Martin Short And The Accidental Time Capsule That Became A Documentary

Some of the most valuable footage in entertainment history was never meant to be footage at all. It was a teenager's habit that happened to follow him into a rehearsal room in Toronto in 1972 — and more than fifty years later, that habit is the reason a documentary called You Had to Be There exists at all.

Martin Short sat down with Good Morning America, on ABC News, this week to talk about the film, timed alongside the arrival of Only Murders in the Building's sixth season, and the conversation ended up doing something rarer than most press-tour stops: it traced a straight line from a scrappy regional production of Godspell to the sitcom writers' rooms and sketch shows that would go on to define American comedy for the next five decades.

The documentary centers on the 1972 Toronto staging of Godspell, a production Short landed alongside a cast that included Eugene Levy, Victor Garber and Gilda Radner, among others who would go on to shape SCTV, Saturday Night Live and the broader ecosystem Lorne Michaels eventually built. At the time, Short says, none of them had any sense of what they were part of — it was simply the first job for nearly everyone involved, chosen out of roughly 500 hopefuls auditioning for ten spots. What the documentary captures, decades later, is how much of the DNA of that era's Canadian comedy boom traces back to that single room.

Short and Levy were roommates during the run, and their apartment became a weekly gathering spot for a circle of young performers who had no way of knowing how significant they'd eventually become. Short recalls Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O'Hara and Bill Murray among the regulars, all in their early twenties, all essentially unknown. One of the more telling details he shares involves Paul Shaffer, the first of the group to head to New York for a Broadway gig, and a phone call Short and Radner — a couple at the time — made asking what New York actors were actually like. Shaffer's reassurance that the Toronto group was every bit as talented was met, Short admits, with polite disbelief. In hindsight, he notes, Shaffer wasn't exaggerating at all.

What makes the documentary possible in the first place is a habit Short had cultivated since childhood: recording everything, whether anyone thought it mattered or not. During the Godspell rehearsals, with no one else documenting the process, Short strung microphones along the set and captured audio that now threads through the entire film. He's candid that the recording wasn't exactly authorized — but the instinct, formed years before anyone had reason to expect he'd become one of the most enduring comedic performers of his generation, ended up preserving something no one else thought to save. A brief clip from those sessions, shown to the surviving cast for the first time by filmmaker Nick Davis, becomes one of the documentary's most affecting moments — a group of now-legendary performers seeing themselves, decades younger and entirely unaware of what was ahead, for the first time.

Short also traced the more unlikely origin of his own ambitions, growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, watching American television bleed across the border from Buffalo. Show business, as he describes it, felt as remote and unreachable as another planet — something to watch, not something to join. Rather than dreaming specifically of acting, young Short set his sights on medicine, an ambition he now attributes less to any real interest in the profession and more to his admiration for Richard Chamberlain's turn as a telegenic young doctor. It's a detail that captures something true about Short's sensibility as a performer: an instinct for finding the comedy inside sincerity, even when describing his own younger self.

The conversation closed on more current ground, with Short teasing the sixth season of Only Murders in the Building, which relocates the mystery-comedy to London for a run he's calling, only half-jokingly, "Only Murders in London." Alongside longtime collaborators Steve Martin and Selena Gomez, the new season adds a formidable roster of British talent, including Olivia Colman, Martin Freeman, David Tennant and Jennifer Saunders.

Taken together, the two projects on Short's plate this season make for an unusually neat portrait of a career built on instinct — the instinct to keep recording, to keep showing up, and to keep finding the people worth doing both alongside. You Had to Be There is now playing in theaters, and the sixth season of Only Murders in the Building premieres December 8th on Hulu.