Michael McKean & Annette O’Toole

Michael McKean & Annette O’Toole
Their Funny Valentine

Actor/writer/songwriter Michael McKean (This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show) recalls the moment that he and his wife, actress Annette O’Toole (currently starring in "Smallville"), successfully collaborated on writing a song together. "Annette and I were driving to Vancouver and somewhere between Portland and Seattle, she turned to me and said I have this tune running through my head and I’m not sure what it is."

“It was just a little melody and I kept thinking that I had heard it somewhere,” says O’Toole.

“But she sang it for me and we decided it was new,” says McKean. “In order to remember the tune rhythmically until we could get to a piece of paper, we just added these nonsense words.” That song became “Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon,” one of the hilarious songs featured in film director Chistopher Guest’s folk-music mockumentary, A Mighty Wind, last year. Guest liked their collaboration so much he asked the couple to come up with another tune for the characters Mitch and Mickey to sing as their signature song in the film. His only request was that it sound like a folk hit from the ‘60s.

“We decided to take it one step further,” says McKean. “It was our idea to come up with a song that sounded like it could conceivably be a traditional song, something written by Stephen Foster or one of his imitators.”

The song that McKean and O’Toole wrote was “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” a genuinely tender love song. Although director Guest thought the tune was a little too straight for a film that was all about sending up the saccharine side of the 60’s folk music movement, his wife Jamie Lee Curtis urged him to accept it as Mitch and Mickey’s song.

The song works perfectly in the film, most poignantly in the scene where the reunited lovers Mitch and Mickey, played by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, sing the song onstage at New York City’s Town Hall in front of a large audience.

Says McKean, “I think the scene is also greatly helped by Eugene’s performance which, while it is very funny, is also very moving.” Incidentally, McKean co-wrote the title song, "A Mighty Wind," with Levy and Christopher Guest and won a Grammy this year for Best Song written for a Motion Picture.

“A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" not only succeeded in the scene for which it was written, it has now become a success for McKean and O’Toole as a songwriting team. McKean and O’Toole were nominated for an Oscar for “Kiss” and they now are in the process of writing more material for a movie musical.

“We really love what we’ve done so far,” Says McKean. “We have some characters we’re already in love with. And others we hate.”

Says O’Toole, “It’s fun because we’re writing the script as we go as well. So the songs are a part of the story.”

The couple say they have worked out a perfect method for fruitful further collaboration. “I’m the typist,” says O’Toole. “He paces.”

BY ERIK PHILBROOK