Released 30 years ago this month, Tommy Boy is one of the most iconic ‘90s comedies and an all-time great comedy filled with one ridiculous and hilarious scene after another. As strange as it may sound, a lot of those moments came from real-life events. And better yet, a lot of those ideas came about when the Chris Farley and David Spade classic was on the verge of almost not happening.
Ahead of the Tommy Boy 30th anniversary, I sat down for a chat with director Peter Segal. During our conversation, he opened up about how shooting around Farley and Spade’s Saturday Night Live schedule was initially something that almost led to him quitting before he and screenwriter Fred Wolfe took a step back and retooled everything. As Segal put it, they started over and pulled from their memories to create what would end up being some of the movie’s best moments.
Ahead of the Tommy Boy 30th anniversary, I sat down for a chat with director Peter Segal. During our conversation, he opened up about how shooting around Farley and Spade’s Saturday Night Live schedule was initially something that almost led to him quitting before he and screenwriter Fred Wolfe took a step back and retooled everything. As Segal put it, they started over and pulled from their memories to create what would end up being some of the movie’s best moments.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Is there another little like gem from the movie that you do think that like kind of that you go back to all these years or kind of you wish people would recognize more?
00:09Well, you know, a lot of the the things that happened in the story came from stuff that happened to either myself or Fred Wolf, the writer, because when we sat down, I had, you know, tried to quit the movie because we had, you know, passed the time that we were supposed to make it in between the two SNL seasons.
00:29Now we were going to be competing with SNL, so we didn't really have a script.
00:34And so I knew that I wanted to take the story in a slightly different direction than was originally written.
00:40And and that would involve a road trip.
00:43So I had just tried to fill my wife's car up with gas at the gas station.
00:50I didn't park close enough to the pump. I backed up and I hyperextended the door and couldn't close it.
00:56And so we wrote that down on a on an index card, Fred.
00:59And I was like, that might be something. And then he said, yeah, the other day I was driving not the other day, a while back.
01:05And my hood flew up on the freeway because I left an oil can under and you can't latch the hood.
01:11And I said, yeah, that might be something. We wrote that down.
01:15And then I was, you know, I went to high school in Arizona and learned to sail on a boat in McCormick Ranch Lake.
01:22And I was on a date and it was a dead calm.
01:26And some kids started heckling me from the shore.
01:30Oh, this might be it. We knew we wanted to get, you know, a Farley screaming moment in because that's what he was kind of known for.
01:37And so here's an opportunity. So it was like little things like that.
01:40We would just start peppering in from our own lives.
01:44And then that guy in a little coat was something, you know, Farley would do at the SNL offices.
01:49So then we started taking some of their life from, you know, from work and combine that as well.
01:57And piece by piece, you know, we came up with this story.
02:00And piece by piece, you know, we came up with this story.