by Tom Farley
In May, he returned to Marquette to receive the speech department’s Distinguished Young Alumnus Award, an honor of which he was exceedingly proud. Then, in June, he joined David Spade at the MTV Movie Awards to accept the Best On-screen Duo award for Tommy Boy.
Chris went back to work that August, taking the lead role in Edwards & Hunt, a satirical spoof of Lewis and Clark’s historic journey to find an overland route to the Pacific Ocean. Before the film’s eventual release, the studio’s marketing team found cause to change its name, and it has gone down in history as Almost Heroes.
Chris had been cast in the role of Bartholomew Hunt, master tracker and woodsman. Spinal Tap veteran Christopher Guest signed on to direct. The producers set about assembling a comedy ensemble to flesh out the exploring party, including Eugene Levy and Bokeem Woodbine. Several actors were considered for the lead role opposite Chris, and the part ultimately went to Friends star Matthew Perry.
Beverly Hills Ninja had been a bad choice, and Black Sheep was no choice at all, but at the time Edwards & Hunt was a good bet. On paper, the script recalled the absurdity of classic Mel Brooks, and it was widely thought to be one of the funniest unproduced scripts in Hollywood. As the cast and crew began shooting in the forests and small towns of northern California, everyone believed, somewhat prematurely, they had a bona fide hit in the works.
MARK NUTTER, screenwriter:
Tom Wolfe and I were working on a sitcom with our third partner, Boyd Hale. One Sunday, we decided to skip a trip to Anaheim to watch the L.A. Rams—it was raining—and had some beers at a bar in Venice instead. Boyd came up with the original concept of a Lewis and Clark comedy; the ideas flowed freely from there, and we wrote the script in a couple months. Our agent Rob Carlson also represented Steve Oedekerk, who had written for Jim Carrey, and with Steve’s help the script made the rounds.
TOM WOLFE, screenwriter:
Steve was so hot at the time, because of his stuff with Jim Carrey, that Edwards & Hunt became a hot script. Turner Pictures ended up buying it. I don’t remember exactly when Farley came on board, but I know he was first. For the other lead, we wanted Hugh Laurie, who’s now the star of House but at the time was not well known. Turner wanted someone far more famous. I remember one of the executives saying, “Yeah, we could get a bunch of great actors and make a great little movie . . . but then what?”
And of course, from her way of looking at it, she was right. It would be much harder to market a “little” film with “unknown” actors. For a time Hugh Grant was interested, but he bowed out. I remember when Denise Di Novi brought up Matthew Perry for the first time. Being the self-loathing TV writers we were, we weren’t that thrilled with a TV actor being the costar. But we were the writers, and this was our first film. The caterer had more power than we did.
DENISE DI NOVI, producer:
The script was brilliant. We even hired Christopher Guest to direct it. I’ve thought so many times about what went wrong. I always like to say I have the distinction of making the only unsuccessful Christopher Guest movie.
You never know with movies. It’s kind of like alchemy; the chemistry just didn’t work. It had all the right actors. It had a great director, a great script. But I think the tone of the comedy was very odd. It almost read better than it played. It wanted to be a quirky, British, Black Adder type of comedy, and here we had Chris Farley and Matthew Perry. It was just a weird combination.
TOM WOLFE:
We thought Chris Guest would bring the right sensibility to the script, but then the notes about changes came from the studio. They saw it from the beginning as a buddy comedy between Edwards and Hunt, and less like the ensemble comedy we saw it as. In one meeting, someone from Turner called Lethal Weapon “the greatest buddy film ever made,” and I thought, oh shit, this is not a good sign.
TED DONDANVILLE:
They had to trim fat, and so they trimmed a lot of the funny stuff going on around Chris, which, ironically, would have helped Chris’s performance. The movie would have been funnier with all the things the peripheral characters had to do, but of course those are the first to go; you have to build a movie around “the star.” They cut the ensemble scenes first, Matthew Perry’s second, and Chris’s never.
BOKEEM WOODBINE, costar:
It was one of those things where they should have left well enough alone. Stuff was getting cut, and it was kind of bizarre. We shot the ending one way, and it was a pretty cool ending. Then they totally reshot the ending without my character there. That kind of shit happens sometimes. You don’t get your feelings hurt, but the thing is, it affected the film, because it wasn’t linear. At one point we’re all together, fighting as this band against these conquistador bastards, and then in the next scene they all meet up and regroup—except for me, and it’s like, “What happened to the brother?”
TED DONDANVILLE:
The movie came out after Chris died and when Matthew Perry had gone into rehab, and so a lot of the speculation was that drugs were to blame for the movie’s failure, but that wasn’t true.
The first weekend of filming, we were shooting in Redding, California, and he was drinking then. Denise Di Novi and the other producers, they found out about it, realized it was a major problem, and even threatened to shut down production. Chris thought he’d really blown it, that this time the personal shit had hit the professional fan.
So Chris had a sobriety bodyguard for the rest of the film, somebody who stayed with him the whole time. With that, Chris stayed pretty much okay for the rest of the shoot. As always, it was the work that kept him going.
DENISE DI NOVI:
That was the only incident. We traveled around a lot on this shoot, and whatever city we were in I would try and find a sponsor and a meeting for him to go to. I have to say it made me gain a lot of respect for people in recovery. No matter what teeny-tiny town we were in, within a couple of hours somebody would show up.
He also went to church every Sunday. No matter where we were on the road, he would find a church nearby and go. He got upset one week when we had to shoot on a Sunday. So instead of going to mass, he had a priest come from his church in Santa Monica and say mass for him on the set.
He was great with my kids. I remember I was sitting on the set one day with my son, who was about four and a half. We were playing a game for about a half an hour, and Chris was just watching us, staring. He said, “Boy, your son is so lucky to have you. I bet he’s going to grow up to be a really great person.”
And there was just such a sadness in that moment. He had a really big heart, but there was a melancholy there. I never really understood where it came from.
TED DONDANVILLE:
During Edwards & Hunt, this girl from the Make-A-Wish Foundation who was dying of AIDS wanted to meet Matthew Perry. She showed up on the set, and everyone doted on her. But Chris noticed she had a brother off to the side, whom everyone was ignoring, and who had probably been ignored for a while, what with his sister taking up all the attention. Chris went and brought the brother into his trailer and goofed around with him and just gave him the greatest day of his life. And it was Chris who instigated it. It wasn’t the kid coming over and asking to meet him. The boy ended up having a better Make-A-Wish day than his sister did, and he hadn’t even made a wish.
LORRI BAGLEY:
If you even mentioned that, say, your friend’s mother had died, tears would start to well up in Chris’s eyes. He had such a big heart, and when you have a heart that big, you have to find ways to protect yourself. People who didn’t know Chris that well just thought he was the most naïve little kid—and he was—but he knew that he was, and he knew how to use it. He knew exactly how to push your buttons, how to hurt your feelings, how to get you to feel sorry for him. Chris even said to me, “I know how to play people’s games.” And he did. He was always a hundred percent aware of what was going on and what he was doing.
ERIC NEWMAN:
He’d play dumb with people, but then later he�
�d recount something from their conversations that let you know he knew exactly what was going on. “The Chris Farley Show” character, the guy who asks the dumb questions, that was the guy he could become when he wanted to. It was a defense mechanism. It protected him, and it made people feel better. I remember we were sitting once in Toronto with Jim Carrey. Carrey’s father had just died, and Chris sat down with him and kind of took on this obsequious role. At the time I didn’t really think much of it, but looking back, he did it to put Jim Carrey at ease, and Carrey is, by all accounts, a pretty uncomfortable guy out in the world.
TED DONDANVILLE:
He had a very high psychological intelligence. Anything that had to be learned in a book he probably shied away from, but he understood people very, very well.
Bob Timmons was a professional sobriety guy. He’s the guy who would send out bodyguards to sit with Chris on the movie set. These “sober companions” got paid good money to essentially sit around the set and do nothing. They certainly got paid more than I did. Chris resented that, and he went through those guys like nothing. He would break them down, mentally. It was like the movie Jeremiah Johnson, where they only send out one guy at a time to try and kill Robert Redford, until he kills so many of them that they have to have respect for him.
On Edwards & Hunt there was a thief on the set who’d made off with some production equipment, and the producers were trying to figure out who’d done it. Gary was Chris’s new sobriety watcher, and the producers came around after the theft, asking Chris, “How well do you know Gary?”
“Hmm,” Chris shrugged, “not very.”
Things got a little uncomfortable for Gary after that. People stopped talking to him. Then a couple weeks later he left, never really knowing why. Then they sent out another guy. That’s basically how it went. Chris would treat these guys like a new best friend, and then a few weeks later— either passively, aggressively, or passive-aggressively—they’d be gone, not really understanding why it didn’t work out.
I don’t know that those people helped so much. Ultimately, all those professional celebrity recovery people have their own issues and their own agendas.
ERIC NEWMAN:
Maybe it’s a recovery thing, but Chris attracted loonies.
JILLIAN SEELY:
There are some real wackos out in L.A., a lot of really disgusting people. There was one guy who wanted to be Chris’s sponsor, but he charged $125 an hour, and this was back in 1996. I’d never heard of anything like that. You’re someone’s sponsor, but you charge them by the hour? What the fuck?
KEVIN FARLEY:
There’s this whole community of recovery “professionals” who charge you money to watch you. They’ll escort you to Hazelden and charge you three grand just for riding on a plane. And that really breaks with tradition. You’re not supposed to take money for anything you do to help someone in recovery, and, if you do, it’s only because those folks have that money to give.
If you go back to the way it all started, with Bill W. and Dr. Bob, they would go and visit hospitals and they would just find drunks, bring them to meetings and start talking to them. They never charged them money for it. You can make the argument that it costs $13,000 to spend a few weeks at such-and-such facility because they’ve got staff costs and real estate to keep up. But the whole idea of recovery is that it’s free. I don’t think it does any of these stars any good to try and deal with the problem inside that bubble. The whole idea is to break yourself down and destroy this illusion you have that you can handle the booze again. You go to a Chicago meeting, or a Madison meeting, and you get humbled pretty quickly.
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris needed a psychologist, not a guy punching a clock to sit around with him. I don’t know how much Chris spent on them, but those guys charge exorbitant amounts of money. Jillian, Tim O’Malley, those guys didn’t charge him anything, and they were the ones who were really helping him. But I think also the studios were stipulating that those guys be around; otherwise Chris couldn’t get insured.
BOKEEM WOODBINE:
I saw those bodyguards hanging around Chris, but they were so cool about their shit that I didn’t see them for what they were for the longest time. I didn’t realize that Chris was going through the struggles he was having.
I remember one Friday we had wrapped for the week, and we were in somebody’s trailer. I had a six-pack of Corona, and I was ready for the weekend. Chris had this trick where he knew how to open up a bottle with a cigarette lighter. I held up a beer and said, “Hey, Chris, could you open this for me?”
Everyone just stared at me. Chris said sure. He went to open it, and his hand was shaking. I thought he was making a joke, you know, being Chris. So I just started laughing, saying, “Look at this guy. He’s hilarious.” And everyone was looking at me like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And I wasn’t getting it. It all went right over my head.
Well, about the third beer, Chris obliged me and opened it, but his hands were still shaking terribly. Then he left to go take a walk, smoke a cigarette or something, and Matthew Perry was like, “Bokeem, what the hell’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Chris is an alcoholic. He’s having a hard time right now, and you’re giving him fucking beer to open?”
“Shit, nobody sent me the memo. I didn’t know.”
Of course, if I had known, I never would have even brought the beer around. But I was impressed by his dedication. I got the definite vibe that he was serious about not screwing up, and it seemed like his mental attitude was getting progressively healthier throughout the shoot. He was more and more upbeat every day we were working.
TED DONDANVILLE:
After Edwards & Hunt, when we weren’t working, Chris would deliberately do things like going to health resorts or weight-loss clinics, places where he’d be safe and preoccupied with staying in shape. That year was definitely more up than down, and the downs were not so terrible. The relapses were smaller. He’d have a couple drinks, kick himself over it, talk it out, and be right back at a meeting the next day.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris was fighting it like crazy. He’d put together two, three months, and you’d think, okay, he’s sober again. Then something would trigger it.
TODD GREEN:
Chris had been in L.A. full-time, so that Christmas I hadn’t seen him in probably six or seven months. We all got together at some restaurant in Madison. At one point we kind of broke away and had our own little conversation, and Chris said, “Greenie, man, we’re almost thirty-three years old and we’re not married. God, that’s weird.” He just seemed really anxious.
I said, “Chris, what’s wrong?”
“I just . . . I don’t know. I’m playing these parts where I’m just the funny guy, and I’d like to do some more serious stuff.”
I told him, “Why don’t you come back to New York and do something onstage, Broadway or off Broadway?”
He really liked the idea. He seemed to take it seriously. Then we agreed that if the Packers went to the Super Bowl we would get together there, since we’d both be going anyway. He was doing great, and we were all so proud of him. I walked away from that conversation thinking, Chris is back. We’ve got him back for good.
TIM O’MALLEY, cast member, Second City:
When Chris was at a weight-loss camp that November, he started to put together some time again. I met up with him again sometime that winter. I had about a year sober by that point. After Chris had left Second City, I’d stayed in Chicago, and my addiction just got worse. Eventually, when my brothers wouldn’t come and bail me out of jail anymore, I cleaned up. Chris called me, and we started to go to meetings.
On January 20, 1997, we hooked up at a party at the Hancock for a recovery club that’s here in Chicago. He had ninety-nine days. He was so happy, happiest I’d ever seen him. I watched him do backflips. He was doing actual backflips in the room. He was jumping and flipping and yelling, “I did it
, Tim! Ninety-nine days! I did it! I did it!”
I was so thrilled for him that day. I was so fucking happy that I was crying.
He said, “I’m going to be here in Chicago for a while. If I keep checking in with you, will you help me?”
I took it as a request for sponsorship. He didn’t specifically ask me to sponsor him or spell it out like that, but I could tell he wanted help. So for a few weeks he’d call me, I’d pick him up and take him to meetings. He started to get it again. He was happy and it was fun and we could crack jokes and make fun of each other just like we used to.
And then he stopped calling.
CHAPTER 13
The Devil in the Closet
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris said to me once, “You know what my dream is, Johnny?”
“What?” I said, thinking this was going to be some odd, Alice in Wonderland, through-the-rabbit-hole kind of thing. “What’s your dream?”
