Bill Martin doesn’t recall Shawn or Marlon being frozen out by the writing staff. “We were there for no other reason than to make Keenen happy and what made him happy was getting his brothers in the show,” he says. “So we wrote tons of stuff for those guys.”
Shawn and Marlon did quickly score with some original characters, two neighborhood wannabe thugs, Snuff and Roam, based on two guys they’d known growing up. According to Marlon, most of the sketches he starred in he wrote himself, including an over-the-top parody of Def Comedy Jam. One of Shawn’s more memorable moments was portraying Chris Rock in a commercial parody for a credit card called Anonymous Express. According to Mike Schiff, the sketch was commissioned by Keenen. Schiff recalls sitting in his office one day and watching Rupert Murdoch walk past his door with Chris Rock, on their way to a meeting with Keenen. “I don’t know what was said in that meeting but [afterward] Keenen called a pitch meeting and the word went out, ‘Keenen wants to parody Chris Rock,’ ” says Schiff. “The words may have been, ‘He wants to go after Chris Rock.’ ”
The sketch skewers Rock’s near-invisibility at Saturday Night Live. When Shawn as Rock encounters a tour group being shown around the 30 Rock studios—one of whom is, ironically enough, played by future SNL cast member Molly Shannon—they try to guess who he is. One guesses he’s Eddie Murphy. Another thinks he’s Damon Wayans. “No, he got fired from his first season,” Shawn answers, as Rock. “Now, he’s on that other show, the one I should’ve been on in the first place.”
Rock wasn’t thrilled with the sketch. It cut close to the bone. “There was a whole cultural thing going on that I was kind of a part of but that I couldn’t really express on SNL,” he said in 2004. “I’m on SNL, and In Living Color’s on, rap’s on MTV, Def Comedy Jam is happening, Martin is happening, all this black stuff is happening. I was like Charley Pride or some shit.”
Shawn was tight with Rock at the time, and the sketch made things dicey between them. “I learned the New York comedy club ropes from Chris,” says Shawn. “I had to call him and tell him we were doing him and how the joke wasn’t really on him, the joke was on SNL. We’re cool now, but at that time, it was a little tough.”
Ali Wentworth found her place on the show pretty quickly, playing, in her words, “a lot of hookers, strippers, and Hillary Clinton.” But in sharp contrast to her smooth on-screen integration, behind the scenes Wentworth found her introduction to the show harrowing. David Alan Grier and Jamie Foxx were warm toward her, but as a white female, she felt Kelly Coffield saw her as a threat. “I was welcomed by the men,” she says. “I was shunned by the women.”
Much of Wentworth’s discomfort had very little to do with her. Upon her arrival, she walked into a tangled mess of alliances, rivalries, and hostilities she didn’t understand. “I wasn’t aware of the kind of in-depth fighting,” she says. “There was not only a rift between Keenen and Fox, but there started to become a rift between the Wayans and Jim Carrey too. It got to a point where Jim and the Wayans weren’t speaking to each other.”
Carrey admits the vibe had changed considerably by this point: “Season 4 was a turning point. A lot of people started thinking about Where am I going from here? It becomes like a family. There’s certain people in my family I’m not so close to because we’ve just had too much time together in a high-pressure situation. And Keenen wasn’t an easy boss to work for. A lot of times he made us dig a hole, fill the hole, dig the hole, and fill the hole. There was a little infighting going on. There were a couple times I’d show up in a sketch with black sunglasses on and completely bum the sketch out. Then Kim would show up in one of my sketches wearing black sunglasses obviously not committed at all.”
For Wentworth, who didn’t know the other cast members and had never worked on television before, all the quiet hostility and passive-aggressive sniping made the working conditions dreadful. “I had a pit in my stomach every single day I went to work,” she says. “There’s nothing harder than having to be funny amidst all that. I didn’t know what was going on. I very much tried to keep to myself. When we weren’t rehearsing, I’d stay in my dressing room. It was a really cold, destructive place to work. I felt like at any moment somebody was going to lose their shit.”
Oedekerk had known and liked Keenen and Damon from standup, but when he arrived at ILC, he barely recognized the guys he’d known. “At that point, Keenen was bald, always wore these dark glasses—so dark I was wondering if he could actually see well inside ’cause it wasn’t a brightly lit place,” he says. “When I showed up, it was sort of like, My gosh, you’ve become Colonel Kurtz. What happened?”
Tommy Davidson continued to struggle amid the tense atmosphere and fierce competition. A few episodes into the season, he departed to get treatment for substance abuse. SNL was infamous as a den of iniquity, where drug abuse was not just common, but was practically a job requirement, but ILC’s backstage culture was comparatively straitlaced, which made Davidson’s mounting problems stand out even more. He’s intentionally vague on the details—though he’s spoken, at times, of his problems with cocaine—but says everyone on the show could see what was happening with him. “It was all the not-good things you do when you start getting strung out on something. I was late. I went from being an A-1 professional guy to a guy who wasn’t showing up.” Eventually, he just cracked. “I had a meltdown. I had to go get some help, get some new tools to live.” Many of his issues were personal, but his experiences at the show also played a part. “That was the source of a lot of frustration and pain. It was a contributing factor.”
Although Keenen was the source of some of this angst, Davidson says he was also part of the solution. “Keenen was a supportive dude,” he says. “He treated me like family. He said, ‘Do what you gotta do and take care of yourself. I love you.’ ”
Behind his chilly exterior, Keenen hid a surprising reservoir of empathy. One of the new writers, Robert Schimmel, who’d been hired along with his brother Jeff, was dealing with a horrifying situation at home: His young son was dying of cancer. The situation was excruciating. Robert—who died in a car crash in 2010—often walked out of his office, or a writer’s meeting, to go cry in the building’s stairwell. Every weekend, he flew home to Arizona to be with his family.
“Keenen came to my brother and said, ‘I know what’s happening with your son and it’s horrible,’ ” says Jeff Schimmel. “ ‘Go home and be with your kid. The show is going to be here. Come back when you want to come back.’ ” Robert was concerned if he left the show, he’d lose his salary and his family’s health benefits. “Keenen said, ‘You’re not fired, you’re not quitting, everything is here for you. Your job’s not in jeopardy, your benefits aren’t in jeopardy. When you’re ready to come back, you’re welcome to.’ I’ve been in the entertainment industry for twenty-eight years. It’s rare to see that.’ ”
Ratings dipped during the first part of the season, not precipitously, but enough that it didn’t go unnoticed. The show had done good work—the L.A. Riots sketches; “The Black People’s Awards,” which pointedly honored African-Americans’ work on television in such esteemed categories as “Best Black Sassy Next-Door Neighbor” and “Best Scared Brother on a Police Show”; “Juice Mania,” an off-the-wall infomercial written by Schiff and Martin that featured Carrey hamming it up as an insane octogenarian peddling his juice maker’s magical powers—but something was missing. When Damon left, he took all his characters with him. This meant no Homey the Clown, no “Men on Film,” no Anton Jackson, no “Homeboy Shopping Network,” no Brothers Brothers, no Handi-Man, no Oswald Bates. The solution to ILC’s troubles was obvious, particularly to Fox: Get Damon back.
Fox offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse: seventy-five thousand dollars per sketch. According to Gold, the deal made Damon the highest-paid actor on television. The schedule was set so Damon didn’t have to be there all the time. He could film multiple sketches in an afternoon. “He’d make two hundred twenty-five thousand dollar
s in a day,” says Gold.
As Damon sees it, “This was me getting paid what I deserved, or making up for the times when I wasn’t.” When Damon returned, playing Anton Jackson, a mere five weeks into the season, the episode spurred a nice uptick in the ratings. But Damon didn’t come back pretending to just be one of the guys.
“He had a bodyguard,” says Oedekerk. “A really nice guy named Willy. That cracked me up.”
Oedekerk may have been taken aback by how much Damon and Keenen had changed from the guys he knew from standup, but he kept his head down, worked hard, and quickly earned his keep as a writer. Early in the season, he and Carrey began making the most of the long hours in the office. Carrey’s agent asked him to read a script for a film called Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The script had been bouncing around for a while—both Rick Moranis and Chris Farley had reportedly passed on it—and it was easy to understand why. “It was a piece of shit,” Carrey says.
Carrey gave the script to Oedekerk one weekend to confirm his assessment. “I read the script,” says Oedekerk, “and came back on Monday and said, ‘You’d be crazy to do this, man. It’s absurdly unfunny.’ ”
As they talked about it though, they began to see a way that maybe they could make it work. “I made a deal with the company that I’d get paid to rewrite it,” says Carrey, “but if it ended up being something I don’t want to do, I wasn’t obligated. I had a back door out of it that gave me a lot of freedom to do whatever I wanted in a really extreme way. So, me and Steve decided to rewrite from page one together.”
Oedekerk was also working on a draft of a screenplay for the film Nothing to Lose, which would eventually star Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins when it finally made it to the screen in 1997. “We’d finish In Living Color somewhere between eleven and midnight, then we’d work on Ace Ventura until like three in the morning,” says Oedekerk. “Then I’d drive back to Laguna Hills. On the drive, I was finishing up Nothing to Lose on a tape recorder. I’d sleep for two hours, then drive back.”
The long hours seemed to benefit the writing. Sometimes, they couldn’t tell whether what they were conjuring was genuinely funny or if they were just overtired and punch-drunk. “We were howling with laughter,” says Carrey. “I’d go, ‘Okay, what do people love?’ ‘Fuckin’, uh, shark attacks!’ ‘Okay, let’s do a shark scene.’ It was a total expression of disrespect for the medium of movies. We had the greatest time hanging out until four in the morning every night, writing this stupid movie.”
Schiff’s office with Martin was next door to Carrey and Oedekerk’s. “Jim would come into our office late at night and ask which punch line we liked best, but he’d never give us the setup,” says Schiff.
Carrey and Oedekerk spent seven months—essentially the entire fourth season—rewriting Ace Ventura. There was mounting pressure on Carrey to re-launch his film career with the right project. If his next film bombed, there might not be any more. As he and Oedekerk worked, he was growing increasingly confident that this script—the same one he and everyone else dismissed as a “piece of shit”—was the way to go. “Once I got into writing it,” he says, “I realized I have to do this movie.”
Tamara Rawitt had been something of an invisible hand at the show since its inception. She was more than just a traffic coordinator, making sure things happened on time; she was involved in just about every aspect of the show, from casting and staffing to dealing with the network and the studio. She also had a tight relationship with Keenen, whom she seemed to understand better than most outside his family, and who, in return, seemed to trust her implicitly. But like a lot of things about ILC, that was beginning to unravel in Season 4.
Rawitt was part of the writing process but wasn’t, officially, a writer. As she puts it, “I did a lot of writing on the show. I fixed many things and made them much funnier behind the scenes.” But she wasn’t credited as a writer, and felt like, in general, her contributions were being overlooked. To remedy this, she asked Keenen for a writing credit. This, according to Firestein, didn’t sit well with the writers.
“She’d never written anything for the show whatsoever and hadn’t really offered to write,” says Firestein. “Basically, the writers were asked, ‘Are you okay with Tamara having a writing credit even though she doesn’t write on the show?’ which to many people seemed like saying, We want to make this person chief of surgery at Cedars-Sinai even though they don’t have a medical degree. The writers were like, ‘No, we’re not okay with it.’ ”
Eric Gold says that Tamara’s relationship with the writers grew worse over time. “She started to insist on writing credit,” he explains, for her supervisory involvement in the writing process. He also felt she was too close to the network executives, particularly considering the amount of friction there was at the time between Keenen, the show, and the network. The situation grew untenable, and after close to four years working alongside Keenen, Rawitt left the show, she insists of her own accord. Other than losing Damon, it was arguably the most significant departure the production had suffered to that point.
Rawitt was angry that Keenen didn’t have her back in the dispute over the writing credit. “That was one of the sore subjects between Keenen and me,” she says. “I did an enormous amount on that show and I wasn’t given credit for it.”
30
“They Were Trying to Commandeer the Show”
On Election Night 1992, Fox broadcast its first Tuesday night of programming in the network’s history. As befitted Fox’s brand at the time, they weren’t on the air to cover the election, but to amuse those who didn’t care about it, with new episodes of The Simpsons and Herman’s Head sandwiched around Martin and In Living Color reruns.
“We used to pride ourselves on being the ultimate counterprogrammers,” says Sandy Grushow, then Fox’s EVP of entertainment. “The best way to grow the network was to program aggressively when the other guys weren’t.”
The counterprogramming experiment was a minor success. The Simpsons finished second in its time slot, and even though both Martin and In Living Color finished fourth, they were competitive, drawing about sixteen million viewers who weren’t interested in seeing Bill Clinton become the forty-second president of the United States. Not everyone was happy. Keenen was growing increasingly annoyed at Fox’s eagerness to plug ILC reruns into their programming slate whenever they wanted. He believed that more runs of the show lowered its potential value in syndication.
Financially, syndication is the holy grail for a television show. Whatever money a producer or show creator might make in an initial deal pales in comparison with the potential income from syndication. Individual stations, or groups of stations, buy the rights from the studio to air reruns, and they pay per episode. There are more than three hundred independent television stations across the country, and the rights to air a single episode can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per station; it can add up to a lot of money very quickly. Generally, a series needs to have one hundred original episodes before it has value on the syndication market, and ILC was on pace to pass one hundred episodes by the end of the fourth season. Keenen’s belief that rerunning the show extensively before then would harm its syndication value is not exactly settled science. Jamie Kellner, Fox president at the time, says that in his experience, the shows “that had already been viewed by the highest number of people did the best in syndication.” So far from undermining its value, additional reruns of ILC might actually increase its worth. Keenen didn’t see it that way, and it’s not clear anyone tried to sell him on that explanation anyway.
He had other headaches with Fox too. He’d recently batted away an attempt by the network to move the show from Sunday night to Saturday night based on a marketing report that indicated black viewers watched television on weekend nights in greater numbers. Keenen insisted to Fox that ILC’s audience wasn’t simply black people, it was young people, and most would be out on Saturday night. Beyond arguments over scheduling, there seemed to always be network
notes asking for more of this character or less of that one, friction with the Standards Department, or unwelcome input on possible guest stars.
“Sometimes the network would make requests of things they thought would work but they were things we’d already tried and confirmed didn’t work,” says Firestein. “Of course, Fox wouldn’t take no for an answer.” At one point, someone from the network “got caught fishing dead sketches from our recycle bin.”
As the weeks passed, clashes between Keenen and Fox grew more pronounced.
“They were trying to commandeer the show,” says Kelly Coffield. “They wanted stuff to be more marketable, more recognizable, to have even more buzz around particular characters and sketches.”
Sandy Grushow doesn’t dismiss these concerns but maintains that some of it was more a matter of perception. “There wasn’t anybody in the Programming Department trying to rein the show in creatively. If there was any attempt to do so, it would’ve come from Broadcast Standards, Ad Sales, or Network Distribution. I had no sense Keenen was frustrated creatively. He and his manager, Eric Gold, had a direct and, as far as I could tell, positive relationship with Jamie Kellner. So, he may have been expressing that to Jamie, but I never got yanked into those dynamics.”
For his part, Kellner says Gold “would call me and we’d try to find common ground,” but that Grushow’s boss, Fox Entertainment Group president Peter Chernin, “would’ve been the person responsible for maintaining that relationship” with Keenen and the show.
As the season dragged on, Keenen’s patience for the seemingly constant battles wore thin. He was around less and less, and although he denies it, it was pretty apparent he was eying the exit door.
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