'The Cable Guy' Turns 20: Looking Back at Jim Carrey's Weird, Dark $20 Million Payday

Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick in ‘The Cable Guy’ (Everett)

In the mid-1990s, Jim Carrey was the biggest star in the world. His 1994 comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had been a surprise smash, and all four of the movies he’d made after that — The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Batman Forever and the Ace Ventura sequel — were $100 million hits in the U.S. So it was a surprise when his next film was a strange, dark, idiosyncratic comedy that took Carrey’s screen persona to a new, not-entirely-pleasant extreme.

By late 1995, everybody wanted Carrey’s next movie, and Sony took a nearly unprecedented step and offered him $20 million — a sum no actor had ever received up front for a single project — to star in a film called The Cable Guy. The result, when it was released 20 years ago this week, on June 14, 1996, was a film that no one had been expecting, that very few people liked, and that turned out to be a glimpse of the direction in which bigscreen comedy would go over the next two decades.

The film began when Lou Holtz Jr., a county prosecutor and the son of a famous vaudeville comic, wrote his first screenplay, what he called “a comedy about a needy cable guy you can’t get rid of.” The script found its way to the desk of producers Andy Licht and Jeff Mueller. “The perfect $3 million to $5 million independent comedy,” Licht would call it in the Los Angeles Times, and comics including Andrew Dice Clay and Chris Elliott were considered for the lead role.

But soon, Saturday Night Live star Chris Farley became attached, and Columbia Pictures bought the project, pushing it into a bigger budget range. When Farley dropped out due to a scheduling conflict, Columbia boss Mark Canton made Carrey the infamous $20 million offer (with the budget as a whole rising to $40 million), causing some rivals to predict disaster. “They’ve set something in motion that ratchets up the entire business,” an unnamed executive at 20th Century Fox told Entertainment Weekly. “They’ll self destruct the industry.”

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Carrey also had creative clout, and he persuaded Sony to hire then-29-year-old Judd Apatow to produce and rewrite the movie. (Apatow had opened for Carrey on tour during their stand-up days and had gone on to work on The Larry Sanders Show.) When Apatow’s hopes to direct the film were quashed, he sold the studio on Ben Stiller, with whom he’d worked on the short-lived Fox sketch series The Ben Stiller Show before the actor-director made a well-regarded directorial debut with the 1993 slacker comedy Reality Bites.

With Carrey eager to push into new comedy territory, they agreed to take Holtz’s original script — which Apatow would later compare to the Bill Murray vehicle What About Bob? — in a darker direction. “What I wanted to do was make a comedy that satirized the psycho thrillers like Cape Fear and Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Fatal Attraction,” Stiller told The New York Times.

The new version of the script (with reportedly heavy rewrites by Apatow, though the Writers Guild of America would later deny him credit) saw architect Steven Kovacs (eventually played by Matthew Broderick), recently dumped by his girlfriend (Leslie Mann) and befriended by Carrey’s obsessive cable installer Chip. But what initially seems to be a benign friendship becomes increasingly dangerous as Chip sabotages Steven’s relationship, his job, and his life.

On a DVD commentary recorded in 2010, Carrey said “the more money people pay me, the more I want to rebel.” With a locked-in release date and a compact production schedule (the film started shooting in December 1995 and was in theaters just six months later), the studio had little chance to soften the story, despite being reportedly “dismayed” by preview screenings. (At least Stiller and Apatow were persuaded to not kill off Carrey’s character as originally planned.)

The marketing, however, did try to sell a lighter film (“The trailer was a little ridiculous, in terms of the oom-pah-pah music,” Stiller says on the commentary). But even that couldn’t escape the long shadow cast by the star’s immense salary. “Whenever they talked about the movie, it was always in terms of the movie Jim was getting paid [so much] for,” Apatow would later recall to the A.V. Club.

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Perhaps because of that, critics were mostly hostile once the movie opened. “A grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. (Even then, though, there were some defenders: Gene Siskel called it “a major hoot” in the Chicago Tribune.) The movie’s box office wasn’t a total disaster — it opened, appropriately, to just under $20 million, eventually ending up at a just-profitable $60 million domestic — but it was barely half what Carrey’s previous hits had made.

To some extent, the film’s reputation is deserved. Carrey’s performance is abrasive even by his standards. The film is funny, but rarely in a laugh-out-loud way, and the idea of a comedic-spin on the Fatal Attraction-style yuppies-in-peril movie feels dated now that sub-genre has fallen out of favor.

And yet those who’ve called it deeply underrated, as more and more have done over the years, are also right. Stiller directs the film with real flair, and Carrey is utterly fearless and committed. It’s a rare comedy of substance, feeling both personal (“I used to watch 10 hours of television a night, my entire childhood. And I don’t think it did all good things to me,” Apatow would later say), and political, with an almost Chayefskian sense of the media’s capacity to corrupt. “Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer… you can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam,” Chip says at one point.

Stiller’s comedic sensibility wasn’t yet in the mainstream. But two years later, he’d land a smash hit as an actor thanks to There’s Something About Mary, and his next directorial feature, Zoolander, would prove to be a cult hit. A decade later, Apatow would become the biggest name in studio comedy thanks to equally personal material in films like Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and more. (His movies often costar his wife, Leslie Mann: The couple married after meeting during The Cable Guy shoot.) And the film’s dark influence can be felt in more recent, more successful comedies from Bad Santa to HBO’s Eastbound & Down.

As for Carrey, his run of back-to-back smashes had ended, but his star wasn’t too badly damaged —his biggest hits like Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty were still ahead of him. And the film stood as an interesting statement of intent for him, one that foreshadowed future, more dramatic movies like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. No wonder, then, that Carrey doesn’t seem like he would have done anything differently. “I’m still living off that $20 million,” he says on the DVD commentary. “It’s too bad that my money got in the way of all the fun.“