A Life Through Film #023: The Cable Guy
Jim Carrey didn't want to be Ace Ventura anymore and America wasn't having it
Release Date: 6/14/1996
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!
When last we checked in on his career, Jim Carrey was experiencing a rough moment amid his monumental mid ‘90s success. A bitter, public divorce with his first wife was occupying his personal life while his career was being dictated by threat of legal action. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was a comedy sequel made under duress of many kinds, and even though the superstar ran the production through a puppet director, it didn’t do much to elevate the film’s quality. The comedy sequel was a big hit, but Carrey still holds the distinction for making the worst movie I’ve covered so far in “A Life Through Film.”
A normal human being would take a step back and reflect, perhaps step away from work and focusing on private matters before reemerging into the public eye. As we established in our review of When Nature Calls, however, Jim Carrey is not a normal human being. As he was about to start filming the Ace Ventura sequel that he never wanted to make, Carrey was thinking not just of his next project but of his long-term career prospects as well.
Would this be his life? Trapped in endless sequels and knockoffs of characters he had already done before? Forced to perform the same jokes and bits that audiences demanded, year in and year out?
Carrey saw this potential future and rejected it. A change was necessary, and he would use his clout to force that change. He wouldn’t touch a sequel to his own work again until the 2010s. He would embrace roles that challenged him to be a different person and a more dynamic performer. He would leave the Jim Carrey that people fell in love with in 1994 behind and become something greater.
In the long term, this decision would lead Carrey to making some of my favorite films of all time. In the short term, it would ruin the life of a fellow comedian and change the economics of Hollywood forever.
This week’s movie was the catalyst for all of this. Not bad for a movie that made no money and that nobody at the time liked.
The Cable Guy is a 1996 dark comedy starring Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, and Leslie Man that’s directed by Ben Stiller. The plot follows Steven (Broderick) who, while on a break from his girlfriend (Mann), befriends the cable guy who hooks him up with free HBO at his new apartment (Carrey, of course). From there, their friendship twists and evolves to something more sinister as the cable guy’s obsession with Steven intensifies and grows increasingly dangerous.
On paper, The Cable Guy sounds like a can’t miss prospect. A major star surrounded by both established top talent and future stars guided by the vision of a hot creative who was becoming a celebrity in his own right. The movie represented a major investment from Sony Pictures through their Tristar Productions brand. The studio believed that, just like every other Carrey project since 1994, The Cable Guy would be a major hit thanks to the presence of America’s favorite comedian.
So why didn’t that happen? Despite its mainstream ambitions and insane $70 million budget, The Cable Guy is firmly a cult film these days, a weird and honestly off-putting piece of comedy that pulls more from Cape Fear [3/5] and Alfred Hitchcock than Airplane! [3.5/5] and Mel Brooks. Some of the names involved in the film, Judd Apatow, Owen Wilson, Jack Black, and of course its director, would go on to be some of the most important comedy stars of the 21st century, but this movie is not often one that jumps to mind when thinking about those men’s careers. So what gives?
The origins of this strange movie are themselves a little odd. One day, L.A. County Prosecutor Lou Holtz Jr. went to a couple of his friends who worked as Hollywood producers with a script he had written. This was the first screenplay he had ever written and, if his IMDB page is anything to go off of, also the last. His story was a buddy comedy about a guy who hits it off with his cable guy and is inspired by the friendship to get his ex-girlfriend back.
Holtz’s friends told him to get an agent off the strength of his script, which the lawyer did. That agent shopped the script around and within days had great news: SNL star Chris Farley loved the script and thought it would be a fantastic choice for his next movie. With a star like that attached, Holtz and his agent went to Tristar, who were desperately in need of a big comedy for the summer of 1996.
The screenwriter flew out to New York to talk to Farley about the part, but things quickly grew complicated. As I mentioned in my Black Sheep review, Farley became trapped by a contractual agreement with Paramount. Despite his intense interest in starring in The Cable Guy, he would be unable to turn down Paramount’s project if they had a script written and David Spade onboard to take part. As Farley tried to convince his friend to turn down another payday though, his plans went up in smoke anyway thanks to forces totally outside of his control.
At some point, Jim Carrey caught wind of this buddy comedy script and expressed interest in it. Once Tristar heard this, Farley, loaded with more contractual baggage than they had expected, was fully out of consideration. After only a couple of short years in the limelight, Carrey was by far the most bankable comedy star of the decade. So confident was the studio that his leading presence in The Cable Guy would yield massive returns that they changed the nature of Hollywood business forever.
The road had been paved for top stars to earn $20 million for a role before Carrey had become a household name. Action legends like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sly Stallone were already getting huge paydays of around $15 million by the time Carrey emerged as a star of their caliber. It didn’t matter though; in all of the coverage and reviews of The Cable Guy at the time of its release, the first thing everyone mentions is that Jim Carrey was the first actor to be paid $20 million for a movie role.
It’s unclear if the actor actually fought for that crazy paycheck. He was already interested in the project when Mark Canton, the head of Tristar Pictures at the time, cut him that absurd deal. Would Carrey have done it for $12 million? After the contract was signed, it didn’t matter. Almost immediately, the standard for movie star payouts changed. After The Cable Guy deal, the top guys were asking for and getting $20 million just like Jim. One man’s paycheck had caused a wave of inflation to surge through the film industry; actors, agents, producers, directors, everyone was getting paid more.
I’m all for higher wages, even for out of touch celebrity actors, but the cost of this was a long term rejection of risk by the studios. If you pay Bruce Willis $6 million to star in a weird erotic thriller that doesn’t do great business at the box office, that sucks. If you paid him $20 million to do it, suddenly your accountants are looking at a disaster. Moving forward, big budgets and big stars meant safe bets, creatively. That meant prioritizing known franchises over new IP. Next time you walk by a movie theater, check to see what’s playing and realize we’re definitely still living with the fallout of The Cable Guy to this day.
Other studios were pissed at Sony Pictures, the corporate owners of Tristar. The larger corporation already had a negative reputation in Hollywood from their hostile entry into the film business in 1989 in which they used their technology money to buy existing studios wholesale and poach the best talent. They had a reputation for reckless spending already by the time Carrey cashed his The Cable Guy check. That just solidified them as the villains of corporate filmmaking.
Every eye in the film industry was on this buddy comedy, with many not-so-secretly hoping for its failure. Surely, Carrey felt the pressure to make a movie that would return a profit and justify his industry-shaking pay. If the movie had been a safe, wacky execution of the original idea, it would have been a big hit. If this was the same Jim Carrey that had burst into the mainstream in 1994, he would have made that movie. But it was 1996. Carrey had just rehashed his old character for a terrible sequel that he didn’t want to make, was still dealing with his very public divorce, and had seen his formerly niche shtick co-opted into the newest Batman film.
Carrey wasn’t interested in the commercial prospects when he got The Cable Guy. Instead, he wanted to use the film as a platform for changing his public image. It was time for people to realize that they wanted more from Jim Carrey. He would make them see that he could be so much more than the clown who farts and yells.
The first thing he did was fly his pal Judd Apatow to South Carolina where Carrey was filming When Nature Calls to start rewriting the script to match their personal vision for it. Apatow and Carrey had known each other since their days skulking around the Los Angeles Comedy Scene, with the former getting his start as a producer/writer at around the same time that the latter was really starting to get some wind in his sails professionally. Apatow briefly petitioned Tristar to let him direct, but not even a close friendship with the $20 million man would get him that honor. It’s fine though. He knew a guy.
I always forget that Ben Stiller is also a director, but he’s got an impressive catalog of films under his belt that he helmed behind the camera. By 1996, the son of comedy legends Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara had found limited success as an actor (compared to what would come later in his career, anyway), but already had a critically acclaimed indie hit under his belt. Released in 1994, Reality Bites is kind of in the same camp as Clerks [4.5/5], starring Gen X young adults commiserating over their miserable economic situation and reflecting on how emotionally stunting it was to be raised by sellout hippies and their television set.
I don’t know why the version of this that Clerks does works better for me than Reality Bites, especially given the latter’s much higher production budget and incredible cast. But seeing Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo, and Stiller himself mope and struggle with generational ennui feels like a slog that you have to suffer through to get to the actually solid romantic comedy that takes over in the second half. If I had been born in 1975 instead of 1995, Reality Bites might be one of my favorite movies. As it stands, it’s fine. [3/5]
Reality Bites didn’t make very much money in theaters, but it earned solid reviews and allowed for Stiller’s creative pursuits to continue after the cancellation of his self-titled sketch comedy show on MTV. That show was co-run by Apatow, who thought his old friend would be a perfect fit for the darker movie that he and Carrey were transforming The Cable Guy into. The three men took the broad comedy that Chris Farley had wanted to star in and shifted it into something a bit odder and more sinister. This new version of the film would now be more inspired by tense thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle than it would be goofy buddy comedies like Dumb and Dumber [3/5].
Like with last week’s movie, the rewriting of the original script for this film led to accreditation issues from the Writers Guild of America. Despite the drastic changes that Carrey, Stiller, and especially Apatow made to the story, characters, dialogue, and scenes of The Cable Guy, none of them were credited as writers on the film. Apatow, who ended up getting a producer credit instead, was irate at this, and even sued the WGA as a result. He lost, and to this day Lou Holtz Jr. is credited as the sole writer of the film despite having no involvement with the movie that was eventually made besides coming up with the first draft.
The final version of The Cable Guy is not the easy commercial prospect that Tristar thought they were getting when they brought Jim Carrey in. Instead of playing an affable jokester, the actor flips his established comedy persona on its head and makes himself the villain of the piece. His goofy antics and exaggerated mannerisms are suddenly sinister where once they were gut busting, as he worms his way into a regular man’s life and threatens to destroy every aspect of it out of loneliness and anger. And as much as I love Chris Farley’s work, I think that Carrey’s version The Cable Guy outstrips the more lighthearted form the film would have taken if he hadn’t come onboard.
When I reviewed When Nature Calls, I found myself frustrated at Carrey’s return to the well of his same old style. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t so obvious that it had led to diminishing creative returns. Instead of a refreshing jester with a knack for physical comedy, Ace Ventura was just a straight up asshole to a world full of straight men, all of whom just had to grin and bear his hijinks. The Cable Guy plays with this same dynamic, but this time it’s intentionally meant to make the character off-putting to the viewers.
This recontextualization of the silly Jim Carrey routine that audiences had grown used to is extremely effective. The Cable Guy inappropriately jumping in non sequitur celebrity impressions isn’t just a silly gag, it’s proof of his disconnect from reality. Carrey’s plastic face shifting and contorting into different configurations now makes him an impossible to read menace. This character isn’t a human being, he’s a human-shaped presence with decades of television and movie references filling in where his personality is supposed to be who lashes out at others because of his own loneliness.
Maybe that’s why the performance has held up so well. In 1996, this was the premise of a movie villain. Nearly 30 years later, it’s just every other guy I run into on Twitter.
Of course, this is a comedy at the end of the day. I laughed heartily while watching The Cable Guy, far more than I did when watching When Nature Calls. Sometimes they were awkward chuckles, and other times, like in the frequently hilarious excursions to a side plot about an actor on trial for murdering his twin brother (both played by Stiller), I had to pause the movie for a full laugh break. Especially in the first half of The Cable Guy, you can laugh along at both the dark comedy of the situation and Carrey’s performance. This makes the movie’s narrative switchup in the second half, after Broderick flat out refuses The Cable Guy’s friendship, even more impressive.
Whenever Carrey is onscreen in this part of the movie, I’m legitimately tense for fear of what he might do. The social horror that his character puts Broderick through is funny, sure, but it spirals into insanity so quickly that it makes you almost fearful for the next twist of the knife. The Cable Guy’s actions will make you reconsider your own safety when you have to let repair technicians and other specialists into your home. I don’t think Broderick’s character is necessarily being punished for showing initial friendliness to his eventual nemesis, but it does make his initial promise to hang out with the guy seem like a massive mistake in hindsight.
Broderick, Mann, and everyone else in the movie is basically just fine. It’s clear they were told to keep the runway clear for Carrey and to not get in his way, and they do an admirable job of not upstaging his incredible work. Broderick’s extremely straight performance of a guy dealing with an awkward breakup never really jumps off of the screen, but it’s serviceable enough as background to Carrey ruining his life.
The supporting cast is interesting though, as the movie unintentionally serves as the junction point between two different eras of comedy. In one sense, every cast member from The Ben Stiller show gets at least a brief appearance on screen, so the ‘90s alt-comedy crowd can get excited by cameos from Janeane Garofalo, Andy Dick, David Cross, and Bob Odenkirk. Meanwhile, the presence of rising stars in front of the camera like Jack Black and Owen Wilson and behind it like Stiller and Apatow predicted the next 15 years of successful studio comedies. The only person The Cable Guy was missing to make this a proper mid-2000s Frat Pack movie was Vince Vaughn. Even Leslie Mann would become a recurring figure in later Apatow movies like Knocked Up. Props to the casting director here for filling the supporting roles around Carrey with some all star talent, even if they’re mostly just there for the star to play off of.
The Cable Guy isn’t a perfect movie. This is the second movie in a row directed by Stiller to have a serious message about the damage done to Gen X by all of the TV they watched growing up. It’s an interesting and timely idea that’s delivered thoughtfully at first, but by the end it gets way too heavy handed. Combined with a climax that fails to commit fully to the darker tone of the hour preceding it, and it feels like the movie ends up snickering at me for caring so much in the build up to the credits. And the star can’t leave all of his old tricks behind. Some scenes, like Broderick’s brief stint in jail or an admittedly excellent excursion to Medieval Times, feel more like excuses for Carrey to run different bits than actually important parts of the movie.
The Cable Guy looks pretty alright visually, though it’s nothing spectacular. I don’t know Carrey shadow directed the movie through Stiller like Steve Oedekerk did for When Nature Calls, but I lean towards no. I get the sense that Stiller had enough comedy cred even by 1996 to be treated more like an actual collaborator rather than simply as another yes man. Not that he uses the opportunity to go buckwild as a director. Even though I’m impressed by his commitment to shooting the movie like a tense thriller (was that a split diopter shot, Ben? Okay!), I don’t walk away feeling like Stiller has a super distinct style.
Should Carrey have been given $20 million for The Cable Guy? Absolutely not. That massive payday ended up taking up about half of the movie’s overall production budget, and as we’ll see, it made returning a profit a much more daunting task. But the comic is just so captivating to watch in this movie that it’s impossible for me to say he shouldn’t have made it at all. The comedian clearly wanted to change his style up and show his range to America. And it’s not like he was wrong. Jean-Claude Van Damme wasn’t the right guy to try and prove his own creative versatility, but as we’ll see in later movies, Jim Carrey going for it was the right move for him in the long term.
You wouldn’t know that looking at the response The Cable Guy got. The critics had never been huge fans of Carrey, but they weren’t just critical of the movie. They were confused, worried even for the state of the star’s future. Roger Ebert named it one of the worst movies of the year, and Janet Maslin from the New York Times said the movie was “sure to scare off part of Mr. Carrey's devoted following.” Apatow told the LA Times around the release of the movie that the movie was far tamer than they originally planned, with the creative team cutting 90% of what the studio told them to excise. One anonymous source says that the studio was afraid to criticize Carrey, despite qualms with the script.
Okay fine, the critics didn’t enjoy another Jim Carrey comedy. Surely the people would show up to the theater. The Cable Guy had the biggest comic star in America doing more funny impressions! And it was summer, the perfect time to enjoy a big mainstream comedy.
By its appearance in this column, I’m sure you can see that enough people were excited to see the next Jim Carrey movie that they helped The Cable Guy premiere at number one at the box office. But despite one of the widest releases in film history and a massive star at its center, the film only raked in $19 million that first weekend. From there, word got out that this was not another Ace Ventura or The Mask [3.5/5]. The film’s gross nearly halved its second weekend, and from there its placement on the box office rankings continued to plummet.
Since 1994, all of Jim Carrey’s movies had been runaway hits. The Cable Guy only stayed in theaters for 2 months and pulled in a final domestic gross of $65 million. The international release and later home movie rentals helped the film eventually turn a profit, but you don’t hire Jim Carrey in the mid-90s to make money eventually. The Cable Guy was a total bomb, and today lives on as a cult film despite its mainstream release and aspirations.
You could blame the movie’s failure on a few things, but I think it comes down to expectations. Its marketing highlighted wacky antics over legitimate thriller tension. People wanted to see more of the same from Jim Carrey, not this darker twist on the persona they loved. After all, he didn’t make nearly enough fart jokes for their liking here.
With the power of hindsight, it’s easy to see that of course Carrey is the kind of versatile talent that can mix up his style with nearly every movie. In 1996 though, people just wanted to laugh when he did a silly voice.
The Cable Guy has held up better than a lot of other comedies from this period, probably because its message of overreliance on media as a substitution for human connection rings even louder today. Today, the Cable Guy would be the Internet Guy, but otherwise you could easily remake this today without having to make too many changes to the script. Not that you should though; Carrey’s performance is too insane and singular to recreate.
If you’re in the mood for a dark comedy, I heartily recommend The Cable Guy if you haven’t seen it. Its mix of laughter and tension had me smirking and covering my eyes at the same time. And if, like me, you found some of Carrey’s more broad comedic roles around this time to be more annoying than funny, this shows the first step on his road to becoming a far more interesting performer than anyone at the time thought he could be.
Worries about Jim Carrey’s future as a star were, of course, unfounded. Not only will he be back in this column as a featured character, but Carrey will be here as both a loud funnyman with a goofy face and as a more thoughtful dramatic actor as well. The Cable Guy was too much too fast for American audiences. They would come around eventually. Eventually, everyone grows up and realizes that Ace Ventura wasn’t really all that good to begin with.
Rating: 4/5
Works Cited
Next Week: From one movie star to another, next week we eulogize a whole subgenre of action movie when the column looks at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Eraser.
See you then!
-Will