Tim Kazurinsky began his successful career in show business doing improvisational comedy at Second City in Chicago in 1978. Three years later he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live, where his wide range of celebrity impersonations included Franklin Roosevelt, Ozzy Osbourne, and Billie Jean King. Since then, he has appeared in a variety of films (notably, several of the Police Academy comedies); he has written and co-written successful screenplays; and has continued to work in television and live theater.
I interviewed Kazurinsky during the filming of the new film Scrooge & Marley, a contemporary retelling of the classic Dicken’s tale, A Christmas Carol, “with a gay twist,” that will premiere during this year’s holiday season. At the start, Tim Kazurinsky wanted to clarify his role in Scrooge & Marley: “I am not playing Marley, who is a young, handsome, good looking guy. I am playing Marley’s Ghost,” he says. “So this poor kid has to look at me and go ‘Yeeeew, that’s what I’m going to look like when I’m old and dead?'”
Kazurinsky was transformed “from this good-looking guy into the horrible, ugly Marley’s Ghost by [makeup artist] Lora Michael and her wonderful crew. They put about an hour’s worth of work into making me look like the walking dead. I literally have mold on my face and flesh hanging from my chin,” he said.
Kazurinsky didn’t feel that his makeup sessions were a chore, however. Quite the opposite. He likened the experience to “getting a backrub or a massage. This is like somebody massaging your face for an hour. I invariably fall asleep in the chair and it’s a wonderful feeling. Then I’ve got to wake up and work.”
Other aspects of his Ghost costume did prove a bit of an obstacle. “My first day of shooting, there really weren’t quite enough chains for Marley’s Ghost.” They were shooting in a private home, and the owner, Dick Uyvari, said he thought he had some in the basement. “He went down and brought up the biggest, heaviest, ugliest rusted chains you’ve ever seen in your life. And so these were then draped on me. I’m like, ‘oh, these look great, really terrific looking chains, mixed in with all the other chains’. But in retrospect, they weighed about a hundred pounds and I had them on me for about eight hours. By the end of the day, I think I was about three inches shorter, from lugging these chains around for the whole day.” He chuckled. “And I get to do it again tomorrow!”
Kazurinsky strikes me as a good-natured man who enjoys what he’s doing, who tries to see the best in, and get the most fun from, every situation. The actor made time to appear in Scrooge & Marley despite an already busy schedule. “Right now I’m doing Hairspray out at Drury Lane in Oakbrook [he’s now in the Odd Couple in Chicago]. I’m having a great time, but I’m doing eight shows a week, and it’s interfering with my film career, with Scrooge & Marley, because I’m not getting as much time on set as I would like. I’m also not getting as much sleep as I would like. But it’s okay, because it’s a fun role, and whatever it takes, I get to do it.”
Kazurinsky, who lives in Evanston with his wife and two children, says that what drew him to the project was the script, “and more importantly, Richard Knight, who wrote the script with Ellen Stoneking. Rich is an old pal, and we have mutual friends, and we’ve worked together and done some crazy cabaret things. So when he asked me to get involved, I went, ‘Well, let’s read it first … ‘ and yeah, I loved the script, so I jumped onboard. And even though I was kind of too busy to do it, I’m doing it anyway, and I’m really glad I’m doing it. You make the time for the good jobs, and I’m having a blast. And it’s a wonderful crew and cast. Everybody’s pulling together. You’d think you were on a Spielberg movie,” he mused.
He also clearly thinks this is a project with a purpose. “A Christmas Carol is a timeless tale, and the message is really important and also timeless, much as Shakespeare’s plays are done,” Kazurinsky observed. “I just saw Timon of Athens, which was set in the now, and also I just did Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was set in the 1920s, and Puck was kind of a Freudian character. These stories and messages get transferred from generation to generation because you can’t hear this message often enough. So in this version, which is a current version, the gay community, this message is important to all of us—it translates into so many different arenas. It works for us, too, it works for everybody.”
Kazurinsky was born in the U.S. but grew up in Australia, and lived there until he was sixteen. “I was born in 1950, and in 1966 I ran away to America, to a small conservative town, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I’d grown up watching Leave It to Beaver and the Donna Reed Show. That was not the America that I found when I got here. It was very racially segregated, sexually segregated—that was 1966. It blows my mind, it astonishes me, that there’s an African-American in the White House. I never thought I’d live to see that. The changes that have occurred in this country in the time that I’ve been here—I don’t know that young people can grasp it or appreciate it, or have any idea what it was like back then for black people, gay people, and women.”
Coincidentally, in 1972, six years after he arrived back in the U.S., Kazurinsky and co-star Bruce Vilanch, who plays Fezziwig in the film, lived in the same building in Chicago at the corner of North and Wells in Old Town. “Now there’s a big Starbucks there. Back then it was Reichstein’s Delicatessen, and Bruce and I both lived above there, in different apartments.” On the Scrooge & Marley set, Kazurinsky reminded Vilanch that they were once neighbors, “before he went off to Hollywood and I went off to New York.”
Deeply impressed by the social changes that have occurred in America in recent decades, Kazurinsky says he believes that the push for an open, diverse society has decisively won. “It’s pretty much over. We are a biracial [society], we are aware, everybody has a gay friend—everybody has a gay family member. It’s over. I really think that I would love to live another fifty years to see how it flowers and how terrific things are going to be, because I think the worst is behind us.”
His hopes for Scrooge & Marley, the film, are also high. “I hope that this film is a smashing success and that it reaches not just the gay audience but a whole wider swath. That’s the great thing about film: it has the opportunity to go beyond its region. I’m hoping that it’s a crossover hit as well as a hit with the gay community—which I know it’s going to be—and also travel around the world, to England, to Spain, and be an international hit.”