Butt. “Other than a few more wrinkles and stuff and I have less hair, really what you like about the show is here.”
It wasn’t always a lock that the movie would happen. The project had a false start a year earlier when it was decided the script needed more work.
Writers Butt, Andrew Carr and Andrew Wreggitt added heart and story to keep the movie from feeling like an extended episode of the series. Dog River is in danger and the townspeople have to rally around a challenge facing many rural communities across Canada but especially faced now by suddenly prosperous Saskatchewan — urbanization.
Funding was also a challenge. Saskatchewan pulled out of the tax credit business, sending film and TV pro- duction scurrying to neighbouring provinces. The prospect of shooting the movie anywhere but Saskatchewan did not seem right to Butt. “You can’t fake that horizon,” he says.
Executive producer Virginia Thompson came up with the idea of a kickstarter campaign to bridge funding shortfalls.
“In the feature film arena, there isn’t as much money for publicity and promotion as there is in television,” she says. A 30-day Kickstarter campaign was seen as a way to engage fans by offering chances to become extras or host red carpet screenings.
It would also build buzz in the Corner Gas community and help spread the word about the theatrical screenings.
Funding for the film was a challenge. Saskatchewan pulled out of the tax credit business, sending production scurrying to neighbouring provinces
Thompson, Butt and others were astonished when the full funding goal was reached in just 26 hours. “I woke up to it, and it was like, ‘What?’ ” says Butt.
More money was raised through Saskatchewan tourism, an apt partner given how the show literally brings bus loads of tourists to Regina and Rouleau every year.
Buses would drive past familiar series landmarks, including the “Foo Mar T” grocery store destroyed in a fire a few months after production wrapped.
“For whatever reason this show touched people in a way that a lot of TV shows don’t,” says Butt.
“They took some possession of the show or got invested for some reason. You kind of forget that and then you see the tours or Twitter. You forget that this was on in 26 countries.”
Which perhaps explains another, surprising reason for the success of Corner Gas — it avoided being too Canadian.
“I remember the very first episode when the set decorator had put about 50 Canadian flags in front of the cash register,” says Butt.
“I went in and I took them all down except one. That says it plenty.
“Outside of Olympic hockey or something, we’re not really a flagwaving country,” he says.
Don’t get Butt wrong. In his quiet, authentic way, he waves the flag more than most.
He calls his production company Sparrow Media because “a sparrow is a bird that doesn’t need to fly south. That’s kind of my touchstone. Every time I’m writing a cheque and I see Sparrow Media on it, it reminds me I can live here and survive here.”