McGrath and Eastwood team up again in director Don Shebib’s sequel, thirty years later, called Down the Road Again - which picks up where Goin' Down the Road left off - after Joey’s death. The film finds Pete (Doug McGrath), who was estranged from Joey (Paul Bradley) for years, but agreed to his posthumous request to scatter his ashes in their Maritime hometown. So Pete sets out to drive across Canada from BC to the Maritimes, to carry out his wishes.
Along the way he delivers a note from Joey to Betty (Jayne Eastwood) and meets her daughter Betty Jo (Kathleen Robertson), whom Joey abandoned before she was born, at Pete’s urging. Pete and Betty are at odds but he finds himself bonding with Betty Jo just as he did her father. I spoke with McGrath and Eastwood on the Toronto set of Down the Road Again.
Doug McGrath “Pete”:
AB – Goin’ Down the Road was an amazingly powerful film, and one of the first great Canadian film experiences, and very few have lived up to it.
DMG - It was very good in the early seventies but it didn’t continue. I don’t know why. The Rowdyman was my favourite film. To have the honour of being part of it is great, but it would have been nicer to see (good films) continue.
AB - Where does the script for Down the Road Again take us?
MCG - It’s a lovely script very apropos to the times we live in. Goin’ Down the Road was too…but this has a different flavour, it knits the life back together. My character is just getting into retirement and going back and rediscovering the family and life. It’s about what happened to Peter – he had it and he lost it and now all of a sudden he’s back in.
AB - Kathleen looks a lot like Paul Bradley.
DMG -When I saw her I said “Wow”. I saw those eyes.
AB - Did you use the same cast and crew as far as you could?
DMG - No, nobody. But one character when Pete went to the advertising film there was an extra there and he showed up. He just wanted to be part of it. It was marvellous he just wanted to be part of it.
AB - I watched you do a scene, you’ve been given some bad news, and you don’t do much but somehow all this emotion floods through your face.
DMG - That’s one of those things I learned, to trust myself. Someone said I could do. Over the years I wonder if there is enough in me, enough in me, and when I was told that and he showed me photos, I found it reassuring. It is a gift and for someone to tell me is a gift too.
AB - Do the cast and crew, who are pretty young, know about the importance of the original film?
DMG - I think they found out by watching it. Kathleen knows it. And someone in the film wanted to be in it, he’d had a small role. The production company told him that they couldn’t afford to bring him to Toronto to be in the film, and he showed up! It’s all about the heart.
Don describes the original film as a dirge with some humour at the top.
It was all heart.
Jayne Eastwood “Betty”:
AB – So you’ve made the sequel to one of the most brilliant films ever made in Canada, finally.
JE - It’s amazing. It doesn’t feel like it’s really even hit me yet. It’s like going home again. It makes me really happy. The script is great and Don’s doing a great job with it. Don is a brilliant storyteller and editor and filmmaker and he’s got a great story. I think people are going to love it. It’s scary; it’s very scary doing this. We’re going to be under the gun, like “What have you done? Should you have left it alone?” Or “Bravo for doing this”. So we’ll see what happens. There is good will, everyone is excited about it. Goin’ Down the Road made my career. I had done a couple of commercials, but I hadn’t even done Godspell yet with all the kings of comedy moving into SCTV yet. I was taking classes at Eli Rills’ – from the Actors’ Studio. He’d seen me in an amateur production, I hadn’t done much, and he told me I should be a professional. He put me on the stage. I was just thrilled I was doing a movie; I was paid $500 to do it. I was modeling at Art College to stay alive. You know? It was like “Hey man, we’re doing a film. Cool, eh?” And we dressed ourselves because there was no crew, no crew at all. There was Don Shebib, and two guys and us, that was it, which was how we made the movie. It’s kind of mind-blowing. When people saw that film, they hadn’t thought about those kinds of people coming to Toronto, trying to make it big, what can happen to them. There were very few safety groups at that time, maybe there were some soup kitchens. That was a city that was on the move and in the groove and that was what was happening and no one thought about these poor kids and how they were suffering.
AB - Don said there were no homeless then.
JE - Not, not really, or if there were, we didn’t see them. Or think about them. It was shocking to see how you could go down, down, down, from the rented the furniture from the back of the TV Guide. Hahaha and we thought we were pretty swank, we were in a high-rise!
AB - It made a splash for Canada; major American critics were eating it up.
JE - I was doing this movie of the week called Blended, you know, “she has four kids, and he has whatever!” I was probably playing the housekeeper, the hooker with the heart of gold or the stern mother! Those were the parts I played! I met the director and he was very pleasant the first day and the second day he came up to me and said “Were you in that movie Goin’ Down the Road”? He said he was directing an off-Broadway show at that time and this cast came to me and said “You have GOT to see this movie down from Canada”. And that was cool. It did resonate beyond Canadian borders. And that was before Midnight Cowboy too. It really was the beginning of that genre. Don had a real vision. We have big shoes to fill doing this movie! But it’s a wonderful story.
AB - How did you relate to the story?
JE - What’s so great about the script, what moved me mostly about the original script was Peter’s longing and yearning for a more elevated life. He was just stuck in that social stratum. That scene when he played that Erik Satie piece? He’d seen that beautiful girl in the record store and she was playing Erik Satie and I think he not only longed for the beautiful girl, he longed for what she saw in that music. And there’s this great scene we’re just talking, sitting together in the apartment, and he’s brought the record home. And he’s just listening and he has an Erik Satie poster on the wall, so it’s still his journey. He still hasn’t made it; he wants to be a writer so it’s great to see what his journey is now in this movie. I think it’s going to be pretty heartfelt.
AB - Kudos to you working so steadily in Canada all these years.
JE - Thank you! I’ve been a lucky girl.
Anne Brodie - I review films each week on Corus and Rogers TV and for Metro News Canada, AskMen.com and Monsters and Critics. I profile celebrities for ...
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