The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  “Okay.”

  “I read it. I wasn’t crazy about it. You read it, and you decide.”

  And so I’m in a tough spot. If I say yes, Fred Wolf gets paid and gets a movie made, and so do I. If I say no, Fred and I don’t have work, but Chris gets to go and do the other one.

  I say, “Look, I’ll read it, and I’ll decide based on no reason other than whether or not I like it. And if I like it, I have to say yes.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I read it, and I thought it was actually pretty good. Coming off Tommy Boy, I thought Chris, Fred, and I could pull it off.

  ERIC NEWMAN:

  And so Black Sheep was concocted to preempt Cable Guy, but, unfortunately, at the same time, the Cable Guy deal was falling apart on its own due to the Jim Carrey thing.

  BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, manager/founder, Brillstein-Grey

  Entertainment:

  It was the worst. Endeavor sent me the script for The Cable Guy. You can’t even imagine how different that script was from what got made. It was a simple, fun story. Gurvitz and I took it over to Columbia, to Mark Canton. They bought it with Chris attached. We were then going through all the preproduction, and Brad Grey and I got a call from Canton. “Please be over here at six o’clock. It’s very important that we see you.”

  Now, when someone calls you for an important six o’clock meeting, it’s never good news, and it’s never to give you money, ever. We went over to Columbia and Canton said, “Somehow, the Cable Guy script made it to Jim Carrey.”

  “Somehow?” I said. “Did it fly over there or did you send it by cab?”

  That started the meeting out on a bit of a hostile front.

  “Jim Carrey wants to do it,” he said, “and we want to make it our summer tent-pole movie.”

  Brad and I had brought Columbia this script, and, without our knowing, they had brought on Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, and Jim Carrey, who wanted to turn it into a dark, black comedy. They were going to pay Carrey $20 million, and it was the first time anyone had broken the $20 million ceiling. I was very blunt. I said, “You just lost twenty million.”

  So now Canton says, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll pay off Chris. You two can stay with the picture as producers, and we’ll pay you.”

  It was a tough decision. It was a lot of money. It was our script, so I didn’t feel bad about taking the money, honest to God. And they weren’t going to budge off of Jim Carrey, so as long as Chris got paid, that was the best we could hope for, for him.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS, director:

  One Sunday afternoon, I got a call from John Goldwyn at Paramount. He put Sherry Lansing on the phone, and they said, “Chris Farley wants to do this movie called The Cable Guy, and if we don’t exercise our option on him by tomorrow morning, we lose our rights to hold him to another movie.” They asked me if I would direct it.

  I said, “Well, where’s the script?”

  “We don’t have one,” they said, “but we have a great idea.”

  They pitched me the idea. It didn’t seem something I really wanted to do. Then they told me what they were going to pay me—and it was obscene. It was about two and a half or three million dollars. They needed to get the picture done that badly. So, I hate to sound crass, but I did it for the money. Plus, after doing Wayne’s World I really did love Chris and really did want to work with him. Between those two things, I went for it.

  DAVID SPADE:

  And that’s when the trouble started. I believe up until that point we would have had another Tommy Boy on our hands. But Penelope got paid more than all of us put together, because she’d done Wayne’s World. So all the power went to her. The problem is, you have to give a lot of credit on Wayne’s World to Mike and Dana. I’m sure she did something right, but as far as the funny is concerned, that’s Mike and Dana, in my opinion.

  So Penelope says, “I know how to make you guys funny.” Which is the first red flag. Chris, Fred, and I knew what we needed to do. We just needed someone to shoot us, but she ripped forty pages out of the script and said, “I’m going to work on this with my friend.” All our complaints fell on deaf ears, and Fred got fired.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS:

  There was one point in a meeting when we were discussing the script with the studio people. Fred came up with some stupid-ass idea, and I said, “I’m not going to do that.”

  Then everybody looked at Lorne, and Lorne said, “Well, Fred is the writer on the show.” Parentheses: The writer is king on Saturday Night Live.

  So I said, “Okay, you guys can take your two and a half million and shove it up your ass.”

  And I walked out. I couldn’t believe I’d done it, but I was walking across the parking lot and I heard the click-click-click of Karen Rosenfeld’s high heels, and she came up to me going, “Penelope, don’t leave. Please, please.”

  They didn’t care about me, mind you. They just didn’t want to lose the director, any director, for fear of derailing the project and losing Chris.

  ERIC NEWMAN:

  A movie’s like a train, a five-hundred-ton train, and once it leaves the station there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. If you’re Jerry Bruckheimer it’s pretty easy to stand on principle and say, “This movie’s not ready.” (Not that he ever has.) But if you’re not at that level, you work with what you have. Everyone thinks, okay, it’ll all come out in the wash. The process will right the ship. And it never does. And so, despite the best efforts of Chris, David, Lorne, and Fred, Black Sheep is an entirely forget-table movie. It’s a terrible movie. It’s a really bad movie.

  TED DONDANVILLE, friend:

  Johnny Farley had moved to Chicago and started performing at ImprovOlympic, and he and I were drinking buddies. He told me Chris was looking for an assistant. So I just called Chris up and asked him for the job, and I got it. I wasn’t hired for my secretarial efficiency but because that concrete wall seals off after you become famous. You can only trust the people on one side of it, and I was on that side. And of course I’d taken care of him when he was the poor, starving actor at Second City.

  We flew out to Los Angeles on the Fourth of July of 1995, and I was his personal assistant from that day on. When we got there we moved into the Park Hyatt hotel. He had a nice suite, with a big living room area. He lived there for all of Black Sheep, and then for all the time we weren’t on location for Beverly Hills Ninja and Edwards & Hunt. That was his home in L.A. Filming started about a week after we got to town.

  Chris, because of his clout, got them to hire writers to work on punching up the script three or four nights a week. The guys who wrote Edwards & Hunt, which became Almost Heroes, they came in. Those guys would come over to Chris’s hotel suite, we’d order food, and they’d sit around for hours going over the upcoming scenes, trying to make it better. Those sessions were a great time, a lot of fun to watch, these intellectual writers setting Chris up and giving him stuff to work on. He’d act it out a little and tweak it with them.

  The process was more enjoyable than the actual product. Not a lot of that material got worked in, ultimately, because it was all last-second stuff. So Chris knew it was a piece of crap, but he was going to go down swinging.

  TIM MATHESON, costar:

  Chris was very positive. Always prepared. You could tell that all the principal performers were just doing it by rote, to fill an obligation, except for Chris. I didn’t much believe in the movie. I just figured it had to be at least half as good as Tommy Boy, and that would be okay. But they just kept adding and changing crap all the time, and never to make it better. It just got dumber.

  FRED WOLF:

  If you’re going to do something in a slapdash manner, you need the captain of the ship to make sure it comes off right. I think we were all missing that.

  On Tommy Boy, Pete Segal would call me in my room and say, “We’re out here with Chris and Rob Lowe. He’s washing him off after the cow-tipping scene. Do you have anything?”

  And I knew that any time you had Ch
ris dancing you had comedy gold. So I’d say, “Why not have him singing ‘Maniac’ from Flashdance?”

  Then they were able to knock it out on the spot. On Black Sheep, the director wasn’t speaking to me, and I was banned from the set. Penelope Spheeris fired me a total of three times. Chris rehired me twice, and Lorne Michaels a third time. I missed Pete Segal.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  Chris liked the way that Penelope was very open about hearing his ideas. On the other hand, he didn’t really trust her comedy chops. He had a fear of her not knowing what was funny and what wasn’t, and he was worried about the lack of strong direction. Personally, though, they got along great. He liked the freedom she gave him.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS:

  It was actually Chris’s idea to get Tim Matheson and Bruce McGill for their parts, specifically because of Animal House. For me, I trusted him on it, and then I met the guys and they were just great. My first impulse was, “Who’s going to believe Chris Farley and Tim Matheson as brothers?” But they really felt like brothers.

  TIM MATHESON:

  I went in for the audition, and to my surprise Chris was there. He was the star, and I was just coming in for this supporting part, but he was so gracious and so deferential and so flattering that you honestly would have thought it was his audition. But I got the feeling that he was responsible for my being there. I was very grateful for that, and I wanted to deliver.

  He wanted to hear anything and everything I could remember about Animal House. He wanted to get my take on the whole experience and what it was like working with Belushi. I liked to make him laugh, so I told him as many stories as I could.

  Chris had an innocence about him, a golly-shucks-gee kind of thing. John felt like an older brother. Chris felt like a younger brother. John had big designs, was always in charge. He grabbed that ball and ran with it. Chris was always “Golly-gee, what do you think?” Belushi was also a sweet guy, but Belushi was very aware of who he was, the impact he had on people, and the clout that it gave him, both in the industry and just over average people. John was very savvy. You got the feeling that Chris wasn’t. Or, if he was, he chose to ignore it. He had a very salt-of-the-earth quality about him. When he introduced me to his brother, it was all about how great his brother was.

  BRUCE McGILL, costar:

  Toward the end of the movie, we all played in a golf tournament, so we spent about six hours out there together. You usually try and keep humiliating experiences down to ten, fifteen minutes, right? But a game of golf is just hours and hours of ego-bruising degradation, which breaks people down and opens them up. If you want to know something about a guy, go play golf with him.

  And while we were out there we had a very protracted, involved three-way conversation about what had happened to John, and how he should avoid that for himself. It was fascinating to see how interested he was in Belushi and Belushi’s demise—and how adamant he was that he would not go down that road. Cut to two years later and he went exactly the same way. If there was ever a moth to a flame, whether it was conscious, unconscious, I don’t know.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  When Chris left SNL, he told me that the only goal he’d ever had in life was to be on that show, that his father had loved John Belushi on that show, and if he could make it there, he’d make his father happy. That’s where the Belushi thing came from—his father.

  BRUCE McGILL:

  If Belushi made Chris’s father laugh, well, there you go. It’s positively Greek.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS:

  My problem with Black Sheep was that then and to this day I find Chris Farley absolutely, brilliantly, hilariously funny. I don’t think I’ve ever even smiled at anything David Spade’s ever done. Chris was lovable and positive, and David was so bitter and negative. You take your pick.

  I still have a recording of a message David left on my answering machine. He said, “You’ve spent this whole movie trying to cut my comedy balls off.”

  DAVID SPADE:

  The main problem was that Penelope separated us. She had Chris go off and do one thing and me go off and do another. We kept saying, “Look, our characters just need to be together. We need to fight and bicker and do all that shit.”

  And Chris wasn’t helping much, because he thought he should be doing more dramatic stuff, that the movie should be more about his character and Tim Matheson’s character and less about me. He even hinted that “would I mind” if I got paid not to be in it so they could make it more of a dramedy. And I don’t think he meant it to be offensive to me. He just wanted to act and didn’t want to keep doing fatty falls down. Personally, I thought it was too early; we needed more experience before we tried to do those things.

  So they added a few scenes for Chris and Tim to be a little more serious, and they had another writer come in to work on the ending. And I was kind of on my own. I didn’t have anyone to play off of. I didn’t have Chris, and my humor is funny when I have someone to play off of.

  ERIC NEWMAN:

  Actors need rules, and those rules need to come from the director. Penelope clearly didn’t get David, and she really allowed him to meander. Chris Farley alone is the comedy team of Costello and Costello. You needed the sharp-tongued straight man. You can pretend that you’re just making a Chris Farley movie, but you’re not. It’s a Chris Farley/David Spade movie.

  TIM MATHESON:

  I sensed that there was something wrong with Chris and David, but I thought it was David not wanting to be the second banana.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS:

  You could feel the tension between them, believe me.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  I was staying with Chris in his hotel room, and at the end of the shoot he would come back and see me and vent out all of his tension. “You’re the reason me and my best friend aren’t talking.” That sort of thing. It was hard.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  It was about the girl, basically, and some underlying jealousy, too, which Spade actually handled very well. Spade was pissed off about how things went down with Kit Kat. I think it was one of those things where Spade thought she was his girl, but they weren’t really dating to begin with.

  DAVID SPADE:

  Dating, not dating, whatever. I don’t know what you want to call it. We were certainly hanging out a lot. I wasn’t her boyfriend, but we were very close. And I didn’t find out from them. It was an accident. For some reason, I wasn’t supposed to know. So if she and I weren’t dating, then why was I being kept in the dark? And whatever. The problems with Lorri were that I felt somewhat betrayed on both sides. I felt like, here’s my friend. I always made sure he got to hang out with us because he said he had no one else to be with, and to have that bite me in the ass later didn’t sit right.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  I talked to Lorri about it a lot, and according to her, Chris was guilt-ridden over it. She says that she and David were never more than friends, but who knows how women revisit stuff.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  Chris and I were just emotional, crazy people. Our relationship was always rocky. Up and down, like being on a ship at sea. David always used to say, “You two are going to kill each other.” The thing with Chris, the thing we had problems with, was intimacy. Any time you got close to him, if he let down his guard and really let you in, then he’d push you back out. As close as you got the night before, you’d be pushed that much further away the next morning.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  Whenever Lorri would visit L.A., there was a standard pattern to it. They’d start talking on the phone a lot, then she’d come out and he’d send me away. For a couple of days it’d be full-time, lovey-dovey, baby-talk heaven. Then for a couple of days they’d begin to resemble a calmer, everyday, normal couple. I’d be invited back in—the third wheel added to their little bicycle—and we’d all hang out together. Then it’d start to disintegrate into some crazy-ass fight. I’d get a call from Chris in his hotel suite: “Come up. Come through the bedroom.” I’d go
up and she’d be on the other side of his bedroom door, out in the suite, yelling and screaming, and Chris would be like, “Get her her own fucking room tonight and fly her back tomorrow.”

  She’d fly back to New York, they’d ignore each other for a month or so, then the phone calls would start and the whole thing would crank up again.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  In every part of his life Chris had a role to play. His relationships with people were always predicated on “What do you want?” And then he would be that for them. I actually tried to break all those different roles down. We’d fight about it, but then in the end he’d feel better that he didn’t have to play some part. I always felt that he could only really be himself with me.

  People would never believe that we were together. They didn’t understand it, or questioned the reasons behind it. That was until they saw us together. They’d look back and forth between the two of us and say, “God, they’re like the same person.” One time he was going to do an interview. We were with his publicist in the car. She was like, “Chris, you’re so calm.” Then she looked over at me.

  “Kitten makes me calm,” he said. He always said to me, “You’re the only girl I feel comfortable with. I’ve always been nervous and anxious around women, but not with you.”