by Adam Carolla
Shortly thereafter I was stuffed into a van and driven to a county fair, then a bowling alley, and then a swap meet to talk about crackers with a bunch of crackers.
That said, some of the jobs were ones I desperately wanted to take—namely my sitcom pilots. But because of the process and executives, what should have been a highlight of my life became an infuriating pain in the ass.
Here’s how the process worked. In ’08 I wrote a sitcom script with my writing partner Kevin Hench that was considered one of the best of that pilot season. There was even a bidding war among the networks for it. It was called Ace in the Hole and eventually landed at CBS. We then spent the next seven weeks leading into the pilot taping having the script picked apart by a small army of unfunny people whose claim to fame is they fucked up a bunch of other sitcoms before fucking up mine. The executives, at least when I did my CBS pilot, were women in their forties or fifties who couldn’t crack a smile even if their Botox wasn’t preventing it in the first place. If you want to know why traditional sitcoms aren’t funny, here’s one possible explanation. In the eight weeks of preproduction, and what felt like 2,000 notes we got from the network and studio, the phrase “story arc” was mentioned 26,000 times, “C story momentum” was mentioned 19,000 times, “proactive story drive” 16,500 times, but the word funny was never whispered once.
After they were done turning my 9½ into a 5, it was time for the network run-through. I’m not saying it was an uncomfortable experience, but I’d rather have been raped on a pinball machine. A network run-through is like giving the best-man speech if the bride and groom were a couple of the heads from Easter Island. I had to perform the script for the humorless decaf-coffee klatsch, a script that was being picked apart up to the very moment I hit the set. This was including character names, which is a particular mindfuck. I spent the three days leading up to the final taping calling my son “Nate,” his original name, instead of “Eddie,” the name we needed to change it to for no goddamn reason.
As if changing the name wasn’t bad enough, the actor changed three times. The casting process on a sitcom is brutal. The bone-heads I made the mistake of working with picked a kid to play my son who was way too young and way too Canadian. We never even saw him live, just on tape. Hench was the only one smart enough to raise his hand and say, “We’re going to hire him sight unseen? That could have been his fifty-seventh take.” Of course he was shut down by the “experts” I would have had to share executive-producer credit with. After the first run-through, we had to send him packing back up to the Great White North. But they looked at Kevin with a straight face and said, “We’re gonna have to replace the kid” as if he hadn’t raised the red flag and as if they hadn’t pulled that red flag down and wiped their asses with it. Leaders of banana republics and Middle Eastern dictators are more willing to say “my bad” than TV executives.
We later held a quick casting session and saw one kid we liked and one we could settle for but weren’t in love with. The development executives said that we should take them both to the network for approval. Kevin Hench, being the smartest guy in most rooms he walks into and definitely in this one, asked why we would even give the network the option of picking the kid we didn’t want. He was greeted with the usual executive chorus of “We know what we’re doing.” Well, the story wouldn’t be worth telling if we didn’t end up getting stuck with the kid we didn’t want. Through the whole final pilot taping, he was a combination of forgetful and asleep. He had the energy of a sloth on methadone. Except for one moment. When the taping wrapped, the cast came out to do their bows. Apparently he’d finished metabolizing the bottle of Nyquil he chugged beforehand because he bounded out and did a mock home run swing into the bleachers. In keeping with their MO, after the taping the executives looked at Hench with a straight face and said, “Great taping. But we need to get rid of that kid.”
I wish I could say that was the worst story involving my sitcom son. But after kid one had been fired and kid two hadn’t been hired, we had another run-through. So they needed a temporary Nate, or Eddie. I can’t even remember what the fuck he was called at that point. It was an important day, and there were executives buzzing around. And they don’t sit in the bleachers—they hang right on the edge of the fake sitcom kitchen. I could see them eighteen inches away from me staring coldly as I had to do the important scene where my son had decided to quit the baseball team. I got down on one knee, looked him in the eye, and in my best dad heart-to-heart voice said, “When you bail on the Padres, you join a new team called the Quitters.”
Except our temporary kid that day wasn’t an eight-year-old with TV good looks, it was a grizzled fifty-two-year-old midget wearing a cabbie hat. Yes. You may not know, yet may not be surprised considering how fucked-up this business is, that when they need someone to stand in and read lines for a kid actor, they often use a little person. I was nervous as hell knowing what was on the line if I didn’t get this scene right. But across from me in the spot where my cute son was supposed to be stood a four-foot-three guy with cigar smoke and bourbon on his breath who probably did two tours in Nam.
The funniest moment of Ace in the Hole, however, did not take place on screen, or on set, but rather at the table read. A table read happens before the full rehearsal. The actors sit at a table and read the script, the director reads the stage direction, and the executives read their BlackBerries. This helps the team figure out the pace and what is and isn’t working. Our table read went fine, with the exception of the aforementioned child actor. It was what happened afterward that is the stuff of legend. The show had a producer named Dionne. She was the nicest woman on the planet and one of the few producers who actually pulled her weight. She also happened to be the granddaughter of showbiz legend and philanthropist Danny Thomas. Danny was the Daddy of Make Room for Daddy, a sitcom that lasted thirteen seasons. He starred in some movies in the fifties, produced legendary sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Andy Griffith Show, and most important, he founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which has treated thousands of kids with cancer.
But he’s also famous for another thing that he may or may not have done. Or, rather, infamous. A rumor has been floating around for at least fifty years that Danny had a particular sexual fetish. He would allegedly pay hookers to squat over and defecate on a glass-topped coffee table while he was underneath it, looking up.
I’ve always wondered how these rumors get started. I can understand it now in the age of the Internet, but how did we all spontaneously, at different ages, in different parts of the country, hear that Rod Stewart had his stomach pumped because it was full of semen? I work and hang out with guys who are in their twenties and are from Boston and guys in their fifties who are from Southern California. Every one of them knows the Rod Stewart story. I could parachute into a remote Ugandan village that doesn’t have running water or electricity and ask the first tribesman I encountered, “Did you hear about Rod Stewart?” and he’d respond, “Yeah, stomach pumped ’cause it was full of jizz.” Here’s the documentary I’m going to make and subsequently win an Academy Award for. I’m going to track down the guy who started the Richard Gere gerbil rumor. This shit has to start somewhere. In fact, I’m going to start a rumor in this book and check back in twenty years to see if it has become legend. Here it is. Justin Bieber had to have his stomach pumped because he swallowed a gerbil that was filled with Rod Stewart’s jizz.
Danny Thomas’s granddaughter adored him and we adored her, so we all avoided the subject. After the table read we were all mingling, snacking, and discussing how it went. I was standing around with Dionne and Kimmel (a producer on the project as well) when up walked Pam Adlon, who played my sitcom wife. Jimmy was heaping praise on Dionne’s aunt Marlo Thomas because he had recently purchased Free to Be You and Me, which had been dedicated to Dionne. Pam joined the conversation, and Jimmy explained the Danny Thomas connection. Pam instantly, without a second of hesitation, asked, “What’s up with the glass c
offee table?” There was a beat of silence that felt like it lasted as long as the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Meanwhile, all of our hearts stopped beating from the pure uncut discomfort. A second later, Pam said, “Oh, my God. What did I just say?” and began profusely apologizing. This only made it worse. The producer then had to address it saying, “Well, I’ve heard the rumors.” I don’t know what Pam expected, like the producer would pull out a shoebox full of fecal-fetish mementos or a coffee-table book about her grandfather’s coffee table and the many asses it had seen.
Me and Jimmy were beet red from holding in our laughter. Jimmy loves an awkward moment. For him, this was like having front-row seats on the 50-yard line at the Super Bowl of Embarrassment. I later noted as I was telling Dr. Drew this story the irony that it happened at the “table” read.
The next year when I did a pilot for NBC, I made the mistake of working with the same company that produced my CBS pilot. Overall it was a similar experience, an exercise in infuriation. The casting was miserable and included a battle, nay, a protracted war over casting my friend Oswaldo in the role of my friend Oswaldo (who, like Eddie/Nate, was briefly Rogelio and Eduardo). There was also the hilarious moment when we wanted to cast Amy Landecker, who was fresh off the Coen brothers movie A Serious Man, as my character’s ex-wife. The network wanted her to come in and read for the part. Hench and I said, “Good enough for the Coen brothers, good enough for us.” But the suits insisted and she was forced to come in and read while she was in L.A. for the goddamn Academy Awards.
Like every other job I’ve had working for a corporation—such as when I had my morning show on CBS radio—for this pilot I was told I needed to sit through a sexual-harassment seminar. And like when I was on CBS radio, I refused. My thoughts on these time wasters are more than laid out in my previous book. But just so you don’t think I’m bullshitting about how strongly I feel about these, I’ll share a story of my less than passive resistance to this one. After I put my foot down and said I wasn’t going to do it, the network put its foot down and said it wouldn’t shoot the pilot until I sat through it and signed a piece of paper saying I sat through it. I still refused, holding up production and scaring the shit out of all the employees who hoped this would turn into a steady gig. The network relented and offered that the chick could come to me at my convenience to do the seminar. I said I had to work on the script and did not have a convenient time. They said they could have her come in while I was working on the script. Knowing that I was going to ignore her anyway, I reluctantly agreed. At this point the rest of the cast, the producers—essentially everyone except Hench—were pissed at me. So one night while Kevin and I were working on the script, the chick came in and started going through her materials. I made it abundantly clear that I wanted this thing to move quickly and that I would probably spend the next half hour ignoring her. But at a certain point she brought up the lawsuit in which a female writers’ assistant on Friends sued because of the sexual conversation in the writers’ room. She asked me if I understood the point she was trying to make. I’m sure she was hoping I’d say to not create a hostile work environment but I said, and truly believe the lesson is, “Don’t hire chicks.”
On every TV show I’ve ever done, I’ve had to deal with the idiots from Broadcast Standards. The NBC pilot was no different. For those who may not know, these are the people who make sure you can see a dismembered hooker corpse on every episode of CSI but protect you from seeing a little nip slip on Survivor.
Why is it okay to see smashed bodies being pulled from the rubble in Haiti on the six o’clock news, but at eight they have to tile the ass crack on the chick scrambling up the cargo net on the reality show? Though I must admit that if they did start showing nipples on TV, we would just keep going. It wouldn’t be too long before you’d hear me complaining, “What, no vag?” And then in ten years I’d say, “You can see people fucking but what, no cum shot? I’m not saying he has to cum in her face, but would it be such a crime to blow a load on the tits? What is this, the Vatican?” Eventually it would get down to, “I don’t understand the taboo on double penetration. Why are we such Puritans?”
One of the battles I got into with NBC Broadcast Standards was over smoking. Despite that fact that obesity kills more people than smoking, networks will, without hesitation, show an ad for Hardee’s bacon ranch country-gravy strudel, but won’t show someone taking a drag. All the Law & Order–type shows use the “ripped from the headlines” angle when they do the story about the pedophile murderer, but when I was doing my pilot for NBC we couldn’t show a construction worker smoking a butt. Construction workers smoke. This is not an advertisement, it is a fact. And it is hardly a glorification. The character was a dimwit hybrid of every chain-smoking stoner white guy I ever worked construction with. No one would watch him and think, “If that guy is smoking, then I should too. I want to be like him.” The network said we could show him holding a cigarette, but not if it was lit. As if that makes a fucking difference. It’s not like people out there would watch that and think he was going to eat it. They did eventually concede that if we showed him with the cigarette lit, we would have to say something negative about it. Eventually we just cut that bit because it was too much of a pain in the ass. Congratulations, Broadcast Standards, you’ve succeeded in making your product 20 percent less funny.
You’ll be pleased to know that my streak of getting into awkward situations with celebrities and the Hollywood elite continued unabated. Here are three of my favorites:
QUEEN LATIFAH: In January of 2009 I did The Tonight Show. The guest before me was Queen Latifah. First, how great must it be to be black? Somewhere in your early twenties, you can just declare that people call you Queen and everyone goes along with it? I could never pull that off. If I told all my friends to call me King Carolla, they’d instantly dub me Sir Douchebag. Plus black guys get to wear crazy hats and no one ever says shit.
Anyway, just to set the table for the disaster that was about to befall me, let me say this: I have no idea what Queen Latifah is into sexually. But she’s a woman in her forties who’s never been married, has no kids, and let’s just say there are a lot of rumors that perhaps the Queen isn’t interested in finding a king. Queen Latifah’s segment focused on her recent trip to Trinidad and Tobago and how she had spent the whole time “limin’.” That’s slang down there for relaxing. She went on to explain how it came from British people rubbing lime on their skin and proceeded to say the word “limin’ ” 217 times in a six-minute segment.
Then I came out for my spot. I was doing a bit on kids’ toy packaging, since the holidays had just ended. I took out a Hannah Montana doll and had Jay try to open it while I explained how you needed spindly fingers, the jaws of life, lineman dykes, and a cutting torch to extract it. It was a good bit and I thought it went over well. That was, until the commercial.
When we went to break, the band was playing and five producers came scurrying out of the booth and up to the edge of the stage and called me over in a panic. It was three gay guys and two postmenopausal women. They said, “Listen, we’ve got to put this show up on the satellite to New York in the next twenty minutes, but we don’t want to do that.” I asked why. They said, “Because you just pointed at Queen Latifah and called her a dyke.”
I was confused. I knew I was thinking it, but I didn’t say it. I denied that I called her a dyke. One of the producers said, “Yes, you did. You pointed right at her and called her a limin’ dyke. You said to get that package open, you needed a limin’ dyke.”
I figured out what happened. In my list of tools you needed to open the package, I had included lineman dykes. But they heard limin’ dyke. I’d been in the trades too long. I assumed everyone knew what lineman dykes were. Just like everybody knows what an oscillating spindle sander is. Right? I tried to explain to the three gays having cows and the two ladies having hot flashes, “No, No. Lineman dykes. Diagonal cutters. The kind linemen use. You know, dykes? Just dykes.” At this point the
lead female producer gestured for me to lean in and said, “Adam, could you please stop shouting dyke.”
PHIL ROSENTHAL AND SAUL RUBINEK: Phil Rosenthal is the brains behind Everybody Loves Raymond. He’s a nice, funny guy and has more money than God. Thus he has an amazing home theater and throws movie nights. Phil invites all his showbiz friends and gets the best food, so if you’re lucky you’ll find yourself sitting around eating homemade pizza with Norman Lear. Phil and I have a mutual friend named Ed who hooked me up with an opportunity to attend one of these events. I asked Ed what time it started, and he said it was about seven or seven thirty. I asked because I had to go and host Loveline that night. This was in 2009, long after I’d left Loveline—I was just filling in for the night. I did some math and figured out that the Loveline studio in Culver City was about fifteen minutes away from Phil’s house and that I’d be able to make it. Bear in mind that radio shows start on time, whether you’re there or not, so I had to plan this out to the minute.
Phil’s theater looks like a regular movie theater with about twenty seats and some pillows to sit on lying on the floor in front of the first row. So before the movie, I flopped down on the pillow with a belly full of red wine and pizza. It was wonderful, except the part where I saw Phil’s happy kids floating around and was thinking about my own miserable childhood and how inconceivable this all would have been.
One of the key features of Phil’s movie night is that he always brings in someone connected with the movie to talk about it. One time, after the evening I’m telling you about, I was there to watch Spinal Tap and Fred Willard joined us. At the end of the movie, Fred got up and said a couple words about what it was like on set. For Fred, brevity was the soul of wit. On the outing when I needed to dash to Loveline, we were watching True Romance and Saul Rubinek was there. Saul played the role of the coked-up Hollywood producer. The movie had started about twenty minutes late and True Romance is a little longer than you remember, and we were watching the director’s cut. I looked at my watch during the credits, at 9:33, and decided to sneak out during the intermission I’d envisioned taking place between the movie and the speaker. I’d assumed there’d be a ten-minute break where people would be able to fill their wine glasses and empty their bladders. I started to make my move, but a moment later the house lights were powered up and so were Saul’s gums. I immediately sat back down on the pillow. Keep in mind I had almost eleven years of Loveline five nights a week, oftentimes from different restaurants and other establishments around town, so I knew exactly how long to the minute it would take to get from wherever I was in Los Angeles to the studio chair. In this particular case my hard-out time was 9:46. This would give Saul more than ten minutes to talk about his nine minutes of screen time.