Almost Interesting (20 page)

The first day of shooting was the first time either of us had played lead in a film, and we were trying to prep for the overwhelmingness to come. We never had to memorize lines on
Saturday Night Live,
because they were always changing and would ultimately be on cue cards anyway. Pete Segal, our director on
Tommy Boy,
was a very easygoing, affable guy who loved comedy. He was a good presence to have on the set because he wasn’t a screaming asshole . . . which I found out later some directors are. He sometimes didn’t 100 percent get our odd sense of humor, but he liked us and told us to be as funny as we could, to riff and make shit up, and that he’d try to make sure it looked good and the story worked.

Day one involved three and a half pages of dialogue between just Chris and me in a diner. During the conversation, I realize that Chris (Tommy) is a good salesman. Simple enough idea, right? Being a comedian, I was used to one shot to get something right. Of course, on
SNL
you do your stuff live, so that is only one take. Neither one of us was prepared for how many takes we would have to do to knock out a three-and-a-half-page scene. It was twelve straight hours of saying the same shit over and over, trying to keep it lively and loose because you never knew which take they were going to use. Pete then did at least fifteen master shots of the two of us. Ten over my shoulder toward Chris, ten medium close-ups, and ten tight close-ups. Then he flipped around and did ten to fifteen from a bunch of different angles. Pete called it coverage; we called it smotherage. Chris and I didn’t foresee the burnout that would come with all of this. It was amateur hour for us and the movie thing. We were so naïve.

Here’s an example of just how green we were. In the morning Chris started the day with a thermos of cappuccino. He would do a small shot before each take to make sure he “gave it everything.” After literally twenty-six shots I said, “You can’t do this shit anymore, dude. Pete just told me we’re going to be at this all day and we haven’t even gotten to your close-up. Save it.” Chris would go into his trailer at lunch and crash. Hard. No PAs wanted the task of waking him up because they learned pretty quick that they would get their heads ripped off . . . which of course was hilarious to me . . . except when I was on the other end of it. In fact Chris would get so mad when someone woke him up, in such a predictable fashion, that I couldn’t resist the chance to set him up. Midway through the shoot, Sherry Lansing stopped by the set to say hello. She chatted with me at lunch for a minute, and then said she’d like to say hello to Chris before she left. This was a typical set visit, but having the visitor be the head of the studio wasn’t so typical. It’s usually an executive who stops by, not the big cheese. I should have told Sherry that Chris was sleeping but instead told her, “He’s in his trailer. I’ll have a PA walk you over there, he’d love to chat!” As she was getting closer to the trailer, everyone started looking around with a worried look, knowing this wasn’t going to end well.

Well, Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount, the one who green-lit our movie and was responsible for paying us, tapped on the door of his trailer. “Chris, are you in there?” Here comes the response we all expected. “I SAID I’M SLEEPING AND DON’T WAKE ME UP YOU FUCKING CUNT!” Sherry didn’t even react. She just quietly said, “Chris, it’s Sherry Lansing, I just wanted to say hi.” Pause. Then a completely different, sweet Chris voice says, “Oh, hey, Sherry, let me just get something on, it’ll be one sec.”

The very next day, we shot the scene where I come to Tommy Boy’s hotel in the morning with coffee to announce that we have just made a sale. I knock on the door and say, “Housekeeping?” in a high-pitched Spanish voice. This was something we added to the script when we shot it because I said that to Chris every day at the hotel where we were staying. We stayed on the same floor at the Four Seasons in Toronto during the whole shoot, and when we had a 5
A
.
M
. pickup, I would go over to Chris’s room and knock on the door and say, “Housekeeping?” And he would yell, “No thanks!” And I would keep doing it over and over, saying all the things maids say when they come knocking. “Do you want me check minibar? Do you need towels? You like chocolate?” On and on until he would yell, “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. IT SAYS ‘DO NOT DISTURB’! LOOK AT THE FUCKING THING ON THE DOOR!”

And then he’d open the door, see me, and quietly say, “Oh, it’s you.” I’d say, “Yes, it’s me, Chris. It’s me
every fucking time
. I can’t believe you still fall for this.” When we shot the hotel scene we threw this exchange in and made something a little flat funnier with our stupid daily shenanigans.

We also couldn’t figure out what Farley should wear when he opened the door in that scene. I was pushing for him to come to the door wrapped in nothing but a blanket, which he would drop when he said his last line. We ended up shooting three versions—one of pajama bottoms, one where he is wearing little tighty whities with polka dots, and one where he is totally naked, just for the gag reel. When we did the one where he was totally naked, everyone busted up laughing. He was being shot from behind, but for some reason he turned around to the camera and started moving his hips so his dick would swing in circles and said, “Sherry, do you like the movie?” or something to that effect. Everyone laughed even harder then, mostly out of fear of getting fired. I recently saw those dailies, and rewatched them just to prove to myself that this really happened. I always wondered if Pete stopped that take from getting to Paramount. The studio folks went through dailies every night to see how the shoot was going and a swinging dick might not have sent a positive message. Who knows. Sherry was so cool, she probably wouldn’t have given a shit.

As the shoot dragged on, it got harder and harder to keep our spirits up. Chris and I were great friends, of course, and we were having a fucking blast cracking each other up, but there was a little downtime and the moodiness and irritability set in. It was human nature. And being together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week . . . it got tough. It was so pointless for me to fly back to New York for read-through on Wednesdays because if I hadn’t written anything for myself, I wasn’t going to be in the show. And I was too burnt out from memorizing lines and shooting to write anything. So by flying back to read-through, I was getting the shit kicked out of me from exhaustion with a sprinkle of humiliation. Chris always had a lot to do in read-through—writers would put him in every sketch because they knew he was a score machine but he was wiped out, too.

A lot of things come together from different angles when you’re doing a comedy. Every joke is so fucking important that you rack your brain all day to try to make things better and better. The best jokes are almost never in the script that was handed in the day before the shoot. I would imagine that in a drama, you don’t have that much leeway. (I wouldn’t know. Lifetime has never called me.) But with a comedy, especially if you have a good enough team of actors, directors, and producers, you can keep adding to the bitter end to make the movie funnier. I know Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell, Sandler, all the funniest guys out there do this. Even an editor who is on his game can get you so many free laughs. A good editor is so important. Our editor, Bill Kerr, was great at the extra gag. Three days after we shot the scene in a gas station where Farley breaks the doors off, Kerr showed me a rough version. He had done it so that the scene cuts to me being sarcastic to the attendant, and then to the attendant, and then back to me again before we even say another line. Stuff like that is so crucial to the final product. We got three laughs instead of one. He also threw in the song “Crazy” droning in the background. Another nice touch.

One of my script ideas was the scene when Chris and I are driving along after a long day of sales. We are both burned and tired and the really fruity song comes on the radio. I pitched the idea to Fred that the song should be one by the Carpenters. (This comes from my REAL LIFE, because I had
The Best of Carpenters
CD in my car, and once a girl got in and turned on the radio to find that disc blaring “Rainy Days and Mondays.” I played it off like “What is this shit?” and then acted like I didn’t know it was even in there. I may have even tried to blame her.) The scene in the movie based on that is pretty funny, especially with the final beat being the hood of the car popping up and we spin out. It is joke to joke to joke. Fred was good at placing ideas like that, then adding to them.

One other bit that we threw in at the last minute was the scene right before I whack off to the girl at the pool. It was sort of flat and jokeless until I see her out the window, so I asked if we could weave in a bit I had written for Weekend Update a few weeks before. (I was still trying, in my lame way, to get on the show.) The bit involved me reviewing movies, something along the lines of: “You know which comedian liked this movie?” (And there’d be a picture of Cameron Diaz.) “Buddy Whack-it.” “You know what baseball team loves Cameron? The Yankees.” “Who was your favorite Little Rascal? Was it Spanky?” And on and on. All those jokes were loaded in to that update bit (which bombed at read-through, by the way) but I had such confidence that there was something funny about it I asked if we could put it in and dish those payoff lines to Chris because it made the most sense. It was not a big scene but it made the existing one a bit funnier with him nailing those. Also, when Chris walked by the hot girl at the pool and said, “Is there a weight room?” or whatever, all those takes were classic Farley making shit up and killing. Props can also help a scene, too. I love that exchange when Chris tells me he’s wearing a clip-on and I go, “Are you sure?” Throwaway jokes like that are important. They don’t get huge laughs but they’re nice texture and they carry the style of your humor across. And often they pass by so quickly it doesn’t matter if not everyone laughs. Those are my favorite kinds of jokes, the ones that pay off the tenth time you see the film.

As I write this I feel like I sound like I’m patting myself on my back, claiming that I wrote every joke in that movie. I didn’t, of course. I would just add in my ideas here and there and try to hold up my end of the deal. This movie was obviously a tour de force for Chris and made him a movie star. He was hilarious in it. Bonnie, Terry, and Fred wrote a great script and Fred added jokes the whole way. Chris added in his own killer stuff. The one thing I did a lot of was rely on my memory. I could remember all the funny shit Chris had said in the past. I would tell him to say them when I thought they would work on-screen. And Chris would say, “Davey, that’s a great joke, thanks.” And I’d say, “It’s your joke, dude; you said it a year ago.”

We finished the movie and Paramount seemed pretty happy with the test screenings. When it was released, it was number one for the weekend. That shocked a lot of people, including us. Neither one of us had much of a concept of whether we had fans, or if anyone even gave a fuck about us at all. So to see the movie debut so strong was a nice boost. Today, all these years later, it’s still talked about, which I guess means it has stood the test of time whereas many of my other on-screen performances (or gems, as I like to call them) have not. I have to say I definitely got spoiled with
Tommy Boy
because I didn’t quite realize how fucking hard it is to get a movie to number one, to get it to be pretty solid all the way through and memorable ten years later. People forget that making a shitty movie is just as hard as making a good one. That one was sort of lightning in a bottle.

After
Tommy Boy
worked, Chris and I went on to shoot
Black Sheep
. The story behind
Black Sheep
is complicated, and there are a few different versions out there. I’m going to tell you my version, how I remember it. Sometimes people remember things differently, but this is my recollection. Paramount wanted another movie with us after
Tommy Boy
. The timing needed to be that we would write the movie during the
SNL
season, and then shoot during our summer break again. It was interesting working backward from a green light. I don’t think there was ever another time in my career when I experienced this, and I can say now that this was a luxury. But the problem was that after
Tommy Boy
was considered a success, everything got way more complicated. That movie was Chris, Fred, and me making up shit and having fun, with no one on our asses. For this movie we were being watched like a hawk and the clock was ticking.

Fred Wolf wrote up a quick first version of a script and handed it in for Chris, me, and Paramount to read. This was where things got tough. In a strange turn of events, I was going to make more money than Chris on this movie. The reason was that Chris had been in and out of rehab, and had made a two-picture deal with Lorne and Paramount. I’m sure he signed it to get back in everyone’s good graces, to show he was a team player. He had a set fee for the second movie. My fee for
Tommy Boy
was a one-shot deal so I got to negotiate from scratch for the follow-up. So that was awkward, but we got past it. The real elephant in the room was that Chris had quietly been offered the lead in
The Cable Guy
for $3 million. This was an unbelievable amount of money and nothing close to what either of us was going to make on
Black Sheep
.

I came to work one day and Chris was there, hair all greased back, smoking a cigarette, and in all-biz mode. He said, “Hey, have you read
Black Sheep
yet?” I said, “No, I’m reading it tonight. How is it?” He said, “It’s good, not great. I think it needs a lot of work. There are some good moments but we should really take our time with this and get it right. Probably wait until next summer.” I left and went to an Au Bon Pain café underneath Rockefeller Center. I went there to think about the situation. It was very unnerving. I knew that if I didn’t like the script and said no to doing
Black Sheep
that summer, Chris would be off the hook with Paramount and could do
The Cable Guy
. But if I liked the script and said yes, Chris would have to do it because he owed Paramount a movie. So I had to take his script comments with a grain of salt because maybe he was telling me in between the lines to just say no to this so he could go do
The Cable Guy
. I decided I would read it with an open mind and just go with my gut. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it, and Chris could do whatever he wanted. That night I read it and realized it wasn’t perfect but there was a funny movie there. I thought we could work with Fred, pepper in our extra jokes, and everything would work out fine. This had a chance to be as good as
Tommy Boy,
in my opinion. So I said yes. This didn’t go over great. I told Chris, “I’m sorry but if you took
Cable Guy
out of the equation, you know this movie can be really good.”