Now Adjusting Rabbit Ears

Eugene Levy was surprised when it seemed he had to audition for the part of Gil Bender, the children’s television show producer he plays on the new Fox comedy “Greg the Bunny.”

On “SCTV,” the legendary Canadian sketch comedy series that ran in syndication and on NBC from 1977 to 1983, Levy had played characters ranging from Bobby Bittman, the bombastic stand-up comic, to Earl Camembert, the slightly befuddled local news anchor in the town of Melonville. With writer-performer Christopher Guest, he had collaborated on two quintessential mock documentaries, “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show.”

“I thought, well, listen, if I have to read for this, I may as well pack it in,” Levy said recently, over breakfast in Brentwood.

It didn’t help that he’d gone to the “Greg the Bunny” meeting in pain, having just been released from the hospital for treatment of a herniated disc. Levy ultimately didn’t have to read for the part, but he did improvise bits of Bender, whom he sees as a former big-shot producer from the ‘70s, “when comedy was loud,” now relegated to working on a kids show.

“The ideal thing would be to have the show hit reasonably well, so that Fox kind of says they like the show, and everybody takes a deep breath and relaxes, and allows the show to keep creeping into an area that’s more daring,” he said.

Levy’s daring happens in fits and starts--movie and TV roles that don’t necessarily exploit his gifts, interspersed with the kind of work the 55-year-old writer-performer was doing back in the Toronto and Edmonton days on “SCTV.”

His family home is in Toronto, but Levy also has a place in L.A., where he is currently entrenched in guitar lessons--preparation for his next movie project with Guest, called “A Mighty Wind.”

The film, which is scheduled to begin shooting in May, will root around in the earnest subculture of aging folk musicians, in the same way “Guffman” spoofed local theater and “Best in Show” lampooned the Westminster Dog Show.

In this one, a talent manager’s death prompts his acts to hold a reunion/tribute concert (the title is based on a folk anthem written for the movie). Already, it is clear, Levy and Guest are having fun coming up with their own kind of folk oral history.

“You look at the groups and you say, ‘OK, now how did this group form?’” Levy said of the back stories he and Guest are inventing. “These guys played with this other group, they picked up these two guys who used to be known as the Troubadours, and then they picked up another guy out there--you know, Ramblin’ Sandy Pitnick--and they hooked up and formed this group, and then they joined this group, and together they formed the Main Street Singers.”

The sincerity with which folk musicians approach their craft became a memorable joke in the movie “Animal House,” where John Belushi happens upon a folk singer strumming a heartfelt tune on the stairs of his frat house. Belushi listens for a few beats, then grabs the guy’s guitar and smashes it against the wall.

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Working on Third Film With Christopher Guest

“What he hit on in ‘Animal House’ is kind of what we’re trying to tap into, which is there’s kind of a pomposity and a little bit of an arrogance about folk music and folk artists, some of them,” Levy said. “You find there’s not a lot of people with a great sense of humor about themselves and about their work. They’re just too intense, they’re trying to get out the message.”

As with the two previous films, character-building is much more essential to what the movie becomes than scripted dialogue.

“Most of the work that we do is put into character and character backgrounds that usually don’t end up in the final thing,” Levy said.

Though this is Levy’s third film with Guest, the two have not been working together all that long. According to Levy, Guest called him in Toronto, out of the blue, in 1995, saying he wanted to collaborate on a film idea--what was to become “Guffman.” The two weren’t friends; in fact, Levy said, they’d only worked together previously on a 1980s Billy Crystal special, “Don’t Get Me Started.”

“He’s not the easiest guy to get to know,” Levy said of Guest. “He’s kind of standoffish, or he appeared to me to be a little standoffish and not overly warm. When you come to know the man, you know that nothing has changed--no, this is just his way. But he’s a very warm, funny person.”

What has changed, Levy said, is the eagerness with which Castle Rock Entertainment, the studio behind their films, has approached their work. For “Guffman”--released in 1996 and made on a budget of $4 million--he and Guest had to pitch the idea first, write a treatment, rewrite a treatment and then produce a script. The film was a cult success and opened the market a bit for “Best in Show,” which received a wider release.

On their latest project, Levy said, producers didn’t much hesitate. “They heard the idea and said, ‘When do you want to shoot it?’”