Two other people are at least as crucial to the success of Coopers’ Camera as Jason Jones and Samantha Bee: Mike Beaver, who co-wrote the film and co-stars as the drunk, violence-prone Uncle Nick, and Warren Sonoda, the film’s director.
It’s still all in the family, though. Beaver and Sonoda have known Jones forever – all the way back to their days at Ryerson and the formation of Jones and Beaver’s sketch comedy troupe, the Bobroom.
“We went to high school together in Hamilton,” recalls Sonoda, “and I would be the stage manager and he would act in plays. Jason and Mike were at Ryerson Theatre, that’s how they met.”
“Jason and I weren’t really friends for the first year,” says Beaver in a phone conversation from Los Angeles.
“We really just kinda became friends when we were forced to work together in a scene, and then we realized there was a connection. But we had to be paired up beforehand otherwise, I wasn’t gonna hang out with him in his tap shoes and tights. I just wasn’t into dance the way he was.”
After several successful collaborations, Jones and Beaver put the Bobroom together with Rob Tinkler, Stacey DePass and Jennifer Baxter. (Baxter, now Mrs. Beaver, also stars in Coopers’ Camera Tinkler turns up as a police officer.)
Meanwhile, Bee – who’d gone to the University of Ottawa before coming back to Toronto – was founding the Atomic Fireballs with Fiona Carver, Sarah Carver and Allana Harkin.
Jones and Beaver perfected their collaborative style while the Bobroom headlined weekly shows at the Rivoli’s ALTdotCOMedy Lounge.
“It forced us to write together on a regular basis. And then, when we got our series with CTV, we wrote, like, over a hundred sketches in the course of three weeks. But then we found out that CTV just wanted to do an in-studio show, and we’d written 75 field shoots – all single-camera stuff.”
Coopers’ Camera gives Jones and Beaver plenty of single-camera stuff.
“We shot it in 11 days, and we had to base it around Jason and Sam’s hiatus from The Daily Show,” Sonoda says.
“And this is not just because I have a microphone on me now, but it was the best shoot I’ve ever had in my career. Being able to make movies with your friends is the greatest thing.”
