by David Spade
RIIIIINNNGGGGGGG!!
HE’S CALLING AGAIN! WHAT. THE. FUCK.
“Eddie Murphy again . . .” the page said.
“I’m in a meeting,” I lied.
“He says he knows you’re not in a meeting, because it’s five forty-five P.M. and the Monday host meeting is at six and it’s never on time. He says call him back right now, or he’s driving in from Brooklyn to talk to you in person.”
I was staring at this page in disbelief. Why on God’s green earth was this superstar blowing me up three times in a row?? Didn’t he have money to count or chicks to bang? (One day, twenty years later, someone had this very thought about me! Success!) Chris Rock then walked in and said, “You better call him; you don’t want him coming down here. Don’t forget, he’s still a black guy.”
No shit. I don’t want this guy coming to have a talk with me. Even if he’s famous. He scares me. I have no choice. So I take his number and asked Chris to get on the other phone to listen in and protect me.
I dialed . . .
My heart was pounding. I didn’t want to do this, especially since I had zero game plan.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice answered! My heart leapt! Perhaps I had dialed the wrong number.
“Um, is Eddie there? It’s . . . David Spade.” I’m sure my voice cracked like Peter Brady in that Brady Bunch episode where he goes through pubie.
“Hang on,” she said. Then, muffled, “It’s him.”
Stomach in knots, I heard, “Hello.”
“Hey, Eddie, it’s Spade.”
(Dramatic pause. If this was a Lifetime movie we would definitely fade to commercial at this point.)
Now here comes Eddie . . . “David Spade, who the fuck do you think you are?!! Honestly? Who. The. Fuck. Going after ME?? You dumb motherfucker! I’m off-limits, don’t you know that? You wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for me. Talking shit about me??” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . . . on and on and on and making me feel like shit.
I barely spoke. I just stared at Rock in disbelief. It was so much worse than I had imagined. I wanted to apologize, explain the joke, anything, but nothing came out. Here was one of my favorite comedians of all time ripping me a new asshole. I had worshipped this dude for years, knew every line of his stand-up. And now he hated me. Like, really really hated me. The opposite of Sally Field. It was horrible. I didn’t hate him. Of course not. He just got caught in friendly fire and my deep desire to make an impression on my bosses and keep my job. How pathetic. I took my beating and then he hung up.
Rock felt bad for me. He was caught in the middle. Old friend of Eddie’s, new friend of mine. I said, “Rock, Eddie makes fun of Mr. T getting AIDS and a million other people in his HBO special. This joke was barely a flesh wound; it won’t hurt him. WTF is he freaking out about? I’m nobody!” Rock tried to make me feel better but there was nothing he could do. He split back to his office. I kept thinking it wasn’t fair.
But the truth was that when you are famous, you never want someone on a supposedly cool show to say you’re not cool. Even if the person saying it is a nobody like me. Fame is so fragile and fleeting, and it can disappear for a million reasons. A jab like the one I had directed at Eddie can be the thing that starts to turn public opinion against someone. I try not to think of the casualties when I do rough jokes, but there are consequences sometimes. I know for a fact that I can’t take it when it comes my way. It’s horrible for all the same reasons. I’ve come to see Eddie’s point on this one. Everybody in showbiz wants people to like them. That’s how you get fans. But when you get reamed in a sketch or online or however, that shit staaaangs. And it can add up quickly. Then before you know it you’re a punch line—just look at Vanilla Ice and five hundred million others. Eddie was mad. No one had dared go after him. And he wanted it to stop there.
After that incident I had some close encounters with Mr. Murphy. Once was at the opening of the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, when a bunch of celebs got invited to see a private Rolling Stones concert. (What a douche thing for me to mention in my book.) I brought one of my idiot buddies from high school. This was a fucking star-studded event. Brad Pitt to my right, Depp and DiCaprio at noon and six. There couldn’t have been more celebs there and we were packed in like stardines. (Lolololololol, stardines, not sardines. Stay close.) I was having the time of my life when for some reason I glanced back to the row behind me. I think it was just to let those people know that I knew all the words to “Gimme Shelter.” When who do I see down the row but Edward Murphy and Chris Rock? Oh fuck. My kryptonite was in the house. Suddenly . . . feeling . . . weak . . . I didn’t want to get beat up in front of the Stones. It was going to be Altamont all over again. So I snuck another glance and saw Rock mouth to me, “I can’t talk to you. I’m with Eddie.” I understood. That Rock was a chickenshit. I’m kidding. I was never mad at Rock because he was always half kidding, but I was freaking out enough that Brad noticed. He asked what was going on, so I filled him in with the short version. “I’ll protect you,” he said. Like I’m a chick. Which I am. Sort of. So I laughed quietly and hoped he was serious.
Whenever I’d see Rock after that, for years, he’d say “Saw Eddie last week. He still hates you.” It sort of impressed me that it still bugged him. In a recent Rolling Stone cover story, Eddie Murphy was asked about this infamous incident. I was told he said he was mad at everyone about this, not just me. He was mad that Lorne would let that joke through to air. He was mad that the show turned on him, and that’s why he has never hosted after that or done the reunion shows. (After that article came out he briefly appeared at the fortieth.) He says he’s over this now. I hope that’s true.
About a month after that cover story, I was crossing the street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Mercedes Gullwing (a supernice car) parked in front of Coffee Bean. A black guy walked out with a hot blond chick on his arm and got in the car. Like the jerk I am I thought, I wonder who that guy plays for? Then as he started to pull out of the parking lot and I got to the other side of the street, I realized it was Ed Murphy. My old-school fear came crashing back. Should I say something? We hadn’t spoken in almost twenty years at this point. Before I knew it, Murphy had spotted me through the windshield. Maybe he thought I was Miley Cyrus. Either way, for some reason I gave a half wave and quick nod. It was my equivalent of the white flag. This can be a risky move if it goes unreciprocated. Then I heard the sound of a window going down. Once again, I was paralyzed by doubt. Do I look? I looked. He stopped in the middle of the street and I walked over. Through the open passenger window he said, “Hey, Spade, how are you doing?” I reached in and shook his hand. I said, “Hey, Eddie. Glad we’re good.” “Take it easy,” he said, and drove away with a girl young enough to be . . . well, my date. (She was superhot.)
My Watergate with Eddie Murphy was over. My burden was lifted. After all those years, that stupid joke can just be that, a stupid joke. And I can go back to appreciating what a funny motherfucker he is.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TOMMY BOY
Tommy Boy is the movie people ask me about the most. I’ve probably been in twenty-some movies at this point, and like every actor I have my favorites and the ones I knew were clankers. Many actors can tell you the list of their top movies off the top of their heads, in order, because of the feedback they get. I hear positive comments about a handful of movies I’ve done and I don’t hear jack shit about the rest. Over the years the top five have varied to some degree . . . but the clankers have never changed. Social media makes it super-obvious which of your movies the fans like. Lately, my top three have been Tommy Boy, Joe Dirt, and Grown Ups. There’s a certain fondness out there as well for The Emperor’s New Groove, which happens to be the only movie for which I received decent reviews. Of course, I was only a voice in an animated film but I’ll take it. I’m still clinging to those positive notices. I also hear nice comments from time to time about Black Sheep, The Benchwarmers, and Dickie Roberts. But Tommy Boy i
s the one that is most loved, from people of all ages and all over the map. Which is nice because of all the things I’ve done, this movie is the one I am most proud of. I loved being on the television shows, but films are a whole different animal. And with Tommy Boy, I’m just amazed that it came together as well as it did. At the time it felt completely thrown together, but that was part of the fun.
I was very lucky to be a part of this movie. I was still on Saturday Night Live and by no means killing it, but Chris was totally killing it. Lorne Michaels, in his infinite wisdom, liked the way we interacted around the office and had a notion to do something with it. We were always hanging out and ripping on each other. I’d make fun of Chris and he’d laugh, and everything he did made me laugh. Chris was actually much sharper than most people thought. You could throw any joke at him, no matter how dry or far-fetched, and he would get it and start laughing, or better yet add to it and throw it back. A lot of people thought Chris was dumb, but that was just an act that he did to come across as funny, and it always worked. With comedy he was very smart.
So, sometime in 1993 Lorne reached out to Bonnie and Terry Turner, the awesome husband-and-wife writing team who went on to create That ’70s Show and Third Rock from the Sun. Lorne told them, “I have a deal to make movies for Paramount. Why don’t you guys write something for David and Chris the way they act around the office? Use that relationship and make some sort of big comedy.” So Bonnie and Terry went off and came up with a movie about Chris and me as traveling salesmen driving through Ohio peddling brake pads. They put a rough draft of a script together pretty quickly. At that point, the movie was called Billy the Third (A Midwestern), which I thought was clever. This whole movie was a gift, especially to me because at this point in his career, Farley could probably carry a movie on his own—even though it was still early days for him. But this script was ready to go, with an idea that Paramount liked, and it included me! We just had to have the script ready in time to shoot in the summer, during our time off from the show.
This was great news because I don’t think we would ever have been able to sell that movie on a pitch alone. I know that. We backed into the whole thing because of Lorne’s deal with Paramount and its then CEO, Sherry Lansing. Lansing approved the movie based on the cast, and thank God for that. If she had just heard the pitch—a movie about two bozos that drive around selling brake pads in Ohio—well, that doesn’t exactly sound like the next Star Wars. So we got lucky in that we skated right past based on our amazing marquee names (Chris’s anyway). Next, Chris and I read the script. We agreed it was a bit rough but good. Fred Wolf was brought in to do a rewrite and to nail our voices a little better. Fred, Chris, and I were buddies so this was perfect. He eventually became head writer for SNL. Lucky for me he knew my voice and the type of jokes I like to do very well. Everyone was on board and happy. We had one tiny stumbling block, which was that Adam was just about to come out with Billy Madison. We all decided that both Adam and Chris being named Billy in their first movies was a bad move. So Billy the Third was scrapped. However, it was a lot harder than we thought it would be to come up with a new title. We played with Rocky Road for a while, and then The Big Time, but nothing seemed right. Finally someone said Tommy Boy and it stuck. (Of course, whoever said it didn’t say this until the end of shooting.)
Fred worked on the script with feedback from Chris and me. It took longer than it should have because we didn’t start shooting until the beginning of August, right before we had to report back to New York for Saturday Night Live. This situation ended up becoming a bit prickly. We were shooting in Toronto and the idea was that there would be a little private plane, I think a Lear 55, that would take Farley and me back and forth once the show started. I think we got in two straight weeks of shooting before the back-and-forth grind hit. Our schedule became: Monday, Tuesday—Toronto. Wednesday—Fly back to New York for read-through. Thursday—Toronto. Friday, Saturday—New York. And at 1:30 A.M. Sunday, after the show, the plane would take us back to Toronto to shoot that morning at 7 A.M. Now this scared the Spademan a little, because I am what is commonly known around the schoolyard as a pussy. My neck gives me trouble from my little Extravaganza face plant way back when; I need to eat all the time . . . The list goes fucking on and on. It’s what doctors call “high maintenance.” I’m good for only one thing and that’s throwing away jokes in a movie like Tommy Boy. So the plan was, shove some Vicodins in my pocket and a protein bar down my throat, push me out there, and then say some funny shit, you little clown. Chris came with his own list of challenges. If memory serves, he was not drinking at this point, was in the middle of a sober stint. This was a recipe for more moodiness than normal with Chris . . . and then, well . . . he liked his food. Well, loved. Any food, all the time. He switched his addiction from booze to caffeine to get through this schedule. By the end of the movie, I had lost weight and he had gained weight, so the pounds were still up on the screen; they had just switched over to him.
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. “Chr
is, 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.
