As I said, toward the end at
SNL
I often felt like I had no way to get anything on the show regularly, even if something killed in dress rehearsal. Things just got way too political. One of the producers, Michael Shoemaker, noticed, and one day he stopped by my office. He listened to me complain for a few minutes before he stopped me and said, “Why are you busting your ass with sketches?”
“’Cause I’d like to get on the show.”
“Sure,” he said. “But notice how there’s an entirely different set of writers for the monologues and the ‘Update’? When Sandler was here, he just completely took over the ‘Update’ with characters. They couldn’t get him off. So, if you want to get on the show, start there. They can’t touch you.”
So that’s where I retreated. I had great luck getting on monologues, and I found I could be creative without getting my material compromised. One of my favorites was playing Mickey the trainer from
Rocky.
In the end, after the call from the NBC exec, I called my agent and Lorne, and I asked for my release. From my viewpoint, it wasn’t going to magically get better. “You have too big a heart, Jim,” Lorne said. I thought that was a little over the top. You didn’t need a big heart to not want to put up with people trashing your work. But even when it was rocky, I’d gotten some irreplaceable experiences, worked with the best of the best, and created some of the show’s finest moments. All in all, it was a great run while it lasted.
Chapter 15
Half Baked,
Dave Chappelle, and Monk the Pooping Dog
In May of 1996, I was at a wrap party for my first season on
SNL.
It was at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center, and it was a moment when the cast really bonded and let loose. Looking back, it seems like a time when we all got along the best; maybe that was because we were all done for the season.
On this particular night, I was in a circle of drunken folks like Will Ferrell, Mark McKinney, and Tracy Morgan. I was psyched because I was coming back to the show next season, and I was happy to be among talented people who had now become my friends. I looked over and saw Dave Chappelle had shown up and that made me even happier.
Dave and I hadn’t spent much time together since I got shit-canned from
Buddies.
But we quickly reconnected at the wrap party. I think he still felt kind of shitty about how the whole
Buddies
thing went down, because I remember him saying, “Don’t worry, Breu Dog, one day we’ll get them back, on the big screen. We’ll do a movie together. That’ll show ’em.”
Later that summer, I was performing at Carolines in New York and Dave showed up in the greenroom after my set with a guy named Neal Brennan. Neal was the door guy when I used to play the Boston Comedy Club. He was the kid handing out flyers trying to get people into the club. He was a young guy, and he’d always wheeze, “Breuer, I got this joke for you,” or “Breuer, listen to this, I got this add-on for ya.”
“I want you to be in this weed movie we wrote,” Dave said, pointing a thumb in Neal’s direction. “I want you to play my brother Brian.” He meant his real-life, happy-go-lucky stoner brother Brian. I was blown away. I had no clue that he and Neal had been collaborating.
“We’re gonna have some amazing cameos in it,” Dave added. “This thing is gonna blow up.”
I didn’t know if I believed him. Was he talking about some kind of straight-to-video spoof movie?
“When you say
movie,
” I asked, “do you mean like movie-in-actual-theaters-type movie?” I wanted clarification.
“Yeah, man,” he said in his drawn-out, almost disgusted manner, like how could I be doubting the potential success of this? “
Movie
like in-the-
theaters
movie! Universal Studios wants to do this shit!”
“Okay,” I said. That was all I needed to hear. “I’ll do it.” I hadn’t even seen the script.
What was weird is that I was out pitching movies at the time. And one of them was a weed movie. I thought the times called for a great, new, adventurous Cheech and Chong. Mine was the story of me and my best friend when we were eighteen years old and smoking a lot of grass.
Now a misconception about me is that I was a real weed head at the time. Sorry, but I just look high. I have my whole life. Now, I smoked a little, but nothing close to Brian, the character I was going to play. I was never a wake-and-bake guy, but I do admit that in my last season of
Saturday Night Live
I was smoking more than I had in the past. I guess it was my way of coping with the friction there.
I wound up talking to a producer in L.A. named Bob Simonds. He’d done all the Adam Sandler movies up to that point. “Do you know Dave Chappelle?” he asked. “’Cause he was in here two weeks ago pitching a weed movie. And his is complete, and I love it and we’re going with it, so you should talk to him about getting a role in it.”
Still, beyond Simonds’s confidence, I’d heard nothing about Universal Studios. But here was Dave, all excited, and his was the weed movie that had a shot. So I was glad he approached me because I wasn’t going to try to bogart my way into his film, pardon the pun.
After that conversation, my manager Leon, who also repped Dave, sent me the script. To this day, I’ve never laughed harder when reading a script. I couldn’t believe how well written it was. When people today tell me they like the movie, I explain that I improv-ed nothing. I only did line for line what was written, including the food-ordering scene and the killer speech. It was even Neal’s idea to give Brian a hook. He came up to me during shooting and suggested Brian punctuate things by saying, “Fully, man.” And all I did was perform it.
So I read the script and I didn’t hear from Dave for a while, and then I heard this rumor that Christian Slater was now up for the part promised to me. Something weird was going on. Well, the weird thing turned out to be that Dave was firing our mutual manager, Leon. Everything was getting scrambled, but I really wanted to be in this thing and I didn’t want to get bounced.
Then I personally called Dave and left a message. “Listen,” I said. “You came and asked me to be in your movie. I said yes. But it’s your movie. If you don’t want me in it, I have no problem with that. It’s all good, don’t worry about it.”
A couple of days later Bob Simonds called. “Do you like this role?” he asked.
“It’s the funniest script ever,” I said. “Of course.”
“The role is yours,” he said. And that was that. Drama over. Dave came through and held firm to his word and I was off to Toronto to shoot my first movie.
The funniest part of the whole
Half Baked
experience was that Dave brought his new dog along for the entire six-week shoot, a small Alaskan husky named Whitey. What a disaster. Dave could barely take care of himself, let alone a frisky, spiteful, undisciplined dog.
Now, I love Dave, but he is extremely forgetful. He didn’t and does not care about anything.
He just doesn’t care.
When we did the sitcom
Buddies,
if we had to be at a meeting or rehearsal, I would lie to him about what time it started, so he would get there even halfway on time. After a while I realized, okay, an hour’s not going to cut it, I have to make it an hour and a half. His whole attitude toward everything was: “Oh, man, don’t worry about it!” This is an awesome attitude for a friend to have but a really shitty one for a pet owner.
So you can see what I am getting at. Same thing on the set of
Half Baked.
No urgency about the movie. No pressure. No organization on his part. My theory is that the most artistic people are also the sloppiest. Or at least their pets are.
Case in point: I went to Toronto. Everyone in the cast was staying at this five-star hotel. It was beyond nuts. Marble floors. Soaring ceilings. Concierges everywhere. This was the place they put any star who was in town. Marilyn Manson and his creepy eyes were there. Norm MacDonald. Chris Farley. Everyone. So I walked into the lobby and there was Dave with Whitey, who was taking a shit right in the middle of it all. And Dave was just like, “My bad. My bad. I’ll get it.” But you know he really wasn’t going to get it, and the concierges were diving on the pile like it was a live grenade. “It’s okay, sir. It’s okay, sir. Our pleasure.”
I have no idea why Dave wanted to call this dog Whitey. I think it was partially simply because Dave wanted to be able to give something white commands. He took special glee in giving it orders:
“Whitey, sit down.”
“Whitey, roll over.”
“Whitey, play dead.”
But at some point early during the shoot, he changed the dog’s name to Monk, after the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. Dave’s dad was a huge jazz buff, so it must have been some sort of tribute to name an Alaskan husky after a famous jazz musician. Who knows?
When he wasn’t crapping in the lobby, Monk busied himself by trying to bite this young dreadlocked kid who drove us to the set every morning in a van. Dave would be riding, talking away to everyone, absentmindedly engaged in conversation, and the kid would be swerving and veering off the road and politely removing his bicep from Monk’s mouth. Dave would scold Monk, saying, “Bad dog! Bad dog!” But it didn’t do any good, and the kid didn’t want to complain about it. Because ultimately Dave was the whole reason all of this was happening. The whole reason we all had jobs. So the kid would grin and bear it, and then probably drive over to the ER to get stitches after he dropped us off.
Once Monk got to the set, he’d shit in Dave’s trailer. Rip it to pieces. Dave would try all different combinations to get this thing to chill out. He’d have PAs on the set walking him every fifteen minutes, feeding him, rubbing the thing behind the ears. Nothing helped. The dog had zero discipline.
So then Dave decided to leave Monk in his hotel room. Like I said earlier, Dave was disorganized. So he didn’t safeguard anything. Monk proceeded to eat all of his shoes, which were all nice, rare Nikes, like vintage Air Jordans. We’d go to the mall and Dave would routinely drop five hundred or six hundred dollars on shoes and clothes. And Monk had a buffet with all of that. And he would crap all over the room. It was both funny and sad that Dave would work his ass off all day on the movie only to come home to ruined clothes and crap piles all over his room.
Across the hall from Dave’s room was yet another famous person. A big, ginormous, beautiful old woman whom you might know as Florida Evans from the seventies sitcom
Good Times.
Esther Rolle was her real name, may she rest in peace.
One day I walked out of Dave’s room right as she was walking out of hers. To say she wore a pained look is putting it mildly. She looked at me like I had just burned down her house and dropkicked her birthday cake into rush-hour traffic. “Are you staying in
that
room?” Her voice, as you might recall, crackled like an old 78 record.
“No, ma’am,” I said. I just wanted to get back to my room. But that wasn’t going to happen.
“Well, it smells like
shit
in there!” she yelled. Clearly she’d been wanting to vent for a while. Her tone was disgusted; she didn’t care at all that it wasn’t my room. I was guilty by association. And it was painfully obvious to her that I was a moron for even having anything to do with this foul room.
“And that damn dog is
always
barking,” she said. “And I smell
marijuana,
” she added in that saddened voice she used when J. J. Evans had let her down for the fourteen hundredth time. “What is going
on
in there? It is dis
grace
ful.
Who
is staying in there?” I was surprised, to be honest, that she didn’t slap me.
I couldn’t say, “Why, it’s the fine young comic actor Dave Chappelle, Ms. Rolle.” She couldn’t have cared less. I told her I’d ask the manager about it, and as soon as I walked away from her I started laughing. Poor Dave. This dog had managed to gross out or bite nearly everyone it came in contact with. But Dave was blind to it. He loved Monk. Treated him and loved him like he was his own kid. He made excuses for the dog constantly.
Pretty soon, all the girls from the hotel and the bellmen were walking Monk. Babysitting Monk. Trying to keep him on his best behavior, but eventually it got to the point where too many people were complaining. I found this funny, but at the same time I tried to tell Dave he had to do something. You don’t wanna get sued by Florida Evans or someone else the dog annoyed. Dave was becoming stressed, too. It was like seeing a parent with an out-of-control kid who just didn’t know how to discipline him. The producers of
Half Baked,
Neal Brennan, the people who ran the hotel—everyone could see that Monk was a problem. People tried to help, or at least tried to cover up the destruction, but Monk was as rabid as you can get without having rabies. Dave might as well have brought along an orangutan.
One night I was looking out the peephole of Dave’s door, trying to make sure I could sneak past Florida Evans’s room without incurring her wrath. Dave was sitting on the bed; Monk was lying next to him, panting quietly, satisfied, having just mangled a baseball cap.
“I think they wanna kick me out,” Dave said. “I think I gotta get rid of Monk.”
“Is there someone back in New York who can watch him?”
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll figure something out.”
And then Dave got an idea. “Jim, you’re gonna be proud of me,” he said, patting Monk’s head one day as we rode to the set in the van. “I’m sending this little guy to obedience school. Boot camp. You’re gonna see some changes.”
Monk went every day to obedience school for three or four weeks, and Dave was so proud of him. He would call me down to his room and show me all of the new moves and tricks Monk had learned. He’d say, “Monk, give me your paw.” And the dog would do it. “Monk, lay down.” And the dog would do it. No more shoes and socks got chewed up. And Dave’s stress level dropped considerably. I was impressed. And yet the smell of crap still seemed to linger. It was embedded in the room somehow, but that was no big deal and it would certainly fade. Dave was so happy. He knew there was goodness in the dog. “See,” he’d say after Monk did some tricks. “I told you there was nothing wrong with this dog. He has a good heart. He didn’t mean to bite, he just didn’t know better.”