Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

  The show’s stature made its players valuable commodities. This included the Fly Girls. Although the Virgin deal had fallen apart, Warner Bros. picked up the thread, and Keenen still saw potential for the troupe as a multimedia juggernaut. As such, he was very interested in protecting—or maybe, better put, controlling—their image. But the dancers themselves weren’t under contract to the show between seasons, so when four of them—all but Jennifer Lopez—saw a casting call for a Budweiser commercial soliciting “Fly Girl types” during the hiatus, they figured as actual Fly Girls, they’d be shoo-ins. They were right. All four were offered the commercial. Keenen called the Girls in for a meeting.

  “Keenen was like, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” says Carrie Ann Inaba. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry, you don’t actually get to say that.’ We weren’t on retainer.”

  Cari French felt the same way: “We have to make money on the months we’re off from this show. We can’t sit around between seasons and not work.”

  The problem wasn’t that they were working during the hiatus. It was that if all four of them did the commercial, even if they weren’t billed as “The Fly Girls,” they might as well have been because everyone would recognize who they were. So essentially Budweiser was getting the Fly Girls on the cheap.

  “They were getting paid scale,” says Keenen. “At the same time, we were negotiating a Sprite commercial where they were going to get $350,000. But they didn’t have the patience to wait for the Sprite commercial.”

  Keenen gave them an ultimatum: the commercial or the show. Inaba, French, and Lisa Marie Todd picked the commercial. “I just said, ‘Look, I’m done,’ ” says Inaba. “The energy of the group had changed a little. It wasn’t as exciting. It was time to move on.”

  Deidre Lang stayed with the Fly Girls, leaving just her and Lopez. Two new dancers, Josie Harris and Lisa Joann Thompson, were hired, but Keenen seemed frustrated and disillusioned with the way the plans for the Fly Girls—the TV spinoff, the recording project, the whole brand—had gotten derailed. “After we hired new girls, Jennifer and I went to Keenen and said, ‘Are we still going to do the recording?’ ” says Lang. “He was like, ‘It’s changed now. I don’t want to.’ So it ended up falling apart.”

  Another consequence of the show’s popularity was that its stars wanted to renegotiate their contracts with the studio. Jim Carrey felt he deserved more than seventy-five hundred dollars an episode.

  “Jim says he wants twenty-five thousand dollars an episode, which isn’t a lot, really,” explains Eric Gold. However, because the original contracts were “favored nations,” Carrey’s demand triggered a domino effect. “David Alan Grier says, ‘Well, if Jim’s gonna get twenty-five, I want twenty-five.’ And Tommy says, ‘If you guys are getting it, I want it.’ And Kim is like, ‘Well, what about me?’ ”

  Keenen backed his cast’s salary demands, even as production on Season 4 was beginning and they were threatening to hold out until a deal was reached. The studio head at the time was Lucie Salhany, who’d taken over the year before, after having run Paramount’s television division. Salhany, a college dropout, had started her career as a secretary at a Cleveland television station, then risen steadily through the ranks. She’d helped bring Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show into syndication, and was instrumental in the creation of Arsenio’s show. She was short, with dark hair and large eyes, and the fact she was a woman made her something of a unicorn in the television industry’s upper echelons.

  According to Gold, during a meeting, Salhany proposed an idea for breaking the impasse with the ILC cast. “Lucie says, ‘I got an idea: We’re gonna fire Jim Carrey.’ I’m in the room. I’m like, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ ” Gold implored her, saying that talents like Carrey aren’t easy to find.

  Salhany says that Gold “was very tough to deal with. Eric was a pit bull. From my standpoint, it was a nightmare,” though she admits, for a manager, “that’s who you want.”

  Ultimately, cooler heads prevailed. No one was fired, new contracts were signed, the cast got their raises, and all was seemingly well. But the dealings with Salhany left a bad taste and certainly weren’t a good foundation for an ongoing relationship between her and the show’s principals.

  When the cast reconvened, Steve Park wasn’t among them. His contract hadn’t been renewed, which was devastating to Park and something of a surprise among the other cast members. Although he’d struggled to create recurring characters, he was a good team player, who was funny in his spots and worked hard. At the time, Park was simply told he wasn’t invited back. “The circumstances,” he says, “were always shrouded in mystery.” Years later, he reconnected with and eventually married Kelly Coffield, who passed along to him the story she’d been told about his departure.

  “Keenen said my manager was playing hardball, demanding more money,” says Park. “I think Keenen was really struggling with Fox, and was like, ‘Screw it. Just let him go.’ ”

  For Park, the disappointment was personal, but also, particularly in the wake of the L.A. Riots and the tense relations between the Korean-American and African-American communities, it felt bigger. Having worked with Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing and Keenen on In Living Color, Park had been a part of two black cultural landmarks. He’d been a huge fan of both Spike and Keenen, and before ever working with either, had felt bonded to their work. “I had this feeling like we’re all on the same page,” he says. “Like we all had the same point of view as minorities in American culture. Then when I worked with them, I realized that’s not the case. I’m seen as the outsider. That was disillusioning. It was difficult for me to realize they don’t feel as connected to me as I do to them.”

  Park’s exit wasn’t the loss the show felt most acutely, however. With Damon’s departure, there was a huge, gaping hole right at the show’s center. “We could replace him, but he was irreplaceable,” says Pam Veasey, who along with Les Firestein and Greg Fields was promoted from head writer to co-producer for Season 4. “When he left, the show wasn’t the same.”

  After a wide casting call to find two new cast members, one, predictably, was found closer to home. Marlon Wayans had been around since the show’s beginning but had been pursuing a college degree. “I wanted to learn to be Marlon before I came to be a Wayans,” he says. “That’s why I went off to college and learned to be my own man.”

  Life at a historically black college wasn’t always what he’d envisioned. “I went to Howard because I thought I wanted to be around my people,” he said. “Then I realized that them niggas hated me. My professors would be giving a class and go, ‘What we’re going to do in this class is talk about dignity—unlike that show In Living Color which is a minstrel show.’ And he’d be looking dead at me.” Marlon had attended LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in New York—the school famously featured in Fame—and always knew acting and comedy were in his future. He’d begun auditioning for movies while still at Howard. He was offered a role in Juice but turned it down. He was cast to play Robin in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, but Burton cut Robin out of the film before they’d even begun shooting.

  Marlon’s first film or television role—not including a cameo in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka—was in Mo’ Money. Damon made him audition for a role that had initially been earmarked for Kadeem Hardison. Hardison passed, Marlon got the part, and the film was a hit. With Damon leaving ILC, that Marlon would take his spot seemed like a foregone conclusion, but he was conflicted because it would mean dropping out of college. He remembered his mother cursing Keenen out in the laundry room of their Chelsea apartment when Keenen left Tuskegee. When Marlon approached her with essentially the same issue, her tune had changed. As he recalled, she was “sitting on a whole new washing machine now, with her fur and diamonds, going, ‘Baby, don’t be a jackass. Do like Keenen. Go take yourself out there and become an actor.’ ”

  Marlon’s arrival occasioned the expected grumbles about nepotism, but there was also a sense that while nob
ody could replace Damon, Marlon was about as close as anybody was going to get. “Maybe Keenen gave Shawn more than Shawn had deserved at the time,” says Gold, who by this time was also managing Marlon and Shawn. “But when Marlon comes along, Marlon is a breakout talent like Damon.”

  Ali Wentworth came to the show through the more traditional route. She was a young actress who’d been part of the L.A. improv and sketch theater group the Groundlings. Her agent told her the show “was looking for a black guy to replace Damon Wayans.” Naturally, she says wryly, as a blond, white woman, she figured she’d be perfect. She went through several rounds of casting before meeting with Keenen, who by this point in time had shaved his head clean and taken to wearing dark sunglasses, even indoors.

  “I went to his office and he was eating a weird salad,” says Wentworth. “He had sunglasses on, the kind that you can’t see his eyes. I remember thinking, I have to kind of sex it up. I have to look kind of trashy. I couldn’t wear my white corduroys and cashmere turtleneck sweater. So, I went in a miniskirt and this tight tube top thing. We had a conversation. It was pretty short. I left and thought, Well, forget it. That’s not going to work. I found out later that day I got it.” She had no idea what she was walking into.

  29

  “It Was a Really Cold, Destructive Place to Work”

  By the beginning of the fourth season, something had changed. Coming out to greet the audience at the beginning of the first episode wearing a dark black suit, dark sunglasses, and sporting a shiny bald pate, Keenen looked more like a professional assassin than a comedian. It would be his only time on-screen all season. While he never made it official policy—and the show’s writers still wrote sketches for him—Keenen stayed behind the scenes for the rest of his time on the show. Most interpreted this as part of an overall effort to gradually step away from the day-to-day hassles of running the show. By reducing his responsibilities and promoting Les Firestein, Pam Veasey, and Greg Fields into producer roles, Keenen could concentrate more energy on taking advantage of other offers coming in for him.

  “Keenen got hot from the show as a personality, but also as a filmmaker/executive producer,” says Eric Gold. He was being offered “once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to star, direct, produce, host. His desire was to transition the executive producing heavy lifting to the internal team.”

  Firestein thought this made sense and not just because it meant a promotion for him. “He probably wanted a system in place to keep the mothership alive and expand his empire,” he says. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t. He wanted to follow Lorne Michaels’s trajectory, which is I don’t need to be here doing this every day.”

  Keenen denies he was any less invested in the show than in earlier seasons. “There’s no truth to that at all,” he says. “As the show progressed, it required so much more from me simply because each season gets harder, it doesn’t get easier. You can’t be at a distance on a show like that in Season 4. It’s all-consuming. I had to be everywhere but nothing was coming together. There was a point where there was so much, I had to stop being in front of the camera. I had no time to be in sketches.”

  That first episode was devoted almost entirely to the L.A. Riots. By the time the writers assembled to start working in early July, the riots were a couple of months past, but the effects were still tangible around the city as the cleanup was in progress. It was a tragedy, no doubt, but if comedy is tragedy plus time, the sense was that enough time had passed. But it was a needle to thread. Mike Schiff, who was hired at the beginning of the season along with a writing partner, Bill Martin, says, “The marching orders were that the first episode was going to be all Riot stuff. We were looking for ways to make the riots funny, but we’d all lived through them and they weren’t funny at the time. I remember thinking, If we can do this right, anything that makes the show more relevant and less goofy would be good for a premiere.”

  Larry Wilmore recalls, “I wrote a lot of sketches around the Riots. I pitched so many inappropriate jokes, a lot that I wished to God had gotten on the air but didn’t.”

  One sketch was a fake PSA portraying Rodney King (David Alan Grier) and Reginald Denny (Jim Carrey) as shell-shocked and brain-damaged. Their message: “Stay in your car.” In “Fire Marshal Bill Rebuilds Los Angeles,” the character’s goofiness is paired this time with sharp commentary. Carrey, as Bill, enters a recently rebuilt grocery store with a shotgun. “So I hear you folks like to take shots at firemen,” he says. He takes jabs at police brutality, looters, racists, the Simi Valley jury, and the justice system. Carrey, who’s a main character in all but one of the episode’s sketches, says he returned from the show’s hiatus “pissed off royally” at the King verdicts and the violent fallout, “chomping at the bit” to exact a little comic justice. The show, he says, “was the only place to be as far as taking that subject on.”

  A new writer, Rick Najera, the show’s first Latino writer, had been caught up in the riots personally. He was teaching a class and hadn’t heard about the King verdict. When none of his students showed up, he walked back to his car and started to see smoke, and hear gunshots and sirens. He was approached by a group of young black and Latino men. “They jumped me,” he says. “They were hitting me, saying, ‘Let’s get this white motherfucker!’ I’m a light-skinned Latino. I go, ‘Motherfucker, why you calling me white?’ ” He yelled at them in Spanish and they backed off. Najera drove home through the center of the mayhem, not far, he says, from where Denny was attacked.

  Najera wrote a sketch called “Edward James Olmos Does Yardwork” that lampooned the Latino actor’s prominent role as freelance peacemaker and janitor after the riots, when television news crews followed him as he led volunteers, broom in hand, on a mission to clean up the mess.

  “Eddie was a friend and still is—he’s my children’s godfather,” says Najera. “After the riots, Eddie said, ‘Rick, let’s go clean up.’ I went to where he was having people clean up. We were in a part of South Central that hadn’t been affected by the riots. There must have been thirty, forty, fifty preppy Americans sweeping up someone’s front yard. A woman walks out and goes, ‘Hey! There’s no riots here. That’s my yard. Leave it alone.’ ”

  That became the basis for Najera’s sketch. In it, Carrey, as Olmos, earnestly leads a crew as they make renovations to Olmos’s own house. The suggestion that the actor was grandstanding (“There is so much to do,” he says in the sketch, “so very many ways to be seen.”) seemed fair, but the shots at Olmos’s pocked complexion were a little out of bounds for Najera. “Keenen’s big thing was ‘You gotta go harder on Eddie,’ ” he says. “In the end, another writer wrote, ‘We have to clean up the biggest part of this mess: my face.’ ” Olmos was unhappy with the cheap shot. “In Latino culture we can be very sensitive because of the way we’re portrayed in the media. I was in a [writers’] room with people that didn’t understand Latinos. I talked to Eddie and said, ‘Listen, everyone gets parodied on In Living Color.’ ” It was an early lesson for Najera in the show’s credo. “The feeling with every sketch was You can go further.”

  By the beginning of Season 4, the atmosphere behind the scenes was, at best, tense and, at worst, downright poisonous. Keenen was unhappy with Fox, cast members were at odds with each other, and the writing staff had gone through a makeover that was extreme even by its own ever-volatile standards. The head writers, Firestein, Veasey, and Fields, were now producers, which led to the departure of one of the staff’s most productive teams, Fax Bahr and Adam Small.

  “Keenen put Les, Pam, and Greg in charge and we said we don’t want to be a part of that,” says Small. “We felt we should’ve been promoted.”

  Michael Anthony Snowden had written a spec script for a potential Blade Runner sequel. Keenen helped get the script to Warner Bros., where the project ultimately stalled, but suddenly Snowden was an in-demand screenwriter—quite a transformation for a kid who’d been discovered dancing at a nightclub a year earlier—and left the show to pursue
it. Steve Tompkins quit (“I couldn’t wait to leave,” he says. “It was absolute slave labor.”) to work on a short-lived sketch show called The Edge. Fred Graver got a job writing for Cheers. In their place, the show hired eleven new writers, including several standups, some sitcom vets, and strangely enough, two former network executives. The new blood didn’t change the vibe.

  “It was high stress, very competitive,” says Nancy Neufeld Callaway, who had been a VP in the film division at Fox before taking the writing gig. “We’d stay until two, three in the morning. I wouldn’t say it was a warm, fuzzy room.” A couple months into the season, Najera says, “people were falling apart physically.” Such a big writing staff brought in more ideas, but also created other problems.

  “We had 3 EPs [executive producers] and a gazillion writers,” says Steve Oedekerk, a standup who’d been recruited to the show by Larry Wilmore. “The more people you have to manage, the harder it is to have a core symmetry.” The writers cleaved into cliques. Oedekerk was friendly with Carrey from the Comedy Store, so he ended up sharing an office with him and writing almost exclusively for him. “It was very compartmentalized. I showed up there most excited about working with David Alan Grier. I didn’t work with him on one sketch the entire season.”

  Marlon arrived at the show to find the same problems Shawn had. “The writers didn’t really write for me and Shawn,” says Marlon. Some of this, he thinks, was a matter of him being new to the show. The writers didn’t know his capabilities. Shawn thinks there was more to it than that.

  “New people came on and they had their gripe with Keenen pushing them as writers,” says Shawn. “Me and Marlon took the backlash. People were mean to us, which was good because it motivated me and Marlon to become the writers we are.”