I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (17 page)

O
RIGINALLY
, the civil rights movement was focused on getting minorities a place at the table. That was the case literally, as in segregated public establishments, and it was the case figuratively, with regard to business opportunities. So extending civil rights boils down to one simple and easy question: Does a certain action make it
easier
for a group to achieve, or does it make it
harder
?

People realize intuitively that getting your own television show is very hard. But have contemporary civil rights leaders made it easier for minorities to get their own shows—or have they made it harder?
In other words, have they maintained the spirit of the movement, or have they turned the movement against its own people? I know how I would answer that question, and I am speaking based on my own experience.

In 1992 I didn’t have my own show yet, but I did have a family and I needed insurance. To get insurance from AFTRA, the actors’ union, you have to make a certain amount of money in a year. I found out that
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
was looking for a comedian to warm up the audience before taping and during breaks. It wasn’t a great gig, but it was a
paying
gig.

I was waiting in the production office’s lobby when Myles, one of the writers, came walking in. “What are you here for?” he asked me.

“I’m here to audition for the warm-up job,” I told him.

“I’ve seen you on TV, and I’ve seen you out in Philly. You got the job.”

My primary gig was to keep the audience abreast of the script. “In this scene Will’s going to make fun of Carlton’s dancing again.” If the script wasn’t funny, I just started telling jokes. Pretty soon, the crowd would be laughing so hard that the writers had a problem. “Hey, man, you’re funnier than the script,” one of the staff told me. “You just need to keep the audience abreast of what’s going on. Don’t do any jokes.”

But I wouldn’t listen. It was the audience to a
comedy
show and I had a microphone; I’m going to be telling jokes. That’s just all there is to it. I would have at it and I was
slaying
them, Jack. I didn’t care who walked around the stage; I would call them out and tease them mercilessly. It was completely in good fun and there was never anything malicious about it. But people in Hollywood have thin skins and inflated egos, and it often takes just a pinprick to pop that self-important balloon.

Myles would let me know that it was driving the show’s writers
nuts
. “I hate him! He’s vulgar.” But we all knew it wasn’t my foul mouth that was the issue. It got to Will, too. It was
his
show, after all, and he didn’t like that his opening act was upstaging him on his own set. One time he and I started going back and forth right in front of everybody. He started coming up the stairs to me so we could battle. “Stay down there,” I told him. “That’s your world. Up here’s my world. Don’t mess around.”

“Give me a microphone,” he said. “Give me a microphone!”

Quickly they scurried to find him a mike, and I just stood there amazed. “Before that thought gets finished running around in your big-ass fucking head,” I told him, “come over here and ring the starting bell.
Ding!
”

The audience just erupted, and Will was paralyzed. There was nothing he could say, but I can’t imagine this kind of thing was appreciated. The show was like one big family, but I already had a family and I didn’t need another one. I even refused to let my kids visit the set despite how much they were dying to meet the Fresh Prince. LaDonna thought that was petty. She thought everybody would love the kids, but she thinks everybody loves everybody anyway. But from my perspective, my children are
my
children and
my
responsibility. I heap love and praise on them. I didn’t want to expose them to the industry, and particularly people who make a living pretending to be somebody else. I don’t mean Will, I mean actors in general. Their gig is to pretend to be someone that they’re not. That’s not only a skill set, it’s a character flaw.

Will would make everybody come into the office to do cheers and that kind of stuff, but I wouldn’t do it. I would get the script, go sit in the bleachers, and read it. Obviously my attitude didn’t endear me to the higher-ups. After a while they started playing music
between scenes so I couldn’t talk. They thought I was being insolent, and I thought I was doing my job and being funny. Maybe there was some truth to both of our sides.

The last straw was one day when I was doing introductions. When it came time for me to introduce Alfonso Ribeiro, his father told me to roll the R’s. I didn’t, because I
couldn’t
. The producers thought I was being a dick, but I really couldn’t pronounce it. That gave them the excuse they wanted to fire me.

One month later, Will called me back himself. “Come on, D.L.,” he said, “I want you to come back.”

I knew that meant that whoever replaced me had been
horrible
. But the experience had been needlessly shitty for me, too. “No, man,” I told him. “They treated me fucked up.”

“Just give it a try.”

I knew that if the star of the show was calling me back, then no one else really had the power to fire me. After that, I could do whatever I wanted. I wasn’t taking a lot of shit, but I had insurance. The experience really soured me on getting my own show, which is purportedly every comedian’s dream. But I always wanted to do a late-night talk show, not a sitcom.

Sure enough, the opportunity presented itself. NBC’s
Later
was going through guest hosts, and I threw my hat into the ring. The network execs were hesitant. They said that they couldn’t understand me because I talked too bad, so my manager set up a meeting simply so they could hear me speak. As I was chitchatting about my recent experiences moving into a white neighborhood, my manager slammed his hand on the table. “Fuck that,” he said. “You got an idea for a series here. They’re going to let you guest-host this, that’s fine, but I’m going to get you a series.”

And that’s exactly what he did.

The way we pitched
The Hughleys
was by telling the executives stories from my life, and that strategy worked. Every network bid, and we ended up going with ABC. We shot the pilot, and it got picked up for a full season. In many ways it was like a traditional sitcom, although in our case
everyone
was everyone else’s wacky neighbor because of the differences in race.

After the first season, we were doing really well and we thought we were going to get renewed. While I was waiting to hear, I found out that another new ABC show called
Sports Night
had gotten its order in for another season. An Aaron Sorkin series,
Sports Night
was critically acclaimed, but it just wasn’t doing well ratings-wise. ABC renewed it as a token of goodwill to Aaron, who’s a brilliant writer (and who I would later work with on
Studio 60
, as I mentioned).

I had lunch about this time with Jamie Tarses, then head of ABC’s entertainment division. She was talking about
Sports Night
but wasn’t letting me know shit about
The Hughleys
. “We’re the number-one new comedy on ABC,” I reminded her. “Am I gonna get picked up?”

I guess that’s not the typical Hollywood approach, to flat-out ask an executive like that. “I can’t guarantee you,” she said, “but I’d be
shocked
if you weren’t picked up. You know how it is.” She started to explain the process.

“Jamie, I’ve been a nigger for a long time. It’s just new to
you
.” I was used to living on the periphery, living as an afterthought. It wasn’t surprising that a white show that we were outperforming would get picked up, and would get decided upon
first
.

Eventually, though, we did get the order for another season. But before we could start shooting, there was another major problem for me to address. I had created the show, and I was the producer.
As the producer, I was privy to the show’s budget—and I saw that
everybody
was making more money than me. I had no idea what was happening, but that didn’t make sense to me. The show was
The Hughleys
. It was
my
show about
my
life, and I needed to make more money than everybody—not the other way around.

My lawyer called the network and told them that I was too sick to go to work. I wasn’t coming in until the budget was adjusted in a way that made more sense. The network said no. They said they couldn’t pay me more, so sure enough I didn’t come in to work. They could have made it happen if they just gave me what I wanted. But instead, they gave me something I
didn’t
really want.

The Cadillac Escalade had just come out, and
everyone
knows black men like Escalades almost as much as we like smoking crack and raping white women. The next morning, sitting in my driveway was a brand-new Escalade. At first I couldn’t believe that the network thought that would work. Then I realized that for some other people, it
had
worked. Don King made a career out of moves like that. He would show up to meet poor, black athletes with a briefcase full of money and a contract. They would get the money if they signed on the spot—but the contract had a stipulation that the briefcase of money was a loan to be paid back. So sometimes, flashy bribes worked.

This wasn’t one of those times.

I kept the Cadillac but never drove it. ABC ended up taking cash from everybody who was making more than me and gave me a pretty big raise. My illness miraculously cured, I returned to work. This was the era when audiences started getting more and more divided, and they didn’t really know what to do with a show like
The Hughleys
. It wasn’t a black show but it wasn’t a white show, either. That caused a lot of drama, which is not a good thing for a comedy.

Of course we had creative differences, but that’s part of the process. It’s those kinds of arguments that drive you crazy at the time, but you look back upon them fondly. The writers kept wanting to put me in a dress on the show, and I kept saying no. That battle I won. They wanted me to chase a chicken, and ain’t no way in the fuck that I’m chasing a chicken. For that one we compromised and my costar chased the bird around. They had a musical episode, and they got me over on that one. We did the whole song and dance, literally. But at the end I got to hold up a sign that said
THE WHITE MAN MADE ME DO IT
!

We moved to TGIF, ABC’s family night that featured
Full House
and
Step by Step
, but we were an edgy, urban show. On the one hand, our “Why Can’t We Be Friends” episode was shown as part of an army department’s racial-sensitivity training. On the other hand, I got death threats because we did a show about guns, and people didn’t like what we had to say. This was before Twitter and Facebook, so people couldn’t contact you directly. You had to go out of your way and read the message boards to find out that someone was calling you a nigger.

People got upset with us
all the time
. We had a Christmas episode, and the story flashed back to when I was a little boy and the first time it snowed in L.A. I dreamt that Santa Claus came, and we had Isaac Hayes playing St. Nick. Later in the story, my son had the same dream and Isaac Hayes came back. The posts were immediate: “My children woke up and they asked me if Santa Claus was black!” What can you tell people like that?
Of course
Santa Claus is not black. He’s not
Jesus
. But Santa isn’t white, either.
He’s not real
.

For four years, working on the show was a struggle. I don’t mean there was more bad than good, because there wasn’t. One of my writers put it best: “There were too many people making an easy job
hard.” I had the best crew, the best support people; people I’m very close to to this day. I loved coming to work to see the people, but I
despised
the process. It drained me and took everything out of me.

I’d always kind of thought of myself as a freethinker. And as bright as I thought I was, they just didn’t agree. They would humor me, smile, and then do whatever the fuck they were planning on doing. There wasn’t a discussion; it was a placating, patronizing situation. From what we ate to what we wore, we would have these internal skirmishes that made me feel like a child.

No one made it harder than the president of the studio that produced
The Hughleys
. George was gay, but specifically that very bitchy type of gay. He wanted me to change the way I pronounce my name. He thought
Hewg-lee
was too hard for marketing, so I should pronounce it
Hew-ley
. He wanted to cover the birthmark on my cheek. Whenever George wanted me to not do something, he would act as if it didn’t come from him but from the network. It took me a while to figure out that game. I was hands-on, so I would go to the writers’ meetings and the table reads. If I got a note from “the network,” I would tell the director or the writer why I wanted to do things differently from their note.

“What note?” they’d ask.

“Didn’t you just tell David to move the sofa?” I said, or whatever it was that week.

“No …”

The problems kept coming whenever group decisions had to be made. In one episode in particular, my character’s son was supposed to have a crush on a girl who was his babysitter. When it came time for casting, I thought one girl was
stunningly
beautiful. Not only did little boys have a crush on her, but this here big boy did, too.

Yet according to “the network,” she was too dark. George
thought that wasn’t beautiful. I was like, “Why am I arguing with you to decide what’s hot? You’re
gay
. When I see that girl, I want to fuck her!” They brought a lighter woman in, and it
killed
me. I knew that that dark, gorgeous beauty had heard the same thing a million times before, and my show was just the latest in a long line of unfair and outrageous rejections.

When I started to grow my hair out, George didn’t want me to. He wanted me to cut it and kept telling me so. I did the smart thing: I got a doctor’s note saying that I had alopecia, and that my hair was covering up my bald spots.
George wanted to look at my scalp
. He just wouldn’t let my haircut go. Week after week, he wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go. It was constant snide, bitchy comments from him. In September 2001, we were doing a table reading. Out of nowhere but as usual, George asked, “Why do you do your hair like that?”