Homey Don't Play That! Page 14

  Damon had plenty going on in his career at the time, and several people suggested he was hedging on whether he wanted to be tied down to a weekly show for five years. Damon, though, has said that after getting fired off SNL he “needed redemption.” Regardless, Keenen was upset. Damon was integral to his plans. Plus, he was worried about his younger brother.

  “Damon had blown several career opportunities because of his emotionality,” says Gold. “He’d already self-destructed on SNL. Damon also thought Keenen should’ve made him an executive producer. Keenen was adamant that we had to figure out something.”

  The solution was to hire Damon as a “guest star” for the pilot. “Basically Fox punted and figured they could deal with him later when they knew whether the pilot would go to series,” says Gold. “If Damon was anyone else besides Keenen’s younger brother, he never would’ve been allowed to do the pilot.”

  Damon soon rehired Gold (and then fired and rehired him several more times over the next decade and a half) and, after the pilot, signed a separate one-year contract. Gold believes this was a good deal for Damon, because it gave him more leverage later on. Damon, however, felt disrespected by the whole turn of events.

  “When I walked into In Living Color, they treated me like Keenen’s little brother,” he says. “I had a one-year deal. They didn’t even respect me enough to make me a regular. I was a recurring character.” That first contract, he says, paid him only fifteen hundred dollars per episode. “I don’t think Fox knew what I could do.”

  A.J. Johnson had just moved to Los Angeles when she first met Keenen in a club on Melrose Avenue. Johnson had been a Miss Collegiate Black America, as well as a sorority step captain at Spelman College in Atlanta, and had had a small role in Spike Lee’s School Daze before graduating. She was making her living as a dancer and was with friends at the club the night Keenen spotted her on the dance floor. It was something to see.

  “My dance style was grabbing a girl standing on the side of the dance floor, grabbing another girl, teaching them a quick count of eight, and now, we’re grooving to this count of eight and everybody’s putting their own style on it,” says Johnson. Slowly, more people joined in until the floor was jammed with dancers all working off the same theme. “It was almost like the beginning of line dancing.”

  Keenen liked what he saw and came over to talk to her. He wanted dancers on In Living Color, but was trying to figure out what exactly that was going to look like. Laugh-In had used quick dance “bumpers” between segments, and he also remembered that Jackie Gleason’s various variety shows had featured the June Taylor Dancers.

  “All these are pieces of my childhood,” he says. But he wanted to put his own spin on it. His dancers wouldn’t be old-school chorus line girls, they’d be the cool, stylish chicks people gawked at in clubs. Girls like Johnson. Fly Girls.

  “I really like this freestyle thing you do,” Keenen told Johnson at the side of the dance floor. He explained that he had a project he was working on that he wanted to talk to her about. “Can we do lunch tomorrow?”

  Johnson wasn’t entirely sure whether this was really about work or if he was trying to pick her up, but she didn’t really care.

  “He was hot!” she says. “Physically, as a man, as well as in his career. So I had no reason not to meet him for lunch. Either way, personally or professionally, I’m winning!”

  Keenen did want to talk about work at lunch the next day, though it’s also worth mentioning that he and Johnson ended up dating—“for a minute,” as Johnson, puts it—not too long after that too. At lunch, he explained his vision for the Fly Girls.

  “He showed me some clips of Laugh-In,” Johnson says. That was the template, but of course, hipper. It was a fairly radical idea. “You have to remember this was the end of the eighties. There was nothing on TV like it.”

  He wanted her to replicate the energy that he saw on the dance floor at the club, but in thirty-second snippets. He asked her to put together a small troupe and show him what it might look like.

  Johnson already had a few dancers in mind. She’d recently worked with two of them, Lisa Marie Todd and Deidre Lang, on a video for a song called “Just Coolin’,” a collaboration between the R&B group LeVert and rapper—and Keenen’s friend—Heavy D. “If you look at the ‘Just Coolin’ video, you’ll see where the Fly Girls concept came from,” says Johnson. “It’s me, Deidre, Lisa, and two or three other girls. That video—girls on the street, hip-hop clothes, offering up dance battles when they run into guys on the street—that whole concept is what we transferred to In Living Color.”

  The pilot’s budget was tight, so there was only one small audition, and afterward Johnson chose who she knew she wanted from the beginning—all young dancers, all friends of hers, all black. Another friend, an actress and dancer named Tisha Campbell, who’d been one of the leads in School Daze, was frequently around to lend a hand with the choreography. Johnson admits that she didn’t totally see Keenen’s vision for the Fly Girls. As he watched them work on routines, she told him so.

  “I don’t get why you want dancers coming out in the middle of a comedy show,” she said.

  “I’m telling you,” Keenen insisted, “it’s going to be one of the hottest parts of the show. It’s gonna be crazy!”

  “I still don’t get it. You’re going to have some dancers out there for a couple of seconds. Big deal.”

  “When I saw you dance in the club that night, that’s when the vision hit,” Keenen said. “Everybody in America’s gonna wanna do these dances. Everybody in America’s gonna wanna dress like these girls. Trust me!”

  “Well,” Johnson said, “I’m gonna have to.”

  13

  “Is This Okay to Say?”

  Kim Coles was exhausted. She’d had a standup gig in London, and had flown to New York then taken a red-eye into LAX so she could be there for the cast’s first day of work in the spring of 1989. After landing around three in the morning, she found a place to stay near the airport, slept for a few hours, showered, and then arrived at the Fox lot, on the corner of Wilton and Sunset. She was buzzing with nervous energy—and lack of sleep—as she met her castmates. “We were just sort of sizing each other up, looking to see who’d gotten the job,” she says.

  Many of the other cast members knew each other already, and not just the ones who were related. Damon and Jim Carrey were close friends. David Alan Grier had appeared in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Partners in Crime and was close with the Wayans siblings. Tommy Davidson had been a regular at the Comedy Act Theater and knew Keenen, Damon, T.J. McGee, and Toney Riley. Coles only knew Davidson, from doing standup gigs with him. Kelly Coffield and T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, who were moving from Chicago, were relative outsiders too. Coles and Coffield decided to sublet a house together in West Hollywood.

  “We were all just excited to be with one another,” says Coffield. “There hadn’t been a show like this before. There was great camaraderie. We used to say, ‘This must be what it was like to be on the Mickey Mouse Club.’ ”

  The writing staff cranked out sketches every day. The ones Keenen liked got written up on notecards and tacked to the big bulletin board in Tamara Rawitt’s office. The ones he didn’t, went in the trash can. There was a feeling, at times, that the writing of sketches was an end in and of itself.

  “I thought I’d written more than half of the show,” says Rob Edwards, “then the next day you’d see the board again and everything I’d written was gone. I’d write a bunch of new stuff that would go up, then a couple days later, the board would shift.” Material that seemed funny at first would naturally grow stale with repeated exposure. Edwards says the smarter, more experienced sketch writers—“which I was not”—held their best material until the end of the writing process. In a few weeks of writing, a mountain of sketches was generated. The pilot was slated to be an hour long, and Keenen wanted to produce at least an hour and a half of solid material to edit down. Extra sketches could always be ban
ked for future shows. When the cast, producers, and writers got together to read through the initial cache of scripts, director Paul Miller, the SNL vet, was floored.

  “I’d been through that with Saturday Night Live, but I had never been through anything like this,” he says. “There must’ve been a hundred sketches read in one day. It was kind of numbing.”

  Interesting ideas got lost in the shuffle. Howard Kuperberg recalls a piece he wrote called “Picasso’s Black Period,” with Carrey as Picasso, that was discarded. Edwards wrote a sketch imagining the 1934 NAACP Image Awards. Trophies would be awarded to the likes of Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel, who played a series of infamous “mammy” roles, most famously in Gone with the Wind.

  “The joke is the idiotically stereotypical characters that were accepted as mainstream entertainment back in the day,” says Edwards. “I wrote it and everybody was high-fiving, but we wound up not shooting it. That broke my heart.”

  Some of the sketches that survived had a history that dated back years or even decades. Keenen and Damon had been playing some version of Wiz and Ice since they were teenagers. Kuperberg and Buddy Sheffield helped turn them into the first “Homeboy Shopping Network” sketch. “Men on Film” dated back to Damon and Keenen’s youthful masquerading as a gay couple around the West Village, and as movie critic siblings Dickie and Donald Davis. Sandy Frank reimagined them as Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather. Initially, Damon and Keenen were set to play Blaine and Antoine. As Damon recalls it, Keenen gave his part away to Grier simply because he had too much other stuff to do, and Grier didn’t. Grier says he was originally slated to play the father in another sketch called “Hey Mon” about a family of Jamaican immigrants, but couldn’t muster a passable Jamaican accent, so Damon—who had a Jamaican character in his arsenal as far back as those Kitchen Table improvs—took that part, and Keenen gave Grier the part of Antoine.

  Edwards recalls a related bit of horse-trading between Damon and Keenen. Both did pretty good Mike Tyson impressions, and either could’ve played the boxer in a sketch that imagined Tyson and then wife Robin Givens on an episode of the dating show Love Connection. Both were also capable of playing Blaine in “Men on Film.”

  “Whoever did the film critic was going to get a lot of really creepy mail,” says Edwards, “but whoever did Tyson was going to get punched in the face at a party when they least expected it. Tyson was notoriously thin-skinned and self-conscious about his voice. They kind of went rock-paper-scissors: Keenen got Tyson and Damon wound up doing the film critic.”

  Grier says the initial “Men on Film” script had fictional movie titles in it, but after read-throughs and rehearsals, he and Damon began improvising. “We started using real movies that had no gay connotation—like Top Gun, or whatever—which really upped the ante. The straighter the movie, the funnier it got that we would put this gay inference in it.”

  Blaine and Antoine are very much a product of a pre–politically correct era. Even back then, it raised the hackles of more than a few people. Don Bay, a gentlemanly lawyer who had been hired by Fox to run its Broadcast Standards and Practices Department, recalls meeting Keenen for the first time in the office of the VP of programming. Keenen outlined the show and mentioned “Men on Film.”

  “I was concerned about how gays would be treated since the subject was a sensitive one at that time, and I’d met with reps of the gay community before,” says Bay. Fox Chairman Barry Diller was also uncomfortable with the sketch.

  Back in 1989, Diller was already a legendary Hollywood executive, known as one of the smartest, toughest, most ambitious guys in the industry. He’d started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency (now known as William Morris Endeavor), worked his way up to head of prime-time programming at ABC and eventually chairman of Paramount Pictures, where he reigned for a decade before being lured to Fox. He was short and stocky, with a clean, shiny bald head that only seemed to add to his intimidating mien. Diller read the “Men on Film” script, and according to Keenen, he raged to Fox president Peter Chernin about it.

  “He ripped Peter a new ass and was like, ‘We can’t do this,’ ” says Keenen. “He called me and was like, ‘This might be going too far.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what: Come to the rehearsal. Come see it and if you have an issue with it after that, let’s talk.’ ” Diller came to the dress rehearsal in front of a live audience. “It sounded like somebody put a bomb in the building,” Keenen says. “That’s how big the laughs were. People were stomping their feet. No one had ever seen anything like this. Barry watched the whole thing and that was it.” Diller was convinced.

  As the dates for filming the pilot loomed, there was no real sense among the writers and cast which sketches were in and which were out. Of those one hundred or so that had been read through initially, many had been discarded but many remained and new ones popped up all the time.

  “There would be six sketches up on the wall and we’d be prepping them with costumes and casting,” says Edwards, “and the next day, you’d go in and six new sketches were up. Three days later, there would be three new sketches up. We never really knew what the rundown of the show would be.”

  This was a nice problem to have. There was so much good material that they were spoiled for choice. But the longer Keenen put off making a final call on the pilot’s rundown, the more it created a logjam in the production cycle. People were waiting on him to do their jobs.

  “We were about two weeks away from shooting and Keenen had not locked into a show yet,” says producer Kevin Bright. “He just kept the writers writing and writing and didn’t want to commit. Paul Miller and I were really concerned. We had to get scenery built. We thought maybe if we initiated a rundown based on the material we had, it would pin him down, get him to think about it and then work with us to commit to a show. So we did and showed it to him. He liked it and we were going to go with that.” But Bright had broken the rule Keenen had asked him to commit to when he first started: He wasn’t supposed to be involved with creative decisions. “Tamara came into my office and told me Keenen was angry. I was out of my lane.”

  Miller says they ended up producing “many more sketches than we could ever use in one episode.” In addition to “The Homeboy Shopping Network,” “Men on Film,” and the Mike Tyson “Love Connection” sketch, the final rundown included Keymáh’s “Blackworld” piece that she’d auditioned with, as well as a few short “Great Moments in Black History” bits that Edwards had proposed at his first meeting with Keenen. There was also a sketch with Keymáh hosting a female empowerment cable access show called “Go On Girl.” Damon had a short commercial parody for the United Negro College Fund, in which he played a malapropism-spouting prison inmate named Oswald Bates. The character was based on an impression Marlon used to do of a guy from the family’s old neighborhood who’d gone to prison and returned spewing all sorts of half-cocked wisdom. Damon had also written a funny Calvin Klein commercial parody called “Oppression.” In addition, the final rundown included a sketch Sheffield and Kuperberg had penned, a commercial for a Broadway show featuring Sammy Davis Jr.—as played by Tommy Davidson—starring as South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, that was universally beloved among the cast and writing staff.

  But arguably the sketch that both set the template and the bar for In Living Color was a Star Trek spoof called “The Wrath of Farrakhan.” In it, Damon plays the militant Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan aboard the Starship Enterprise. Farrakhan, as David Alan Grier’s Spock helpfully tells Carrey’s Captain Kirk (and viewers), “is a former calypso singer who later became leader of a twentieth-century African-American religious sect.” At the time, Farrakhan was known mostly for controversial statements that some construed to be anti-white and anti-Semitic. In the sketch, Farrakhan proclaims, “I’ve come to warn your crew of their enslavement on this vessel.” Everywhere he looks on the Enterprise, he sees oppression. Uhura, played by Kim Wayans, is a glorified secretary who hasn’t gotten a raise
in fifteen years. Grier’s Spock is the crew’s strongest and smartest yet only second in command. Soon, Farrakhan, ever the rabble-rouser, has fomented an insurrection.

  Kim Wayans calls the sketch “quintessential In Living Color.” It’s one of Keenen’s favorites too. It’s pop-culture silliness spiked with sharp sociopolitical barbs. It makes fun of Farrakhan but also suggests that despite his occasional flights into the absurd, he often has a valid point. As Keenen put it, “It was just the right mix of everything.”

  The executives at Fox weren’t thrilled with it, though. As Rawitt recalls, “Everybody at Fox said, ‘Nobody knows who Louis Farrakhan is! Nobody is going to care!’ The point is you let us create a show for black culture. Everyone in black culture knows who Farrakhan is.”

  Fox figured anything about Farrakhan was likely to stir up problems either from the Anti-Defamation League or the Nation of Islam itself. Probably both. Keenen believed Farrakhan himself deserved a fairer hearing than he’d gotten in the culture at large.

  “Farrakhan is a brother that when white people hear his name, they start shaking in their boots,” he told journalist Nelson George in the early nineties. “Farrakhan isn’t the hatemonger he’s painted out to be. If people would listen to him they’d realize that he may have a different opinion but he’s not Adolf Hitler.”

  There was a part of Damon that simply got a kick out of Farrakhan. Here was a guy who wasn’t trying to mend fences and promote racial healing. He was unapologetically angry. Farrakhan was himself, apparently, a fan of “The Wrath of Farrakhan.”

  “Thankfully, he found it funny,” says Damon. “His son told me, ‘Man, Pops loves that. He thinks it’s really hilarious.’ It’s nice to know he has a sense of humor because there’s a nation of people who love him and if you make fun of him it could be very painful.”

  Keenen was steering the show without a road map. He was making people nervous. Even the show’s own writers and producers didn’t always agree with him.