With Albrecht and Zlotnik gone, the producer they’d brought in for the pilot, Kevin Bright, was out too, though not by choice. He’d already run afoul of Keenen by creating the initial rundown for the pilot, and in other places seemed to be straining against the strictures of his mandate to keep his nose out of the creative side of the show. Davola says that there was also a feeling that he was too close to the production people on their way out. According to Gold though, there was a more immediate, more personal reason for his dismissal: He had Shawn Wayans’s car towed.
“Kevin Bright ended up getting fired off the show for the worst possible reason,” says Gold.
Shawn was working as a production assistant on the pilot, and by his own admission, had very little idea how a television production worked. Among the things he didn’t know was where to park his car. “I remember not understanding that I was parking in the producer’s parking spot,” Shawn says. “I had no idea. I was just looking at it like, My brother Keenen parks here, and Damon parks here. I want to be close to their cars, so I’m gonna park here.”
But to some, this was a sign of unearned and unwelcome entitlement on the part of the show creator’s little brother. It crystalized a lot of anxieties about Keenen possibly playing favorites with his family members. At any rate, Bright had his car towed. The incident was the culmination of several things that put some distance between Bright and the show. “It was after a lot of Maybe Kevin doesn’t get us,” says Gold.
Bright was hugely disappointed to be out, but things worked out okay for him. He had already started developing the show Dream On, with Marta Kauffman and David Crane, for HBO, which eventually ran for six seasons. In 1993 he formed Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, and produced a sitcom about six young New Yorkers called Friends, which became one of the most popular sitcoms in television history.
The ILC writing staff also went through a shakeup. After the long lag time between pilot and the pickup, only Sheffield and Frank returned for the series. Rawitt had to re-staff almost completely. Her initial haul netted two more ex–David Letterman writers, Matt Wickline and Joe Toplyn; a writing team of two women, Mimi Friedman and Jeanette Collins, who’d never worked in television before; and two seasoned black standups, Franklyn Ajaye and Barry “Berry” Douglas.
With the show running at thirty minutes instead of an hour, the cast needed trimming. Jeff Joseph left with Bright to work on Dream On. Toney Riley and T.J. McGee were deemed surplus to requirements. McGee was surprised by his dismissal. So surprised, in fact, that he showed up back at the Fox lot, thinking he still had a job.
“They were going, ‘Didn’t somebody tell you?’ ” McGee says. “I’m like, ‘Tell me what?’ ” Eventually the show’s casting director, Robi Reed, whom McGee knew from the Comedy Act, told him that they’d contacted his manager about it, but apparently she hadn’t passed on word. At the time, McGee had a part in another pilot for ABC that his manager was more keen on anyway. He later heard through the grapevine that she’d been working to get him out of his holding deal with Fox so he could do the ABC show.
“She kind of destroyed my relationship with Keenen,” he says. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but she told Keenen, ‘T.J. shouldn’t be a part of this nigger shit.’ They thought I wanted off the show. I didn’t. I loved the show.”
The Fly Girls underwent personnel changes too. A.J. Johnson was offered a part in House Party, a low-budget film that a pair of brothers named Reggie and Warrington Hudlin were making with rappers Kid ’n Play. Keenen told her she had to make a choice: the show or the movie. Johnson wanted to do both. “I can choreograph a thirty-second dance number in my sleep,” she told him.
It was a sticky situation made slightly stickier by the fact that Johnson and Keenen were, in her words, “kind of dating.” “I remember us arguing about it, professionally and personally,” she says. “Like, ‘Why are you holding me back from going away to do a movie over a thirty-second dance bumper?’ We had a hard time in our friendship over that.”
In the end, she chose House Party but didn’t want to leave Keenen hanging. She recommended her own replacement, another young actress/dancer who, like her, had gotten her start in a Spike Lee movie: Rosie Perez.
Keenen had met Perez at one of Eddie Murphy’s Bubble Hill parties, but didn’t really know her. Robi Reed, though, had cast her in Do the Right Thing and arranged for the two to meet. They hit it off. Keenen told her to expect a call from one of the show’s producers in the coming days to work out a contract. The call never came. Perez finally called the production offices herself and a producer told her they’d hired someone else.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Perez. “I didn’t have Keenen’s number. I didn’t know Keenen like that, so I said, ‘Will you leave a message with Keenen?’ He didn’t call me back.” Perez had an offer to choreograph LL Cool J’s concert tour, so she took it.
Keenen maintains it was all a miscommunication. Regardless, instead of Perez, a seasoned choreographer named Carla Earle was hired. The decision was made to cast a wider net for dancers, so Earle arranged new auditions and saw more than two thousand of them during a three-day stretch.
Deidre Lang, a dancer from the pilot, says there was a clear imperative with the new auditions. On the pilot, she explains, all four dancers were African-American. “Once the show got picked up, they were like, ‘We need this to be more of a melting pot. We need to have each race.’ So there was somebody for everybody.’ ”
One of the dancers who auditioned was a young, striking Asian-American named Carrie Ann Inaba. It was one of Inaba’s first casting calls and she fretted over what to wear. “I chose this super-lacy bra I bought from this really expensive lingerie store, black leggings, motorcycle boots, and a black jacket.” Keenen later told her that the outfit got her the gig.
“He was like, ‘Your outfit was so strange but you looked like you thought it was the best,’ ” she says. “ ‘You walked in with so much confidence I pretty much gave you the job the moment I saw you.’ ”
Along with Inaba, two other women were hired from the auditions: Michelle Whitney-Morrison, a raven-haired beauty who’d been on the television show Fame and had a minor role in School Daze, and a tall blonde named Cari French. Lang stayed on from the pilot, as did Lisa Marie Todd. The final troupe fit the United Colors of Benetton ideal. “We had an Asian girl, a dark-skinned sister, a light-skinned sister, an Italian girl, and a white girl,” says Earle.
The DJ from the pilot, DJ Daddy Mack, was replaced for the series with a new DJ, SW1, better known as Shawn Wayans. Keenen knew Shawn wanted to be a part of the show, but also knew that as a writer, standup, or actor, he simply wasn’t ready. Bringing him in as the DJ, introducing him to audiences on-screen while he worked on his comedy chops, made sense, though Shawn maintains that wasn’t the original impetus for the change.
“They tested the show and the DJ they had was good but didn’t feel like he fit the look and the feel of what they were doing,” says Shawn. “They wanted someone with a bit more swag. I had a little swag so one of the producers suggested me.”
The not particularly well-kept secret was that Shawn, unlike the man he replaced, wasn’t a real DJ. Up in the booth at ILC, his job was to merely act like a DJ. None of his equipment was connected to anything. “I’d listen to the tracks and make sure I was on cue when the camera cut to me, to look like I was mixing,” he admits.
As Keenen puts it, “It didn’t matter whether he was a DJ or not because it wasn’t live. He was a cute kid and he wanted to be around his brothers while he was working on his standup, so I put him up there.”
Perhaps Shawn’s biggest musical contribution was helping to recruit rapper Heavy D to do the show’s theme song. As Keenen recalls, “Heavy grew up with my cousin in Mount Vernon, and him and Shawn were friends. So I sat with him and told him what the show was and he went off and put it together.” Heavy D, who died in 2011, was already a star in hip-hop, and his association with the
show helped build the show’s credibility and recognition in that world. For Keenen, the song, with its energetic verses, rhythmic turntable scratches, and singsongy chorus—“You can do what you want to do/In Living Color”—was “perfect” for what he was trying to get across. “I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
In trimming the show down to a half hour, cuts needed to be made to the pilot. Sammy Davis Jr. was undergoing a very public battle with throat cancer in late 1989 and early 1990—one that he’d eventually succumb to in May 1990—so the decision was made to shelve Tommy Davidson’s Sammy-as-Mandela sketch. At the time, it was a perhaps understandable—reportedly, a test audience reacted negatively to it—though with the release of Mandela from prison in South Africa that February, a counterargument could easily be made that the sketch would never have been timelier. The fact that it was permanently shelved and has never publicly surfaced leaves Davidson still smarting all these years later.
“I don’t know why they didn’t air it because somebody being sick is not enough to me,” he says. Far from being a takedown of Sammy, the sketch “was an ode to him. Personally it would’ve established me as one of the front-runners of the whole damn show.” Instead, Davidson was barely in the show’s first episode. Some have suggested Keenen was trying to ensure Damon would be the breakout star of the ensemble. As Davidson sees it, “There wasn’t a lot of Tommy Davidson–centric energy at the show.”
Other choices had to be made about Episode 1, and everyone, it seemed, had an opinion, including Barry Diller and Peter Chernin. If Diller was known as bullish and intimidating, Chernin was prized for his bedside manner. A former English literature major at Cal-Berkeley, he had softer, doughier features and a kind, fatherly countenance. Chernin had worked in publishing before moving over to television at Showtime, where, like Albrecht at HBO, he pushed the network toward original programming. By the time he came to Fox in 1989, he was an executive known for building bridges not burning them, a guy with a knack for dealing with talent. He was the one you sent in to ease your show creator off a ledge. Chernin had asked Joe Davola to talk to Keenen about toning down the first episode, but Davola balked. Davola had spent a lot of time building trust with Keenen, and didn’t want to ruin their relationship. Besides, he didn’t want to be the messenger for a message he didn’t agree with anyway. About a week before ILC was set to debut, Chernin came to see Keenen himself.
“Peter said, ‘We want to make some changes to the pilot,’ ” Keenen recalls. “ ‘We want to take out “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” “Men on Film,” and “The Wrath of Farrakhan,” come in with some tamer stuff, and slowly build this audience. Then we can really push the envelope.’ ”
It wasn’t a totally unreasonable suggestion. Why scare away potential viewers right out of the gate? Why not warm them up a little, build a relationship with them, so they’ll be open to the more radical sketches later? Fox wasn’t in an unassailable position. The network was limping along, still only broadcasting three nights a week, with a couple of modest hits to its name. Upsetting viewers and advertisers wasn’t in its best interest. Chernin and Diller weren’t big, bad, clueless executives stomping out creativity they didn’t understand. They liked the show. They liked Keenen. They wanted to help him succeed. Chernin wasn’t trying to sand down the show’s jagged points, just rearrange them a little.
Keenen wasn’t interested: “I said to him, ‘Peter, I wanna kick the door in, guns blazing. Whatever happens, happens. If we fail, we fail big. If we win, we win big. I don’t wanna spoon-feed the audience. I want them to know exactly what time it is. I’m willing to take that risk. Whatever heat comes, send it my way.’ ”
It was an impassioned defense and Chernin took it in for a minute. He told Keenen he’d talk to Diller and get back to him. It was a high-stakes staring contest. Fox blinked first.
“They were like, ‘Okaaaay,’ ” says Keenen, letting out a theatrical sigh. “ ‘If you’ll take the heat and you’re okay that this could be the worst thing that ever happened in the history of television, we’ll support you.’ ”
With that less-than-unqualified vote of confidence, In Living Color debuted on April 15, 1990.
15
“It Was Just This Overnight Sensation”
Five days before In Living Color debuted, Public Enemy released Fear of a Black Planet. That a fiercely militant, unabashedly angry and not particularly radio-friendly album of Afrocentric hip-hop managed to hit the Top 10 on the Billboard chart and sell more than a million copies in its first two months on record store shelves is a pretty decent indicator of the tenor of the moment. The group’s outspoken frontman Chuck D had begun telling journalists a couple years earlier that rap was black America’s CNN. N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton certainly offered a better sense of what was going on in the streets of Los Angeles than the nightly news could. But while rap may have been delivering black America’s news, most of the reports from the front were harrowing.
African-American communities were being decimated by crack cocaine in the late eighties and early nineties. The percentage of black children in foster care doubled during this period, fetal death rates and weapons arrests rose 25 percent. In 1989, the per capita income for black families was roughly half that of white families. The unemployment rate was more than double. An astonishing 33 percent of black families were living in poverty, as compared with 10 percent of white families. Perhaps most alarmingly, the homicide rate for black men under twenty-five doubled between 1984 and 1994. A generation was on the verge of being lost.
This grim tale had a flip side, however. College attendance rates for African-Americans rose during the second half of the eighties, and although black household incomes remained stubbornly below white households’, they weren’t stagnant, rising 84 percent over the course of the decade. This was progress.
This complex narrative played out in ways big and small across the nation. In New York, in August of 1989, a black teenager was shot and killed after being set upon by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Al Sharpton called the city, “America’s capital of racial violence.” Then in November, the city elected its first black mayor, David Dinkins. In Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, a former civil rights activist, had become so-called “mayor for life,” serving three terms between 1979 and 1991. He was denied a fourth term after being arrested for crack possession in January 1990. He claimed he was framed by the FBI.
With Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy was wrapping its arms around this entire messy dynamic. The album’s title—particularly viewed in conjunction with PE’s previous album title, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back—could be taken in many ways: a lamentation, a rallying cry, a warning. And the album itself was filled with songs that fell into all three of those categories, sometimes all at once—“Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” “911 Is a Joke,” “Welcome to the Terrordome,” and of course, “Fight the Power,” a call to arms that had been the score and the subtext of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. “Burn Hollywood Burn” took the film industry to task for its demeaning depictions of African-Americans, singling out Driving Miss Daisy, featuring Morgan Freeman as a contented, subservient chauffeur. (The film had just won a Best Picture Oscar, much to the vocal dismay of Lee, whose Do the Right Thing was shut out at the Oscars.)
Chuck D, coincidentally, grew up down the street from Eddie Murphy in Roosevelt, New York. He knew him well enough that when Eddie showed up at the door of Chuck’s house hoping to take Chuck’s sister out, he lied and told Eddie she wasn’t home. In their teens, Chuck and Eddie had attended a seminar together called “The Afro-American Experience,” led by Black Panthers and black Muslims. He felt a kinship with Eddie, with Spike, and even with guys like Keenen and Arsenio though he didn’t really know them. They’d all come of age as ambitious, artistic black men in the generation after the Civil Rights Movement, and all seemed to be hitting their stride around the same time, introducing white America to art, comedy, music, and ide
as that had previously had little airing outside black enclaves. “There was something special going on at that time,” Chuck says.
All around them was the evidence. One month before In Living Color’s debut, the Hudlins’ film, House Party—which co-starred Comedy Act alums Martin Lawrence and Robin Harris—premiered. The film’s reception certainly felt like a good omen for ILC: House Party opened at number three at the box office, despite a production budget one-tenth the size of the two films that grossed more that weekend. The film, like Sucka before it, was proof of a wildly underserved market. Tragically, Harris, who was being tipped as the next big breakout black comedy star, died of a heart attack nine days after the film’s release.
The first episode of In Living Color, which aired at 9:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, April 15, mixed material from the pilot—including “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” “Men on Film,” and the “Love Connection” sketch—with stuff that had been written and produced in the weeks after the show got its pickup order. One of the new sketches, a commercial parody for a credit card called “Equity Express,” in which David Alan Grier is harassed and ultimately arrested because a store owner suspects he’s “not the sort of person to be carrying a gold card, if you know what I mean.” Keenen was justifiably pleased with the debut.
“Everything lined up right,” he says. “All the stuff I wanted to try worked. The sketches were funny and we were making fun of people no one had made fun of before. The dancers didn’t look weird in the context of a sketch show. The hip-hop music didn’t throw you off. It was different than anything you’d seen on TV.”
Homey Don't Play That! Page 16