by Tom Farley
MICHAEL EWING, associate producer:
Tommy Boy, at that point, was called Billy the III: A Midwestern. It was changed because Billy Madison was being shot at the same time. Bonnie and Terry Turner had written the first draft. It was a sweet script, but it was a bit of a mess—and it was a famous bit of mess, because now Chris Farley was attached to it and it was going to get made. I walked in to the office the first day, and Pete said, “Well, what do you think of the script?”
I said, “I think we have work to do.”
FRED WOLF:
I shared an office at SNL with Spade, Sandler, and Rock. Farley was always coming over to our office to hang out. It almost seemed like he was a part of the office, too. I was the quiet guy who observed them, and so it seemed like I might be a good guy to bring a little of their sense of humor to the page.
Jim Downey and I were hired to do a polish of the Turners’ script. We were working on it literally as the pages came in. Then Downey had to go back to the show, leaving me to do what amounted to a full rewrite. We all went up to Toronto, and I started commuting back and forth to the show, just like Chris and David did. I got married while the film was being shot, and at one point I was writing pages from my hotel room in Hawaii and faxing them in. It was crazy.
PETER SEGAL, director:
Even though there was no script, I really believed in Chris. One night before production started, I was driving him to the Palm in L.A. to meet Brian Dennehy, who was to play his father. This was at a time when Saturday Night Live was in its nadir. People were writing all the articles about “Saturday Night Dead” and so on. And here we were with a movie with a fixed start date and no finished script. Chris turned to me and said, “Pete, everyone expects us to fail.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re right.”
“Our only victory will be a success.”
And at that point I knew we were bonded, because we were both taking a leap of faith in each other, that we were gonna go through this as comrades. Fred Wolf had given us sixty-six pages. I called them the Magic Sixty-six, because that’s all we had. We left for Toronto with very little to go on. It was like taking the pin out of a grenade and going jogging.
FRED WOLF:
It was my first movie. I didn’t know enough to know that it was abnormal, though obviously it was. Pete and I would write until three or four in the morning, and then he’d have to be on the set by six. Then, while they were shooting what we’d written the night before, I’d be in the hotel room writing the scenes for the next day.
PETER SEGAL:
Fred and I would meet for dinner, or lie out on the floor of the hotel room with note cards, talking about things that’d happened to us. Fred would say, “I once left an oil can in the engine, and the hood flew up in my face.”
And I’d say, “Great, put it down on a card. It’s in.”
Then I told him how I was once backing up at a gas station in Glen-dale and I hyperextended my car door on the cement post. So that went in. We just started building these stacks of cards.
After that, Fred and I would go to dinner and watch Chris and Dave interact, and we’d literally just start taking notes on things that they would say to each other. One day on the set, Chris came out with a new sport coat, and he said, “Does this coat make me look fat?”
And Spade said, “No, your face does.”
I stopped what I was doing and said, “Wait, wait, wait. What was that? Say that again! That’s gold! We gotta put that in the movie!”
Unfortunately, we ran into trouble with the start date. We were warned that if we started past a certain day in July we would run into the Saturday Night Live season and then we’d be splitting time with the show, which we ended up doing.
ERIC NEWMAN, production assistant:
Lorne had Paramount give us a plane that would shuttle Chris and David and me back and forth from Toronto to New York. It was my job to accompany them wherever they went. Mostly Chris. David didn’t really need the accompaniment. We went back and forth twice a week. We’d shoot on Tuesday, fly down Wednesday morning, do the read-through, fly back up to Toronto, work for two days, then fly back down on Friday for blocking, do the show, then fly back to Toronto at four in the morning.
MICHAEL EWING:
To have Chris and David flying back and forth was actually lucky for us. We had a chance to write material so we’d have something to shoot when they got back. I would get calls at two in the morning from Pete and Fred. They would call and say, “You gotta call the casting director. We need a police officer for this new scene.”
So I’d have to call casting, then wardrobe, then do everything to make sure that actor was ready first thing in the morning. The scene when Chris and David drive the car up to the airport, ditch it, and throw the guy the keys? That’s that guy. He was hired at two-thirty in the morning and had to be on the set at sunrise. And that happened on a daily basis.
BOB WEISS:
It was rough, but the beautiful thing in Tommy Boy of course is the chemistry between Chris and David Spade. It wasn’t like, “Hey, let’s invent a comedy team.” It’s not that easy. There was just a hunch that their personal relationship would really pay off. And it did. A lot of what you see in that movie is who they really were. We started filming, and I was like, “Fuck, this is funny.” They just hit home run after home run.
PETER SEGAL:
When Tommy Boy came out it was resoundingly dissed by every critic. But a couple of them, and one in the L.A. Times, said these guys were the new Laurel and Hardy. I was too young to really appreciate the Hope and Crosby Road movies, but there were certain comedy teams that were produced in the eighties, like Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, or Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. It was kind of neat to think, God forbid, that these guys could become like them.
MICHAEL EWING:
We were having a reading of the script up in Canada. The studio had flown in for the occasion, and we knew we didn’t have a third act. It was a fucking mess. It didn’t go so well. But Chris was being his wonderful, boisterous self, kind of the life of the party, and at one point David Spade turned to him and said, “Chris!” Then he made this hand gesture like he was turning down his hearing aid a little bit. That was the first introduction that I had to them and their relationship.
DAVID SPADE:
We got close just by spending twenty-four/seven together. He trusted me enough to know I was a really great friend. And I was a huge fan—fan’s an odd word, but I really thought he was talented, and he knew that I genuinely believed that. During Tommy Boy, and even during SNL, I was always trying to come up with ways for him to score, to think of jokes for him, and that’s a sacrifice you maybe don’t see a lot of in show business. When we presented together at the Oscars, I came up with a punch line so I could set him up and he could get the laugh. Over time we just built up a mutual trust and respect.
ERIC NEWMAN:
Chris and David were somewhat competitive, which comes from being on Saturday Night Live. They all have that.
David was always looking to get out of work, wondering when he’d get days off. So we’re on the plane one week, the three of us, and I get out a schedule. I have a copy, I hand David a copy, I’m taking David through it, and Chris goes “What is that?”
“Oh, David wanted a copy of the schedule,” I say.
Chris rips my schedule out of my hand and says, “I get whatever David gets!”
Then he starts looking at it—sideways, because he can’t figure it out—flips it upside down, can’t figure it out, then drops it and abruptly pretends to fall asleep. It was hilarious. He’d acted out a little bit, and he knew it, so he tried to make it into a joke. He knew there were guys who became movie stars and became dicks, and he didn’t want to become that guy.
LORNE MICHAELS:
I always said that while making the movies, Chris would put on thirty pounds and David would lose thirty pounds, but no matter what, the amount of weight in the frame stayed the
same. Chris would get bigger, and you’d be saying “Get Spade a banana,” because he was wasting away.
ROB LOWE, costar:
Chris and David were literally like an old married couple. They could be so petty with each other in ways that were so funny and unbelievable that you were never really sure when it was an act, which it often was, and when it crossed over to become real, which it often did.
The two instances I really remember were when they fought over me, like I was some girl. We were shooting in Toronto, and Spade and I had been at the gym at the same time and we ended up hanging out in the Jacuzzi. Then, the next day, Chris said to Spade, “Where were you? I called you in your room.”
“I was hanging out in the Jacuzzi with Rob.”
“You were in the Jacuzzi with Rob?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“Why didn’t you guys call me?”
And it became this whole thing of who was in the Jacuzzi with me, and it just went on from there.
DAVID SPADE:
Then, one night after flying back from New York, Chris goes, “I got the flu, so when I land I’m going right to bed.”
“Okay.”
We got in to our hotel in Toronto. Chris was being cranky and grumpy, and he went to bed. Rob Lowe called, and I said, “Farley’s crashing. You want to grab a drink?” He said sure. So we went down and we had one quick drink and went to bed, because we both had a six A.M. call.
The next day I’m sitting in makeup. Farley’s staring at me in the mirror, biting his lip, which means there’s a fight coming. He goes, “How’s Rob Lowe?”
“He’s all right.”
“Huh? How’s Rob Lowe?” And he kept saying it. “How’s Rob Lowe?”
I said, “Uh, I don’t get it.”
“Where’s your precious Rob Lowe?”
“Oh, you mean last night. Yeah, I had a drink with Rob Lowe.”
“Oh, yeah. I heard all about it.”
We’d just been together too much at that point. So we come to the set, it’s twenty-five degrees and I’m huddling on the ground, waiting for the scene to start, trying to eat a tuna fish sandwich with my freezing fingers. Chris walks up and steps on the sandwich and my hand with his boot. I yell, “Ow, you motherfucker!”
And he goes, “Huh?! How’s Rob Lowe?”
“What?!”
I throw my Diet Coke on him and he throws me into a wall and down the stairs and he comes to hit me and they yell, “Action!”
We both freeze in the middle of this fight, wait for our cue, and then open the door and walk in. I just stare at the other actors for a moment, and then I say, “Fuck this.” And I walk out.
I just leave and go back to my room, and Farley goes, “What’s his problem?”
Chris was actually jealous of Rob Lowe. He admitted it later. That’s probably why I’m not married now; my first experience didn’t work out.
MICHAEL EWING:
Best friends are always competitive, and comedians and actors are always competitive in a certain way. That’s just part of it, that’s part of the one-upmanship. And that carried over into their lives, with women and with friends. When you get people like Chris was, like Dave is, those are complicated relationships.
PETER SEGAL:
David had a boldness about calling out the elephant in the room where nobody else would. It was all playful, but it was the kind of humor that unless you knew Chris you would never go there. There was a lot of honesty in Dave’s jokes toward Chris, and I think Chris appreciated the ballsiness of it. The guys from SNL all tell me that everyone felt Chris was the funniest guy. So for Dave to be the one to crack Chris up, well, that was like being the one to pluck the thorn from the lion’s paw. He had a friend for life.
JULIE WARNER, costar:
David doesn’t drink or do anything bad. He’s very orderly, very much a grown-up at a young age. That stability is part of what attracted Chris to him. But I could see David’s frustration. He knew that there was so much danger for Chris. He felt responsible, and it’s too much responsibility for any one person. I’ve been around enough addicts to know that your greatest fear is to be abandoned. Chris knew David was never going to leave him, so there was safety there.
DAVID SPADE:
He trusted me. He also thought I was smart, whether I am or not. He would always ask my advice on a million things, and I would just try and help him in the best way I could. He had his problems, and it was a mounting pile of them as time went on. It was really hard for me. It scared me for myself. I wasn’t even half as famous as he was, and I’m having my own weird stuff going on. Is this what it’s like, being famous? Because it’s getting harder and scarier to watch.
KEVIN FARLEY:
At the time of Tommy Boy, Chris was on his second year of sobriety. He already had a year under his belt. He was down to maybe 225 pounds, which was a pretty good weight for him. He could move really well in that movie, and it showed. That was probably the best he ever looked, and his sobriety was probably the best it had ever been. Everything was clicking on all levels.
MICHAEL EWING:
Every night after we’d finish shooting, I’d take him either to a meeting or to church to visit with his priest. Sometimes both. He would call the priest also, sometimes late at night. He was completely straight during that whole shoot. He was dedicated to helping himself, and he was totally serious about it.
PETER SEGAL:
He was very superstitious, and I think it all tied in to habits that he felt would keep him on the straight and narrow. His habit of visiting his priest every day, it was as much for the routine as for the actual counseling.
DAVID SPADE:
He had to pull up his pant leg twice and tap the ground twice before every take, which over the course of an entire movie gets a little annoying, to say the least. So one time while he was tapping the ground like that I said, “You know, Chris, the good thing about the devil is that he won’t come to you. You have to summon him like you’re doing now.”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“You see, I like God. That’s just my own thing. But you like to tap on the roof of hell and invite the devil to join you.”
“Shut the fuck up. That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Well, there’s no superstition in the Bible, Chris, which you’d know if you ever leafed through it. That’s something the devil made up so people would invite him into their lives.”
He was fucking stunned. I loved it. He didn’t know what to do. Even though I was totally bullshitting him, it sort of sounded like it made sense, and he just stared at me, frozen.
PETER SEGAL:
And there was no joking about that stuff, either. Every time he smoked a cigarette he brought it out backwards to his lips and touched it, and then turned it around and put it in his mouth. If he turned around, did a 360-degree turn to the right, he’d have to unwind and do another 360 to the left, like how you’d spin if you went around the corner and forgot something and came back for it. You’d ask him about it, and he’d say, “I gotta undo. I wound up to the right, and I gotta unwind to the left.” There were all these habits. For some reason, I think they were comfort factors to Chris.
JULIE WARNER:
Chris looked everywhere for safety and support, and he felt very safe within the family he’d found on this film. Whatever feeling of acceptance he craved, I think he found it there.
Chris was very silly with me at first. He was like, “I can’t believe they cast someone so pretty to be the love interest.” He had this kind of goofy thing that he did around girls. It was like, “Oh, Julie, I can’t even look at you. You’re so pretty. I can’t even talk to you.”
It was put on, but it was obviously his defense for the fact that he couldn’t have a real moment with you. That whole aw-shucks character he did on “The Chris Farley Show,” that was all very deliberate. He’d say stuff to me like, “You were really good in Doc Hollywood. Especially in the naked part. You remember
that time in Doc Hollywood when you were naked? You remember that? That was awesome.”
At the beginning it was funny. Then it went on for weeks, every time I saw him. I even said to David, “Is it always going to be like that?”
He said, “Chris can’t talk to girls he thinks are pretty.”
To be an actor, you have to make it real, play off the other person, listen and react. And Chris had that. We really connected when we were acting together. Interestingly, when Chris was on camera, it was the only time I could get him to look me directly in the eye.
PETER SEGAL:
We went to a club one night after work. Chris came in a three-piece suit, wearing his black horn-rimmed glasses. There were a lot of pretty women there, and Chris looked really tense. I said, “What’s the matter?”
He was looking at these beautiful women at the bar, and he said, “Pete, beauty makes me angry. I can’t tell whether I want to take ’em home or club ’em over the head with an empty wine bottle.”
I’ve quoted that line to so many people over the years. It was hilarious, but you could tell that he was tortured by his own insecurities. He was the bravest guy in the room, yet fearful in ways that he would never let on.
