Various excerpted Articles from Jam Showbiz website on the movie "Whitecoats"

The McKenzies will never die! Sunday, March 9, 2003 By STEVE TILLEY -- Edmonton Sun
Dave Thomas is in Edmonton shooting the movie Whitecoats, a hospital comedy starring a cast of relatively unknown young talents backed up by some familiar Canuck-bred faces, including Dan Aykroyd, Dave Foley, Matt Frewer, Maury Chaykin and Saul Rubinek. In addition to writing and starring in Whitecoats, Thomas is behind the camera, directing his first feature film since 1989's forgettable John Travolta comedy The Experts. And he's having the time of his life.

"I've been in stuff that's gone bad and stuff that's gone well," he understated. "This has gone way better than I ever dreamt it could have. It's been the most fun creatively for me that I've had in a decade."

A production of Edmonton's Minds Eye Entertainment, Whitecoats follows six young doctors in their third year of residency at the fictional St. Albert's Hospital, where they spend their time avoiding doctors, pursuing romantic liaisons and vomiting on cadavers.

Thomas is adamant that people aren't going to come out of Whitecoats remembering him or Aykroyd or Foley, but rather the film's young cast: Peter Oldring, Pat Kelly, Christine Chatelain, Viv Leacock, Jane McLean, Carly Pope and Ingrid Kavelaars.

"These are the stars of the movie, not us," Thomas said. "This is their movie. When this is cut together, you won't be going, 'Oh, Dave is great' or 'Danny is great.' You'll be going, 'These kids are amazing!' "

But while the premise of a bunch of medical interns involved in wacky shenanigans in a teaching hospital might sound strangely familiar, Thomas says Whitecoats is not Scrubs - The Movie.

"I can honestly say I don't think there's one single joke in my show that's been on their show," Thomas said of the hit NBC comedy. "I went further than they can for taste. Way further. It's like blood and gore and guts and comedy all together."

That includes an intern barfing in a cadaver's open chest cavity, more risque sexual humour and at least one patient in the emergency room with an unlikely object stuck in a place where the sun don't shine.

Medical mayhem By STEVE TILLEY -- Edmonton Sun
Surgeons shouting orders. Nurses scrambling for instruments. Interns frozen in fear. It's been 10 years since an operating room at the abandoned Charles Camsell hospital has seen this kind of frenzied activity.

Unfortunately, on this day things don't appear to be going very well at all.

"I've got a woman who's crashing here and a guy who died in the hall before I could get him on the table!" a doctor shouts to a group of interns who have just rushed into the operating theatre. "I need some help here!"

A minute later, someone points out that the patient is, in fact, a man.

Dave Thomas, decked from head to toe in surgical scrubs, looks down at the prosthetic human torso in front of him, its chest carved open. "Did I say woman?" he asks the cast and crew crowded around the operating table. "Well, she's got the flattest chest I've ever seen."

Welcome to a typical day on the set of Whitecoats, the $4.5-million feature film in its final month of shooting in Edmonton. The west-end's Charles Camsell hospital, closed for roughly a decade, is serving as set, production offices and basically everything else for the comedy, produced by Edmonton's Minds Eye Productions.

SCTV icon Thomas is directing, writing and starring in the flick as chief of medicine at the fictional St. Albert's Hospital, a teaching facility where a cadre of young interns are in their make-or-break third year.

Some of the other high-profile talent on board includes Dave Foley as a hard-headed cardiac surgeon, Dan Aykroyd as the hospital administrator and Saul Rubinek as a successful doctor who wants his med student son (Peter Oldring) to follow in his footsteps.

But it's Whitecoats' cast of young and relatively unknown actresses and actors that had the set crackling with unbridled energy. While shooting an, um, going-at-it scene might require bravery, nobody on the Whitecoats set has more guts than Dan Rebert. Rebert is the Hollywood-based special-effects expert hired to provide fake blood, prosthetic limbs and internal organs. Lots and lots of organs.

Rebert, the primary guts and corpses guy on HBO's acclaimed series Six Feet Under, also created the animatronic frogs that rained down on Julianne Moore in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. Though there aren't any frogs in Whitecoats, there's an awful lot of heart. Three of them, at least. Maybe more. The abandoned hospital might be a symbol of Alberta's crumbling health-care system, but producer Josh Miller said it's a unique selling point for Edmonton's TV and film business. Whether the provincial government will allow the Camsell to stay standing as a film set remains to be seen. But shooting in an empty hospital does have other benefits, like providing enough indoor heated space to house everything from the craft service people to the actors' dressing rooms, which are located in old patient rooms on the fourth floor.

"We chose that floor because they're all carpeted on that floor, and not any other floor," Miller said. "We couldn't figure it out, and then we found out why: It's the old psych ward. So we've got the actors' dressing rooms in the psych ward."