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 A Member Profile by Chris Davison, davison@intellcap.com
Ali LeRoi is Executive Producer of hit show “Everybody Hates Chris”. Ali began his career as a journalist and has since worked in many areas of the business, from stand-up to sketch comedy to sitcoms. I recently had a chance to speak with Ali to discuss Chris Rock, the Marx Brothers and Bernie Mac.
Q: Can you tell us about your background and what made you want to work in entertainment? How did you get involved with the HRTS?
-I actually began as a writer in high school, I had a column in my school newspaper. I also loved comedy from way back, like the Marx Brothers, Carol Burnett, Dick Van Dyke, Laugh-In, and I had particular fondness for writers in print, such as Sydney J. Harris, Erma Bombeck. In high school I met Lance Crouther, who had a comedy group that I joined and we did sketch comedy. Years later I started doing stand-up, I met Bernie Mac on the Chicago comedy club scene. He I became close friends. I wrote for Bernie for over 10 years and I also toured with him for about 4 years.
Around 1991, I was on the road with Chris Rock, who I had known from stand-up since 1987. Chris had done SNL and “In Living Color”, and it was just a few years later that he did “Bring The Pain”. After that he called me up and said “I'm about to do this show on HBO” and he asked me if I wanted to come out and write for him. This laid the foundation for my TV writing career. I had dabbled in other things, but moving to the "The Chris Rock Show" and winning an Emmy there solidified the transition.
My work on “Everybody Hates Chris” resulted in an invitation to a Newsmaker Luncheon. I was aware of the HRTS but I hadn't really participated in the past. The panel I was on was David Shore, Marc Cherry, Peter Tolan, Meredith Stiehm and myself. After the luncheon I joined the HRTS because I'm not the most social guy in the world, I go to work and I spend a lot of time by myself when I am creating. I do not do a lot of out-of-work social functions so the best way for me to meet people in the business is to join a group like the HRTS. I've been to other panels since then just to sit and watch, it's a great way for me to be involved in the community.
Q: What was your development process like on "Everybody Hates Chris"?
-it was actually an odd sort of thing. The notion for what would eventually become EHC began about three or four years before we actually got on the air. Chris and I had been working on “Head Of State”, Dana Walden was over at Fox and she had some interest in working with Chris on a TV show but there was no concrete idea at that time. After we finished editing and releasing the movie in early 2003, I was out in LA so I went over to take a meeting with Dana Walden and Gary Newman. They said they loved the idea of working with Chris in a similar situation to “Malcolm in the Middle”. Our logline became 'Chris Rock meets the Wonder Years'. I took the idea to Chris, and our idea became a show about a kid in NYC in the 1990s but it wouldn't be Chris. We picked the 1990s since Clinton had become president and there was a cultural change in society. But before we went back to the studio, Chris said to me “if we want to get this on the air, the kid probably should be me”.
We then began to restructure and take some poetic license, the character on the show is really younger than Chris was at the time period of the show, and being in the 1990s gave us the hip-hop landscape to play with. It was Spring 2005 before we got on set and started shooting something. While the project was at Fox it never got on the air. They had another show with Method Man and Red Man that eventually got on the air and so they didn't pick us up. The project sat on the shelf over there and we thought it was going to
end there, but Dawn Ostroff, who was at UPN at the time, had seen the script and really liked it. She reached out quietly to Chris and then to me and said that we could do the project at UPN but we had to wait until the option ran out at Fox. It did and then she picked it up, with a few minor changes we got it on the air at UPN and it did really, really well coming out of the gate.
Unfortunately the UPN then became the CW and some of the networks priorities shifted and I believe that affected our momentum somewhat. We had solid numbers and did very well internationally and so we got a lot of support from the studio and from the network as well, I know that Les Moonves was a fan of the show. This was one of the times that being good actually made a difference. It would have been great had we had “Two and a Half Men” numbers, but we’ve had four great seasons, so I can’t complain.
Q: What are your thoughts on product integration?
-in the production of any show, there's a great deal of emphasis internally on how products are mentioned or used. If you're EHC and the kids are sitting eating cereal, we have a directive that no cereal brand be mentioned by name so that no one gets free advertising. The other side is to make sure that no product is mentioned in a negative light so that you don't have to worry about a lawsuit. If the networks and the studios really take a look at the programs that they have and make sure that it fits the context of the show then the integration is going to work, but I'm not going to write an entire storyline around Zest or Cocoa Puffs. We can certainly place a box of Frosted Flakes on a breakfast table but it isn't the basis of the storyline.
It isn't incredibly difficult to have real and sensible integrations on the show but it has to be carefully discussed with the advertisers, showrunners and the network and studio. I don't have a problem with it, it just needs to be organic. In “30 Rock” they make fun of the product integration, it's very organic and it works. I think that we may be going back to a time like in the 1950s and 60s where we have Texaco Star Theater and you just buy the hour.
Q: In general, what is funny?
-whenever you talk to executives or when you're dealing with an audience, people say that 'funny is funny' and that's not true. Comedy is not given the same sort of segmented view, it's not broken up like music is. Music is music, yes, comedy is comedy, yes, funny is funny, not true. Comedy has similar categories, there's farce, parody, blue comedy, slapstick, satire, so if you understand what style of comedy you are creating, you understand what style of comedy you are selling then you'll have some idea of whether or not the people you are trying to sell this comedy to appreciate it.
Unfortunately, I don't think that some executives know the gradations of comedy but most all are willing to listen to a creator that talks about the show's style, tonality, the audience they are shooting for. “30 Rock” and “The Office” do entirely different things, they are entirely different tonalities, so what is funny? What's funny to me is different, I have a very eclectic sense of humor. I love the Marx Brothers and Benny Hill, I watched “The Office” when it was on the BBC, “30 Rock” is hilarious, and being an idiot can be funny, “Jackass” is funny. Is “Jackass” the same subtle comic tonality as “Desperate Housewives”? No. But it is relatable to an audience, and sometimes just dumb is funny. It's a broad question and I don't think that most people are learned enough in the distinctions of comedy to know that it's not always just 'funny is funny'. Blue is not just blue, there are 800 different shades.
Q: Where do you want to be five years from now?
-I'm in a different place now, in addition to still trying to create shows, my primary goal is to move into independent production but that era of Carsey Werner, and Bonnie and Terry Turner, has kind of gone away. Imagine has a lot of stuff going on in TV, Bruckheimer has many TV projects but they're not independent comedy producers. It's when you are talking about independent producers of content, that's an area that I am really interested in moving into.
I am forming a venture with Orlando Jones called "F. Mass Media" and we are starting to develop content. It's multiplatform for television, web, for phones, some of this has the ability to upsell. There is content created for TV that can be exploited on the web and on the phone, because at the end of the day, all of these platforms are going to need things to show. They are going to need things that are cost-effective to produce and are of a certain quality. Coke is not going to put their ads behind a clip where a guy clamps electrodes onto his balls.
Television is not interactive, but on the web I am in control of how I am taking in this content - do I go to a destination site, do I have things delivered to my Inbox, do I get a podcast? If there's some quality quotient then you may be able to develop some sort of following. How do I measure the success of that content? Who's watching? Are you using banner ads or imbedded advertising on the web? Coke says that they want to tag a 15-second ad onto the front of that content, there's a countdown bar for the ad so I know when it will be over and I therefore have a control since I know how long to wait. It's not like television where you don't know how long it will be until the commercials end.
For me, to get into this space and start to create content and have people bring us ideas that we produce and present to buyers, whether it's TV or the web, we want to become a real independent production unit. As a producer, I am also interested in branching out into reality, animation and other areas. I already have my own office, and have used it as studio space. Even if I have a studio job I always maintain a separate office, I need a functional and usable space that I can work out of, my own independent base of operations. I'm self-employed, my business is Ali LeRoi and all of the things he comes up with. In five years, I’d like that to be a very lucrative business.
Q: Anything you would like to add?
-when I hear people talk about the trouble that TV is in, that comedy is dead, I think that they are ignoring the cyclical nature of any business, the upswings and downswings. I also think that the stand-up comedy pool was tapped out at a certain point but now comedy is being given a chance to recover. In the next 3-4 years there will be a resurgence of multi-camera comedy, with new comedy faces and voices.
Television has been severely damaged by vertical integration but it isn't going away. When independent producers can't go to a studio or network and sell the best show to the right buyer, then the whole business suffers. If you can't sell it to one network then you may not be able to take it somewhere else and it just sits on a shelf, so your product won't get made and they won't sell it to someone else. Networks are not creative entities, they are distributors; do you want the product in blue, green or red? The networks bit off more than they could chew, there shouldn't even be development departments at networks, they should just be buyers of content. I hope that some of the conglomerates are broken up, that the vertical integration comes to an end. If and when that occurs, I think that television and film will become much more viable businesses again. While one guy might not be able to make a movie for $200 million, five guys might be able to make movies for $40 million each, it's like Crazy Eddie's in New York, how do we do it? Volume!
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