Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  IF YOU’VE ever seen my MTV Diary episode, you know that I bought my first house in L.A. in the Hollywood Hills from a former porn star. I moved to Los Angeles in February 2006, almost ten years after my first trip there.

  When I step back and read these first two sentences, they seem a bit surreal to me. As much as I had always dreamed of stringing these words together, never did I think they would ever come true. If America is some fantasy place that all of us growing up in Canada watch on TV, then Los Angeles is where the fantasy begins.

  Shortly after moving into that house in L.A., I went back to my old townhouse in Woodbridge. Despite having moved out, my old bedroom was exactly how I’d left it—same pile of clothes on the floor, same dresser, bedding, pictures … everything. After a few days of being back, I woke up one afternoon and looked around my room. I sat there staring at everything, then started asking myself if all that L.A. stuff was real. Was L.A. all a dream and Woodbridge the reality? It took a few seconds for it to sink in, but L.A. was real. I really did own a house there. I had friends and another life there too. I’d really done it.

  As a kid in the ’70s, watching TV with my parents, we’d watch The Brady Bunch, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company, CHiPs, Emergency! … and the list goes on. Almost all of those shows were set in Los Angeles. The people on those shows had blond hair, great smiles, funky clothes, convertible sports cars—and it was always, always sunny. Aesthetically, it was very pleasing to me.

  Los Angeles was a world away from Brampton. We were ethnic, with dark hair and dark eyes. The closest we got to seeing people who looked somewhat like us on television was Erik Estrada on CHiPs, or Ricardo Montalban on Fantasy Island—and both of them were Latino. As a kid, I was convinced that Erik Estrada was Indian, like me. To this day, I have suspicions about that guy …

  In November 1996 I flew down to L.A. The city looked exactly like I thought it would—sunny, clean and downright glamorous. The only misconception that I had was that gangs would be everywhere and that I shouldn’t wear red or blue. (I may have watched Boyz n the Hood, Colors, American Me and Menace II Society one too many times in the early ’90s.) I’m not saying there are no gangs in L.A., but they’re so localized that you can avoid them.

  Somehow during that trip, we got invited to Russell Simmons’ place for a party. The invite was a cigar with a Def Jam wrapper around it. In order to get to Simmons’ mansion, you had to go this hotel in Beverly Hills, where a limo picked you up and took you to the mansion. The dance floor was outside, on the tennis court. Kid Capri DJed and everybody was at that party: Brian McKnight, Kellie Williams (Family Matters), Ronnie DeVoe, Ricky Bell, Tiny Lister, Keenen Ivory Wayans, all the Def Jam comedians … and me, the unknown comic. I was pretty much invisible at that party, but I didn’t mind; I was at a party at Russell Simmons’ mansion in Hollywood on my very first visit to L.A.! I didn’t perform anywhere; I just hung out for a few days. Let’s just say I got a feel for a world that no longer seemed so far away.

  Basically, he was going to “make me a star.”

  In 1997, I landed my first management deal, with Inner City Management, which was owned by Chuck and Percy Sutton. They’d seen me at Just for Laughs and taken me on. I flew out to L.A. for two shows and stayed at the Travelodge on Sunset Boulevard. Nobody of any importance attended. The people I did meet really liked my business card … which I guess says something about how good my act was.

  I went back in 2004 while on the Gurus of Comedy tour, and I met this film producer named Deepak Nayar. He saw the show and invited me out to dinner with him on Melrose. He’d produced a bunch of TV shows and was one of the producers of the film Bend It Like Beckham. He wanted me to sign a deal with him and his production company. Basically, he was going to “make me a star.” I was going to live in his guest house and he was going to take me around to all the networks and studios and launch my career.

  I’ll be honest with you—it sounded pretty cool. And like most Indians, this guy was a pretty convincing talker. When I got back to Toronto, he sent me a contract. Our agreement would last seven years, and we’d be 50/50 partners. He would get 50 per cent of whatever I made! Now, I don’t claim to be a smart guy, but seriously? Needless to say, I didn’t sign.

  On that same trip, the producer of the Gurus tour, Piyush Dinker Pandya, introduced me to a young agent named Ashwin Rajan from United Talent Agency. Before setting up the meeting, Piyush asked me, “If I set you up with this guy and something comes from it, what will you do for me?” Fucking Indians—always trying to work an angle.

  I answered him, “Um … nothing.”

  Nothing came of the meeting, but Ashwin did mention me to his boss at UTA, who responded, “An Indian comic? I don’t get it.” That guy who “didn’t get it” is now part of my team of agents at CAA!

  After my showcase gigs in L.A. in 2005, I got my first holding deal, in which a studio or production company puts a bunch of money down to “hold” you to develop a project with them (and to keep you from developing a project somewhere else). The deal was with the production company Werner/Gold/Miller, with Warner Brothers as the studio.

  Tom Werner was the former producing partner of Marcy Carsey—as in Carsey-Werner, as in The Cosby Show, Roseanne, A Different World, 3rd Rock from the Sun … and the list goes on. Tom had just formed a new production company with super-managers Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller. Eric and Jimmy managed everyone from Jim Carrey to Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell. All of these guys were serious heavy hitters.

  Once we locked in our deal, we moved ahead with developing a sitcom for me. My brother and I hadn’t yet been working together for five months when this all started. We were green as green could be and had never been through the development process before.

  The first thing you need to develop a show is a writer. Tom Werner liked a young, fellow Harvard alumnus named Tom Brady, and we liked him too. It was now coming up on September, which is late for pitching a show to a network. Everybody had an idea of what the show should be—Eric wanted a workplace comedy; Jimmy wanted something more family focused; Tom wanted to see something in the middle. And me? I just sat back and let them do their thing. I tried to be as cooperative as possible. When you get into a room with shooters like these guys, you need to acknowledge that theirs is bigger than yours, especially back in ’05. (Mine’s grown quite a bit since then.)

  Whatever misgivings I had about the actual concept, I kept to myself —including the use of “Somebody Gonna Get a-Hurt Real Bad” as a character tagline and the use of other bits of mine in the show. It’s not that I didn’t want to use this stuff; it just seemed a little forced. But what did I know? By mid-October we had decided the show would be about a multicultural, mega car dealership in the San Fernando Valley.

  My brother and I were flying back and forth from Toronto to L.A. for the studio and writer meetings. We stayed at the Hyatt on Sunset and had started working with Paul Canterna at Seven Summits Pictures and Management as an L.A. manager. Paul, or Paully Walnuts, as I call him, comes from a very Catholic working-class family in the small town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He’s honest and down to earth and not very “L.A.” at all, which was important to me. He works hard for me and has become a good and trusted friend.

  The show was going to be called Those People, and once the script was done we scrambled to pitch it to the networks. Before you actually pitch a show, you get together with everyone involved and work out who’s going to say what and when. I have to admit that I thought the show was a bit contrived—we had an African guy, a Latina, my very Indian parents, a redneck mechanic, an Asian guy and a WASPy dealership owner. The concept wasn’t great, and I think we knew it.

  Still, everyone wanted to hear the pitch from Tom Werner’s new company—ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the WB. The only network that didn’t pass after the pitches was Fox. But they weren’t entirely convinced and wanted a table read before they would decide whether they’d order a pilot. For the read,
we hired a comedian friend of mine, Godfrey, to play the Nigerian car salesman, Boomie Moshoeshoe, as well as Gerry Bednob as my dad and Shelley Malil as my brother. Gerry and Shelley were both in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Tom Werner pulled in a favour and got Kurtwood Smith from That 70’s Show to play the dealership manager for the read.

  We did the table read at a screening room at Fox on February 15, 2006. Everyone did their best to make it funny, but the read was flat, and by that afternoon we’d received word that Fox had passed on the show. I got the balance of my payment for the holding deal and moved on.

  In the midst of trying to get my first sitcom off the ground, I moved into my new house in the Hills, bought a year-old Porsche Cayenne Turbo, taped my first U.S. stand-up special, wrapped up my first solo Canadian tour, signed with CAA for representation, secured a great lawyer, Dale de la Torre, and even hired a business manager to look after all of my financial matters. Brandi and Fred from my business management company helped me get my financial act together by ensuring that all of my taxes were taken care of properly. As much as I hate paying taxes, Brandi and Fred make sure they’re always paid and then some. There’s enough cautionary tales in this business regarding unpaid taxes, and I don’t want to become a character in one of them.

  As I got settled into L.A., I spent a lot of time hanging out with comedian Yoshi Obayashi and the Mexican-Jewish brothers Isaac and Jacob Giron. Yoshi is Korean, but was raised as Japanese. He indexes porn DVDs as his day job. (When his bosses are pissed off with him, they make him index tranny porn.) Yoshi and his brother were born in Japan, where they lived until he was eleven. When his mom and dad divorced, his mom took the two boys and dumped them with his cousins in Washington State. His cousins only spoke broken English and Korean, and Yoshi and his brother spoke only Japanese. It was at this time that his mom decided to let them know that they weren’t actually Japanese, but Korean. Now, this might not seem like a big deal to most of us, but there’s a long history of animosity between the two peoples. To add insult to injury, Yoshi and his brother would get beaten up in their newly adopted navy town in Washington State, because the locals thought they were Japanese. Their mother returned for the boys, and they ultimately became legal citizens under Reagan’s immigration amnesty in 1986.

  Hanging out with Yoshi.

  Even though Yoshi’s been in the country since he was eleven, he still has the thickest Japanese accent I’ve ever heard. His brother, on the other hand, has no accent whatsoever. In the fall of 2003, just three weeks after his father killed himself in Japan, Yoshi got a terrible call that his cousin had killed himself in Seattle.

  He grabbed his knapsack and some clothes and went straight to the airport. When he put his knapsack through the security scanner, the alarms went off and the police were called. They opened up the knapsack to find a collapsible iron baton—which is illegal not just to fly with but to carry as a concealed weapon in general. Yoshi forgot that he had it with him. He’d carried it for protection since his days as a video store clerk in Seattle, when he’d get hassled late at night while working at the store. Security was on high alert that day at the airport—it was September 11, 2003—and they weren’t taking any chances.

  Yoshi was arrested and taken to L.A. County prison. While waiting to be processed, he was held with his hands cuffed behind him in a holding cell. As he sat there, he started wondering if he’d be able to lift his cuffed hands from behind his back to in front of him, just like he’d seen in the movies. Yoshi’s a very slim, fit guy and he was able to slip his arms under his hips and legs and put his hands on his lap. As soon as he did that, he realized that this might not be a good idea. The guard might think he was trying to escape or something, so he decided to return to his original position with his hands behind his back. With his cuffed arms out in front of him, he put one leg through and was about to put the other leg through, when the guard walked in on him. He spent the rest of the night with one arm raised in the air, cuffed to a bar above his head. By the time the police processed him, it was Friday, and he remained in jail for another four days.

  I put Yoshi on a bunch of my shows in 2006, including opening for me in Australia. I even put him on a couple of my Canadian dates. Yoshi did some really edgy material, which I know offended a few people at some of my shows. He actually seemed to enjoy watching the audience turn on him. I ultimately stopped putting him on as an opener because I felt that he wasn’t taking his craft as a stand-up as seriously as I felt that he should. Nevertheless, Yoshi became a trusted friend to me in those early L.A. days and could always be counted on to look after my house for me when I was travelling and taking care of anything that I needed—including an endless supply of adult DVDs.

  By now, my good friend Angelo Tsarouchas had also moved to L.A., and it was good to have him there. He had just gotten his papers and wanted to focus on acting in the States. Ang opened for me when we taped Outsourced in San Francisco. We both started getting spots at the Laugh Factory, which was close to my new house and became my club in L.A. But this wasn’t just any club. On any given night, you could drop by and do a set, and you’d be on shows with guys like Dane Cook, Dom Irerra, Dave Chappelle, Bobby Lee, Dave Attell—even Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy would drop by just to do a set. Jamie, the club’s owner, is well known in the comedy world and was really good to me early on. He’s the kind of owner who won’t let just anyone take the stage at his club, and I was honoured that he’d let me be part of this group of guys.

  My good friend Angelo and me.

  I’d become a bit of an urban myth—the Indian guy from Canada who was selling out two- and three-thousand-seat theatres across the States and internationally.

  Remember that none of these guys really knew me. I’d become a bit of an urban myth—the Indian guy from Canada who was selling out two- and three-thousand-seat theatres across the States and internationally. It took some time, but after several months of just doing walk-ons, these other comics started to get to know me. They’d call and invite me to do other shows, and I was happy to go. I also started doing spots at the Melrose Improv. I’d made friends with some of the Latino comics, and they’d invite me to be on their shows.

  The Latino shows in L.A. have like fourteen comics in a row, and sometimes I’d be the last guy up. You look out into the audience and there’s these hard-looking Mexican kids, their arms, necks and sometimes their faces all tatted up. Growing up in Canada, there really weren’t any Mexicans around, or Latinos in general, so I didn’t really know their community or their culture. It was intimidating at first, and I wasn’t sure how these guys were going to take to my stuff. Fortunately, they were right there with me, and as I did more and more of those nights, they’d come up to me after the shows and give me props on my set. (Whew!)

  I should mention that I’ve really come to love Mexicans. Once I moved to L.A., I started to get a better understanding of their culture. They are the hardest-working people around. They love their families and always come with respect. I really believe that the entire state of California would come to a grinding halt if it weren’t for them. Almost every valet in L.A. is Mexican, and for me, it’s more important for me to be friends with the valet of a restaurant than with the manager or maître d’. It’s not like the valets can do anything for me, it’s just that I identify with them more than I do with anyone else. Hell, if it weren’t for pure luck, I’d probably be one of them!

  I don’t see these guys as taking jobs away from hard-working Americans; they’re usually doing jobs that Americans just don’t want to do anymore. I can’t help but look at them and see my dad or my mom when they first came to Canada: a little scared, a little poor, but they’re there for a better life and many of them have sacrificed everything for their shot at it.

  My assistant in L.A. is Mexican. Eddie’s a great kid. He takes good care of me and my family when we’re in town. He’s also ridiculously positive and makes me laugh with his “go team” attitude.

  In the fall of 2006, I wa
s back to work on another sitcom opportunity. This time, there was no holding deal. We were working with Doug Liman’s company, Dutch Oven, trying to develop a show for me. Doug had seen me perform at the Aspen Comedy Arts Festival earlier in the year. He came to the show with Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston and Jon Favreau. They all arrived late and were seated a few rows back from the stage. And even though I was up there doing my thing, everyone in the place just stopped when they came in and watched them sit down. At the time, Vaughn and Aniston were the hot Hollywood couple. When I looked out into the audience, all I could see were their faces. They were the biggest stars I’d seen to that point, and I was completely starstruck. Thing was, it didn’t look like they were laughing, and it was freaking me out! I don’t think I had a great set that night.

  Anyway, Doug Liman’s company had a deal with NBC and was looking to develop more television and thought that we could do something together. They brought in the writing team of Jim and Steve Armogida, these two American brothers who had been working on the British show My Family. They lived in London and had a good, English sensibility about them, which meant that they got my material and understood South Asians, since there are soooo many of them in England. They also reminded me of my brother and me; we really liked them. Unfortunately, we were once again getting started late in the game and the show never came together.

  At the same time as we were trying to develop this project, I was being courted by Simon Fuller, the creator of American Idol (well, all the Idol shows, originating with Pop Idol in the UK). He had come to my L.A. show at the Wiltern Theatre that fall with my agent. (To hear my agent tell it, he was the one who specifically invited Fuller to the show. To hear Simon tell it, they were out at dinner and my agent told him he had to go to a show and Simon decided to come along.) Anyway, he wanted to develop a “global talk show,” and with his record of success, there was no reason to think that we couldn’t do something great together. Unfortunately, Simon was so busy with Idol and the Beckhams that we couldn’t really get the project off the ground. Frankly, it was pretty cool just to know him. He was very nice to me and even introduced me to Victoria Beckham at his office when I was there one day.