I walked into the table read like I owned the world, and the director, David Zucker, gave me three small parts to recite. There wasn’t enough dialogue in any of them for me to show much of my personality, so I improvised extra lines when I saw opportunities for humor. The movie was a comedy, so I figured at least I was helping everyone get in a good mood.
Afterward, Zucker called Dave Becky and told him, “I think Kevin’s our guy. He’s very funny. He did an amazing job with the part of CJ. It’s just a small part, but we’d like to meet with him and see if we can build this character out a little more for him.”
Zucker is a comedy legend. He directed Airplane! and other classic Leslie Nielsen comedies. I met with him and the screenwriters, and they said that there were two friends in the film, played by Anthony Anderson and Simon Rex. “What if we add your character to the friendship? You guys can be a trio.”
“I love it,” I replied. Of course, I would have said the same thing if they were suggesting that I play a tree. I was just glad that I was going to be in a legitimate Hollywood film. Progress.
When they asked if I wanted to write my own scenes into the script, I just about passed out. I’d personality’d my way into the movie.
There was a parody of the Ring series in the script, and Anthony Anderson’s character, Mahalik, had a line about someone who “woke up dead.” I’m a logical person, and that phrase didn’t make sense to me, so I played with the dialogue afterward:
CJ: How in the hell do you wake up dead?
Mahalik: Because you’re alive when you go to sleep.
CJ: So you’re telling me that you can go to bed dead and wake up alive?
Mahalik: You can’t go to bed dead, man. That shit would be redundant.
Working on the script was a good distraction from my marriage, which, to no one’s surprise but ours, hadn’t improved our relationship. Every week, we made promises to each other about what we were and weren’t going to do. Yet, a few days later, we were yelling our fuck yous, storming out of the house, exchanging phone numbers with anyone who seemed interested, and then coming home and accusing each other of cheating. We’d fight, fuck, wake up, and then start all over again with the promises.
One weekend, my childhood friend Spank visited. He went out with Torrei and me one night, and the usual happened. We were having a good time, we did a few shots, and then Torrei started laying into me: “I went into the bathroom and there was some bitch talking about you. That bitch in the white dress.”
She wanted to know who she was and why she was up in my business. I looked over and I had never seen the woman before in my life.
“Yo, we out, man,” I told Spank.
With Spank in the back seat, Torrei and I fought the whole ride home and then on into the house. Spank finally pulled Torrei into another room and pleaded with her: “Come on—not in front of me. Just go somewhere else if y’all have to do that.”
According to Spank, Torrei responded, “Spank, I ain’t even hear nothing in the bathroom. I just like to push his buttons.”
Fortunately, I was able to get out of town and start filming Scary Movie 3 in Vancouver. It was the first time I saw the professionalism of a film with a decent budget. Every comfort and luxury was taken care of. All I had to do was show up. My scenes turned out to be some of the best on-camera work I’d done. Because I’d written my own lines, it was easy to be authentic with them.
In the process of filming, I came to understand why none of my pilots had been picked up: They weren’t my material. If I wanted my next pilot to get picked up, maybe I should write it myself. It could be honest, like my comedy, and the audience would know something about me by the end of the show.
I thought back to an idea I’d once discussed with Na’im, my comedian friend from Philadelphia: We thought it would be cool to do a show about my family, but to make them rich instead of poor. We quickly dismissed it because it sounded too much like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But on set, where I was so attached to being treated like a star and sad to think it would end, I figured out a solution. The show should be The Fresh Prince in reverse: Instead of being about a poor kid moving in with rich relatives, it should be about a rich kid who loses everything and has to move in with his poor relatives.
Sometimes you have to get outside of your environment in order to see it more clearly. Though I was disappointed when filming in Vancouver ended, I was excited to get home and make this show idea work.
60
* * *
MY NUCLEAR FAMILY
“I know we’ve been having bad luck with these pilots,” I said to Dave when I saw him next. “But what if I have an idea for a pilot? Will they take an original idea that I have?”
“Sure. Do you have one?”
“Yeah, it’s loosely based on my family.” I explained as much of the idea as I’d worked out: a wealthy, spoiled version of me is living in Malibu, but his mother passes away and his dad gets thrown in prison for a financial crime. The only other family he has lives in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia, so he has to move in with them.
“So I go there expecting my own apartment with a cook and a maid,” I concluded, “but instead I have to sleep on, like, a couch in the basement with my cousin.”
“I think there’s a show there. I wanna pair you up with a showrunner to develop the idea.”
I had no idea what a showrunner was, and I felt like the idea was already developed, but getting paired up with one sounded like a good thing. So I agreed.
A showrunner, I soon learned, is a writer who’s in charge of making the creative and production decisions on a TV show. I was introduced to Stephen Engel, who’d worked on Mad About You and other sitcoms. Through talking with him, I began to see that all I had was a premise—not a show. He filled in the world until it felt like a sitcom that could generate new episodes for decades. He gave the characters more depth and created meaningful relationships between them.
Most importantly, he gave the show a theme. Kevin Hart, as we creatively decided to name the main character, defined himself through his valuable toys—cars, watches, clothes. But his relatives in Philadelphia defined themselves by internal values. The show would be about Kevin discovering who he was and what he stood for. The big idea was that losing everything materially would ultimately make him rich spiritually.
We named the show The Big House because it worked on many levels: It was the mansion Kevin left, the prison his father was in, and the packed home overflowing with relatives that he moved into.
I loved it. Dave loved it. And soon, ABC loved it.