WITH CARREY: James and Jim
(Gleaned from my November 1985 and June 1990 interviews with the actor-comedian.)
By Gregory N. Joseph
AH, HOW TIME FLIES. Jim Carrey — now Hollywood’s $20 million man with hit films like “Ace Ventura, Pet Detective,” “The Mask” and “Liar, Liar,” to his credit, not to mention a messy tabloid-ravaged divorce to his name — figures the turning point in his comic acting career, if not in his life, took place in the second grade. That’s when he amused himself, the other students (but not his teacher) by mimicking instruments in music class. Two out of three ain’t bad.
How wrong could I be?
Pretty wrong.
Hunched over stiff black cups of coffee one November day in 1985 with Carrey, I figured that here is another in the long line of young clucks who wants to be the next James Dean (this was before Luke Perry got the imitation down pat). And I said so in PRINT.
Well, hell’s bells. Carrey, at the time, had the grease pompadour, the blue-jean jacket with the turned-up collar, and the squint. That’s essential. The brooding squint from deep down as the cigarette curls dramatically from mouth to nose. He chain-smoked. Of course. But restlessly. Even more of course.
He was 23 years old then, promoting a movie called “Once Bitten,” a comedy in which he played a virginal high school student who becomes the prey of a 400-ish but dazzling vampire played by Vogue cover girl-turned-actress Lauren Hutton. It’s a cruel world, Hollywood is.
“The movie is about an aging vampire,” Carrey said with a caustic edge. “But then, she lives in Los Angeles, and everybody there worries about their age.”
Carrey, whom I would later interview in June of 1990 while he was working on the Fox television comedy-variety series “In Living Color,” had his big break in Hollywood on the NBC show-within-a-show sitcom, “The Duck Factory.”
In the latter, he co-starred with Jack Gilford, a fine, quietly efficient and sympathetic character actor perhaps best remembered as the poker-faced “Crackerjack man” in some immensely popular TV commercials. Carrey played an apprentice animator on a Saturday-morning cartoon show.
Although “The Duck Factory” lasted just three months (April 12, 1984-July 11, 1984), it was enough to lead to appearances on “The Tonight Show” and tours with Rodney Dangerfield, Sheena Easton, Andy Williams, Buddy Hackett and roles in movies like “The Dead Pool,” the fifth installment of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films (in that, he was billed as James Carrey), “Peggy Sue Got Married” (as Jim this time), “Pink Cadillac” (as James again) and “Finders Keepers (back to Jim).
Like most, if not all, comics, Carrey is serious to a fault off-screen — and sometimes on, as in Fox’s excellent TV-movie drama “Doing Time on Maple Drive,” a kind of poor man’s “Ordinary People: in which he portrays the alcoholic “other son” (back to James again).
And, like many comics, Carrey reveals comedy to the public that stems from an askew vision of the real world. The more efficient and funny the comic, it seems, the more serious off-screen and the more askew the interpretation.
Carrey’s “Fire Marshall Bill” character on “In Living Color” came, for instance, from a spontaneous onstage routine at The Comedy Store comedy club in which he launched into a litany of “fire violations” at the club. His “Venus de Milo” bodybuilder on the same series was born after he observed an extremely well-muscled woman at Gold’s Gym.
But, unlike some comedians, Carrey does not have an insatiable desire to play drama in “down” movies (even though he can, and as pointed out, has).
His acting idol is James/Jimmy Stewart, who could play comedy or drama with equal aplomb, and his favorite directors, Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg, because of their tilt toward upbeat endings.
“I really like the sensibility of films like the ones they make,” Carrey said. People have enough dumped on them in everyday life without walking out of a theater feeling down. They should feel uplifted.
“That’s why I like films like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and ‘Harvey’ and parts like ‘The Rainmaker,’ which I once did in acting class. They're just aren’t enough of those around now, and there should be.”
It Carrey prefers to have a rosier view of the world than is actually the case, or to change his first name from Jim to James and back again, he can be forgiven.
Early on, he had a brush with grim reality: Several years before our first chat, his father, an accountant in Toronto, lost his job; at the moment, as we spoke, he still had not found a replacement, and Jim — the youngest of four children — was helping support the family. (Carrey had immediately impressed me by pointing out that a portion of his biography provided by the studio referring to his family situation was not accurate, and he wanted to set the record straight — and did, for publication.)
Not only that, despite what Carrey called “‘a Starsky and Hutch’ eight-foot-high fence” around his Los Angeles home, thieves made off with all the wicker furniture from the front balcony — and his then-new 1985 Toyota Celica Supra.
“Now I’ve got a friend living there,” Carrey confided, a smile flickering across the corner of his mouth. “No problem — unless my friend is the one who took the car and the wicker furniture.”
Carrey was born in Newmarket, Canada, near Toronto. He made his professional debut as a comic at a club called The Hayloft in Scarborough, also in Toronto, where he was paid $20 for delivering material he now admits was lifted from other comedians’ comedy albums “like ‘Don Knotts Meets the Roving Reporter’”. (In fairness, it should be noted that many comedians get their start by “borrowing” material from well-known performers of the day.)
By the time he was 28, the only white male on “In Living Color,” Carrey, who had become more confident and outspoken, frequently stole the show from the likes of Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier (perhaps best known for their parody of foppish public-access film reviewers in the recurring “Men on Film” schtick).
“I think ‘Saturday Night Live’ at this point has kind of gotten a little safer,” Carrey said at the time. “When you first hit the air, you’re hungrier. That’s why I like being with Fox now — no question that they’re hungrier, and they have to prove something.”
So apparently did James/Jim Carrey.
