Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  In July 2007, we were scheduled for a general meeting at Fox. The studio and TV execs had been at my show at Just for Laughs earlier in the month and wanted to get together with me when I got back to L.A.

  The Fox execs were all really cool, and we were sitting around shooting the shit with them when the president of the network joined the meeting. He popped in to hear what we were talking about and asked me what, if any, projects I wanted to develop. My brother had written a treatment for a show that was basically about our family ten years earlier—an Anglo-Indian working-class family, where the dad was recently retired and the mom worked in a K-mart cafeteria. My character was a struggling comic and my older brother had a successful career. Although this wasn’t a formal pitch meeting, Kevin Reilly, the president of entertainment of Fox Broadcasting, loved the idea and “bought it in the room,” as they say.

  We were back in development again. Once again, we needed to find a writer for what we called The Russell Peters Show, and not just a writer, a showrunner—a guy who runs the entire show, from the writers to the cast, production staff, budgets and everything else. Showrunners are as important as the stars. They can make or break a show, and every network has a list of guys who are “approved.”

  Our pick for showrunner was Jim Hope. He was a former writer on The George Lopez Show, and my brother introduced me to him at the Hermosa Beach Comedy Club. Jim was a white guy who was a former stand-up comic. He grew up in a working-class family in East L.A. and was married to a black woman. He now lived in Orange County (the O.C.) in a Korean neighbourhood. He really understood everything that I was about. A lot of the people I’ve met in L.A. come from pretty well-off families, which means that getting a writer who understands the struggles of the working class is really hard to do. Unfortunately, Jim wasn’t a network-approved showrunner, so we had to go with someone else.

  My agents set up a series of meetings with at least a dozen writers who were approved by the network. During the all-day meetings, held at CAA, I decided to wear a giant, one-inch-thick, fake gold chain over my T-shirt. Why? you might ask. I wanted a writer who could look beyond the surface.

  I’ll admit I wasn’t at my best that day and sat there doodling as the writers came in to meet with me, my brother and Paully. My brother would nudge me under the table to pay attention when he thought I had “gone to the happy place.” But the thing about me is that even when it looks like I’m not listening, I am. I know I should be sitting pretty and looking the corporate part, but that doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention. Sometimes that pisses people off. I know I pissed off some of the writers that day. One guy even told my agent that before meeting me that he was a fan. After the meeting, he couldn’t stand me.

  Looking back, I was completely wrong-headed in these meetings. For you kids out there, you should know that there’s an art to securing a writer. You have to seduce them. I was sitting there thinking that I was doing them a favour—meanwhile, these guys have tons of opportunities, especially if they’re known guys. They make as much as (and sometimes more than) the leads in the shows they write. Think of guys like Larry David from Seinfeld or Phil Rosenthal from Everybody Loves Raymond. They were the showrunners and creators. They’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  After these meetings, we made a shortlist of guys that we felt we could work with and who were still interested in working with us. Jim Hope was still my main choice, and we pushed hard for him, but the network exec assigned to my show wasn’t hearing it. They liked someone else, a guy named Ben Wexler, and to be honest, I couldn’t even remember which guy he was after our first meeting.

  Because the network was very hot on this guy, we decided to move ahead with him. The short version of this story is that, as we started working on the pilot script, the writers’ strike started. By the time the strike ended on February 12, 2008, the network wanted a script within ten days. Ben had adhered to the “pens down” rule that the strike mandated. But we weren’t very happy with the script he submitted to the network. He was having trouble understanding the nuances of our working-class family and he wasn’t prepared to make any changes to the script.

  Fox passed on the show. If you ever wonder why I don’t get too hyped up on anything in Hollywood, it’s because of having gone through things like this. I hate being disappointed and don’t believe that anything is going to happen until after it’s happened.

  During all of this, I was still going out on auditions for different television guest-starring roles as well as roles in movies. None of these auditions went very well. I just wasn’t good at auditioning. My live shows were getting bigger and bigger, and I was making more and more money on the road. It was kind of tough to go from that part of my life to being in a waiting room with a bunch of guys who either looked like me or were the usual group of stand-up comics that I knew. It was funny (or not so funny) to watch the Korean comedian Ken Jeong, a.k.a. Dr. Ken, get every role that I also read for: the barista in an episode of Entourage, the gynecologist in Knocked Up, and a bunch of other movies that came out in 2007 and 2008.

  I was always asked to play characters with an “Indian accent,” and I kept turning those roles down—much to my agents’ annoyance. As one of my agents, who’s actually an Indian guy, told me, “Look, everybody has to do these roles at some point.” Not me. I may have fun with the accent in my act, but I didn’t want to play an ongoing stereotype in these TV shows and movies I was auditioning for. When I would read the script, I’d never see any reason for the characters to have an accent. It just didn’t make sense.

  After getting increasingly fed up with being just another face from CAA’s roster, I had Paully specifically ask whether I’d been requested for auditions by the producers or casting agents. If I was just going to be another guy reading, then I wasn’t going to audition. Maybe I sound like an asshole here, but what’s the point of being just another face in the room? I was sucking at it and would put in a minimal amount of effort because I didn’t want to deal with the rejection. If I didn’t try, I didn’t fail.

  In January of 2009, I was invited to a meeting with the Simmons Lathan Media Group in L.A. This is the company owned by Russell Simmons and Stan Lathan—two media legends. They wanted to talk about developing a show for me—maybe a talk show, maybe a variety show, maybe a sitcom. Initially, we were thinking about a talk show, but then we heard that George Lopez was going to develop a late-night talk show, so that idea was canned.

  Next, we discussed me hosting a new stand-up series for them, featuring multi-ethnic comics. That would have been okay, but I had already done that with Comics Without Borders, for Showtime. Eventually, we moved away from the stand-up series and came around to getting a sitcom off the ground. Kim Fleary, one of the execs at Simmons Lathan, used to work at ABC and had worked with writer and showrunner Bruce Helford. Bruce had co-created The Drew Carey Show as well as The Norm Show, Wanda at Large and The George Lopez Show, among others, and came from a working-class background in Chicago. We met with Bruce and really liked him. I’d finally moved up the food chain to working with an A-list showrunner. I was excited.

  I had Bruce Helford and Russell Simmons behind me. Bruce had this English sitcom that he wanted to develop for the States, with me as the lead. As he worked on that, we also kicked around other ideas for a show. We all liked the traditional three-camera sitcoms (like Friends and The Drew Carey Show, among others) versus the current trend towards one-camera sitcoms (The Office, Modern Family, 30 Rock). By October 2009, Bruce wasn’t able to make any progress with securing the rights to the British series and didn’t feel that a three-camera series would work at the time. Modern Family (I love that show) had started on ABC and became an immediate hit, which he interpreted as a sign that the networks would continue with the one-camera format. This meant that by October 2009, I was once again sitcom-less.

  I ended up setting a new attendance record of almost seven thousand people.

  So back to the stage I went. Over the past t
wo years, I’ve played two big shows in L.A., both of them at the Nokia Theatre. My first show at the Nokia was in February 2008. The theatre was only open a few months at that time, and I ended up setting a new attendance record of almost seven thousand people. The week before the Nokia date, I was booked on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Being on The Tonight Show is something all comics dream of. It’s also one of those things that people ask you about—“Oh, you’re a comedian? Have you ever been on The Tonight Show?” In a way, it validates you, because everybody knows the show.

  Before you can do stand-up on The Tonight Show, you need to run your set past the stand-up producers—Bob Read and Ross Mark. We ran through the set at the Hermosa Beach Comedy and Magic Club, and it went well. I was given some notes afterwards. The one thing that they insisted on is that my set be “joke, joke, joke, joke.” The pace has got to be fast. Their focus, as on all TV shows, is ratings. If you’re going too slowly, the network may lose viewers—not good.

  But I’m a storyteller. I don’t do “joke, joke, joke, joke,” so I had to adjust my style a bit for the show. Next, I did a pre-interview. The producers run through things that Jay may ask you, and you have a chance to prepare good answers. Everything went well in the run-through, and Bob and Ross, who are both really good guys, were happy with my set.

  A few days later, I was at The Tonight Show. Jay came by my dressing room to say hi and see what I was up to. He’s a stand-up, so he knew I’d be a bit nervous. He was really supportive and cool with me. Also on the show that night was singer and actress Kristin Chenoweth, who was a great guest and really loosened up the show before I came on and did my thing. I moved through my set quickly, as requested, and it went really well. I even included Kevin Eubanks (Jay’s bandleader) as part of one of the bits. The only thing that threw me off was a Canadian fan in the audience who yelled out during my set. Not a big deal, though.

  After I wrapped my set, Jay invited me over to the desk. I sat down and somehow immediately began flirting with Kristin. Jay was great and we went through all of the questions comfortably—except for one. Jay asked me if I liked hockey—a question all Canadians in L.A. get asked. In the pre-interview I had answered that I liked boxing instead of hockey, and that was supposed to lead to a joke—a joke that to this day, I can’t even remember. So Jay asked me if I liked hockey, and I simply answered, “No.” That was it. I had no comeback.

  Jay paused for a second and then repeated, “So you don’t like hockey?”

  “Nah, nope,” I replied.

  He moved on, and between flirting with Kristin and joking around with Jay, things went well. After the show was over, one of the producers mentioned that I didn’t answer the hockey question the way we’d discussed in the pre-interview. I was like, “I forgot.” Sometimes, that’s just the way it goes.

  When we released Red, White and Brown in the States in the fall of 2008, my agents tried to get me back on The Tonight Show. They said that they’d love to have me on for stand-up, but that I wouldn’t be able to do panel. “Huh? I thought it went pretty well last time.”

  Turns out that by not answering the hockey question properly, I had “gone off script.” Because of that, I wouldn’t be invited back to panel. There was nothing anyone could do.

  Sometimes, when you’re disappointed, you’ve got to just say fuck it. I ended up doing The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson instead to promote the DVD release—and doing Craig’s show meant that I couldn’t do Jay’s show or even Jimmy Kimmel Live. All these shows compete for guests, and if you appear on one, you can’t do the other. I was a huge fan of Craig’s movie The Big Tease. Craig’s a very funny guy and the show’s very relaxed, so we had a good time together.

  This past year I did Lopez Tonight to tie in with my Nokia show. George has a huge studio audience and probably the most hyped-up crowd in late night. I personally think the set and the show look wicked, both on TV and when you’re in the studio. There was no screening of my set beforehand. We just gave the producers an idea of what I was going to do. As part of my pre-interview, we discussed the fact that I liked to roller-skate, so they suggested that I bring my skates with me. We’d do a quick shot of me roller-skating backstage for one of the bumpers.

  Now, I consider myself a pretty good skater—I’ve been doing it for thirty years. I was actually feeling like a bit of a show-off. But … the floor backstage at Lopez is made of Astroturf, of all things. When the crew was ready to shoot the bumper, I stepped out of my dressing room and my skates got caught on the Astroturf. I fell flat. All of the hot producer chicks were there, and I was embarrassed as shit. I pulled myself up and regained my composure and they did a shot of me gliding effortlessly across the Astroturf.

  When I got on stage to do my set, I had to really go for it because George’s intro wasn’t very hype. But that’s okay. The audience was great and my set went well. When George and I sat down, we talked about my recent dinner with the king of Jordan, and I mentioned that he served us alcohol. The king wasn’t drinking, but that didn’t matter. I wish that part had been edited out, because it upset some Muslims who felt that the king shouldn’t be offering alcohol since it’s prohibited by the Qur’an. It wasn’t like my Muslim and Arab fans turned on me, but I don’t aim to offend people’s religion.

  Me and Lopez, then and now, 2000 and 2010 (Lopez Tonight).

  I also realized that, while telling the story of how the king punked me, I said that his guards had Uzis—which of course is a gun that no Arab country would use because they’re made in Israel. Sorry, guys. The Uzi is the only machine-gun name I know.

  The day after I did Lopez’s show, I appeared on a fundraiser he was having for Haitian earthquake relief. I walked into the greenroom at the Nokia Theatre and everyone was there—Sam Jackson, Magic Johnson, Olden Polynice, Don Cheadle, Andy Garcia, Larry David, Los Lobos, Amber Valletta, Ray Romano, Eva Longoria, Slash, George Clinton, Charlie Wilson, Cypress Hill … and Cedric the Entertainer. The only person who recognized me was Cedric. He was like, “Hey, Russell Peters!”

  Many people see me as a celebrity, but I definitely don’t think of myself as one.

  L.A. is the home of hugely successful celebrities. I’m not trying to name-drop by listing all these players. I just want to give you an idea of where I fit in the grander scheme of things. I may be doing okay, but some of these guys are at a whole other level—and I still get starstruck by many of them.

  That night, it was getting late and I was starting to wonder if I was even supposed to perform. Cypress Hill went up and absolutely killed it. I was next. Turns out I was closing the show. The room was still buzzing from Cypress Hill’s performance, so I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but somehow that audience was right there with me, and I had a great set.

  Many people see me as a celebrity, but I definitely don’t think of myself as one. At the end of the day, I’m just a guy who goes onstage and talks about race and culture and maybe throws in a few dick jokes and then goes home. My audiences may have grown from thirty people to thirty thousand, but I don’t feel all that different from the way I did ten years ago. I’ve done a couple of specials, hosted some TV shows and put out two official DVDs. I know that I have a fan base who will support me.

  What I never, ever considered was that the stuff I’ve done would be seen by other performers and real celebrities. That honestly never occurred to me until I met Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell when I was filming the movie The Con Artist (yet to be released). We shot this movie in Toronto and Hamilton in the spring of 2009, and it was done on a pretty low budget. Rebecca was in the movie and so was Rossif Sutherland, who played the lead, as well as his father, Donald.

  One day, Rebecca called me into her trailer. She said, “I watched all your stuff when I was pregnant. I’m a really big fan!” I thought she was shitting me. I asked her how she first saw my work. “One of my neighbours put me onto you.”

  “Who are your neighbours?”

  “Angie Harmon and
Jason Sehorn.” Harmon had seen me on TV when she was pregnant and then picked up Red, White and Brown and Outsourced. During her pregnancy she had torn a disc in her back and was completely bedridden. The only thing that would make her laugh during that time were my specials. She passed the DVDs on to Rebecca during her pregnancy and she loved them, too.

  On February 6, Angie, Rebecca, Jason and Jerry all came to my show at Nokia. They seemed sincerely happy to be there. Because they all had kids, this was a big night out for all of them. Afterwards, Jerry O’Connell asked me where I grew up, and I told him, “Brampton.”

  He replied, “Oh yeah, Brampton.”

  I was like, “You know Brampton?”

  “Sure, it’s just north of Mississauga.”

  It was probably the last thing I was expecting to hear that night.

  (From left) Jerry O’Connell, Rebecca Romijn, me, Angie Harmon and Jason Sehorn.

  THE WHOLE WORLD’S MIXING. THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT:

  In about three hundred years, there’s not going to be any more white people or black people. Everyone’s just going to be beige. And I don’t care. I’m already beige.