Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  Keenen hadn’t met Pryor before that night at the Beverly Hilton. That, in itself, was a little odd, and something Keenen acknowledged in his speech from the stage. Pryor was the reason Keenen got into comedy, but he’d practically avoided him in person until then.

  “I had had my opportunities to meet him when he’d come to the Comedy Store,” Keenen explained in a later interview. “Eddie was very good friends with him and wanted to introduce me. My brother Damon had met him and wanted to introduce me. I didn’t want to. I never wanted to meet him as a fan. I wanted to achieve something and then be able to say, ‘This is because of you.’ ” At that point, he felt he finally had. “I was at the height of In Living Color. It had won the Emmy. He knew who I was. So, I was then able to humble myself and thank him. I went over and hugged him.”

  That hug was an important moment for Keenen. He’d gone from discovering Pryor after being chased home from school by a bully to standing with his arms around him as—if not quite his equal—certainly his peer. It was, along with his first appearance on The Tonight Show, a marker of his progress. “If I were going to bookend my career, it would be those two moments,” he said. “The Tonight Show and being able to thank the guy who showed me what I was going to do with my life.”

  Every Tuesday morning, twenty-five to thirty top Fox executives would meet in a conference room for a free-form staff meeting. Many of the execs looked forward to the meetings. At a network and in an industry so tightly focused on day-to-day ups and downs, this was a chance to think long term, to discuss trends in film, in television, in entertainment broadly. Anybody and everybody was encouraged to speak. On a Tuesday in 1991, Fox president Jamie Kellner began musing about the Super Bowl. CBS had the rights to the next one, and in fact, the rights to the next few Super Bowls were already locked down by other networks.

  “Jamie started talking about how nobody watches the halftime,” says Dan McDermott, a Fox programming executive assigned to ILC. “I remember thinking, Where is he going with this? He said, ‘We should do a live episode of In Living Color. We’ll make a big deal out of it. We’ll convince America to turn the channel at halftime.’ ”

  The Super Bowl was then and remains the most viewed television event of the year. At that point, it was consistently watched by more than one hundred million people in the U.S. The conventional wisdom was it wasn’t worth it for the other networks to sink money into programming opposite the game. There just weren’t enough viewers left over to make it worthwhile. But if Fox could get just a fraction of those Super Bowl viewers to change the channel, Kellner argued, it’d be a coup. They’d been promoting themselves as the “Bad Boys of Television,” irreverent upstarts with no respect for age-old industry norms. What better way to prove it?

  “It was wholly consistent with everything we stood for,” says Sandy Grushow, who by then had been promoted to EVP of Fox’s Entertainment Division. “I used to refer to us as guerilla-like. We’d rush in there, throw a punch, then run out before the competition knew what hit them. That’s exactly what this was designed to do.”

  The idea had its roots in a phone call from a guy named Jay Coleman to ILC’s executive in charge of production (and Keenen’s manager), Eric Gold, a year earlier. Coleman was the president of Entertainment Marketing and Communications International, and a pioneer in bringing together pop stars with corporate brands. He’d paired Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and MC Hammer with Pepsi, Rod Stewart with Canada Dry, and gotten Jōvan Musk to help underwrite a Rolling Stones tour. Coleman told Gold that he’d recently been at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, watching the halftime show—which featured three local college marching bands performing odes to the host city—bored out of his mind. This was hardly an unusual feeling during Super Bowl halftimes. The year before, the main act was an Elvis impersonator named Elvis Presto. The years before that, performers included aging entertainers (Chubby Checker, George Burns, Mickey Rooney), the cultish, morally hectoring singing ensemble Up with People, and more college marching bands. Through his boredom, Coleman, who died in 2011, saw an opportunity.

  He told Gold he wanted MC Hammer to perform on Fox during halftime of the game. In between songs, he wanted fresh In Living Color sketches. He’d find a corporate partner to sponsor the entire program and foot the bill for production and promotion. Gold liked the idea, but only to a point.

  “I said, ‘Jay, I love you, but here’s my thinking: ‘We should do an In Living Color halftime show and have MC Hammer do the musical number,’ ” he says. Discussions wore on, and the idea was pushed a year, by which time MC Hammer had dropped out, and Coleman had signed Frito-Lay to sponsor the whole thing. Coleman met with Kellner, who brought the idea to the Tuesday meeting. It went over big. Keenen loved it too.

  “I thought, This is genius,” he says. “The Super Bowl was the biggest thing in television. No one would dare take on the Super Bowl. We have to do that.”

  CBS’s fusty plans for the 1992 game were ripe for the picking. They’d hired Disney to produce something called “Winter Magic,” really little more than a thinly disguised promo for their Winter Olympics coverage the following month. It featured ice skaters Brian Boitano and Dorothy Hamill, along with a thirty-foot inflatable snowman. As Fox began promoting the hell out of ILC’s alternate halftime show on Fox, CBS seemed spooked and hastily broke with their theme, booking an additional performance by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine.

  CBS weren’t the only ones who were nervous. Frito-Lay was willing to fork over a reported two million dollars to the network and the show, but the brand was concerned about the show’s content, particularly since it would be broadcast live.

  “Everybody’s interested in doing exciting things but they’re also interested in protecting their brand,” says Kellner. He agreed to broadcast the show on a delay. (Various people disagree on exactly how long the delay was, but it was somewhere between five and ten seconds.) Not only would Fox’s Standards VP Don Bay be in the production booth with his hand poised over a button to bleep out any objectionable content, Kellner himself would be in the booth beside Bay, to watch over him.

  Rose Catherine Pinkney, then a young executive at Twentieth Television who covered ILC, says there were many ways the live show could go awry, but Fox’s chief worry was that the cast would take advantage of the situation to slip things past the Standards Department that would get everyone in trouble.

  As preparations began, there was an all-hands-on-deck feeling. Fox’s marketing and promotions teams were working overtime, flooding the airwaves with promos, getting media coverage for the event, and sending out invitations to the famous and the not-so-famous to ensure the live shots of the studio that night looked like a genuine party. John Bowman was convinced to pause his work on the Martin pilot and take a pass at a “Men on Football” sketch.

  On Super Bowl Sunday, the studio filled with guests, including Kirstie Alley, Pauly Shore, Sam Kinison, and Blair Underwood, who mixed with cast members. There was an open bar. The party atmosphere didn’t quite extend to the writers, who were rewriting and tweaking sketches right until showtime.

  The Super Bowl show leaned heavily on franchise characters. Damon and Keenen revived “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” which hadn’t been seen since early in Season 2, and set it inside a football locker room. Fire Marshall Bill visited a sports bar. Background Guy—a Jim Carrey character that grew from his inability to fade into the background of any scene—appeared outside a Super Bowl locker room. Strictly speaking, the show wasn’t all “live”—sketches like “Fire Marshal Bill” were essentially short, complicated, pyrotechnics-filled films that often took hours to shoot—but the most memorable moment was: Damon and David Alan Grier’s “Men on Football.”

  It’s may be unfairly harsh to say that the sketch itself was largely a parade of coy double-entendres and gay innuendos, but that was sort of the characters’ stock-in-trade. Bowman had written the initial sketch, which was then rewritten by the show’s staff, but
the most enduring moments were ad-libbed by Damon and Grier. After a reference to Joe Namath wearing panty hose in a TV commercial, Grier’s Antoine notes that Namath is married. Damon, as Blaine, responds: “Well, so is Richard Gere and you should’ve seen that gerbil in the wedding dress.” The line was a nod to a well-traveled urban myth that Gere had once stuck a live gerbil up his ass as part of some gay fetish play.

  “That was one of the jokes I put in my pocket because I knew the censors wouldn’t let it go,” says Damon. He wanted to surprise Grier, make him laugh. He did. He also made Jamie Kellner laugh, which was why the joke made it onto the air.

  “Don [Bay] and I worked up this scheme where anytime I felt something had gone over the line, I’d pound him on the back, so that within the ten seconds, he’d be focused on it and could hit a button and drop audio to solve the problem,” says Kellner. “I started laughing so hard at the Richard Gere thing that I forgot to hit Don on the back. I forgot to do my job.”

  Damon wasn’t done. Toward the sketch’s end, Antoine mentions he’s excited to see sprinter Carl Lewis at the upcoming Summer Olympics. “You know why Carl runs so fast?” Blaine responds. “You can run but you can’t hide from your true self, Miss Lewis.” The line also went out unmolested by the Standards Department.

  “I had five seconds to make the call and quickly decided not to delete the reference,” says Bay. “Lewis’s being gay was openly discussed in Hollywood. Jamie asked if I’d cut it, to which I replied, ‘No.’ ” Lewis’s lawyer threatened legal action, but none materialized. Gere’s agent called the show incensed and threatened to cause problems but mostly didn’t.

  For a few days afterward, the sketch was all anyone in Hollywood seemed to be talking about. The decision to air the lines about Lewis and Gere was controversial, even among those at Fox. Shortly afterward, the company’s chairman, Barry Diller, said, “I’m not so sure they shouldn’t have pushed the delay button.” Keenen was at peace with the way it played out.

  “There was a six-second button Fox had the option of hitting,” says Keenen. “I didn’t have control over that. That was the reason they had their guy there. If there was anything they didn’t feel was appropriate they could’ve hit that button. I wasn’t the guy to take heat for a decision I didn’t make.”

  In the end, the show had hit a sort of sweet spot: just enough controversy to get people talking, not enough to incur legal action. Certainly, the show’s monster ratings made it easier to soothe Fox’s nerves. Nearly twenty-nine million viewers tuned in that night, and the Super Bowl’s ratings for the second half crashed by ten points.

  That’s not to say there was no fallout at all from Damon’s ad-libs. The Fox halftime show had been the first part of a larger overall marketing deal the show had made with Frito-Lay’s parent company, Pepsi. There were plans for some of the ILC characters, including Homey the Clown, Blaine, and Antoine, to be featured in Pepsi “taste test” commercials.

  “When the chairman of Pepsi watched the halftime show with his conservative friends, he was so appalled he canceled any further involvement,” says Gold. “He killed the deal right there.”

  Other tangible consequences weren’t so bad.

  “Somebody sent us an actual gerbil to the show,” says Michael Anthony Snowden. “[Fans] always sent us stuff—everything from death threats to insane, crazy shit—but somebody sent us an actual gerbil. Les bought one of those little plastic gerbil balls, and for the remainder of the season that gerbil rolled around the office.”

  Perhaps the most far-reaching effect of ILC’s Super Bowl halftime show was on Super Bowl halftime itself. Never again would the NFL hire an Elvis impersonator, figure skaters, or the members of Up with People. The following year, they hired Michael Jackson, then the biggest entertainer on the planet. His five-song halftime mini-concert was one of the most viewed television spectacles of all time, and pointed the way toward a future filled with big-budget concert blowouts, the world’s most famous wardrobe malfunction, and Katy Perry riding a giant, golden lion.

  “We swooped in like pirates and took over that halftime half hour,” says Carrey. “We’re the reason why you see all that amazing entertainment at Super Bowl halftime now.”

  27

  “This Show Isn’t Just a Money Spigot”

  With the success of the Super Bowl experiment, the show hit a new high, but once the buzz wore off, the hangover set in. In retrospect, Super Bowl Sunday was the top of the mountain for In Living Color. Almost immediately it began its long, slow descent.

  In February, Barry Diller resigned his chairmanship at Fox. Although many have debated whether he’s been given—or took—too much credit for the birth of Fox as a fourth network, Diller had successfully steered the network out of its seemingly terminal late-eighties mire toward legitimacy. His decisions—along with those of Peter Chernin, Sandy Grushow, and Jamie Kellner—to push Fox toward “alternative” programming, toward the “Bad Boys of Television,” had proven to be the right one. At the time of his departure, the network was programming five nights a week and was on line to post a profit of forty million dollars for the fiscal year.

  Many were stunned by Diller’s resignation, but the famously confrontational, hard-charging executive had been increasingly chafing against the strictures of his position. He’d been the chairman at Fox, but still had to answer to News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, who never entirely bought into the idea that Fox needed to compete as scrappy underdogs. As one Fox executive puts it, “Rupert couldn’t understand why we were settling for a small piece of the pie, when you can have the whole pie.” The day Diller announced his resignation, Murdoch called a meeting with his five top remaining executives, which included Kellner, Grushow, and Chernin. He told the group, “Now that Barry is gone, we can really get this network firing on all cylinders.” When the remark got back to Diller, who at this point was still in the building, he chuckled to himself and noted that he always sensed Murdoch hadn’t appreciated what they’d achieved. Murdoch took over Diller’s position as Fox chairman himself, and almost immediately became more hands-on in the network’s decision making.

  Although Diller had often been a tough internal critic of ILC’s brash humor and a check on its most outlandish instincts, ultimately he was a supportive presence who’d been there since the show’s beginnings. Now he was gone. Keenen began to feel the reverberations of the shakeup. His show was a huge hit, at the height of its influence, yet he was feeling squeezed. “As regime changes happen, it always seemed like [we] were having to start all over again,” he says.

  Murdoch had previously been a looming presence; now he was an active one. “When Diller left, Rupert was playing catch-up,” says Gold. “He was nowhere to be seen until all of a sudden he was.” Fox’s attitude toward ILC began to shift. There was colder calculus going on.

  “When you have a show that’s a big hit making you a lot of money, it’s going to get more attention,” says Rose Catherine Pinkney. “So there were decisions made as we went along that were definitely much more business than creative.”

  Fox began filling holes in their schedule with ILC reruns. They pushed hard for more appearances from the show’s franchise characters. There was pressure to produce more episodes, to package together clip shows to extend the season. The grind of dealing with the Standards Department grew more intense.

  “We’re like, ‘Give us twenty-eight episodes,’ ” says programming exec Dan McDermott. “ ‘Give us more “Men on Film.”’ ‘Let us do compilation episodes.’ All that sort of stuff designed to make the network more money. I understand that would be upsetting to a guy like Keenen, for whom this show isn’t just a money spigot. This is his blood, his heart and soul.”

  As Pinkney explains, rather than looking at In Living Color and seeing a well-functioning hit show that should be largely left to its own devices, the network, and to some extent, the studio, saw a profitable enterprise with which they wanted to be more deeply involved. “The more the networ
k and the studio tried to become another chef in the kitchen, the less interesting it was for Keenen.”

  And not just Keenen. Cast members began to grumble at what they felt was unwelcome meddling. “It was just more and more network involvement,” says Kelly Coffield. “More people saying, ‘You can do this but you can’t do that.’ ‘You can say this but you can’t say that. And while we’re at it, could you please do six more of this hilarious character because we have it on a T-shirt?’ ”

  Keenen’s reaction to all this was predictable intransigence. “I never gave in because I didn’t think they knew how to run the show,” he says. “I’d listen but make as little compromise as I had to. There was a constant push and shove, give and take.”

  The production team worked on an extremely tight turnaround. The final cut of the show was typically finished and turned in to Fox less than a day or two before the Sunday night when it aired. At that point the network and the Standards Department reviewed it to ensure there wasn’t anything objectionable. “We were frequently delivering the cut to Fox Saturday night or Sunday morning so they wouldn’t have time to [request] changes,” says the show’s editor Kris Trexler. “Then we were always under the threat that they’d bleep us. There were times I’d have to go in Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon. There would be some relenting and compromising done so we could at least get the show on the air, last-minute.”

  Trexler recalls at least one time when someone at Fox personally made sloppy edits to an episode of the show. “They made the kind of cut that I would’ve taken my name off the show,” he says. “It makes the editor look bad.”