Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  “People make mistakes and somehow a mistake got made that somehow was more along the lines of what the show creator would’ve been happy with,” says Trexler. “I’m not going any further than that.”

  Far from being chastened by the battles with Standards or complaints from special interests and viewers, the writers and cast seemed to thrive on stirring shit up.

  “Occasionally, there would be group readings of letters that we’d gotten, because they were so insanely full of hate and upset [over stuff] we thought was so innocuous,” says Coffield.

  It was easy to laugh that stuff off when you were a hit. After the initial scheduling changes and subsequent ratings wobble, the show regained its footing. Each week, eighteen to twenty million viewers were tuning in. Even the show’s reruns managed to consistently draw close to eighteen million viewers. Through the late spring and early summer, ILC won its time slot nearly every week. And the show, along with The Simpsons and Married with Children, was making a huge splash with eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old viewers.

  “People didn’t talk about demographics up until that point,” says Sandy Grushow. “Up until Fox, it was all about ‘households.’ Fox trained the press to report on demographics. Advertisers very much wanted to reach that young audience.”

  Rose Catherine Pinkney was a new executive at Fox’s studio arm, Twentieth Television, when ILC launched and, notably, the only African-American executive working on the show. That gave her a slightly different perspective on the show. “If you were a person of color, you had more of the inside track,” she says. “Keenen didn’t care if white America got the joke.”

  Of course, the network surely did. From the beginning, Fox pushed to broaden the show’s audience. “Once you get something to work, that’s when a lot of the work begins because you have to exploit the success,” says Kellner. “If it’s a hit every advertiser wants to buy into, you drive your CPMs [cost per mille, or per thousand people seeing a commercial]. You have to be able to exploit the show to the advertisers and get the affiliates excited. It’s not hard to get the guy in New York or Atlanta excited, because there’s a large black population you know is going to love the show, but in the network business, you’ve got to get all the affiliates excited, even the guy in Portland, Oregon, where you have a black population of 3 percent.”

  Increasingly, even the guy in Portland was excited. ILC had become the white-hot center of the pop culture world. “It was bubbling,” says Kim Coles. “You could absolutely feel the heat. We had rappers and singers visit the set. You could feel the energy of the audiences that came to see us.”

  The show had also earned respect within comedy circles, even at the institution that in many ways it was created to supplant, Saturday Night Live. “I remember one day sitting in the booth at midnight while we were shooting and I get a tap on my shoulder,” says director Paul Miller. “It was Al Franken, who’d been one of the writers at Saturday Night Live when I was there. I turned around and he says, ‘I just came to congratulate you. You guys are doing a great job.’ ”

  17

  “What They Thought Was Hip-Hop, Wasn’t Hip-Hop”

  When LL Cool J’s 1990 tour made a stop at the Universal Amphitheater in Studio City, California, Keenen made a point of getting himself backstage. He wanted to see Rosie Perez. Carla Earle, the choreographer hired to replace A.J. Johnson, wasn’t working out. He still didn’t understand how things had fallen apart with Perez and was anxious to see if he could remedy the situation. When he found her after the concert, he asked why she didn’t take the job he’d offered her. She explained that a producer told her they’d hired someone else. He insisted he always wanted her for the job and, in fact, still did.

  “What are you getting here?” Keenen asked. “I’ll double it.”

  Perez wasn’t convinced.

  “All right,” Keenen said. “I’ll give you another fifteen hundred more a week.”

  She said she had to ask LL.

  The rapper was supportive, telling her, “Go get that TV money.”

  Why Keenen dumped Earle isn’t totally clear. Earle says she was pregnant when she got hired but nobody at the show knew. She didn’t gain much weight during the pregnancy and even though she was approaching her due date during the six weeks she worked with the Fly Girls, she wasn’t showing.

  “They didn’t find out I was pregnant until I was going into labor,” she says. Her pregnancy, she believes, “was uncomfortable for Keenen.” ILC, she says, “was a boys’ club. At the time, I was in my early thirties, fit—I was his type, let me put it like that. However, I wasn’t about to start sleeping on anybody’s couch to progress or keep my position. I earned everything I got.” When her son was two weeks old, she says, she was released from her contract without explanation. “A few people advised legal action. I just wasn’t going that route.”

  Others have cast Earle’s dismissal as a creative one, unrelated to a pregnancy or any personal issues. Whatever the reason, her abrupt departure didn’t exactly smooth the way for Perez’s arrival. When the new choreographer arrived at ILC, Keenen gave her two specific instructions regarding the Fly Girls. One was that they had to look good—their hair, their bodies, their clothes, the whole package. “No fat, busted chicks,” was the phrase Perez recalled Keenen using. She was charged with ensuring they kept themselves up. The second instruction was that he wanted the Fly Girls to dance like MC Hammer. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” a toxically catchy dance-rap confection that sampled Rick James’s “Super Freak,” had hit the Top 40 the month ILC debuted and was rocketing farther up the charts fueled by a video featuring Hammer’s hyper-athletic, baggy-pants-ed dance moves.

  “Then you should hire his choreographer,” Perez told him. That made Keenen laugh. “I don’t do Hammer,” she said. “I do me.”

  Perez’s early days were rocky. Earle was a professionally trained dancer and choreographer, well versed in jazz, tap, classical, and African dance. So were the dancers she’d hired. Perez was not.

  “Rosie was a non-trained dancer,” says Carrie Ann Inaba. “She got her start from that dance she did in Do the Right Thing. She had no background at all. We were speaking two completely different languages.”

  Deidre Lang, who’d been on the show since the pilot, says that sometimes this communication gap begat unintentional comedy. “She would say, ‘Yeah, Deidre, do that step, you know that step, that pirouette-y,’ ” says Lang, imitating Perez’s heavy Nuyorican accent.

  Perez was as skeptical of the Fly Girls as they were of her.

  “They were so technically trained, but Carrie Ann was the only one that had a little hip-hop dance experience,” says Perez. “The rest, what they thought was hip-hop, wasn’t hip-hop.” Perez drilled them hard to get them up to speed, often eight hours a day or more, five days a week, which didn’t necessarily endear her to her new charges.

  “She was stern and hard,” says Lang. “Some girls didn’t really like that too much. She butted heads with some of them.”

  This professional disconnect may have been the root of the problems, but it wasn’t the extent of it.

  “We all didn’t get along right away,” says Inaba. “Rosie’s a strong personality and we were all cast because we were strong personalities.” Beyond that, there was just the natural friction that comes with spending all day, every day working closely with people. “Women in a room together,” says Inaba, “is not always easy.”

  Perez admits, “It was tense when I came in. They’d bonded with the previous choreographer. I mean there wasn’t any fighting or anything like that, but it was emotional for them, which is completely understandable. But I was very young, so it took me a minute to digest it.” At one point, Perez’s frustrations got so bad that she walked into Keenen’s office and unloaded.

  “They hate me!” she told him, almost in tears.

  Keenen was unmoved. “You just have to do your job,” he said.

  The Fly Girls worked out the kinks. One ni
ght, watching Ann-Margret dance alongside Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas, Perez had a revelation: She quit trying to make the Fly Girls dance exactly as she wanted. “I combined what they had and what I had, then we started to gel.”

  Perez took charge of choosing their music too, which, in that first season, leaned heavily on New York rap. Songs by Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Queen Latifah, and 3rd Bass all soundtracked Fly Girls dance numbers. Simply airing hip-hop back then was revolutionary. This was long before every city had a big hip-hop radio powerhouse on the dial. Rap was often relegated to late-night specialty shows or college radio. Yo! MTV Raps debuted on MTV in 1988, and Arsenio occasionally had rappers on his late-night show, but ILC was prime-time network television. These songs were being heard by anywhere between ten and twenty million people.

  Perez frequently flew home to New York on weekends to hear what DJs were spinning in clubs, in order to keep her finger on the pulse of what was coming next. She’d return with armloads of CDs and tapes, then sit in her office playing them. Initially, her office was on the same floor as the writers’ and producers’, but “one of the executive producers couldn’t stand all the music I was playing, so he put me down in the basement. It was all cinder block.”

  The Fly Girls often rehearsed for more than forty hours a week in order to dance on the show each week for between two and three minutes. But Perez’s work paid off.

  “When Rosie came on, she helped to shape the look and the whole style,” says Keenen. “She was connected to underground hip-hop, so all the dance moves were stuff people hadn’t seen yet. They were coming straight out of the clubs. A lot of the credit for the Fly Girls goes to her.”

  The troupe became a phenomenon. “I remember being on the elevator one day and someone asking us if we had gotten our letters,” says Michelle Whitney-Morrison. “We didn’t know what they were talking about. They said that we received fan mail. That’s when I thought, Huh, people really do know who we are.”

  As Inaba puts it, “The Fly Girls were something of their own. They had their own following, their own identity. There weren’t many shows that featured five girls with different ethnic backgrounds, doing this new style of dancing that they really hadn’t seen on TV. We weren’t five-foot-seven, stick-figure girls. We were regular girls who could shake. People were hungry for it.”

  Many of the first season’s breakout sketches and characters—“The Wrath of Farrakhan,” “Men on Film,” “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” Oswald Bates, Homey the Clown, “Hey Mon,” the Brothers Brothers—had one thing in common: Damon Wayans. More than any other cast member, Damon seemed on a trajectory for stardom within weeks of ILC’s debut. Some might’ve grumbled that his near ubiquity on-screen that season and the frequency with which his characters recurred had the whiff of nepotism about it, but it was impossible to deny the electricity he exuded.

  Unlike a lot of the cast members, Damon also was a writer on the show, which gave him certain advantages. He wasn’t constantly hoping the writing staff would craft something that worked for him, or nudging them to. Many of his characters were adapted from bits he’d been honing for years. Off-camera, Damon could be quiet and withdrawn. In pitch meetings and at table reads, he was sometimes off to the side, but it was clear that, on the subject of funny, Keenen trusted Damon’s opinion above all others.

  “Keenen was executive producer and would say, ‘I want things done this way,’ and then Damon would sometimes quietly either nod his approval or shake his head no,” says Kim Bass, who’d known and worked with Damon before getting hired as a writer.

  Bowman, who would become the show’s co–head writer in Season 2, says Keenen “really liked high performance energy. Things I might’ve written for Saturday Night Live that might’ve been more writerly conceits wouldn’t have made it on In Living Color. Keenen really responded to character-based stuff.” Anton Jackson, a homeless character Damon had first started doing in his standup, was a good example. “If you saw the written material for that character, you probably wouldn’t respond to it. That whole sketch was about Damon’s performance.”

  Anton could’ve easily just been a pathetic drunk—and at times he was. But often, as with Richard Pryor’s famous wino character, which no doubt had been an influence on Damon, Anton was more a court jester, slipping in sly jabs at the criminal justice system, social welfare programs, bourgeois values, or the entertainment industry. His first appearance on the show was a good primer for what followed. “My name is Anton,” he announces to a subway car full of commuters after staggering forward and picking his nose. “I’m a victim of society and an entertainer.”

  A lot of material was scavenged from the Wayans family’s past. Kim based her neighborhood gossip, Benita Butrell, on “a couple of women in our neighborhood in the projects that used to just sit on the bench and talk about everybody’s kids,” she says. “They’d smile in your face, but the second you walked away, they had something negative to say.” Keenen has said that another inspiration for Benita was their mother.

  Even as Damon was primed to be the show’s breakout star, the cast as a whole was still mostly in thrall of simply being a part of this unlikely success story. No one was rich yet. Even Keenen himself was still driving around in a beat-up Toyota. The cast competed with each other for screen time and the biggest laughs, but outright envy and jealousy—for the most part—were kept in check. The cast felt bonded through the long hours together. Many nights they’d be at work from eight in the morning until ten at night. Most of them went to lunch together at places like the Living Room or Kate Mantilini on Wilshire Boulevard.

  “We would just all shove ourselves into somebody’s car and go out to lunch every day,” says Coffield. “One time we were all having lunch together and Damon brought up this idea, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could all rent an apartment together? We could use it as an office in which we could develop stuff.’ We never did, but it was something we were considering because we couldn’t imagine not wanting to hang out with each other more.”

  Their chemistry didn’t go unrewarded. In August, when the Emmy nominations were announced, ILC got three: Episode 1 was nominated for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program, Episode 5 for Outstanding Choreography, and the show overall got a nod for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series. That summer, Keenen signed a production deal with Universal and began developing a film to write, direct, and star in, called Lloyd of London. But now, finally out of the shadow of his more famous friends, there was almost no time to enjoy all the good fortune. With Season 1 drawing to a close, Keenen had only one thing on his mind.

  “ ‘I need a break,’ ” he says, laughing. “That was it. I was so exhausted. We all needed a break.”

  18

  “That’s the Beauty of It: It’s Dangerous and We Shouldn’t Be Doing It”

  Kim Coles hadn’t had a great first season. She wasn’t on-screen that much, and some of the time she was on-screen, she was, by her own admission, “pretty uncomfortable.” Just before she’d landed the ILC role, she’d shed fifty pounds, and many of her parts—as Robin Givens in the “Love Connection” sketch, as a drunken floozy in the “Bolt 45” sketch, wearing a bathing suit in a tampon commercial parody—required her to flaunt a new body with which she wasn’t yet at ease. She may have eventually overcome those issues, but there were other bad signs for her right from the start.

  On the pilot, she and Kim Wayans were slated to be in a sketch together called “Too-Too Ethnic,” a spoof of 227, the Marla Gibbs–Jackée Harry comedy on NBC. Jackée played a broad character who looked a little like Coles, so it seemed a no-brainer to Coles that she should play her. Keenen disagreed.

  “He let me know that Kim does Jackée in her act, so she’s going to play her,” says Coles. “I remember fighting that one. I was like, ‘I look like Jackée and she looks more like Marla, so let me have a stab at it.’ He said, ‘No.’ ” For Coles, it was an early lesson in the show’s dynamics. “Wh
at he says goes. That’s how some bosses run their ship.”

  It was the first of many times Coles felt Keenen favored his sister over her. She says she was frequently cut from sketches. More often, she wasn’t in them at all. “It became evident that it was Keenen’s job to make his sister a star,” she told the Dallas Morning News in 1993. “Keenen would take things right out of my hands and give it to her.”

  Keenen doesn’t recall it that way. “That was her perception,” he says. “The truth was Kim [Wayans] used to write. Kim Coles didn’t. So, as the cast came with their ideas, their ideas got written into the show. The ones who didn’t write were auxiliary players. Her perception was that she wasn’t being given the sketches. You can’t be given somebody else’s sketches. She didn’t step up.”

  Others at the show, however, agree some of Coles’s problems could be traced back to the fact that she was often competing with Keenen’s sister for roles. But Kim Wayans takes issue with the idea that she, or any of her siblings, were somehow gifted something they didn’t earn. “Keenen really tried to be very fair,” she says. “His thing was you had to produce, you had to create. If you wanted more airtime, come up with some funny shit. Some people were able to step to the plate more than others. But there wasn’t a favoritism thing going on where he was just giving me hilarious stuff. Ninety percent of the things you see me do on In Living Color are things I created on my own, characters I wrote myself, developed myself. Now, if you didn’t have the skills to write sketches or create characters, maybe you did find yourself a little stuck and feeling resentful. And who knows how you twist that in your head, how you make it ‘family favoritism’ as opposed to ‘I’m not able to write my own sketches or come up with characters.’ ”