Homey Don't Play That!

by David Peisner

“He was clearly distracted sometimes, and disinterested,” says Mike Schiff. “Honestly, I think he resented being there a little bit.” Marc Wilmore says he can recall Keenen telling the entire writing staff, while they were all sitting around the conference table, that he didn’t want to be at the show anymore.

  At the time, Fox was in the process of rapidly growing its television footprint. The network was planning on expanding to seven nights of programming in January 1993, and was working on launching a cable channel, which would eventually become FX. The company was hungry for content that would bring guaranteed viewers with it, and naturally wanted to acquire said content as inexpensively as possible. In Living Color fit the bill near perfectly. Keenen and company had already produced more than seventy-five episodes across three-plus seasons, the show had a loyal fan base, and perhaps most enticingly, it was produced by Twentieth Television. That meant acquiring its rights would involve Fox negotiating a deal with its own TV studio arm, which is exactly what it began to do. When plans regarding the potential FX deal reached Keenen, he was furious.

  This was the kind of situation the financial syndication rules, or fin-syn, were put in place to prevent. The rules put limits and prohibitions on networks broadcasting shows they themselves owned. But the rules were being weakened by the late eighties when Twentieth took over producing ILC from HBO, and would be eliminated entirely by 1994. At the very least, though, the idea of a company selling the rights to one of its shows to another arm of the same company created a serious perception problem. As ILC’s producer and part-owner, how could Keenen know FX was paying a fair market price for the rights? As Kellner himself admits, “When the studio and network are under one ownership, it’s easy to assume you’re being cheated.”

  Flash forward to late November, when Fox canceled one of its Thursday-night shows, a forgettable twentysomething drama called The Heights. In its place, they decided to run what they were calling In Living Color: The First Season. Keenen says he was told at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday that this plan was going to be announced on Monday. The reruns would start running that Thursday. He was stunned. Not only did he see the negative impact on the show’s syndication value, but the implication of rerunning sketches from Season 1 was that the show’s best years had passed.

  “That’s when the big fallout started to happen,” says Keenen. “I could see syndication going bye-bye, and that was your rainbow. I was working so hard, I’m killing myself and these guys are doing this?”

  Keenen felt like he’d given up opportunities to star in and produce films because of the show, and now he’d been cut off at the knees. As Gold puts it, “You’re leaving millions on the table, you’re under pressure every day, and you’re doing it because you believe you have a big upside. Then they took the upside away.”

  Putting aside whether the Thursday-night reruns would genuinely damage ILC’s syndication value, it seems fair to say Keenen and Fox—both the network and Twentieth Television—had been on a slow-moving collision course for a long time.

  “There was the network, there was the studio, and there was Keenen,” says Fox programming exec Dan McDermott. “This big asset was of enormous value to all three but in different ways. There was a lot of conflict over who had actual control of it and who was going to exploit it for their own financial gain to the detriment of other parties. The network’s instinct—not only instinct but the network’s stated desire—when you get a successful show is to exploit it as much as you can, as broadly and financially lucratively as you can. We wanted more episodes, we wanted to run repeat episodes and classic episodes. Keenen felt like his baby wasn’t being treated well by other partners in the mix.”

  Amid all this, Fox’s executive ranks were in transition. On November 2, Peter Chernin was named the chairman of the company’s film division. Chernin, like Barry Diller, had been one of the executives who’d put the show on the air, and Keenen felt an allegiance with him. Now he’d no longer be around. Sandy Grushow was promoted into Chernin’s place, but not until November 30. Kellner was getting ready to resign as Fox president at the end of the year. Lucie Salhany, who was running Twentieth Television, was quickly named Kellner’s replacement.

  It’s not entirely clear whose decision it was to run In Living Color: The First Season on Thursday nights, but it didn’t matter. The network’s contract with the show gave them the right to do it and they did. What clearly fell through the cracks was having someone at Fox consider how Keenen would react to the plan but having a tight enough relationship with him to figure out a way to make him comfortable with it. Maybe that should’ve been Kellner, but he already had one foot out the door. Maybe it should’ve been Salhany, but she had no real personal relationship with Keenen. (As one exec puts it, “If you were to look at one hundred people and say, ‘Who do you want having these conversations with Keenen?’ Lucie would be your hundredth choice.”) Maybe it should’ve been Grushow, but he says he was mostly unaware of the problem.

  “It was on everybody’s plate and yet it was on nobody’s plate because of all the shifting going on,” says Grushow. Ultimately, it’s probably something that would’ve fallen to Diller or Chernin—or maybe even Joe Davola—but none of them was in the picture anymore. McDermott admits that the absence of Diller and Chernin, in particular, was a problem.

  “Barry and Peter were not just MBAs solely concerned with bottom line,” he says. “They loved the creative process and were very creative themselves. They had a real love of the show. Keenen and these guys were helping define American culture with this show, creating a wave of hip-hop culture that was going to be very dominant. Barry and Peter were respectful and frankly excited about the show and Keenen and all the folks working on the show. Subsequent people came into the network who didn’t have the previous relationship with Keenen and their group, and looked at the show more as an asset they wanted to strip-mine.”

  Rose Catherine Pinkney recalls a meeting around this time with executives from the studio and the network. “It was in a gigantic conference room that I was in maybe four times in my five years at Fox—like the grown-up important conference room,” she says. “All the top studio brass was coming and all of us who worked on the show, the day-to-day folks, were coming. Nobody was sure Keenen was going to show up. It was really funny because when he came, he sat at the end of the table with all the lower-level people, the people he saw on set every day. He clearly did it on purpose because there was a seat at the other end for him. But he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to hear what they had to say. It was his way of being quietly defiant. It was like a Martin Luther King move.”

  As all this was going on, there was still a show to produce. But even that was getting completely engulfed by the bad vibes, particularly with regard to the Standards Department. When the network wanted a line of dialogue in that week’s episode changed, Keenen and the producers went into foot-dragging mode, figuring if they held on to the tape of the episode long enough, Fox wouldn’t have time to make the change. So, they wouldn’t give up the tape.

  As Firestein recalls, “Network lackeys were saying stuff like, ‘It’s our property. We actually own the show. We may just come and get it.’ They were saber rattling like they were literally going to come and take physical possession of the episode.”

  Keenen had had enough. It wasn’t about one line of dialogue. It wasn’t even about not giving them the episode. It was about the totality of it, these various streams—repackaged episodes like The First Season, this bullshit FX deal, this feeling of being censored—merging at a critical moment. He couldn’t let Fox screw him on the syndication stuff, push him around, and tell him what to allow on his show. He had to make a stand. He, Firestein, and producer Kevin Berg needed a plan for what to do if Fox made good on their threat to retrieve the tape of the episode.

  “There was a story about how Keenen hid the master tape in the ceiling somewhere,” says Rose Catherine Pinkney. “I think it’s an urban legend.”

  Actually,
as Keenen explains, laughing, this story is true. “I didn’t physically hide the tape, but I told Kevin not to turn it over, to tell them he couldn’t find it. Kevin was the one that hid it in the ceiling.”

  All the offices had drop ceilings with lightweight panels that could easily be removed and replaced. “It was a big one-inch tape, in those big blue cases,” says Berg. “We thought if they came looking for it, we gotta hide it somewhere, so we literally stuck it up in the ceiling tiles.”

  If Keenen’s goal was to piss off the Fox brass, mission accomplished. “It was a mess,” says incoming Fox chairwoman Lucie Salhany. “Rupert [Murdoch] came into my office and said, ‘That’s a felony! You can’t do that!’ ”

  It was a Mexican standoff. Without the tape, Fox had no new episode to run. But Keenen had played the only card he still held. He was out of moves. He held out for a while, but with the intervention of lawyers, he was eventually convinced of the futility of his situation and delivered the episode. With that one concession, he acknowledged he’d lost control not just of the creative decisions on the show but of the entire direction of the show. He was exhausted. His relationship with Fox felt irretrievable. As he saw it, they thought they could run the show without him. Let them. He was done with it. No one at Fox, he says, tried to convince him to stay.

  “They were under the impression it was a writer-driven show and that that’s all they needed and the show would be just fine,” he says. “So they were like, ‘Yeah, cool, let him go.’ ”

  McDermott says he thought Fox, whatever their problems, recognized Keenen’s value. At the very least, he did. “I never felt it was preferable to do the show without Keenen,” he says. “If I was ever asked and had the chance to weigh in—and I was and I did—my attitude was always that he’s of material importance to the show. He is the show. There might have been decisions made above my pay grade that it’s not worth the hassle or the money it’s costing us or that it will cost us if we make a new deal. But I wasn’t privy to that stuff.”

  On Friday, December 4, one day after the first airing of In Living Color: The First Season, Keenen called the cast and writers into the conference room. He walked to the head of the table, turned his seat backward, and sat down. Fighting back tears, he told them he was leaving the show.

  “This isn’t something I want to do, it’s something I have to do,” he said. He says he asked them to cooperate with whoever took his place. “This won’t be the last time you see me,” he told them. “We’ll cross paths at a later time.”

  The very sight of the show’s stoic leader struggling to stay composed as he walked away from the project that had been his life’s work was shocking to many of those assembled, especially those who knew him best. “Keenen isn’t a guy that cries a lot,” says Marlon. “When he drops a tear, everybody drops one. It was sad. We all cried like babies.”

  Even those who were relatively new to the show found themselves caught up in the emotion of the moment. Writer T. Faye Griffin was hired that season as part of the network’s diversity program and had just recently been bumped up to full staff member when Keenen announced his departure.

  “It was like Daddy left,” she says. “That’s what made his going-away speech so impacting. His voice was quivering and one of the last things he said was, ‘When I land, I’m coming back for all of y’all.’ So, every time I see him, I say, ‘Daddy, I’m still waiting for you to come get me.’ ”

  Although Keenen says he told the staff to play nice with the next regime, some heard a different message entirely. “He certainly didn’t say, ‘Soldier on and make this the biggest hit you can,’ ” says Bill Martin. “Our sense was he would’ve enjoyed it if the place had caught on fire. He felt so disrespected by the network. His baby had been taken from him and there was a lot of ill will. There was nothing explicit but clearly the show was dead to him.”

  In fact, Schiff says, far from advocating a smooth line of succession, he remembers Keenen telling the writers they shouldn’t feel obligated to stick around. “He took us all aside and in a very friendly way said, ‘You guys know your contracts were to work on my show, so you’re free to leave once I’m gone. Just tell your agent you can get out of this because this isn’t what you signed up for.’ It was nice of him to say, but we were all thinking, No, we need these jobs. Thank you for your generous offer that I quit my first good job in television.”

  That night, Keenen made another farewell speech in front of the entire crew at dinner. Then, it being a Friday night, there was—believe it or not—a live show to do. The audience was already in their seats. “It was pretty somber that day,” says Berg. “It was hard to go shoot a show after that.”

  For most of the episode, the cast kept a lid on the behind-the-scenes emotional bloodletting, at least until the final musical segment. The plan was for the entire cast and all the Fly Girls to gather around a piano while Jamie Foxx sang the Donny Hathaway song “This Christmas.” There was no joke to the segment—this was planned as a rare moment of earnestness, a warm Christmastime send-off before the group went on a holiday hiatus. For Foxx, who’d been trying to hip the world to his musical talents since he arrived at ILC, it was a big chance to perform for twenty million viewers.

  The segment opens with each of the Fly Girls, decked out in Santa hats, taking a few seconds to wish “Happy Holidays” to family and friends. When the camera pans to Wentworth, she looks shell-shocked, and just shrugs, “Merry Christmas.” T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh smiles and says “Hi” to her grandmother. Carrey is the only one who attempts a joke, wishing a “Merry Christmas” to “all the spineless little weaklings I had to crush to get where I am today.” As Jamie Foxx stands center stage amid this row of relative good cheer and begins singing, the rest of the cast—Shawn, Kim, Marlon, David Alan Grier, Kelly Coffield, and DJ Leroy “Twist” Casey—stand stone-faced behind them, in dark sunglasses and dark hats, looking to all the world like the Black Panthers have crashed the festive holiday proceedings.

  “All of us that were displeased stood in protest,” says Marlon. “We didn’t smile. The cameras were trying to go around us. Everybody was like, ‘Come on! Cheer up!’ and we were like, ‘No. This Christmas isn’t happy for us.’ ”

  After the show that night, there was a going-away party back in the offices. Keenen walked around with a bottle of Patrón. Most everyone on the writing staff sympathized with him, even those who might not have seen eye to eye with him as a boss. He seemed to be standing up for artistic integrity, for the little guy, refusing to be bullied by a big corporation. There were, however, a quiet few who felt like Keenen’s brave stand was more of a smoke screen, an excuse for ditching a project he’d lost interest in a while ago. According to Marc Wilmore, Fox wasn’t forcing Keenen out. In fact, the network wanted to expand ILC to an hour.

  “Fox was begging him to stay,” he says. “Rupert Murdoch routinely came to our offices. Keenen said he backed up the Brink’s truck for us to go to an hour. Keenen didn’t want to.”

  Gold agrees Keenen did want out or at least a chance to pursue other opportunities, and build a production company. But he doesn’t recall any discussion about the show expanding to an hour, and says that while Murdoch was “always surprisingly nice and gentlemanly, Rupert never backs up the Brink’s truck, especially for a show they didn’t believe had residual value.”

  Many people blame Salhany for the deterioration of Keenen’s relationship with Fox, and it’s true she didn’t have any personal connection to Keenen or personal investment in the show. As the studio head, many say she was heavy-handed with ILC. Unquestionably, she could’ve managed this asset better (or perhaps just managed it less). That said, the decision to run reruns on Thursday nights was almost certainly not hers, and even if she had a hand in selling the rights to FX, ultimately Murdoch himself was the one ruthlessly pushing to make deals to grow his company. In the end, there’s plenty of blame to go around: Salhany, Kellner, Grushow, Chernin, Murdoch, Gold, and Keenen himself
all could’ve handled the situation better. Far from being intractable, Keenen and Fox’s problems were eminently solvable, something that, with hindsight, even Keenen sees now.

  “I regret I didn’t have better advice,” Keenen says. “I was a young, passionate artist. I wasn’t a businessman. I knew the business I was being presented wasn’t favorable and it was going to ruin any opportunity of a back end. But had someone presented a way to make this situation favorable—which it could’ve been—it could’ve been a different negotiation. Everybody would’ve won. But I took a position, Fox took a position, and there was no mediator. Fox and I could’ve worked out that situation and In Living Color could’ve lived on. But with all the tension and the ‘Fuck you!’ ‘Fuck him!’—when you get into that and there’s no mediator, there’s only one outcome.”

  31

  “It Was a Bunch of Scared People Left Trying to Save a Sinking Ship”

  Fox quickly decided the show would continue without Keenen. There wasn’t any serious discussion about simply closing up shop. It was a hit show, and as Sandy Grushow explains, “We were smart enough to know those were hard to come by.”

  Kevin Berg thinks there was a “big frustration factor” in Fox’s decision making. “Fox stood up and said, ‘Okay, we’ll show him. We won’t kill the show. We’ll succeed without him.’ ”

  At the studio, Rose Catherine Pinkney was concerned about the show’s future, post-Keenen. “Nobody wants to lose your visionary producer,” she says. “It’s such a big deal that the person that came to you with an idea, convinced you there were one hundred episodes in it, explained how it could work season after season, when this person leaves, there’s generally a void.”

  But Fox was committed to carrying on. “You have situations where actors or actresses leave shows all the time,” says Jamie Kellner, who was himself resigning at the end of the year but was technically still Fox’s president as all this went down. “Sometimes you replace them and it’s successful. At times, you can’t. You never want it to happen, but when it does, you just do the best you can.”