Every year, it seems, when the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television hands out its Golden Reel Award for the domestic film with the year’s biggest box office, critics dismissively bring up the fact that the raunchy teen comedy Porky’s is this country’s all-time box-office champ. (It hauled in a staggering US$111 million at the North American till, according to Variety.) And Don Carmody, who produced with writer/director Bob Clark, says he is sick of all the carping.

Artistic appraisals aside, many do not even consider this film to be Canadian, shot as it was in south Florida, and telling a story about the misadventures of randy American high school students in 1954, with a cast headed up by Dan Monahan and Mark Herrier.

But Carmody says that he in fact worked hard to make the film ‘Canadian,’ which he had to do to appease executive producer Harold Greenberg, former head of Astral Bellevue Pathé (today Astral Media), who insisted that his company’s contribution to the film’s $4-million budget come under the Capital Cost Allowance. (Melvin Simon Productions from the U.S. and distributor 20th Century Fox were the other funding partners.)

‘The Teamsters didn’t know what to make of me,’ Carmody recalls. ‘I said, ‘Okay, I’ll sign your contract, but your drivers have to be Canadians.’ So I was getting all these ‘Well, this one – his mother is Canadian, but he was born in Miami,’ and I went, ‘Nope.’ So we actually got the unions to cooperate, and virtually the entire crew was Canadian.’

Carmody says that when Clark first explained the concept of the film to him, he thought there was no way they could make it.

‘Nobody had ever done a film quite like Porky’s back then,’ Clark says on the phone from L.A. ‘No one had explored the sexual emergence of 15- and 16-year-old boys and told the truth about it.’

Carmody soon came around. ‘I read the script and [said], ‘This is so unique,’ and that’s what’s always excited me – when I get a script like that and at first I’m appalled, and then I go, ‘No, this is something you’ve never seen,” he says.

Once Carmody was onside, he devoted his legendary zeal to making the film happen.

‘He did the actual physical work of scouting out the locations and pulling together all of the details,’ Clark says. ‘Don did a superb job of putting together a very complex film. His attitude as a producer was, ‘We have a budget and we’re not going to go over that budget.”

Once the film was done, it hardly caught on right away. Carmody recalls that Fox was somewhat skeptical about the product, but agreed to test market the film on screens in Columbia, SC, and Colorado Springs, CO. Carmody and Clark flew out to babysit the Colorado screening.

‘It was so depressing. There was no support. The ad in the paper just said ‘Porky’s’ – just print, no illustration, no nothing,’ the producer says.

Nobody showed up for the first screening, with two or three spectators sitting through the next one.

‘The theater owner said, ‘Don’t you worry, boys. You’ve got a good movie. It’s very funny,” Carmody says. That night saw all seats in the house vacant again. Dejected, they called Melvin Simon’s rep at the Columbia previews. He reported a similarly deserted audience, ”But the theater owner said that he really liked the movie and thinks it’s going to do well.”

Sure enough, for the matinees the next day, about 100 people showed up and were receptive. Carmody says the film went on to play in the two U.S. cities for more than a year.

‘It was huge. And that convinced Fox to release the movie. They were thinking of not releasing it,’ he says.

No doubt they are happy they did. And who can forget the shower scene?