The freewheeling, anything-goes vibe that Firestein—and to a lesser extent, Fields and Veasey—cultivated served a purpose, or at least was intended to. The hope was that the writers would feel liberated to pitch anything, no matter how outlandish or in poor taste.
“The humor in that room was so dark,” says Wilmore. “A lot of that never got on the air but we had to go through that to get to the stuff that was on the air because a lot of that humor hadn’t been on television before.”
Of course, the freedom to say anything cut both ways. Arguments and debates among writers—over humor, culture, race, or where to order lunch from—were frequent and encouraged.
“There was a lot of tension,” says Graver. “The tension was multiracial. It was some of the most intense arguments I saw between people. It was okay for somebody to call somebody else out on being whatever ethnic minority they were and behaving like a stereotype. Being a suburban white guy from Chicago, there were little things I became aware of very quickly.” He felt like some things he did and said became perceived as racially insensitive or just generally not okay. “People looked at me like Here comes Mr. CBS. I remember the fourth or fifth time we were going to do ‘Homeboy Shopping Network,’ I went, ‘Seriously? Are we really going back to this cliché of guys selling shit off the truck again? Isn’t this a bad thing at some point?’ Everybody looked at me like, You’re not allowed to blow the whistle on that. We’ll blow the whistle on that when we’re ready to.” For Graver, the open spirit of inquiry was more stifling than liberating. “I felt I was being very careful every minute of the day.”
Ultimately though, as Graver sees it, the main conflicts among the writers didn’t break along racial lines. “The divisions in the writers’ room came more out of the way we approached our work,” he says. “You had some Harvard boys, some New York Jews, a couple of white trash guys, some California surfer types, several black writers—one of whom was completely street, one of whom was probably a hustler operating a business out of his office—you had Pam Veasey, who was very professional and terrific. I always felt like the underlying conflicts were about Are you lazy? Does your work suck? Does your sucky work take up room that my good work could be in? The biggest arguments I ever had were when I was asked to rewrite somebody’s stuff and just was like, ‘This isn’t good from the get-go. Why am I spending my time on this?’ ”
Larry Wilmore’s brother Marc was hired as a writer midway through the season. He was an immediate contributor, well liked among the rest of the staff, but was only marginally happier at the show than the people he’d replaced. “It certainly wasn’t fun,” he says. “Keenen was hard on the writers. It was his show, so when your name’s on the marquee, you’re going to be tough on people.”
ILC was Marc Wilmore’s first television writing job, and a few months into his tenure, Fields took him aside to explain something important to him. “He said, ‘Look, man, I want you to know I’ve worked on a lot of shows and don’t think every show is like this,’ ” Marc says. “ ‘This is the worst show I’ve ever been on.’ It was just very, very dark. The working conditions were horrible. We didn’t know Keenen was violating WGA rules. We’d leave after midnight, sometimes at four in the morning, and come back at ten in the morning. That’s against Guild rules. There’s like a ten-hour or twelve-hour turnaround that no one bothered to think about or enforce. It was so stressful.”
23
“Jamie Fucking Scared Me”
Jamie Foxx was lying in bed on his side, a wig of frizzy black hair on his head, wearing a pink nightgown. Shawn Wayans was spooning him. They were filming a sketch called “Muttco’s Coyote Ugly One-Night Stand Escape Kit.” Foxx was playing the one-night stand that Shawn was willing to chew off his arm to escape. Neither actor has any lines in the sketch, and at first Foxx’s identity isn’t visible to viewers. The whole sketch essentially turns on one moment, the reveal when Foxx rolls over and the camera focuses on his face. His eyes are closed, his lips garishly contorted. His mere appearance draws huge laughs.
The whole sketch is over in under a minute, but it was probably Foxx’s most memorable appearance during his first few months on the show. Everyone recognized Foxx as a prodigious talent, but like with Jim Carrey, it took a while to figure out what to do with him. Foxx appears pretty sparingly in the first half of Season 3, mostly in supporting roles. Even when the show needed someone to imitate Ray Charles—a job for which Foxx later won an Oscar—David Alan Grier, not Foxx, got the call. He had funny moments but wasn’t minting any characters that required a repeat engagement. He felt like he was floundering, and despite his outward bravado, he was a little taken aback by the talent around him.
“They had already been doing the show for two years when I was hired, so when I saw Damon walk in and Jim walk in, it was like fucking Jurassic Park,” he said. As he put it, “I was the eighth-funniest person in the room at any given time. I had to be quiet sometimes to learn my way.”
That “Coyote Ugly” role pointed the way forward. It was, in a way, a wordless version of Wanda, the ugly woman he did in his audition. Keenen had suggested Foxx do something with that character but Foxx wasn’t sure what. He invited Michael Anthony Snowden to his apartment to try to figure it out. There, the two began to hash out a sketch for Wanda on a blind date with Tommy Davidson.
“We wrote the sketch and it destroyed [at the table read],” says Snowden. “People were on their backs. Keenen was drinking water and shot water out of his nose.”
According to Foxx, although Wanda was from his standup, it took a village to bring her to television. “Keenen reached in this box, gave me this blond wig and said, ‘Try that on,’ ” Foxx recalled. “Then David Alan Grier goes, ‘Hey, man, you’ve got to say, ‘I’ll rock your world.’ Then this character was born. The first time we did it, when I came out in that dress, with those lips and the eyes, that character took off.”
In Foxx’s hands, Wanda is aggressive, obnoxious, and winningly oblivious to her aesthetic flaws, but also sad and lovably weird. When she tries to break the ice with Davidson on that blind date, her opening line is the kind of pure, sublime nonsense you might expect in a Monty Python sketch: “Do you like alligators?”
Ultimately, it’s her interplay with Davidson that puts the sketch over the top. They’re a study in contrasts: She’s broad-shouldered, muscular, intimidating; he’s delicate, refined, petite.
“That was Jamie’s sketch,” says Davidson. “He rocked that. But one of the things I learned at In Living Color was how to play the straight man.”
Davidson and Foxx had a natural comedy dynamic, and the show exploited it. For another Wanda sketch later in the season, Davidson strips down to a towel and lies facedown on a massage table. Wanda is his masseuse. Larry Wilmore wrote the sketch, and for him, it was a lesson in comedy minimalism.
“Tommy was facedown the whole time so he couldn’t see Wanda,” he explains. “I thought the reveal of that would be really funny. It was a breakthrough for me as a comedy writer, constructing a sketch that was just about that premise. It didn’t need all these one-liners and jokes. That setup alone got the laughs and one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever seen on the show, especially that reveal. Jamie’s chasing Tommy around in his little underwear and the audience was just stomping.”
“When I did that character, that’s when it changed,” Foxx said. “Because I was trying to find my bearings. I was there for a trial basis. Nobody knew who I was but they knew this character was slamming. That gave me my stripes.”
For all that Foxx brought to the show, he also subtly changed the dynamic among the cast. Jamie was an aggressive, type-A personality, and joining a cast that already had two seasons under their belt, he came in with something to prove.
“Jamie fucking scared me,” says Davidson. “Jamie was so talented, it was like, Whoa.”
The cast had always been competitive, but once Foxx arrived, that competition took on a sharper edge. “The banter was nonstop
and kind of crazy,” says Kelly Coffield. “The boys would make fun of each other in a big way. Jamie was trying a bit more to get his licks in. Once he came on the scene, there definitely could be some mean-spiritedness with it. There was nothing they wouldn’t tease each other about.” Davidson, she says, often got the worst of it. “Jamie picked on Tommy a lot because the other guys would laugh.”
Keenen, for his part, didn’t seem inclined to tone it down. “Jamie’s the guy who loves to tease, loves to push,” Keenen said. During filming, “Jamie would do things to Tommy that would make Tommy crazy. Tommy would always be looking to me to cut, and I’d never cut. I’d force him to stay in the scene. It would just be so much fun.”
As cast members got more outside acting gigs, there was a sense, at least to Coffield, that the cast’s internal hierarchy was starting to become based on who had the most going on in their career. Those who needed ILC were at the bottom of the totem pole. “There was this sense that the point was getting out there and doing as many other things as you possibly could,” she says. “There was a lot of pointed joking, especially if somebody did something that wasn’t a big hit.”
Kevin Berg, the show’s line producer, increasingly had to juggle the cast’s outside commitments. It wasn’t just film auditions, standup gigs, or promotional jags that Berg had to schedule around but also the cast members’ growing sense that their time was valuable.
“Not only did they have places to be, they didn’t like to hang around anymore when they weren’t actually working,” says Berg. “They expected a call time to coincide with them going to work, not coming in and waiting an hour or two.”
Amid this less familial atmosphere, Davidson was struggling, and it didn’t go unnoticed. According to Rose Catherine Pinkney, then a young studio executive working on the show, “Keenen was really hard on Tommy.” Many in the cast saw Keenen as a father figure, she says, but “he ruled with an iron fist. He can be very specific about what he wants, whether that’s what he wants to eat and how he wants it arranged on his plate, or how he wants the sketch to flow. He was tough on those guys but I believe people felt Keenen was hardest on Tommy, like when a parent is meaner to one kid.” There were rumors Davidson was dabbling in drugs, which didn’t sit right with Keenen, who was a relative model of clean living. “I don’t know what came first,” says Pinkney. “Whether Keenen being hard on him led Tommy to drugs or whether he was hard on Tommy because he knew.”
Davidson says he was feeling the strain of work and family issues. The whole vibe at the show, he says, was “very, very tense. It had become a fight for who’s going to get something on.” He developed a drug habit and became less reliable. “I had a hard time showing up. I became very uninspired.”
T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh also became somewhat detached, frustrated with her perennial second-tier status on the show. “I was probably the lowest person on the totem pole on that show,” she said. “I was rarely given characters to do. It would be ‘Okay, Jim, here’s the piece where you play such-and-such a character, and Crystal, you’re the woman that comes in. Week after week, I’d create characters that were ‘The Girl,’ ‘The Woman.’ ” After a while, she said, “I spent a great deal of time in my dressing room crying.”
That’s not to say the cast was imploding. Far from it. This was more the everyday dysfunction that comes with lots of successful creative endeavors. But, as Coffield says, the vibe had changed.
“It’s not like that crazy time when we were all starting,” she says. “It wasn’t the old gang going to lunch together. Now it was like, Okay, so-and-so isn’t going to be there next week because they’re doing this and that or being flown here and there. People were giving interviews or having meetings with publicists. In that third season, things didn’t split off because we were all pissed at each other. The real world came crashing in.”
24
“I’m Better Than Any of These Girls and You Know It!”
If Jennifer Lopez wanted to be a Fly Girl, she had to slim down and get a haircut. At least, according to Rosie Perez, whose memories of that time—via a 2015 interview and her own 2014 memoir—don’t always line up with those of her colleagues at the time. Lopez was under a holding deal with Fox, but Perez says those were the two stipulations surrounding her joining the show.
“Keenen said if she loses some weight and cuts her hair, let’s roll with it,” Perez says. “That’s the honest truth. Why would I lie about that? I said, ‘Don’t make her cut her hair. She’s Puerto Rican. You can’t do that.’ ” Others suggest the pressure on Lopez regarding her weight came at least equally if not entirely from Fox. Regardless, Lopez was feeling the strain from the minute she arrived at the Fly Girls’ rehearsal space. It didn’t help that two of the troupe’s dancers, Carla Garrido, who’d initially been picked over Lopez for Season 2, and Michelle Whitney-Morrison, had been let go to make room for her.
“Those two are friends of mine and I was sad to see them go,” says Carrie Ann Inaba. “I’m sure it was really hard for Jennifer to come in and be the new kid on the block. I think she always struggled with that. It created not a friendly welcoming.”
Lopez also rubbed some of the dancers and crew the wrong way. Some bristled at her naked ambition. There was a feeling that Jennifer Lopez seemed most interested in what was best for Jennifer Lopez’s own career as opposed to what was best for the group or the show.
“Within less than two weeks,” Perez writes in her memoir, “every day almost, all the girls were coming into my office, complaining how she was manipulating wardrobe, makeup, and me, all to her advantage.” (Lopez, through her publicist, declined to be interviewed for this book.)
To be fair, Lopez got along with some dancers better than others. She and Deidre Lang were tight. Lisa Marie Todd used to drive Lopez to rehearsals and go out to eat with her a fair bit. “I’ve read we were catty to her and all that,” says Todd. “That wasn’t the case for me.” Cari French admits she was “never close” with Lopez and felt that by Season 3, “the tight-knit thing we had in the beginning was definitely not there.”
Inaba, for her part, doesn’t mince words regarding Lopez: “Jennifer and I never really got along. Jennifer is a very strong personality. That sometimes made it challenging for all of us, including her. She unabashedly goes after what she wants. It’s not my style, but I was always impressed with how much she wanted certain things and how she went after them with no apologies.”
Ultimately, it was Lopez’s relationship with Perez that seemed to cause the most problems. Perez says she found Lopez to be ambitious, hardworking, and very professional, and insists the main source of their issues was that the rest of the Fly Girls “didn’t click with her.” “I got caught in the middle,” Perez says. “I was immature and didn’t handle it well.”
That’s probably underselling it a little. Perez worked Lopez hard and Lopez didn’t always appreciate her criticism. Arguments weren’t uncommon. The rest of the dancers certainly weren’t oblivious to the friction.
“It would be more annoying than anything,” says Todd. “Like, Why are we wasting time on that instead of trying to be the best we can be?”
According to Perez’s memoir, at least some of her criticism of Lopez was really coming from Keenen. “He would always call me on the red phone reserved for producers during live and pretapings, telling me to take her out of a certain number if he thought she looked fat that week or too clunky.” Perez would obey her boss’s wishes, pass along the harsh words but conceal their source. During one rehearsal, Lopez stormed into Perez’s office, apoplectic.
“You pick on me, me and only me, every fucking day!” she screamed. “Every fucking day! I work my ass off, deliver, and you keep pushing me aside, treating me like I’m shit! I know I’m good! I’m better than any of these girls and you know it!”
Eric Gold, who later managed Lopez for a spell, recalls that at another moment early in her tenure, she and Perez nearly came to blows.
“Rosie
wasn’t a benevolent dictator,” says Gold. “Rosie ran it like a real dictator. She’s bossing Jennifer around, and Jennifer’s like, ‘Fuck you! Let’s go in the parking lot right now!’ This turns into like a Bronx-Brooklyn thing. Rosie’s like, ‘Fuck you! I’ll kill you!’ And they’re going in the parking lot to fight. Somehow Keenen intervened and it worked itself out.”
Keenen says it never got quite that bad—“Jennifer was a very smart girl and made very smart choices and that’s not a choice she would’ve ever made”—but, regardless, there was no denying the bad vibes between them.
It was clear to most that Lopez saw dancing as a path to other things, not an end in itself. Les Firestein says she made no secret of her desire to act on the show, but found her ambitions stymied in that direction. “She used to ask me about it all the time. My understanding was that Keenen wanted the Fly Girls to be the Fly Girls, end of story.”
Perez insists that over the years, the beef between her and Lopez has been overblown. “I will say that in her time there, there were a few rifts, settled and squashed, and we moved on.” It’s clear that, at the very least, they reached an uneasy détente. Whatever static there was between them, it didn’t negatively impact the Fly Girls’ performances. In fact, many felt the sparks behind the scenes gave the group more creative fire. They were certainly more popular than ever.
Nonetheless, the troupe’s bid for a syndicated spinoff TV series, Kick It with the Fly Girls, flamed out. After producing a sizzle reel and shopping it around at the annual National Association of Television Program Executives conference in early 1991, the plug was pulled despite getting commitments from affiliate stations across 56 percent of the country. However, energy was still poured into turning the Fly Girls into a singing group. Perez was enlisted to help manage the group’s musical career, alongside Gold.
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