CHAPTER 9
FR. TOM GANNON, S.J., friend:
People always ask me what kind of guy Chris Farley was, and I say, “Go and see Tommy Boy.” That’s Chris Farley.
In the summer of 1991, director Penelope Spheeris was working at Paramount Studios, preparing to shoot a feature-film version of "Wayne’s World,” Mike Myers’s popular Saturday Night Live sketch about two kids with a cable-access television show. Lorne Michaels approached her about using Chris Farley in the movie. Chris was still a relative unknown. He had only one year of television under his belt, and Spheeris had no idea who he was. But, she says, “Lorne told me we should give him a part because he’s going to be the biggest thing ever.” On that recommendation she cast him sight unseen as a security guard at the movie’s Alice Cooper concert. As film debuts go it was a small one, but Chris carried it off well.
Wayne’s World, meanwhile, carried off buckets and buckets of money. The low-budget comedy shattered everyone’s expectations, earning $121 million at the box office. Paramount immediately ordered up Wayne’s World 2, as well as another SNL franchise movie, Coneheads.
SNL alum Dan Aykroyd sat down with writer Tom Davis, and the two began drafting the story of Beldar and Prymatt Conehead as a movie. Aykroyd, impressed by what he’d seen in Chris on television, wrote a part for him as Ronnie, the love interest of young Connie Conehead. Over the following year Chris took on other supporting roles, as a roadie in Wayne’s World 2 and as a security guard in Adam Sandler’s Airheads.
By the end of Chris’s fourth year on Saturday Night Live, he was hands down a cast favorite, and Lorne Michaels felt that the young star was ready to carry his own feature—an original story, rather than another SNL franchise picture. Drawing on personal experience, Michaels laid out the central premise of the plot: a father who dies too soon and a son forced to take on responsibilities for which he is not prepared. SNL writers Bonnie and Terry Turner took on screenwriting duties, and Paramount bought the idea immediately, based largely on the casting of Chris Farley and Rob Lowe as brothers.
Very little of the original concept and script made it to the screen. The Turners’ draft was largely discarded, and SNL writer Fred Wolf wrote the bulk of the final screenplay, receiving no credit for it. Wolf wrote most of the story on the fly while director Peter Segal and producers Bob Weiss and Michael Ewing scrambled at record speed to get the film off the ground.
The story that ultimately emerged was that of young Tommy Callahan, heir to a Midwestern auto-parts manufacturer. When Tommy’s father dies, he has to make his dad’s annual sales trip to save the company and his hometown. Joining him on the trip is his late father’s assistant, Richard Hayden, played by the acerbic David Spade. Lorne Michaels had paired up the two close friends on a hunch that their complementary talents might make them the best comedy duo since John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd hit the screen in Blues Brothers, fifteen years earlier. Brian Dennehy took on the role of Big Tom Callahan, with Bo Derek as his bride. Doc Hollywood’s Julie Warner was cast as Chris’s love interest, Michelle Brock. Aykroyd played the heavy, a competing auto-parts magnate named Ray Zalinsky. And Kevin and John Farley also turned up in small roles as their older brother endeavored to give them a leg up in show business.
Few on set knew it at the time, but they were working with Chris at the single high point of his life. He was confident and self-assured, and it showed in his performance. Thanks in no small part to Chris’s commitment, Tommy Boy lives on today as a minor classic, a staple of cable-TV comedy, and a brief glimpse of what might have been.
BOB WEISS, producer:
I got a call from John Goldwyn at Paramount saying, “We have this picture. Would you come in?”
“Do you have a script?” I asked.
“No.”
“Whaddya got?”
“We’ve got thirty pages and a release date.”
“Okay.”
So I met with Lorne, and a lunch was set up at the Paramount commissary for me to meet with Chris.
He sat down at lunch, and he was really like an enthusiastic kid. He was just thrilled about being there and wasn’t jaded in any way. How refreshing it was to have someone like that inside the Paramount commissary. You told him any piece of what was going on and it was “great.” It was “cool.” It was “exciting.” And that’s infectious. You can build on that.
Originally, there was another director involved. I acquainted him with the facts of our shooting schedule, and he left the picture; he was afraid his head would explode. Then Pete Segal agreed to come on board.
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.
MICHAEL EWING:
Chris was very self-deprecating, so self-deprecating. It would leave you always thinking, you know, ouch. You could see that there was some wound just below the surface, just a hair below the surface, and sometimes not even that deep. One time on the set, the crew was cracking up after the take, which happened a lot, and Chris walked by and said, “Yep, everybody likes it when fatty falls down.” I was like, oh, there’s the crux of it.
JULIE WARNER:
It’s hard for me not to be able to connect with someone I’m working with. At a certain point during the shoot, Chris was doing his routine, and I stopped him and said, “Can I have lunch with you? Can I just sit and talk to you?”
So we had lunch in his trailer, and he made about forty jokes about “I can’t believe you’re in my trailer” and all that. But eventually it all just went away. All the shtick, it was just gone. We talked about football, about Madison. I think once he realized I was a safe person he stopped being so sheepish. He had an amazing ability to keep people at arm’s length.
We had one kiss at the end of the movie. It was kind of a throwaway moment, but he talked about it all morning. I really wanted to put him at ease about it, make him feel like I was psyched about it. Because I wasn’t unpsyched about it or anything, and I actually thought Chris was sexy. Talent is sexy. Chris was a big guy, but he was cute. I hated that he didn’t feel worthy of that. The first time we kissed the crew applauded and ribbed him a little bit. He was really embarrassed, but once he got past it he was fine.
There was something deeply lonely about him. Profoundly and deeply lonely. He was a man. He wanted that kind of companionship, and yet he did not know how to get it.
TOM FARLEY:
Even though our dad was incredibly proud of Chris’s career, Chris always suspected that what Dad really wanted was for him to settle down with a wife and kids. It’s like, no matter how successful you are, until you show that you can raise a good family you haven’t really proved yourself. That was the struggle that Chris always went through, wanting to be a family guy like Dad was and yet wanting the success in his acting life, too. But very few people can make it work on both ends successfully. If Dad had had a choice, he would have been running for Congress or making deals on Wall Street with all his Georgetown buddies. He’d given that up. But Chris could never be content with his professional success, because he was living by Dad’s barometer and not his own.
FRED WOLF:
We weren’t trying to write a movie about Chris and his dad, but I think a lot of it just subconsciously worked its way in there.
PETER SEGAL:
In writing that movie, we pooled our emotional stories as well as our comedic stories. It was all done out of desperation, and then, ironically, there was serendipity to it. I think Chris brought a lot of his relationship with his dad to that movie; he tapped into those feelings when Big Tom Callahan died. But it wasn’t Chris’s story. It wasn’t Fred’s story. It wasn’t my story. It was everyone’s story.
BOB WEISS:
When Terry and Bonnie Turner were writing it, Terry would say, “Well, this is like my father’s story.” And Lorne would say that it was like his father’s story. Turns out it was a lot like Chris’s father’s story. It made me wonder, well, whose father is it? I mean, what’s the deal? But that’s why the film is so accessible. We all know the dynamic of trying to struggle under this giant paternal shadow. It’s universal.
BRIAN DENNEHY, costar:
When I got on the set I figured my job was to be like Chris, not for Chris to be like me. I had to create this crazy, Rabelaisian character who would be an older, more settled version of Chris’s character. There was never any conversation about it; it’s just something Chris and I both understood. When we did the scene outside my office where we did that sumo thing, bumping into each other, that was my idea. I said to Peter, “It should be like two crazy-ass rednecks or sumo wrestlers who meet in a bar and start tussling like wild bears.” Because that’s what they are, these characters. All that came out of my watching Chris and thinking what it would mean to be his father.
I think that character loved his son and, to a certain extent, spoiled him. I think he also represented the ideal father for all of us. Psychiatrists might not call him the perfect father, but a lot of kids would.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris always used to say, “I’m only doing funny stuff to make one guy back in Madison laugh.” And if you saw my dad around town, talking about Chris, he’d be gushing. He couldn’t have been prouder. But like a lot of dads, he was a little reserved about actually showing that to us. You want to have your dad say you did a good job. And Dad would do that. He’d go, “Good job, son.” Really brusque and understated. But most families, especially Irish families, they just don’t communicate that well.
BRIAN DENNEHY:
We all grow up with that necessity to be what our fathers want us to be, and probably, ultimately, failing. There’s no question about that. My father’s been dead now for twenty-five years, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t find myself thinking about it. Our relationship was unusual, my father’s and mine. Our family was classically Irish Catholic in the sense that the family was unquestionably the most important aspect of all of our lives, and yet we were not close, if that makes any sense. There is an emotional distance between us that exists today.
Philip Larkin, a British poet whom I love very much, wrote a poem that really says it all: “They fuck you up, your mom and dad / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” And that’s not a criticism of parents, but I think it says that there’s something inevitable about it. Your parents want you to know things that they’ve learned, but they can only do so much. You’ve pretty much got to learn it yourself.
PETER SEGAL:
Knowing more now about his relationship with his father, I recognize a lot of things in hindsight. Chris was a really good athlete. He idolized his coach, who was also a father figure. And I realized that the best way to work with Chris was not as a director but as a coach.
For example, take the day he shot the scene where he looks at his grades and says, “A D plus! I passed!!!” He wasn’t getting it right, and he was so furious with himself. I told him to go out and run around the quad a couple of times and come back in. I said, literally, “Take a lap.” There were times when he’d be so amped up with coffee and cigarettes that I’d have him drop and do twenty push-ups. I just needed him to work it off. He’d go, take the lap, do the push-ups, then he’d come back and he’d look at me like I was about to put him into the game. And that was okay. Every actor is different, and that was how I had to deal with this particular person. In that instance, I was his coach. He would have walked through a brick wall for me if I’d asked him to.
ROB LOWE:
Pete Segal is a comedy mathematician. He really understands the timing and the beats in a way that a lot of other directors don’t. And Chris’s style was very wild and unstructured and, frankly, lacking in technique. So it was a good mix between the two of them.
JULIE WARNER:
I’m sure Paramount wasn’t thrilled about the amount of money that was being spent, but Pete knew there was a gold mine there, and he was determined to get at it. He knew that the movie was only going to work if Chris was free to have fun, and that meant making sure he felt safe and not pressured. He gave Chris the trust and patience that I don’t think he found anywhere else. Once Chris felt that safety, he was able to shine.
MICHAEL EWING:
What people responded to in the movie was the comedy, number one, but also this underlying heart that’s woven through it. They’re dancing at the wedding, and Brian Dennehy suddenly drops dead of a heart attack. I mean, what comedy has one of the main characters drop dead a third of the way through the movie? This is a comedy that people thought was just light and fun, but it also dealt with real things in a real way.
We were just a little movie, and by the end of the shoot Paramount didn’t really want to spend any more money on music or anything. They said, “Here’s the money to make the movie, and not a penny more.”
Then Sherry Lansing saw the first screening. I was sitting across from her, and as the lights came up I could see there were tears running down her face. We went outside; she gave Pete a big hug and gave me a hug and said, “My God, where did all that heart come from? That wasn’t in the script.”
It was just one of those rare things that happens in movies sometimes. It all came together. Then they approved the extra money to do a real score and everything.
FRED WOLF:
The critics totally missed the point of Tommy Boy, and, of course, history has proven them wrong. It’s seen as this mini comic gem. A few years ago, Time magazine listed the “Top 10 Movies to Watch to Make Yourself Feel Better.” It went all the way back to Adam’s Rib and Cocoanuts with the Marx Brothers, and Tommy Boy was on that list. That was really great to see. I wanted to fax that to every movie critic in America.
ROB LOWE:
To this day, people stop me on the street and say they love Tommy Boy. It’s the ultimate movie for fifteen-year-old boys. And if you compare Tommy Boy to what they’re making today for fifteen-year-old boys, it’s the fucking Magnificent Ambersons.
DAVID SPADE:
Looking back it feels like it was a big hit, even though it wasn’t. It did all right. It just has nice memories about it. It’s the most-talked-about movie that I’ve ever had any part of, certainly, and that’s ninety percent because of Chris.
PETER SEGAL:
The premiere was very small. The movie was about to start and everyone had gone to their seats. I was nervous as hell, and I went into the men’s room. Chris came in behind me. He said, “Well, this is it.” He was nervous as hell, too. We knew we had been through a real war together. On the same side, but still a war. To this day it’s the most difficult shoot that I’ve ever experienced.
We stayed there in the men’s room and talked for a little while, knowing that the movie was starting. It was like that moment when you buckle yourself in to a roller coaster and you know that, as afraid as you are of going up that first hill, there’s nothing you can do about it. I gave him a hug, and he said—and he was very adamant about it—he said, “Please don’t leave me. Let’s do this again. Promise me we’ll do this again.”
MICHAEL EWING:
I have a tradition that I get all of the actors to sign my movie poster for me. So one day I gave Chris the Tommy Boy poster. He took it, signed it, and handed it back to me. And what it said just cut straight to my heart, and really surprised me. What he wrote on the poster was: “Dear Michael, Don’t give up on me. Chris.”