KING DEATH

He wins every time...

Not a great week for a couple of people whose work I admire. But, biology remains undefeated.

CATHERINE O’HARA, THE COMIC ACTRESS best known for her roles as Kevin’s mom in the Home Alone franchise and as Moira Rose, the flighty, oblivious, self-centered matriarch in the Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, died today at 71.

O’Hara was born in Toronto in 1954 into a big Irish-Catholic family—she was one of seven children. “I didn’t go to college, unless you call Second City [a] university of comedy,” she said, referring to Toronto’s famous improv comedy group, which she joined shortly after high school. In the early 1970s, Second City featured Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, Bill Murray and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, and Gilda Radner. Radner, eight years O’Hara’s senior, was chiefly responsible for shepherding O’Hara into this world: Radner had dated O’Hara’s brother, befriended her, and trained her as an understudy at Second City.

Members of the troupe would come and go, and eventually a core group that included O’Hara, Thomas, Flaherty, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis, Andrea Martin, John Candy, and others, would join together and launch a landmark sketch comedy show, which over the course of its eight years, would bounce from the CBC to NBC to pay cable and back. But it was a brilliant show—SCTV is to Canadian comedy what Monty Python is to British comedy. The premise was that SCTV was a cable network, and the sketches on each episode (the run-time of the episodes also fluctuated over the years, from thirty minutes to ninety) could be made up of shows that were airing on the network, or they could be brief commercials for shows that were never going to air—that is, become full sketches—or they could focus on behind-the-scenes shenanigans. The upshot is it allowed all performers to play a wide range of characters and tackle varied celebrity impressions.

But O’Hara, along with Andrea Martin, struggled to be recognized among the cast, and to be treated as equals. As she told Dave Thomas for his book SCTV: Behind the Scenes:

I posted a brief visual shrine to her HERE. I’ll miss her. Her wicked humour has been part of my life for decades.

A writer I greatly admire has passed away as well. I have several of his books and a few more on my Kindle. And yes, I have read DRIVE and seen the movie. The movie is half-baked with cool music and is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. He’s an amazing Director….just ask him. I encourage to read James Sallis’ book too.

We are very sorry to share that James Sallis passed away on January 27, 2026, peacefully, with his wife Karyn by his side, after a long illness.

This website will be maintained as Jim’s work continues to be published, shared, and appreciated.

Read the rest HERE.

Okay. Enough with the downers.

This week I managed to finish a first draft of a short film script. Not bad. And to start this week I’ll dive into a micro-budget feature script. And I will say I’m enjoying writing like an old school pulp writer, so I’m also diving into old pulp movies and magazines that bring me delight. Doesn’t sound very micro-budget does it? I respectfully disagree. Pulp stories have always been fun and meant to be disposable and passed along to a friend. Even though it has to do with print, here’s a lady who gets it…

So I’m applying that attitude to my screenplays and other projects.

I’ve given myself some creative touchstones when I get too high on being pretentious.

What can I say. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK had a big affect on me when I was 13 years old. The movie caused me to seek out everything from old pulp and noir stories in movies and print. That and horror comic books. Thus began my education in storytelling. And I’m still learning things at the old age of 58.

I always end with a tune. So here’s my favourite cinematic hero defying death with a score by the amazing John Williams.

Cheers,

TC.