Live From New York - James H. Miller [262]
I did a movie with him; it was like the last movie he ever did. It was the summer of his death, so I saw him then. I worked with him for six weeks. And oh my God, he was big. He had gained a lot of weight. And he was just crazy, reckless, at that point. And when he came back and hosted the show, it was like madness.
ALEC BALDWIN:
I like all of them, but the person I did have a special fondness for was Chris Farley. Even if you were somebody who was on the wagon and didn’t drink and didn’t take drugs, you wanted to go out and just get completely loaded with Chris. You wanted to go out and be with him and do whatever you had to do and just ingest whatever potion you had to ingest to make you look at life the way Chris did. He was so crazy and free and fun. And he was so childlike in a wonderful way, you thought, “How can I get to where he’s at?”
TIM KAZURINSKY, Cast Member:
I have a bunch of breakfast buddies in Chicago who were all in Chris Farley’s company, and I told the Trib I didn’t want them writing a thing about how his friends “didn’t care.” I have breakfast with all the guys in his former company at Second City, and some are AA, and they would not go with him to a place where alcohol was served. They’d say, “Come on over here for breakfast.” They would not be a party to his doing drugs, and they did say, “Fuck you, you’re killing yourself.” Those buddies — one of them was his AA sponsor — they didn’t leave him in the lurch. They talked to him all the time, and they just said, “It’s your choice. You hang with us, or you die.”
When you’re getting $6 million a movie, as one of them said, you can buy a lot of new friends overnight. And he did.
AL FRANKEN, Writer:
With Belushi we did not know that you died that way. We didn’t understand what addiction does and what was going on. With Farley we understood it, he understood it, because he went to rehab about twelve times. He honestly, honestly struggled and tried. He was a wonderful, sweet, loving guy. He was a fan of other people. He loved his family. I don’t know what it was. That was really sad.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
After Chris died and I thought about the things that could have been done and talked to people who were close to him, I came to realize that no matter what I felt, no matter how frustrated I was, I hadn’t seen a lot of Chris in those last few years. He’d been on the West Coast doing his movies, and every now and then I would hear something or see something and get frustrated and make judgments and confront people — but then I would retreat back into my own problems. So when it came time to talk at Chris’s memorial service in New York, there was a part of me that wanted to address my frustration without placing blame on any individuals, because I didn’t feel like I was involved enough to make those kind of judgments. So when I spoke, I talked about the disappointment I felt in what had happened, but from my own perspective, and just apologized to Chris personally for whatever I hadn’t done. I felt like if anyone heard something in what I said that struck a chord with them, then good, then I could speak for them a little bit too. But at the end of the day, I felt like I could only really speak for my own feelings of letting him down.
Saturday Night Live had celebrated, in restrained ways, its fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries. There’d been no fifth-anniversary party, of course, because in its fifth year the show had gone all to hell. But it was nothing if not resilient, and that resilience was commemorated in the show’s biggest-ever blowout, a three-hour prime-time twenty-fifth-anniversary party on September 26, 1999. Of those still living who’d ever been part of the SNL family, Eddie Murphy was probably the only major graduate who stayed away, reputedly out of some ill-defined animosity toward the show that had made him first famous, then rich, then a movie star. Otherwise it was as gala as galas get, with expatriates and former foes burying hatchets to join in the celebration and more than 22 million viewers