In compiling the stories of Chris Farley's life, we had far more than we could actually fit into a book that any publisher would be willing to publish. A complete digest of the funny things Chris did in his life would run roughly the length of Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, only with fewer baked goods and more potty jokes. Many of these "Chris stories" were funny, smart, and illuminating, yet still couldn't be fit into the larger story we were trying to tell. So, we present them to you here, much like those "deleted scenes" you're always disappointed by on special edition DVDs. Only, hopefully, these won't disappoint.

On Tommy Boy:

PETER SEGAL, director, Tommy Boy: 

I did my first HBO special with Merrill Markoe and Harry Shearer. We worked on a show called News to Us. After that, Chris Albrecht at HBO said, “You did pretty well with that. You wanna try another one?” 

“Sure,” I said.

“You know Roseanne?” 

“Yeah!” I thought he was going to give me a Roseanne HBO special. 

“Well, her husband is this guy, Tom Arnold.”

“Okay.”

Turned out the special was for him. I didn’t really know Tom at the time, but I got to sit down and meet with him and we became friends, and we’ve been friends ever since. So, Tom and Roseanne asked me to do this HBO special. I hired a young writer named Judd Apatow, and we were looking at a guy that we thought was the funniest person we had seen in a long time. I had seen him on SNL at this time, and we both thought, God, if we can get this guy in our special, in addition to Tom and Roseanne and all these other people, this is gonna be one of the funniest shows ever. 

The first time I met Chris was in the Hallmark greeting card store in Glendale. The segment that we were going to do was a combination reality / semi-scripted show about relationships. Chris was going to teach Tom how to pick up women. So we took him and a camera crew to the Glendale Galleria. We were just going to follow him around hitting on girls. Totally unscripted. 

And I distinctly remember the first time I saw Chris in the store. He had this huge scar that ran the length of his arm. Huge. I said, “What’s that scar from?” 

He said he went through a plate-glass window when he was a few years younger, on a night when he’d been drinking, and that he’d almost bled to death. 

So that was my first glimpse into the dichotomy of Chris. I knew he was this hugely funny guy, and yet I thought, wow, okay, there’s another side to him. And that scar was the window into it. 

But anyway, we went around the Galleria, and it was an embarrassment of comedy riches. We came up with about three hours’ worth of gold. Chris would say, “Pete, gimme an orange.” 

I got an orange for him and the camera crew followed him up to a pretty girl. He tucked his chin into his chest and produced about eight more chins, as he would, and acted like he was eight years old, saying, “Hi, I’m having trouble starting my orange. Can you help peel it for me?” And the girl would say okay and start peeling it for him, and then he’d start belting out some love song to her so the whole mall could hear and they’d all start staring at her. He was just fearless.

Then, about a year later, ABC gave Tom Arnold The Jackie Thomas Show. He asked me if I would produce it and direct some of the episodes. In one show we wanted to introduce Jackie’s brother, and Tom said, “Hey, let’s invite Chris to do it.” 

So we did this scene, taped, but live in front of a studio audience of about two hundred and fifty people. The set is a bar. Chris walks in and when he comes through the door he clips the wall and takes out a good six-square-foot chunk of the set. It’s just hanging on his shoulder. But instead of stopping he just played the scene in character with an eighty-pound piece of set hanging on him. He played it like that for about two minutes, and the rest of the cast was just trying to keep up. The crowd went apeshit. They were just in hysterics. Of course, we couldn’t use the take, but after that episode, I thought, my God, this guy is electric. He just has the crowd eating out of his hand. 

I noticed Tom and Roseanne kind of whisked him off after the curtain call. And I said, “Where you taking him?” 

 “Rehab.”

And they put him in a limo and took off. Then I remembered the scar on his arm and that other side of him. 

I’d now experienced Chris twice in performance, one completely unscripted, and one scripted where he’d still made it his own and played with it. He was one of the most electrifying performers I’d ever worked with. Not really understanding what made him tick or who he was, I knew that if I ever had a chance to do a feature I wanted to do it with him. 

BOB WEISS, producer, Tommy Boy: 

It must have been daunting to be partnered with Chris, given that the stuff he had to do was big and expansive, and David Spade was more of the set-up/straight man. It reminded me, actually, of when I was doing Dragnet with Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd. Hanks told me that working with Dan Aykroyd was like acting with a Buick, just this big, V8-engine of a character vrooming to life onscreen. It can be daunting to be next to that kind of fully fleshed-out power. 

LORNE MICHAELS, producer, SNL: 

When we were making movies with Chris and Spade, Chris would put on thirty pounds and David would lose thirty pounds, but no matter what, the amount of weight stayed the same. Chris would get bigger and you’d be saying, “Get Spade a banana,” because he was wasting away. 

KEVIN NEALON, cast member, SNL: 

David Spade’s goal was to be Jim Belushi. That’s why they hit it off so well.

FRED WOLF, writer, Tommy Boy: 

I was back in the hotel room working on the script, and Spade called me. He said that Farley was acting up, smashing his sandwich, and it was making it tough that day to do some filming. That was just the way they were. Dave was always making fun of Chris, and Chris always wanted to push somebody’s buttons and get the action going. That’s what he might do, rather than have the fifth double espresso. He’d step on Dave’s sandwich, provoke him a bit, and get the adrenaline going that way. It was nothing serious, but I was still upset by it. I felt like we were all in this together. We were all getting our big break on our first movie and we had to make it work, because it could have been a spectacular failure. It could have just all fallen apart. I didn’t want Chris to do anything to mess it up. This was his big break, but it was my big break, too. 

So I went down to the set. I found Chris in his trailer, and I started giving him this big lecture, really just laying into him, saying, don’t blow it. This is our chance, and you’re acting up, smashing sandwiches, or whatever. 

And Chris was going, “Yeah, Fred. You’re right… I know… It’s good that you’re telling me this… I need to stay on the straight and narrow.” 

“You can’t do this, Chris. You gotta straighten up.”

“I know. I know. This is good. Thank you for telling me.”

But I could also tell that, in spite of what he was saying, he was just getting more and more irritated that I was lecturing him. I’d been in enough fights in my life to know that I was on the verge of really setting him off. I was quickly coming to the realization that I was close to getting a major beating from a guy who could easily take me in a fight. At that moment, Skippy, Pete Segal’s assistant, this six-foot-four, 300-pound guy came in. All he did was open the trailer door and say, “Hey, five minutes ‘till they need you on set.”

And Chris yelled, “OKAY!” And he bolted out of the trailer and tackled Skippy, just threw him onto the ground, under the guise of being playful, Skippy, of course, had no idea what was going on. 

By Skippy opening the door at that exact moment, Farley saw an opportunity to vent his aggressions on the 300-pound. guy, rather than me, the 140-pound. guy. I had overreacted to the sandwich thing, and Chris was nice enough to sit there and take it and, thankfully, take it out on someone who was big enough to handle it.

TIM HERLIHY, writer, SNL: 

Chris was up in Toronto filming Tommy Boy at the same time we were filming Billy Madison, so we kind of had the run of the town. We had a lot of fun. 

Gwyneth Paltrow was up there; this was before she had become a celebrity. We were playing the Dead Game, which is where everyone goes out in the hallway except for one person, and that person finds an interesting way to be dead. Then we all come back in and find the person in this compromising situation. Sandler was on the toilet. I was in a potted plant. Gwyneth was laid out under a glass coffee table. 

Then, when it was Farley’s turn, we were walking out, and we all knew that Farley was going to be the funniest. You were just shaking your head because you knew you were about to be laughing really hard. We waited a moment and then went back in, and of course he was lying on the floor, naked, with a water bottle stuck up his ass. 

Please don’t put that in the book.

MIKE CLEARY, friend: 

Tommy Boy is really based on Chris’s life and the year that he worked for his dad. Some of those meetings he brought Chris into didn’t exactly go well. He and his dad would take a client to lunch and Chris would just say everything wrong. Chris and I talked a lot during that time because we were both living in the same apartment building downtown. He’d always call me up and say, “Eh, I’m in trouble again.” 

TODD GREEN, friend: 

Chris’s family basically paved the roads of the state of Wisconsin. I believe it started with his grandfather. They would just go out and have lunch with clients, and dinner. It was so painfully obvious that Chris wasn’t going to be able to do it, but he really gave it the college try, for his dad’s sake. He’d go out for lunch and then have to come home and take a nap. We would go into his apartment at six in the evening and he’d be all curled up, spent from his long day of going to lunch. 

PETER SEGAL: 

Because he was so used to doing one sketch and moving on, he got bored of doing Tommy Callahan as a character day after day. Some days he came in and he was doing Belushi. The exact same facial expression. I said, “Chris, you’re not doing Tommy today, you’re doing John Belushi.” 

“But I’m so bored with doing the same character every day.” 

“Chris, this is a movie. We have to be the same character until the end of the movie. Then you can change.” 

He got it, but I couldn’t use some of the takes because he had Belushi down so well. There was a moment, and it’s in the outtakes of Tommy Boy, where he’s pounding on all the cars, setting off the alarms, and then he does this one back-and-forth look, feeling proud of himself before he runs off. You can look at the scene in Animal House where Belushi looks around before he swallows up the Jell-O. It’s that same mischievous look. And I said, “Dude, that is like pound for pound the exact same thing. You can’t do that!” 

PETER SEGAL: 

We couldn’t double him with a stunt guy. There was nobody his size who was as good an athlete.  And because he was proud of his athletic ability, he wanted to do everything himself. So whether it was slamming into the wooden fence or falling through the table, there were no stunt doubles. You just see it in slow motion. There is no hesitation; he just totally commits.

In the scene where Spade whacked him with the two-by-four, the two-by-four was a prop, and there was a soft part where it was supposed to break. Spade actually hit him with the hard part, but Chris played it all in character. The bruise that he has in the next scene, that was about fifty percent his own bruise.

On Black Sheep:

PENELOPE SPHEERIS, director, Black Sheep: 

He was like an acrobat almost. It seemed like he was always two feet off the ground.  

I always had to argue with Chris about doing his own stunts. For him it was like he was only half a man if he couldn’t do his own stunts. You always had to sit down and re-explain to him the idea that if he got hurt we’d have to halt production. To which he always responded, “I’m not going to get hurt.” There was one time toward the end of the shoot where he was supposed to bump his head into a tree. I told him not to do it, but he did and he knocked himself out for a moment. When he woke up, I said, “No more stunts.”

ROBERT SMIGEL, writer, SNL: 

I wanted him to do Kingpin. I really thought that would have been a great part for him, but he was stuck with this two-picture deal that they used to make him do Black Sheep. Odenkirk and I had actually written a Super Fans movie. That would have filled his obligations and, I thought, been better for him than going right back to a Spade movie. But Saturday Night Live was tanking that year, and Paramount said they didn’t want any more SNL character movies. Plus everyone around him wanted him to be the star, and the Super Fans film was more of an ensemble.  But getting to do a Farrelly movie would’ve been the best.

TIM MATHESON, costar, Black Sheep: 

He was sober while we filmed, but absolutely the most addictive personality I’d ever seen. He smoked more cigarettes and drank more coffee than any person I’d ever met. When we were shooting, his assistant would bring him an iced coffee in between every camera setup. He would just gulp it down. During one scene I saw him do it ten times. That’s a lot of coffee. 

On Beverly Hills Ninja:

BRAD JENKEL, producer, Beverly Hills Ninja: 

Chris was sober the whole time we were working together in Chicago, and doing very well, very confident. When we would go out, everyone wanted to buy him a drink, buy him a shot, and Chris didn’t want to let anybody down. So he’d let them buy it, say thanks, and then just slide it over to me. I got hammered, but Chris was fine.

One night, we went to dinner, and we ended up at a strip joint. Chris, being the big celebrity, really tried to sit in the back, away from the crowd. You had all these naked girls onstage, and all the guys in the club had their chairs turned around looking at Chris in the back. They’d wave to him. Eventually, Chris started getting in to it, waving back, jumping up on the table, putting on a show for everyone. Every guy in the club is laughing his ass off, and the girls are getting pissed because no one’s paying any attention to them.

On Almost Heroes:

TED DONDANVILLE, friend/personal assistant:

The Hawaii relapse happened just as Chris was in L.A. to go back and do reshoots on Edwards & Hunt (Almost Heroes). It was really bad. Where before Chris had to have these sober companions on the set to hang out with him for moral support, now he had these real twenty-four-hour security guards assigned to watch his every move. But Chris was too smart even for them. He’d bribe waiters to put vodka in water bottles, stuff like that. He always found a way around it.

The reshoots themselves didn’t go well, or help the movie at all. That spring was when everyone found out that Matthew Perry also had a drug problem, with pills. It was about eight months since we’d finished the principal photography. Chris had gained over forty pounds, and Matthew Perry had lost thirty. All of a sudden you had a seventy-pound differential between your two main stars, so it was almost impossible to add new scenes. Because of that, I think Matthew Perry got largely cut out of the end of the movie. 

MICHAEL McKEAN, cast member, SNL: 

There was some shot with Chris and some other actors, and Guest told him, “Don’t turn so full front. We need you facing the other actors.” Then they did the take again, and Chris was back turned full frontal again. Guest said, “I really need you to stand in profile here.”

And Chris said, “But I don’t want to stand like that with my stomach sticking out.”

And it wasn’t really vanity. It was just that if he could control it, he’d like to look a little better. I just thought that was sort of interesting. You assume that a big guy who uses his size for laughs would be over that stuff, but maybe you never are. Here you are a thirty-year-old man who’s still a twelve-year-old boy who’s still embarrassed about how he looks, even though he’s using it as professional currency.

On Shrek:

JILLIAN SEELY, friend: 

I sat with him while he did some of the voiceovers with David Katzenberg. They had the scenes written out and little figurines made of each character. It wasn’t Cameron Diaz who was originally the princess. It was Janeane Garofalo. Katzenberg adored Chris, to the point where he would let Chris smoke in the studio, when you know that no one else was allowed to do that. I was sitting on the floor listening to Chris do the voiceovers and all those guys in the studio, Katzenberg, the writers, the sound guys, they were all like little boys holding their stomachs and laughing so hard.