Homey Don't Play That! Page 13

  Kim was still a relative Hollywood neophyte, but since their days in the Fulton Houses, nobody in the family had been more intensely focused on breaking into show business. After graduating from Wesleyan, she’d moved to Los Angeles and gotten a job as an assistant at CAA, one of the biggest Hollywood talent agencies. She’d had small parts on A Different World and the Vietnam War drama China Beach. Keenen wanted both Damon and Kim in the cast, but as he puts it, “Fox didn’t think I was being objective.” Damon had a résumé and a reputation to convince them, but Kim had to audition.

  “It was very exciting but also nerve-wracking,” she says. “The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass my brother.”

  Shawn had just started doing standup and was still very green. Keenen hired him as a production assistant on the pilot. Marlon had plans to go to Howard University the following fall, but as preproduction got under way, he was frequently hanging around.

  “The Wayanses are kind of a comedy troupe in and of themselves,” says Edwards. “They’d go out to dinner—they eat as a family all the time—and try to crack each other up.” The next day, they’d recount the highlights of the previous night’s meal for the writers’ benefit. “The writers would take as much of this down as humanly possible. They have incredible characters, timing, and a great sense of what’s funny.” Kim seemed to have Keenen’s ear and exerted a subtle influence over a lot of creative choices. And Marlon really impressed despite still being a teenager. “We all instantly thought he was in a league with Damon and Keenen.”

  Several people said Keenen’s original plan was to cast the entire show with African-Americans, but Aleta Chappelle, Fox’s head of casting at the time, says that by the time casting began in earnest they were looking for a white man and a white woman to augment a largely black cast. Rawitt says that they were searching for comics who were versatile, “that had characters, could do accents, were physical, could do anything. It was like casting Noah’s Ark: We had to find two of each who could do everything because we were going to have a small cast.”

  Initially, the search centered around three cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Among those who auditioned were Comedy Act Theater mainstay Robin Harris, Keenen’s old friend from the Improv Melvin George, and two comics who’d later come to prominence on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Susie Essman and J.B. Smoove.

  Damon recommended a friend of his: a tall, lanky, rubber-faced Canadian named Jim Carrey. Carrey had been doing impressions since he was a kid growing up outside of Toronto, and started standup as a teenager. When Damon first got to know him, Carrey was a recovering impressionist. He’d had fans, bookings in Vegas—many had tipped him as the next Rich Little. Carrey found the prospect mildly horrifying. Instead, he began going on late-night at the Comedy Store, trying to come up with a new act. Damon was one of the other late-night misfits at the club, doing comedy that was too edgy for prime time. The two struck up a mutual admiration society.

  “I remember loving Damon’s standup because he took such huge chances and wasn’t afraid to say anything on his mind,” says Carrey. “He had one really sick bit where he talked about his sister being beaten senseless by her husband. He said, ‘Why are you with this guy?’ And then, imitating her swollen lips and half-shut eye, he’d answer, ‘I dooownn’t knooow. D’ere’s jooust somefin’ abou’ ’im.’ It was so wrong. I remember thinking, This is one of the angriest comedians I’ve ever seen. One day he came up to me after seeing me experimenting onstage and said, ‘Man, you’re one of the angriest comedians I’ve ever seen in my life!’ We became friends.”

  Carrey was an undeniable talent but had the stink on him of a guy Hollywood didn’t know what to do with. He’d been in Los Angeles for nearly a decade. He’d starred in a short-lived NBC sitcom (The Duck Factory), a high-school-vampire flick (Once Bitten), a Francis Ford Coppola film (Peggy Sue Got Married), and with Damon in a goofy comedy (Earth Girls Are Easy). He’d auditioned for SNL multiple times. Nothing seemed to be working.

  “I was slated to go on The Tonight Show and they saw me do a bad show one night and canceled me,” he says. “I went to audition for SNL and there was a guy attempting to commit suicide off the roof of NBC, standing on the letter ‘N,’ trying to get the nerve to jump. I didn’t think that was a very good omen. But Keenen actually saw the tape of my SNL audition, in which I played this really racist guy who said the N-word. He thought I was an outlandish guy.”

  “His standup was very alternative,” says Keenen. “He’d do all these crazy characters.” One bit was about a guy who’d survived a nuclear attack. It was all very dark, closer to performance art than traditional standup. Keenen liked him as an impressionist but wasn’t sure about him beyond that. Damon pressed his older brother into giving Carrey a shot.

  At an initial audition in Los Angeles, Carrey was one of 150 or so hopefuls. He needed to do something to stand out. “I felt like the most important thing was to show them that I don’t give a damn,” Carrey says. He didn’t come with any prepared characters, but when they began doing improvs, something clicked. “Suddenly I’d be a Scotsman and suddenly I’d be a pirate,” he says. “I’d make really quick choices. I remember pulling out an impression of Nipsey Russell in the middle of one sketch. They were just falling on the ground.”

  “At that point,” says Keenen, “Jim became an obvious choice.”

  But Carrey was pretty much the first white guy they’d auditioned and they weren’t ready to call off the search. They auditioned countless others. One night, Keenen, Eric Gold, and several others went to the Westwood Comedy Store. The showcase they’d arranged started at nine, and as they arrived, a young comedian onstage was doing a wrenching, sad-sack bit about his own sexual inadequacies. Later, after the entire showcase was finished, and a gaggle of comedians had done their short sets, Gold turned to Keenen and asked, “Well, who did you like best?”

  “I liked that first kid,” Keenen answered.

  Gold tried to pin him down. “The tall, thin guy?”

  “No, that wasn’t him,” Keenen said.

  “The fat guy?”

  “No, not him. The first kid, who did the bit about how he prematurely ejaculates all the time, but he’s really great for about two minutes. The two-minute wonder. That kid.”

  That kid wasn’t part of the showcase, Gold told him. He was the last comic to go on before the showcase started.

  “Well, I like him,” Keenen said. “Who’s that?”

  “Adam Sandler,” Gold said. At the time, however, Sandler wasn’t available. The following year he started on Saturday Night Live.

  Sandler wasn’t the only future SNL cast member to get a look. Rob Schneider auditioned, as did David Spade. Spade made it through a few rounds. When a callback conflicted with a two-week standup gig he’d booked in Hawaii, he canceled the gig to go to the audition, where they split up into groups to do improvs.

  “I’m not a great improv-er but they did need a white guy,” Spade said. “I didn’t know I was against Jim Carrey. If I [had] known, I would’ve skipped it. I wasn’t very good. I don’t do characters. He was so perfect. I was like, ‘Why did you waste all of our time?’ ”

  Survivors of the regional casting sessions were invited to a final showcase at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. About thirty hopefuls, including such future notables as Martin Lawrence, Thomas Haden Church, and Bonnie Hunt, gathered upstairs at the club, eying each other like prizefighters, waiting for their turn onstage. Although most were struggling young actors or comics, quite a few were initially lukewarm about the project.

  Tommy Davidson was one of those. Since arriving in Los Angeles the year before, he’d already been a hot standup, opening for Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. He’d starred in a pilot for Murphy’s production company and was being offered a deal to be written into Candice Bergen’s hit sitcom, Murphy Brown. In his short time in show business, Davidson was already jaded.

  “I actually turned In Living Color down,” he says. “I’d been
through the mill of a lot of top offers. My agent said, ‘Why don’t you just go audition?’ Good agent.” Nonetheless, Davidson was convinced that he’d blown the first day of auditions. “I wasn’t really used to sketch and improv. They say, ‘Okay, you’re in a cab and you’re a Latin guy—go!’ I hadn’t yet put together the ability to channel something in an instant. I did terrible.” Apparently, not everyone agreed, and he was invited to the final Laugh Factory showcase. “I was thirtieth out of thirty comics and I killed everybody. That got me the show.”

  Kelly Coffield showed up to the Chicago casting session on a lark. She was a graduate student, studying theater and performing in a “very dramatic” play at the time. Her agent convinced her to audition, but Coffield was certain she was wrong for it. She wasn’t a standup, didn’t do much improv, and had no idea who Keenen was. Also, she was white. Nonetheless, several weeks after the audition, Rawitt called her and told her to come to Los Angeles ready to do five to ten minutes of her best material. There was only one problem: She didn’t have any material. She was an actress, not a comic.

  “You did a lot of characters at the audition,” Rawitt told her. “Can’t you do that?”

  “But how? Do I just come in with a bunch of monologues?”

  “Oh, you’ll figure it out.”

  Coffield (whose married name is now Kelly Coffield Park) boarded the plane to Los Angeles with no clue what she was going to do onstage. Sitting in her airplane seat, she came up with the idea of playing all the parts in a women’s support group where the main character is Sleeping Beauty. She began scribbling it all down furiously on cocktail napkins.

  At the Laugh Factory, armed with her pile of cocktail napkins, Coffield felt intimidated immediately. Most of her competition were standups used to commanding stages like this. “I’m sure everyone can relate to being in a situation where you’re positive you don’t belong,” she says. “You know, like, Maybe they remembered the wrong girl from the auditions. I really did feel like an imposter. I was getting more and more terrified as it came closer to me going up there. Nobody was doing anything like what I was doing.”

  When Coffield finally got onstage, she was initially met with confused stares. “Part of my thing was I was going to make everybody in the audience part of this meeting,” she says. “So it was just weird. There was absolute, utter silence. Then somebody started laughing, and then there was a lot of laughter. I thought, Either they’re being really nice or they’re making fun of me, but in any case, I’m almost done.”

  When she finished her set, she strode offstage and straight out of the club. She kept walking all the way down Sunset Boulevard back to her hotel. “I was physically shaking,” she says. “Just wringing my hands, like, What the hell just happened? It was horrible.” She flew back to Chicago the next day. She was satisfied to have survived the ordeal, and expected to never hear about it again. A few weeks later, she was cast.

  T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh was another product of the Chicago auditions who felt ill-fit for the show. Keymáh thought of herself as an actress, not a comedian. She hadn’t liked I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. Nonetheless, she showed up to an open call at the Regal Theater in Chicago with two friends, Ali LeRoi and Lance Crouther.

  “There were some other actors there who were really horrible,” she said. “They were doing comedy monologues from staged shows that weren’t at all appropriate in the same room with standup comedians. I thought, God, if I’m going to look like that, strike me dead right before I go on.”

  At the Laugh Factory, Keymáh, a former Miss Black America runner-up, performed a piece she’d written called “Blackworld.” In it, she acted the part of a young girl, playing make-believe in her basement. She imagined, through the eyes of a child, a world where the nation’s ugly racial history had been erased, her family had money, black people owned businesses, Jesse Jackson was the king, Nelson Mandela and James Brown were free men, and she had real black dolls with “real black people hair.” It was funny, but also sentimental and heartbreaking. Keenen loved it.

  “I thought, Wow,” he says. “That’s poignant, it’s cute, it’s well performed, and it says something.” Keymáh was in.

  David Alan Grier had been a part of Keenen and Robert Townsend’s circle for a few years—he’d had a small part in Sucka and a slightly larger one, alongside Townsend, in A Soldier’s Story—but like Coffield and Keymáh, he wasn’t really a comedian. He was a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. He’d been nominated for a Tony Award for his lead role in a musical about Jackie Robinson. He’d grown up a serious young man too. His father, William Grier, was a psychiatrist who co-authored the seminal 1968 book Black Rage, a study of the historical and psychological roots of racial animus in America. Grier was from Detroit, and had marched with his family alongside with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets there in 1968 as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. Grier had even flirted with becoming a Black Panther in his teenage years. When the ILC audition came along, he was still reconciling these different sides of himself.

  As he puts it in his memoir, Barack Like Me, “Even though . . . I know I can be funny and I was voted class clown in elementary, middle and high school, I still see myself as a serious actor. I don’t have a standup act, I don’t have a bunch of characters I do.” Keenen pressed Grier to give it a shot. When he was eventually offered a spot in the cast, Grier says he turned it down before Kim Wayans eventually helped change his mind.

  Kim Coles, who’d first been asked to audition after Keenen met her at a party and recognized her from her standup on the syndicated series Showtime at the Apollo, was plucked from the New York casting sessions. “My understanding was they wanted standups who could do characters,” says Coles. “Luckily for me, I had a bit where I did all the contestants in a Miss America pageant from all over the world, so I did all these different accents.”

  T.J. McGee was a popular comic and impressionist who’d met Keenen at the Comedy Act Theater. He hadn’t taken the audition that seriously until he’d shown up at the Laugh Factory that night and seen the talent assembled—both the hopefuls upstairs and the Hollywood heavy hitters in the audience. Still, his expectations were tempered. “The running joke,” he says, “was if your last name’s not Wayans, you didn’t have a shot.”

  Following the Laugh Factory auditions, the pilot’s cast took shape. Joining Keenen, Damon, and Kim would be Carrey, Coffield, Keymáh, Davidson, Grier, Coles, McGee, and Toney Riley, another comedian/actor Keenen had first discovered at the Comedy Act. Jeff Joseph, a talented standup, would do double duty as both a writer and cast member.

  Chris Rock had been in the mix for a role too. In a 1989 interview with journalist David Mills, he sounded confident a job on the show was his. “I’ll be a writer and a performer,” he said. “Nothing’s been inked out yet. They’re just negotiating the contracts and stuff.” However, Rock wasn’t even at the Laugh Factory showcase. A year later, he told Mills he didn’t know what happened. “It’s a whole L.A. thing. I’m in New York. Things just happened, man. I’m not out there. It was more of an image thing. I don’t want to dis anybody, but it was a Fox decision more or less.”

  Keenen says that guys like Rock and Martin Lawrence were funny, they just weren’t ready. “At that moment in time, they were one step behind the other guys.” Aleta Chappelle says Rock was “somebody we thought about for a while,” but he was “very nervous.” According to Rawitt, the main problem with Rock was that he just wasn’t really what the show needed.

  “Chris was a genius writer and great at being Chris, but the show needed people who could do a myriad of characters and accents,” she says. That’s not what he did. “If we had our own ‘News Update’ desk, he could’ve owned that space.”

  Contract negotiations took longer than expected. All the cast’s contracts were standard five-year deals and had a “favored nations” clause in them that stated, essentially, that all the actors would get paid equally. The clause was common for new shows with an
ensemble cast. Carrey, though, had a thicker résumé than most of his castmates and had a higher standard “quote,” which is to say he wanted more money. But giving Carrey more money would break the “favored nations” deals. For a while, it looked like Carrey might drop out over it.

  “We probably saw two thousand other white guys,” says Gold. “All Keenen said was, ‘I want Jim Carrey. I want Jim Carrey.’ Every goddamn day it was ‘Get me Jim Carrey.’ And Jim didn’t want to do the show. He kept saying, ‘No.’ ”

  Carrey says he was just evaluating other offers, and laughs off the notion forwarded by some that being the token white guy on a black show was giving him pause.

  “No, to me, I knew Keenen and Damon and knew they were really creative, talented guys,” he says. “The racial shit didn’t concern me.”

  Regardless, the negotiations dragged on. Thomas Haden Church, who’d later go on to get an Oscar nomination for the film Sideways, was the show’s backup option. In the end, though, Gold crafted a solution that got Carrey more money without breaking the “favored nations” deal. Carrey signed the same deal as his new castmates, but also got a separate deal from the studio for “non-series television.” That second deal led to him being cast in a dramatic role as an alcoholic in a 1992 television movie called Doing Time on Maple Drive, which was nominated for three Emmys.

  The other tricky contract was Damon’s. Gold, who already managed Keenen and would soon be co-managing Carrey, had started managing Damon too. But as the pilot came together, Damon hired a new agent who got in his ear and suggested Gold could be doing more for him. Damon subsequently fired Gold. His new agent tried to play hardball with Fox to get Damon a better deal. Fox wasn’t having it. Damon, they decided, was more trouble than he was worth. As Gold puts it, “Damon was out.”