Interview by Craig Byrne
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Stephen Stohn has had many important jobs in his lifetime. He’s been a musician, a lawyer, a movie producer, and for the past several years, he’s been one of the executive producers and of the Canadian-created international TV hit known as Degrassi.
For the uninitiated, Degrassi is a television franchise that dates back thirty years. For the last decade, it has become an international sensation with Degrassi: The Next Generation, which airs on Canada’s MuchMusic and in the United States on TeenNick (formerly The N). This year, Degrassi ran an unprecedented 24 episodes on a near-nightly format during the summer months, and the show is set to return with even more new episodes in early October. This latest incarnation of the show — which is now in its tenth season — also represented a bit of a creative resurgence for the show, complete with new characters, which has proven quite popular among the show’s many fans.
In a world where teen dramas like Gossip Girl might get all of the headlines, it seems the true best teen drama can be found up North.
In this exclusive interview with KSiteTV, Stephen Stohn talks about how he became involved with Degrassi, reveals a bit about how The Next Generation came to be, and even drops some hints about the upcoming second half of Season 10, which premieres on Friday, October 8. Enjoy the interview! Questions are in bold; answers are not.
My wife – and she was not my wife at the time – Linda Schuyler was a school teacher. For eight years, she taught Junior High. And in class one day, she showed a 16 millimeter film, and it was a very short, dramatic story, with the theme of alcoholism. She showed it to the class, and at the end of it, there was a great discussion about the issue. After the class was over, one of the kids came up and started talking about it very animatedly, and actually went from discussing it from the third person into the first person. Linda realized “here’s somebody that actually has a problem, and probably for the first time is actually being able to talk about alcoholism in their home,” and she realized what a powerful tool this was, to provoke discussion. So she went to try and find some other films like this, and she couldn’t find any. She felt “we’ve got to do something about this,” and decided “okay, well, I guess I’ll make my own.” She went to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and said “well I’ve got some ideas about doing things” and they sort of patted on the head and told her to come back when she had something more substantive.. Meanwhile, the librarian of the school, who was a very close friend of hers named Bruce Mackey, ordered all of the books he could get that had the word film or cinema in the title – so she could learn how to make films. He came in one day, and said “boy, have I blown it. This is a book, it’s called Ida Makes A Movie, but it’s not about how to make movies – it’s about this little girl who decides to make a movie!” And Linda said, “well, you’ve got it, so let me read it,” and she read it. She was charmed by the story, and thought “this is a story I want to tell.” Meanwhile, she found that the Board of Education had some film equipment that nobody was using, and she got together a little bit of money from here or there, so she thought “you know, I could actually do a little 20 minute film.”
She had heard of me through a friend who said “you know, if you need a lawyer, why don’t you call this young Stephen Stohn.” I had just gotten out of law school, but before going to law school, I had been executive producer of two low-budget feature films (“Me” and The Clown Murders”) and I had some songs that were on the charts, so I had a little bit of a name in the entertainment world. She came to me, and I actually gave some of the best advice that I’ve ever given in my life – as a very young lawyer, fresh out of the bar. I said “Linda, this has an out-of-print book, and if you get a lawyer involved in this, the other side will get a lawyer, and then there’ll be legal fees, and then the lawyers will complicate things, and the price will go up, and you may never get a deal. Here’s what you should do. I’m not going to charge you for this, but here’s a form that would be a complete assignment of all audiovisual rights of whatsoever nature and kind in the universe. Here’s how you fill it out. Just put in your name, put in the title of the book, go down to New York, meet with the publisher, offer them $200. This is a flat buyout. They may ask for $1000, in which case settle on $500.” Well, she took the advice, and she went down to New York and she offered the $200, and they actually accepted it!
I didn’t hear from her again for a couple of years, but what happened was, she made Ida Makes A Movie, took it to CBC, and CBC said, “Oh. Now we understand what you were thinking of doing. This is actually a charming little thing. I’ll tell you what. We’ll give you a little bit of money. Why don’t you make another couple?” So she made some others, with titles like Cookie Goes to the Hospital, Irene Moves In and Noel Buys a Suit. And then she went back, and they said “we like this, and let’s make a few more.” Very rapidly she made all of these little films, and they were all about kids.
When did you become involved in the production side of things?
Many years earlier, before I went to law school, I had a seminal moment. We should all have these moments in our lives. My career path was set at 4:30 p.m. on September 22, 1964. That was the very first rock concert I ever attended, and it was at this big barn of a building called Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, where the Toronto Maple Leafs play. I had never been to a rock concert, and I didn’t know what to expect, but we went with some friends, and in those days, there wasn’t all of the huge production and back line. It was basically just some drums and some Marshall amps. So what they used to do, they’d have a number of opening acts. There were a lot of local bands, like Little Caesar and the Consoles would go up, play three songs, take their equipment off, and five minutes later, another local group would come up and play three songs. They’d do this for five or six sets. Then a group called Sounds Incorporated came up. They were a more international act who had a hit that I don’t even remember. They did their three songs, but then they left their equipment up. Everybody thought, “Okay, they’re an international act, their equipment is still up there so so they’ll probably come back and do another three songs.” But they weren’t doing three more songs. More minutes went by. Nothing was happening. The house lights were on half level. People started chanting, and wondering what’s going on. All of a sudden, every light in the building turned off. It was completely black. And a single spotlight shone on the Sounds Incorporated drum kit, and a roadie raced up, ripped off the front of the drum kit, and now it said… The Beatles. The four lads came rushing out. The first song was “She Was Just Seventeen.” For the next probably not even 90 minutes, because they had shorter set in those days, the Beatles performed. You could not hear a thing. It was massive screaming the entire time, and it was hard not to get completely caught up. I knew at that moment I was going to be a rock star, or if I wasn’t a rock star, I was going to be Ed Sullivan, i.e. a promoter of some sort, or somehow I was going to be involved in the entertainment world, and trying to reach out and touching people’s lives in exactly the same way.
So when I went to university, I became editor of the newspaper. With my friend Christopher Ward, we formed the radio station at the university — this was a relatively young university that was forming. I was in a rock band. I wrote songs. And getting out of university, Christopher got signed to a recording contract. We actually had a couple of albums. I was writing songs with him, so we actually had songs on the charts. And meanwhile, two other friends and I, for almost no money, we did two very low-budget feature films. One was called “Me,” and it was based on a stage play of the same name, and it really was not a success. The second one was a little bit more of a success, but it starred John Candy. It was one of John’s very first films; in fact, it may have been the first film that John ever did. It was a horror film called The Clown Murders, and it wasn’t meant to be a comedy, but it actually turned out to be unintentionally funny. So we then went forward and decided, “Let’s do a much bigger feature film,” and we worked and we worked, and we raised some development money, and we almost got to the stage of putting it on. We had — and these were big names in those days — we had, first of all Paramount Pictures had agreed to distribute. We had James Coburn who had agreed to play the lead. We had a director called Ken Hughes, who had just done Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it all fell through about six weeks before filming, and we were absolutely devastated. We were young kids – early twenties – and this whole thing had fallen through. We think we’re the cat’s meow, we’re doing this big feature film. In Canada, nothing like this had been done before, and it all fell through. Our lawyer came to me and said “Stephen, you’ve got to go to law school. Everything you’ve been doing. You’ve been helping to raise money, you’ve been helping me draft contracts; doing all of this negotiating to help cut down on legal bills. You’d be a really good lawyer.” And I said to him, “I can’t imagine going back to law school.” But I didn’t have anything better to do! He kept saying to me “go,” and I kept saying “no, no, no.” But he said “Here’s five bucks” — which in those days could actually buy something — “Take a cab up to the law school.” I said, “Okay. Here’s the deal. I’m going to one law school. The University of Toronto. If they accept me, okay. But if they don’t, then that’s it. I’m never going to law school.” And of course they accepted me, so I ended up in law school.
So then how did you become involved in the production side of Degrassi?
Before Degrassi, I had already been in the production arena. Then I went to law school, and then I ran into Linda. For a number of years, I was a partner in one of the largest law firms in Canada, and was acting as the lawyer for Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. At a certain point, in 1996, Linda was wanting to produce a new series, but it involved buying a building and creating a studio, which was such a mammoth undertaking. She talked me into leaving the law, and coming to help her buy the building. By that time we were husband and wife. So I said yes, but then we said, “That’s an awful lot of risk. Let’s keep a law firm going,” so right now there is a nine-person law firm in Canada, called Stohn Hay Cafazzo Dembroski Richmond, and I’m the Stohn in it, and that carries on, but since 1996, I’ve done legal work for Epitome, and I’ve been involved as an executive producer of everything Epitome has done. So really, I started in production, and at this stage I’m back in production.
Was there ever a hesitation to bring back Degrassi for a new generation?
I wasn’t hesitant. Linda and her partner Kit Hood had created the original Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High, and I was just the lawyer on those productions. But I was heavily involved in the strategizing, helping to raise funding and going down to PBS and doing all of that.
Kit and Linda split up, and it was not the most amicable of splits. Each owned the rights to Degrassi 50/50. The last episode of Degrassi was actually a Movie of the Week called School’s Out in 1991, but after that, the two of them separated. They were just not on great terms, and so the thought of actually doing anything further with Degrassi was the last thing from either of their minds. First of all, they didn’t want to go forward. It seems now, when you talk about the numbers we’re doing in terms of number of episodes. They had done 65 episodes, and thought there were no more stories left to tell. [laughs] (Now we’re up to 236 episodes of the Next Generation alone.) So we really thought, “No, there just will not be more Degrassi.” I kept saying, though, at the very least we should do a reunion special, but weren’t sure how we would get the rights. Kit and Linda just really weren’t speaking all that much.
Two things happened. First off, we were working on a teen soap opera which we called at the time “Ready, Willing, and Wired.” “Wired” referred to the early days of the Internet. We realized it was sort of like Degrassi, except it was modernized to include mobile phones and the Internet. So that was in the works. It was a soap because we’d actually been producing an actual soap opera called Riverdale, which is what we bought the studio to produce in 1996. It was sort of like Coronation Street. Riverdale was Canada’s Coronation Street, and unfortunately it went for only three years, but it was actually a great show. We’re thankful it didn’t go further; if it had, we wouldn’t be doing Degrassi as we are.
So we were working on this, in effect, a spin-off of that, called Ready, Willing, and Wired, and the other thing was that Degrassi was getting terrific ratings in reruns, so I kept saying, “Couldn’t we do a reunion special?” So we thought we’d put in an offer to Kit. He probably wouldn’t accept it, but then we would wait another year, and if there’s some money on the table, maybe one day he’ll say yes. It took over three years, and eventually one day he did say yes. So all of the sudden we had bought the rights back. There are ongoing royalties to Kit, so that every half hour we produce he’d get a royalty, but we all of a sudden had the rights to do this Degrassi reunion special, and if that worked to do more.
I was always a super Star Trek fan, so I just said, “Oh. Well we’ll call it Degrassi: The Next Generation.” And everybody said: “that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Do not call it that.” But, as it so often happens with these things, it became Degrassi: the Next Generation. That was launched in 2001. This year, we decided to drop the phrase “The Next Generation” because we realized that everybody in Season 10, with the exception of Mr. Simpson, was not around back in 2001 when we launched the next generation. So it truly was “the next, next generation,” which sounded a bit cumbersome. Everybody just calls it Degrassi anyway.
1 Comment
Great Interview. Very interesting!!