by Breuer, Jim
Chapter 15
Half Baked, Dave Chappelle, and Monk the Pooping Dog
In May of 1996, I was at a wrap party for my first season on SNL. It was at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center, and it was a moment when the cast really bonded and let loose. Looking back, it seems like a time when we all got along the best; maybe that was because we were all done for the season.
On this particular night, I was in a circle of drunken folks like Will Ferrell, Mark McKinney, and Tracy Morgan. I was psyched because I was coming back to the show next season, and I was happy to be among talented people who had now become my friends. I looked over and saw Dave Chappelle had shown up and that made me even happier.
Dave and I hadn’t spent much time together since I got shit-canned from Buddies. But we quickly reconnected at the wrap party. I think he still felt kind of shitty about how the whole Buddies thing went down, because I remember him saying, “Don’t worry, Breu Dog, one day we’ll get them back, on the big screen. We’ll do a movie together. That’ll show ’em.”
Later that summer, I was performing at Carolines in New York and Dave showed up in the greenroom after my set with a guy named Neal Brennan. Neal was the door guy when I used to play the Boston Comedy Club. He was the kid handing out flyers trying to get people into the club. He was a young guy, and he’d always wheeze, “Breuer, I got this joke for you,” or “Breuer, listen to this, I got this add-on for ya.”
“I want you to be in this weed movie we wrote,” Dave said, pointing a thumb in Neal’s direction. “I want you to play my brother Brian.” He meant his real-life, happy-go-lucky stoner brother Brian. I was blown away. I had no clue that he and Neal had been collaborating.
“We’re gonna have some amazing cameos in it,” Dave added. “This thing is gonna blow up.”
I didn’t know if I believed him. Was he talking about some kind of straight-to-video spoof movie?
“When you say movie,” I asked, “do you mean like movie-in-actual-theaters-type movie?” I wanted clarification.
“Yeah, man,” he said in his drawn-out, almost disgusted manner, like how could I be doubting the potential success of this? “Movie like in-the-theaters movie! Universal Studios wants to do this shit!”
“Okay,” I said. That was all I needed to hear. “I’ll do it.” I hadn’t even seen the script.
What was weird is that I was out pitching movies at the time. And one of them was a weed movie. I thought the times called for a great, new, adventurous Cheech and Chong. Mine was the story of me and my best friend when we were eighteen years old and smoking a lot of grass.
Now a misconception about me is that I was a real weed head at the time. Sorry, but I just look high. I have my whole life. Now, I smoked a little, but nothing close to Brian, the character I was going to play. I was never a wake-and-bake guy, but I do admit that in my last season of Saturday Night Live I was smoking more than I had in the past. I guess it was my way of coping with the friction there.
I wound up talking to a producer in L.A. named Bob Simonds. He’d done all the Adam Sandler movies up to that point. “Do you know Dave Chappelle?” he asked. “’Cause he was in here two weeks ago pitching a weed movie. And his is complete, and I love it and we’re going with it, so you should talk to him about getting a role in it.”
Still, beyond Simonds’s confidence, I’d heard nothing about Universal Studios. But here was Dave, all excited, and his was the weed movie that had a shot. So I was glad he approached me because I wasn’t going to try to bogart my way into his film, pardon the pun.
After that conversation, my manager Leon, who also repped Dave, sent me the script. To this day, I’ve never laughed harder when reading a script. I couldn’t believe how well written it was. When people today tell me they like the movie, I explain that I improv-ed nothing. I only did line for line what was written, including the food-ordering scene and the killer speech. It was even Neal’s idea to give Brian a hook. He came up to me during shooting and suggested Brian punctuate things by saying, “Fully, man.” And all I did was perform it.
So I read the script and I didn’t hear from Dave for a while, and then I heard this rumor that Christian Slater was now up for the part promised to me. Something weird was going on. Well, the weird thing turned out to be that Dave was firing our mutual manager, Leon. Everything was getting scrambled, but I really wanted to be in this thing and I didn’t want to get bounced.
Then I personally called Dave and left a message. “Listen,” I said. “You came and asked me to be in your movie. I said yes. But it’s your movie. If you don’t want me in it, I have no problem with that. It’s all good, don’t worry about it.”
A couple of days later Bob Simonds called. “Do you like this role?” he asked.
“It’s the funniest script ever,” I said. “Of course.”
“The role is yours,” he said. And that was that. Drama over. Dave came through and held firm to his word and I was off to Toronto to shoot my first movie.
The funniest part of the whole Half Baked experience was that Dave brought his new dog along for the entire six-week shoot, a small Alaskan husky named Whitey. What a disaster. Dave could barely take care of himself, let alone a frisky, spiteful, undisciplined dog.
Now, I love Dave, but he is extremely forgetful. He didn’t and does not care about anything. He just doesn’t care. When we did the sitcom Buddies, if we had to be at a meeting or rehearsal, I would lie to him about what time it started, so he would get there even halfway on time. After a while I realized, okay, an hour’s not going to cut it, I have to make it an hour and a half. His whole attitude toward everything was: “Oh, man, don’t worry about it!” This is an awesome attitude for a friend to have but a really shitty one for a pet owner.
So you can see what I am getting at. Same thing on the set of Half Baked. No urgency about the movie. No pressure. No organization on his part. My theory is that the most artistic people are also the sloppiest. Or at least their pets are.
Case in point: I went to Toronto. Everyone in the cast was staying at this five-star hotel. It was beyond nuts. Marble floors. Soaring ceilings. Concierges everywhere. This was the place they put any star who was in town. Marilyn Manson and his creepy eyes were there. Norm MacDonald. Chris Farley. Everyone. So I walked into the lobby and there was Dave with Whitey, who was taking a shit right in the middle of it all. And Dave was just like, “My bad. My bad. I’ll get it.” But you know he really wasn’t going to get it, and the concierges were diving on the pile like it was a live grenade. “It’s okay, sir. It’s okay, sir. Our pleasure.”
I have no idea why Dave wanted to call this dog Whitey. I think it was partially simply because Dave wanted to be able to give something white commands. He took special glee in giving it orders:
“Whitey, sit down.”
“Whitey, roll over.”
“Whitey, play dead.”
But at some point early during the shoot, he changed the dog’s name to Monk, after the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. Dave’s dad was a huge jazz buff, so it must have been some sort of tribute to name an Alaskan husky after a famous jazz musician. Who knows?
When he wasn’t crapping in the lobby, Monk busied himself by trying to bite this young dreadlocked kid who drove us to the set every morning in a van. Dave would be riding, talking away to everyone, absentmindedly engaged in conversation, and the kid would be swerving and veering off the road and politely removing his bicep from Monk’s mouth. Dave would scold Monk, saying, “Bad dog! Bad dog!” But it didn’t do any good, and the kid didn’t want to complain about it. Because ultimately Dave was the whole reason all of this was happening. The whole reason we all had jobs. So the kid would grin and bear it, and then probably drive over to the ER to get stitches after he dropped us off.
Once Monk got to the set, he’d shit in Dave’s trailer. Rip it to pieces. Dave would try all different combinations to get this thing to chill out. He’d have PAs on the set walking him every fifteen minu
tes, feeding him, rubbing the thing behind the ears. Nothing helped. The dog had zero discipline.
So then Dave decided to leave Monk in his hotel room. Like I said earlier, Dave was disorganized. So he didn’t safeguard anything. Monk proceeded to eat all of his shoes, which were all nice, rare Nikes, like vintage Air Jordans. We’d go to the mall and Dave would routinely drop five hundred or six hundred dollars on shoes and clothes. And Monk had a buffet with all of that. And he would crap all over the room. It was both funny and sad that Dave would work his ass off all day on the movie only to come home to ruined clothes and crap piles all over his room.
Across the hall from Dave’s room was yet another famous person. A big, ginormous, beautiful old woman whom you might know as Florida Evans from the seventies sitcom Good Times. Esther Rolle was her real name, may she rest in peace.
One day I walked out of Dave’s room right as she was walking out of hers. To say she wore a pained look is putting it mildly. She looked at me like I had just burned down her house and dropkicked her birthday cake into rush-hour traffic. “Are you staying in that room?” Her voice, as you might recall, crackled like an old 78 record.
“No, ma’am,” I said. I just wanted to get back to my room. But that wasn’t going to happen.
“Well, it smells like shit in there!” she yelled. Clearly she’d been wanting to vent for a while. Her tone was disgusted; she didn’t care at all that it wasn’t my room. I was guilty by association. And it was painfully obvious to her that I was a moron for even having anything to do with this foul room.
“And that damn dog is always barking,” she said. “And I smell marijuana, ” she added in that saddened voice she used when J. J. Evans had let her down for the fourteen hundredth time. “What is going on in there? It is disgraceful. Who is staying in there?” I was surprised, to be honest, that she didn’t slap me.
I couldn’t say, “Why, it’s the fine young comic actor Dave Chappelle, Ms. Rolle.” She couldn’t have cared less. I told her I’d ask the manager about it, and as soon as I walked away from her I started laughing. Poor Dave. This dog had managed to gross out or bite nearly everyone it came in contact with. But Dave was blind to it. He loved Monk. Treated him and loved him like he was his own kid. He made excuses for the dog constantly.
Pretty soon, all the girls from the hotel and the bellmen were walking Monk. Babysitting Monk. Trying to keep him on his best behavior, but eventually it got to the point where too many people were complaining. I found this funny, but at the same time I tried to tell Dave he had to do something. You don’t wanna get sued by Florida Evans or someone else the dog annoyed. Dave was becoming stressed, too. It was like seeing a parent with an out-of-control kid who just didn’t know how to discipline him. The producers of Half Baked, Neal Brennan, the people who ran the hotel—everyone could see that Monk was a problem. People tried to help, or at least tried to cover up the destruction, but Monk was as rabid as you can get without having rabies. Dave might as well have brought along an orangutan.
One night I was looking out the peephole of Dave’s door, trying to make sure I could sneak past Florida Evans’s room without incurring her wrath. Dave was sitting on the bed; Monk was lying next to him, panting quietly, satisfied, having just mangled a baseball cap.
“I think they wanna kick me out,” Dave said. “I think I gotta get rid of Monk.”
“Is there someone back in New York who can watch him?”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll figure something out.”
And then Dave got an idea. “Jim, you’re gonna be proud of me,” he said, patting Monk’s head one day as we rode to the set in the van. “I’m sending this little guy to obedience school. Boot camp. You’re gonna see some changes.”
Monk went every day to obedience school for three or four weeks, and Dave was so proud of him. He would call me down to his room and show me all of the new moves and tricks Monk had learned. He’d say, “Monk, give me your paw.” And the dog would do it. “Monk, lay down.” And the dog would do it. No more shoes and socks got chewed up. And Dave’s stress level dropped considerably. I was impressed. And yet the smell of crap still seemed to linger. It was embedded in the room somehow, but that was no big deal and it would certainly fade. Dave was so happy. He knew there was goodness in the dog. “See,” he’d say after Monk did some tricks. “I told you there was nothing wrong with this dog. He has a good heart. He didn’t mean to bite, he just didn’t know better.”
One night later on, after we were done shooting for the day, Dave was reflecting on life, the movie, and Monk. Dave was so psyched that his career was taking off.
“I want to do this like Mel Brooks,” he said. “Keep writing my own stuff. Keep casting my own friends.” Dave was thinking that doing movies would allow him to spend time with his dad, who was now getting older, and he was happy that Monk had been trained so well. He laughed a little bit thinking about how the dog almost got him kicked out of the hotel.
As we were talking, I looked past Dave to see Monk taking a nice big juicy logger on his pillow. Seeing Dave’s face was priceless. It was like his own child had betrayed him. Monk jumped off the bed and scooted underneath it. Dave followed him. He stuck his head under the comforter and then slowly pulled back and looked up at me. Whenever I see Dave disappointed, it is the funniest thing. I don’t know why.
“Man,” he said disgustedly, shaking his head. “There’s like forty piles of shit under this bed. On my socks. In my shoes.”
All Monk was doing was going under the bed to do what he had been doing out in the open. The thing that made Dave the maddest was all the time and money down the drain.
“I just spent two thousand dollars to train this dog to be sneaky,” he complained. “That’s all. I paid all this money not for obedience, but just for him to be sneaky.” And with that he pulled his shirt over his nose and began picking up the poop.
So sometimes you think you’ve solved a problem, but all you’ve really done is move the shit somewhere else.
I needed to figure out how I was going to play my character Brian. My niece was really into the Grateful Dead and at the time, she was living with my wife and me in New York City. I’m a metalhead, so the Grateful Dead weren’t for me. I didn’t know much about them at all. One day, my niece showed me a VHS box set of some Grateful Dead concerts and suggested that I might “find” Brian in there somewhere.
I sat down and watched, and on my second or third tape, I saw people going into a stadium before the show, getting frisked and patted down. There was this guy, and he’s in line dancing, and he has a flower in his hand, and as he gets to the security guy and they’re frisking him, he just keeps dancing. And he is still smiling. Nobody is bringing this guy down. I grabbed my wife and said, “This is Brian.” No matter where this guy is in life, he’s happy. He’s in his own world. If he’s in prison, he’s happy. If he’s being tortured, he’s happy. No matter what, he’s still got a smile on his face.
And I also took acting lessons from this teacher in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. During the shoot, I would fly down periodically, and he’d help me build tremendously on my biggest Half Baked scenes by really becoming Brian.
And whenever I would get back on set, having just seen my teacher, people would ask me if I was high. And I’d say no, I was just content to be alone, focusing, and staying in the Brian mind-set.
I loved everything about the whole experience of making Half Baked. I was excited about my trailer. It had a bedroom, a couch, a TV, a stereo, etc. To me that was the greatest thing. Craft services was unreal, too. I showed up weighing 175 pounds and when I left I weighed 195. I had no idea how it all worked.
“You want breakfast?” A guy in an apron asked on my first day on set.
“What do you have?”
“Whatever you want.”
Even smoothies. One guy’s job was just to make smoothies. Sometimes when I was done shooting, I wouldn’t even go back to the hotel. I’d stick around the set. I loved wa
tching scenes get made, even if I wasn’t in them. Or just hanging in my trailer, rocking out to metal. I tried to get Dave to understand Metallica, but he couldn’t do it. It was too crazy for him. But he got me into Biggie Smalls and Tupac.
The funniest thing is that I truly never got stoned while filming the movie. Well, almost.
Right after I finished shooting one day, a PA came up to me and handed me a little package and said, “Go enjoy yourself.” On any movie you do, there’s always someone on the set who eventually comes up to you and says, “I’m the whatever-you-need guy.” And this was different from the craft services make-you-an-omelet guy. If you need a hooker? This guy will get you a hooker. You need a freak? He’ll get you a freak. You need drugs? He’ll get you drugs. He’s the jack-of-all-trades; whatever you need, he can get, no questions asked. On every movie set. Sure, they’re on the payroll supposedly to grip or lay down a wire, but they’re really there for an entirely different purpose.
I had the next few days off from shooting, so I went into my trailer, smoked, and delivered an impromptu Metallica air jam concert to myself. I was terrifically sweaty. A PA girl came and knocked on the door. In my haze, it sounded like pretend knocking. “Just a minor hallucination,” I thought. I kind of laughed, because it would be really funny if someone was really at my door. I kept the Metallica pumping, but that knock was growing louder. My heart rate quickened. I came back to earth as best I could and got a little nervous and paranoid. In a panic, I opened the windows, started fanning my hands near them, hid the weed, and sprayed some Glade air freshener. I thought this might make the knocking go away. It didn’t. In my mind, chaos was unfolding. I found a couple of mints, popped them in my mouth, and opened the door.