A Life Through Film #012: Black Sheep
A bad comedy on the surface, a misery beneath it
Release Date: 2/2/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
“It should’ve been a slam dunk.”
David Spade, Almost Interesting
When was the last time a comedy made you sad? And I mean a comedy comedy. I’m not talking about one of those mumblecore dramedies of the 2000s. Have you ever watched a movie full of gross out gags, pratfalls, and knee slapping irony and walked away more morose than you were when you started?
A comedy putting you in a worse mood than it found you in might be the biggest failure a film can achieve. A tame horror movie like The Cloverfield Paradox [2/5] or a pacifying action movie like The Out-Laws [also a 2/5] are bad cinematic outcomes as well, but there’s a difference. Movies like that failed to inspire the intended emotion, but likely left you feeling otherwise neutral overall (maybe a bit annoyed). A comedy making you feel bad means the craft of the film was so poor as to be a negative magnetic pole, sending you flying into an abyss of sadness and anger.
This phenomenon goes beyond the jokes in the movie not being up to snuff. If the jokes are bad, then the movie is simply unfunny, an undesirable but not uncommon outcome for a lot of studio comedies. It goes deeper than that. The true failure comes with the existential realization that you are spending time and/or money to laugh and are not laughing at all. A smart person would simply stop watching the movie, chalk it up as a bad time. Others watch, wallow, waste away.
The spiral begins. Life is short. Why am I watching this? I could be learning a useful skill, reconnecting with an old friend. Oh God, the people who made this movie, they spent so much time on this. Their lives are as brief as mine, maybe even briefer. They’ve dedicated so much of their life to entertainment, and yet here I am, not only not entertained, but feeling worse off for engaging with their art. I should leave. I can’t leave. My cost is sunk. I am trapped here with the movie. The actors are trapped within it. We are all trapped together.
I hope I’m not tipping my hand on my feelings too much, but this week’s movie is Black Sheep.
Black Sheep is a movie built from the worst kind of studio greed. Paramount Pictures overworked multiple talented creatives and connived with Hollywood agents in an attempt to recapture the magic of another hit. Their unhappy star tried his best despite being massively underpaid and ended up fracturing one of his closest relationships because of it. And in the end, the movie didn’t even do all that well.
Maybe that opening spiel was overly dramatic. Maybe Black Sheep just makes me sad because I know how the Chris Farley story goes.
In the mid ‘90s, a very strong era for Saturday Night Live, Farley was one of its most captivating performers. The Wisconsin native had followed the tried and true method of earning his place on the iconic show by excelling in Chicago’s Second City improv troupe, an unofficial feeder system to SNL. The version of the show that Farley then found himself on was full of absolute comedy hitters: Mike Meyers, Adam Sandler, David Spade, Kevin Nealy, Tim Meadows, and more. Big Man Chris made a splash in his first season of the show though, thanks to the iconic sketch of him and To Wong Foo star Patrick Swayze as Chippendale dancers.
Farley would have stood out amongst that crowd already because of his large size, but the man was a special performer beyond just being a stereotypical “funny fat guy.” The dude was simultaneously graceful as all hell and the king of the pratfall. He could deliver jokes with a quiet, awkward demeanor but he could also yell them in hilarious, frantic anger. He was brilliant in so many of the sketches I’ve watched, whether he was playing the straight man in the scene or an outlandish character like inspirational speaker Matt Foley.
Naturally, not all of these early to mid ‘90s SNL sketches hold up to contemporary watches thanks to the evolving nature of comedy taste. But the ones that do hit extra hard in part because of guys like Farley who could spiral a bit into absurd extremes with total commitment to making people laugh. The dude was an absolute dynamo, and worked wonderfully with both regular castmates and famous celebrity guests. I can’t tell you exactly why “The Herlihy Boy House-Sitting Service” makes me laugh harder than any other clip from Saturday Night Live, but Chris Farley’s part in the escalation of the scene is a core factor.
Like many entertainers, Farley had demons. A need to always be “on” as a way to make others happy led to major self-esteem issues. He struggled with drugs and alcohol through the early ‘90s, but got sober in 1993 as his SNL run really got cooking. Around this same time, showrunner Lorne Michaels was using his influence to produce movies both directly based on SNL sketches and new concepts that would act as showcases for the more talented members of the troupe. Starting with Wayne’s World [3.5/5] in 1992, many of the movies produced by Lorne were, reportedly, pretty bad. I haven’t seen stuff like It’s Pat! or Coneheads, but their negative reputations precede them.
[Looking at Lorne’s credits as a producer, my favorite film he ever put his name on was Hot Rod in 2007. 4.5/5]
In 1995, one of those Lorne Michaels projects was the movie Tommy Boy. A buddy comedy starring Chris Farley and David Spade, the movie follows Farley’s bumbling Tommy as he tries to become a competent enough salesman to save the family business while Spade plays the straight man who tries to keep his crazed energy reined in.
As Farley’s first leading role, Tommy Boy plays on all of the comic’s strengths. There are plenty of physical bits that rely both on his surprising grace and hilarious ability to sell slapstick. Other scenes put Farley’s natural charisma on fully display. Tommy’s quest has him engage in hilarious conversations that at times require awkward nervousness, crass chumminess, blaring vitriol, and maybe even a combination of all three. And that’s even before you get into the banter with Spade. The chemistry between the two comedians is so charming and uplifts the whole project above a field of middling comedies coming from Lorne. Tommy Boy is a 3.5/5. Here’s my favorite scene in the movie, which I rewound to thrice while I was watching it for this column.
Tommy Boy wasn’t a massive hit, only pulling in $32 million on a $20 million budget, and it wasn’t a smash with the critics either. But the word of mouth buzz was strong, and predicted rental rates were high. Paramount Pictures realized that they could have had a massive hit on their hands, if only they had promoted the movie correctly. If only they had another chance.
Luckily for them, Farley had signed a two picture deal with the studio before the release of Tommy Boy in an effort to prove himself as a movie star talent. Eager to cash in correctly on the Chris Farley train this time, Paramount greenlit a follow-up to Tommy Boy starring Farley and Spade without a script or even a story ready to go.
This is where the story starts getting a bit upsetting. A lot of this background is pulled from The Chris Farley Show, a biography/oral history of the comedian released in 2008 that’s really good from the snippets of it that I read. I’ll try to be brief.
Chris Farley’s contract with Paramount meant that he was obligated to work on one of their movies if they presented it to him within a certain window. The timing was impossibly tight. The studio tasked screenwriter Fred Wolf, who had done some rewrites of Tommy Boy, to come up with a script in less than a week or else Farley would be able to walk away and take the lead role in The Cable Guy (a movie that will eventually appear in this column). Wolf was tasked with creating a story that lifted the basics from Tommy Boy, and boy did he follow the assignment.
In Tommy Boy, Chris Farley plays the clumsy, well meaning but talentless son of a factory owner who tries his best to save the family business. In Black Sheep, he plays the clumsy, well meaning but talentless brother of a politician who tries his best to get him elected as governor. David Spade is there in both stories as the guy who has to keep the hijinks levels low but inevitably fails when Farley does something whacky. It’s blatantly 1-to-1, even down to the climaxes of both movies involving Farley taking someone hostage on live TV in order to reveal the antagonist’s villainous plot to the world.
Farley hated the script, but went to David Spade and said that if he was in, then Farley was too. Otherwise, he was off to do The Cable Guy.
As Spade recalls in The Chris Farley Show:
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 read it, and I thought it was actually pretty good. Coming off Tommy Boy, I thought Chris, Fred, and I could pull it off.
Spade agreed to do Black Sheep, locking Farley in as his costar. The Cable Guy role instead went to Jim Carrey.
In lieu of going with Tommy Boy director Peter Segal and ripping the movie off entirely, Paramount hired Penelope Spheeris. Though Spheeris had directed a few B-movies in the ‘80s, the work she’s most renowned for from that decade were her rock documentaries, The Decline of Western Civilization and The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.
Each of these focused on a different musical subculture in LA around the time of their release. The first covered the underground punk scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s while the second looked at the glam metal of the mid to late ‘80s. Both are fascinating looks at these brief yet important cultural moments, with Spheeris acting as observer and light interrogator. She never deeply questions the ethics of the behavior she sees, but she gives her subjects plenty of time to talk and hang themselves with their own words, particularly in Part II.
[Really good documentaries! I give the first one a 4/5 and the second one a 3.5/5.]
Between her catalog of rock documentaries and indie movies, Spheeris was able to secure the directing job for Wayne’s World in 1992, a big hit for her and the start of the ‘90s SNL-to-movie pipeline. For some reason after that though, Spheeris was typecast as the director for feature film remakes of old TV shows as she adapted both The Beverly Hillbillies in 1993 and The Little Rascals in 1994, neither of which reviewed well even if they made a little money.
As Spheeris remembers it, she was brought in at the eleventh hour for Black Sheep:
...[Paramount] 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 [like] something I really wanted to do.
Both director and star were aligned in disliking Black Sheep at its core. Though Spheeris had worked with Farley before on Wayne’s World and liked him a lot, she was hesitant to make a movie she didn’t think would be funny. It ended up being a paycheck of around $2.5 million that really convinced her to helm Black Sheep. This was the catalyst for more on-set issues, as neither Farley nor Spade were making anywhere near that. In fact, Chris Farley was making less than $1 million for the role since the contract that he had signed before he was a big star didn’t allow for a renegotiation of his going rate.
Though Spheeris and Farley got along with one another by all accounts, the same can’t be said for the director and David Spade. From the comedian’s point of view, she was an outsider who thought she knew how to make things funny and didn’t trust the instincts of her comic stars. From the director’s perspective, David Spade was an unfunny hack who to this day has never made her laugh once.
Not to be the enlightened centrist, but I honestly can see sides of both perspectives. David Spade is a very hit or miss comedian for me, often better served as a dry straight man than the lead act. Better than Rob Schneider, but no Ben Stiller, you know? On the other hand, Spheeris fired screenwriter Fred Wolf three times during the filming of Black Sheep, so clearly she had a strong opinion of her ability to determine the funniness of the movie.
So the movie made to trap a comedian in a contractual stipulation and limit his ability to make money on another project in an effort to recreate the magic of a movie that hadn’t even been that big of a hit had a tense set where no one was happy to be there. Welcome to Black Sheep.
The results, unfortunately, speak for themselves. Black Sheep isn’t the worst movie I’ve reviewed so far from this column, but it’s probably the most unfunny comedy I’ve subjected myself to in a long while. Gone are the myriad situations that call for the many facets of Farley as a performer. Instead, we get the Flanderization of the man as he falls down and yells over and over again. It’s like watching him through the lens of someone who hated his work but only had a vague sense of what it was exactly that he did on Saturday Night Live.
Gone is the natural chemistry of Farley and Spade. Their characters have no history before the start of the movie and have no arc of becoming friends like in Tommy Boy. Instead, they’re just mean to each other for no reason except that the script says they have to be, and then they’re friends at the end for the same reason.
It’s not like there’s much opportunity for the characters to bond. One of the more boneheaded ideas for Black Sheep to have is to show us so many scenes where the main duo split up and do their own thing. This decision, reportedly the result of Farley wanting more opportunities to try out his acting chops, removes any opportunity for funny conversations or joint handling of comedic situations, the base of the relationship in Tommy Boy. Unfortunately, the icy relationship between Farley and Spade on camera may have reflected reality somewhat.
This is more hearsay than anything else, but a few people interviewed for The Chris Farley Story mentioned that the tension on set of Black Sheep negatively affected the friendship of its two leads. Farley felt trapped by the movie and was making the least amount of money between the two stars and the director. Spade was having a miserable time failing to convince Spheeris that he was funny. There might have been a girl in the middle of all this too. Again, more hearsay. But whatever the case, the end of shooting provided a clean break. This would be the last movie the two friends would ever make together.
Black Sheep tries to have a plot about a corrupt governor using Chris Farley’s antics to win the election against his brother, but it never has any propulsion to it. Tommy Boy at least had a deadline for its characters to worry about when they were doing antics. Wolf and Spheeris could have easily built in the tension of the impending election day so that the characters could have some motivation to do anything, but that would have required the writer and director to be on speaking terms. So instead, the characters kind of just hang out while a sequence of curious events happens to them.
The movie has an extended second act that is wholly disconnected from the premise of a politician’s screwup brother, since it takes place in a remote cabin in woods far from civilization. The jokes during this part of the movie aren’t based on fun character interactions or clever situations (though to be fair, the rest of Black Sheep isn’t either). It’s just uninspired man versus nature comedy that could have featured any two-bit comedian who can make a funny face in closeup. Instead, we get Chris Farley and an extremely checked out David Spade dealing with bats, rockslides, and hostile survivalist Gary Busey, looking as creepy as you’d expect.
Black Sheep is 88 minutes long and it took me about three hours to get through it. As I watched, I alternated between feelings of annoyed boredom and sad disappointment, pausing frequently not just to take notes but to walk away and do whatever else I could think of doing in that moment to avoid taking in more of the movie. Not even the climax of the movie, an armed intrusion at an official government event to overturn the results of a contentious election with claims of voter fraud, could stir more than a raised eyebrow from me when most of Chris Farley’s jokes were either recycled from Tommy Boy or him falling on the ground while everyone laughs.
This movie seriously bummed me out. I’ve never been so cognizant of our limited time on Earth watching this, the second of three films starring Chris Farley. He tried his best. That’s what everyone says. He tried bringing in more writers to do rewrites. He was responsible for the casting of Tim Matheson and Bruce McGill in supporting roles as a way to capture a little of that Animal House magic [been a while since I’ve watched Animal House, but I remember liking it despite much of it aging poorly. 3/5 until further rewatch]. Farley really wanted this one to work, man.
I’m not surprised that critics didn’t like Black Sheep. They didn’t like Tommy Boy even though that movie’s actually good. This movie never stood a chance with them. Still, I’m a little taken aback by how much they didn’t like it. Siskel and Ebert were brutal. Ebert said the idea of people spending money to see it made his heart sink. He summed it up thusly:
One of the worst comedies I’ve ever seen and one of the least ambitious. It’s like they’re not even trying to make a good movie…Black Sheep is awful.
Siskel admitted to walking out about an hour in, something he hadn’t done in nearly 30 years. Other critics weren’t much nicer. Barry Walters from the San Francisco Examiner hated Farley’s performance, saying he lacks the “charm to coax you into caring about him for the length of an entire movie.” Adam Smith of Empire called it an “asinine stream of charmless drivel.” The nicest thing I found anyone say about it was Mick LaSalle from SF Gate saying that it was absolutely a must watch if you had literally nothing else to do in a day.
So the critics hated it. Did the people making this movie like it at least? Nope! Spheeris helpfully summed up both her and David Spade’s thoughts on the movie when she said this for The Chris Farley Show:
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.”
As for Farley, his reaction broke my heart. According to his girlfriend at the time, he fucking hated Black Sheep, calling it “Tommy Boy II, only worse.” Farley was three years sober by the time he made Black Sheep in the summer of 1995. According to those that knew him, his first relapse came around the same time he saw a preview of the film later that year.
I won’t be so crass as to blame Black Sheep for Farley’s return to alcohol and drugs. There were plenty of other stressors in his life at the time, including dissatisfaction with his next project (which this column will cover), the loss of his job with SNL, and his continued mental health struggles. Whatever the reason Farley turned back to drugs and alcohol, he was deep in the throes of his addictions by the February ‘96 release of Black Sheep.
I can’t find any info on the budget of Black Sheep, but based on the fact that Paramount paid the director exorbitantly, I imagine the production cost was much higher than that of Tommy Boy. And yet, despite a strong first weekend on top of the box office, the movie tanked commercially. It only stayed in theaters for 5 weeks and made the same amount of money as Tommy Boy: $32 million. When you’ve got a movie this bad in the early dump months of the year, it’s no surprise that it brought in so little money.
Tommy Boy was a minor hit that could have done better with smarter marketing. Black Sheep was just a bomb.
Chris Farley was a brilliant performer who deserved better than what he got. I wish Black Sheep was just a minor footnote in a long, fruitful career. I should have thoughts about which of Farley’s many movies are the best, the worst, the most underrated, the ones that speak to me most. That’s not the world we live in though.
The man’s cinematic output is, unfortunately, short and uneven. The next time Chris Farley shows up in this column will be a very morose week indeed.
Wow, I bummed myself out there.
Let’s watch the Tommy Boy scene again.
Rating: 1.5/5
Next Week: Well that sucked! Thankfully, next week’s column just sends me down an existential crisis of what I’m even doing here! Look forward to Broken Arrow next Friday.
See you then!
-Will