Mike Myers & Dana Carvey Use Academy To Bury ‘Wayne’s World’ Hatchet
AMPAS President Hawk Koch tonight used the Academy as a promo tool for the 1992 comedy which he exec produced 21 years ago. Wayne’s World has zero to do with prestigious Academy functions, but a rep told me similar screenings are in the works to attract a new audience to AMPAS. Tonight’s event sold out in 90 seconds at $5 a pop.
With Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels (who produced the pic) Koch wrangled stars Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and director Penelope Spheeris to the event following years of tensions between the trio. In a pre-film panel at the Academy’s Wilshire theater, moderator Koch skirted the infamous squabbles surrounding the Wayne’s World shoot. Those include Myers’ reputed difficult on-set demands. And reports that he Myers and Carvey had fallen out after Myers lifted his Dr. Evil voice from Carvey. Spheeris meanwhile has accused Myers of vetoing her as the sequel’s director because she didn’t listen to his edit requests. (“‘I hated that bastard for years”, she said in a 2008 interview.) No questions were allowed from the at-capacity audience. And the panelists were explicitly instructed not to talk to press at the event.
Tonight as Myers, Carvey, Michaels and Rob Lowe bantered about the film’s SNL beginnings, Spheeris sat farthest from her stars. Whenever Myers began dropping any serious revelations Koch quickly changed the subject. Myers did manage to explain his emotional state at the time when his father had recently passed. “To be honest with you I don’t remember that year at all”, he said. “I remember finishing the film, then I remember my dad dying. Then I just remember Dana and I being strapped to the front of a rocket and me putting on 25 lbs eating my way through it”.
Myers and Michaels acknowledged creative friction on set. “There are two scenes I resisted… in my Canadian ‘you can’t change things’ way”, Myers said — Robert Patrick’s Terminator cameo and a scene in which Lara Flynn Boyle crashes her bike into a car. “Mike had seen a cut and wanted to make some changes, because it was his life”, said Michaels. Meanwhile Tia Carrere, attending with co-stars Brian Doyle Murray, Colleen Camp, and Boyle, was the only one to entertain the idea of a third sequel when she tweeted from the event: “Who’s up for Wayne’s World 3?“
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