Culture
Thirty years ago, Chris Farley and college basketball collided in an unforgettable way
Thirty years later, Christian Laettner isn’t sure he knew it was coming. In 1994, he was in the NBA, his second season with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Maybe someone had informed his agent but he doesn’t think so.
The former Duke star just one day remembers seeing the commercial on ESPN. Chris Farley, then at the height of his “Saturday Night Live” glory, dressed in Laettner’s No. 32 jersey, recreating his buzzer-beating shot against Kentucky, a signature moment in NCAA Tournament history.
“All I know is that all of a sudden it was out and it was hilarious and it was awesome,” Laettner told The Athletic.
Farley did three spots that aired on ESPN, all promoting college basketball, all remembered for the physical comedy and shenanigans that made Farley so beloved and famous.
In one spot, Farley was Michigan’s Rumeal Robinson, standing at the foul line, needing to sink two free throws to win the 1989 national championship. “And he makes it look … ” Farley says, before firing and missing, not once, not twice but six times, yelling out in famed Farley frustration (“GET IN THERE!”) after each brick.
In another, he’s North Carolina’s Michael Jordan in the 1982 title game, but instead of sinking the winning jumper from the wing, Farley decides to take a step-back 3 (he was ahead of his time on this), correctly pointing out in the end that college basketball did not have a 3-point line at the time.
But it’s the Laettner ad that’s so fantastic, so funny, so Farley.
“OK, I’m Christian Laettner,” the comedian begins, wearing a tight Duke uniform. “1992. Duke-Kentucky. Kentucky’s up by one, Christian’s got the ball. Two seconds left.”
Farley turns and faces five Kentucky defenders, life-sized cutouts made from plywood. He dribbles and shoots a turnaround jumper, just as Laettner did that memorable afternoon in Philadelphia in the East Regional final.
Nope.
“Off the glass!”
“Gets his own rebound!”
Miss.
“Loose ball!”
Farley dives and knocks over a Kentucky cutout. Finally, he banks in a layup and raises his arms in celebration.
“Duke wins! Game of the century,” Farley yells. “And that’s the way it happened! … Well, almost.”
Actually, this is how it happened.
In 1993, Glenn Cole worked at Wieden+Kennedy, an ambitious advertising firm based in Portland, Ore. Although it’s a global agency today, Wieden+Kennedy back then devoted a bulk of its resources to one client, Nike. It was known for “Bo Knows” and for Mars Blackmon telling Jordan, “Money, it’s gotta be the shoes.”
A copy writer, Cole, 24, was the youngest at the firm. A former sprinter at the University of Oregon, he loved the creativity and story-telling advertising provided, especially at Wieden+Kennedy. He described himself in that environment as an “idiot who was an intern half a minute ago.” But his superiors thought enough of him to assign him an ESPN campaign that came with a simple task.
Promote college basketball.
“Got the keys to this kind of cool car. Nobody’s looking at it,” said Cole, referring to all the attention the firm gave to Nike. “I have an ESPN basketball campaign. I watch a lot of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ And I was obsessed with Chris Farley.”
Cole had an idea. A common basketball moment — playing solo on a playground. Tie game. Clock winds down. 3 … 2 … 1.
Yet the shot seldom drops. The countdown resets. No game-winning heroics, only an asphalt do-over.
“And so I thought that’d be funny to kind of screw with that trope,” Cole said. “And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, Chris would be the perfect person to do that.’”
Approaching 30, Farley was a rising star. The New York Daily News had called him the breakout performer of SNL’s latest season, one who had brought the same sort of “volcanic, magnetic energy” as Eddie Murphy and John Belushi before him. His talent and comedy had started to transfer to the big screen. “Tommy Boy,” which starred Farley and David Spade, would open in 1995.
Even better in this case: Farley was a sports fan. Growing up in Madison, Wis., he had played hockey and football. At Marquette, he had played club rugby. At SNL, he played pickup hoops with cast mates at 76th Street Basketball Court at Riverside Park.
“Chris was a gifted physical comedian,” said Doug Robinson, Farley’s agent. “And a lot of people don’t know that Chris really was a tremendous athlete. He moved really well. He loved sports. So if Chris was going to do physical comedy, he was going to commit to whatever it is that he did.”
Cole flew to Los Angeles to pitch the concept to Farley. ESPN asked if he had a back-up plan in case Farley declined. “Of course,” Cole said.
Actually, he did not.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is a long shot,’” said Beth Barrett, a producer on the campaign. “It was back in the time when it wasn’t as common as it is now for celebrities and celebrity athletes and comedians and musicians to sell out to commercials. It was almost like a bad thing to be in a commercial.”
Cole met Farley in Farley’s hotel suite. Farley wore a tweed suit, disheveled by design. Cole pitched his vision, and Farley grasped it immediately. The comedian got off the couch and started acting out the Laettner spot. He knocked over a vase, which made Cole instantly realize: “Oh, I have to get something for you to knock over.”
“Yeah, this sounds like a lot of fun,” Cole remembers Farley saying. “Let’s do it.”
The spots were shot days later at a Los Angeles studio. Today, a celebrity likely would show up with an entourage of sorts. But back then, Larry Frey, the creative director on the campaign, recalls Farley’s manager arriving early and Farley pulling up later by himself. Spade dropped in around lunchtime.
“He was literally like a 10-year-old kid, and they just called recess,” Frey said. “Full of energy. Like, ‘Hey, guys! I’m probably going to screw it up today.‘ Super self-deprecating. Super enthusiastic. And just winging it.”
They shot the Michigan and North Carolina spots first, mostly because Cole knew what Farley had planned for Laettner and did not want to risk his star getting hurt.
(In addition to the ads, Farley also shot a series of promos that never aired. In the one below, Farley holds two stuffed animals and pantomimes a conversation about an upcoming rivalry game. Of course, the mascots soon attack each other, and then Farley, and the promo ends with a trademark Farley outburst.)
For the Laettner spot, Cole provided simple instructions.
“Look, I’m going to put you at the 3-point line,” he recalled telling Farley. “We’re going to start this play the way everybody remembers it in our collective memory. And then look, man, try and make the shot, but if you don’t, just hurry up and try to finish the play and surprise me.”
Farley, unleashed.
Farley at his best.
He barreled through cutouts of former Kentucky standouts Deron Feldhaus, John Pelphrey and Travis Ford, knocking them to the floor.
“A whirlwind,” Barrett said.
Good ideas don’t always translate. Cole knew instantly this one did.
“In every single one of them, right after the first take of every spot — all three — I was like, ‘Ah, f—, this is going to be incredible,’” he said.
In “The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts,” authors Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby describe this period as the highpoint of Farley’s life.
The comedian had battled drug and alcohol addiction, but after a trip to an Alabama rehab facility, he was trying to stay clean. Farley was confident and self-assured, the authors wrote, but it ultimately was a losing battle. In 1997, Farley died of an overdose at age 33.
When Cole and Barrett look back on that day in Los Angeles, the experience stands out as much as the finished product. Farley had performed as usual on camera. (After every take, he’d ask: “Was that funny?”) But he was also personable and engaging the entire eight hours he was there.
“We’d go hang out in the green room between set-ups and he asked questions and was interested in other people,” Barrett said. “And just (be) kind of a goof. It was just one of those experiences that was pretty rare in advertising where you actually really got to know somebody by the end of the day. It was pretty great.”
Farley and Cole had connected so well, riffing back and forth, exchanging ideas, Farley had asked him if he had interest in writing for him at SNL. Cole panicked, thinking, “What if I can’t jam out great stuff every week?” It was an incredible offer, but Cole loved what he was doing. He declined.
“That was my third project in advertising as I recall, but it was the first one where I felt like I was collaborating with somebody to make something better than I or he could make independently,” said Cole, who today is co-founder and chairman at 72andSunny, a global ad agency.
A year or two after the commercials aired, Laettner walked on a jetway, about to board a plane. He does not remember which airport or where he was headed, but as soon as he boarded he spotted a familiar face sitting in first class. It was Farley.
Like most celebrities, Farley was looking down, trying not to get noticed, but he made eye contact with Laettner. Farley stood, and the basketball star and comedian embraced and shared a laugh.
“Awesome commercial,” Laettner told him.
Chris Farley and Glenn Cole, backstage at the college basketball commercial shoot. (Courtesy of Glenn Cole)
(Top illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos and videos courtesy of Glenn Cole)
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
Ever since the mad scientist Frankenstein cried, “It’s alive!” in the 1931 classic film directed by James Whale, pop culture has never been the same.
Few works of fiction have inspired more adaptations, re-imaginings, parodies and riffs than Mary Shelley’s tragic 1818 Gothic novel, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” the tale of Victor Frankenstein, who, in his crazed quest to create life, builds a grotesque creature that he rejects immediately.
The story was first borrowed for the screen in 1910 — in a single-reel silent — and has directly or indirectly spawned hundreds of movies and TV shows in many genres. Each one, including Guillermo del Toro’s new “Frankenstein,” streaming on Netflix, comes with the same unspoken agreement: that we collectively share a core understanding of the legend.
Here’s a look at the many ways the central themes that Shelley explored, as she provocatively plumbed the human condition, have been examined and repurposed time and again onscreen.
“I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”— Victor Frankenstein, Chapter 3
The Mad-Scientist Creator
Shelley was profuse in her descriptions of the scientist’s relentless mind-set as he pursued his creation, his fixation on generating life blinding him to all the ramifications.
Sound familiar? Perhaps no single line in cinema has distilled this point better than in the 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” when Dr. Ian Malcolm tells John Hammond, the eccentric C.E.O. with a God complex, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Among the beloved interpretations that offer a maniacal, morally muddled scientist is “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), the first in the Hammer series.
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh, is generally considered the most straightforward adaptation of the book.
More inventive variations include the flamboyant Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who creates a “perfect man” in the 1975 camp favorite “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
In Alex Garland’s 2015 thriller, “Ex Machina,” a reclusive, self-obsessed C.E.O. builds a bevy of female-like humanoids.
And in the 1985 horror comedy “Re-Animator,” a medical student develops a substance that revives dead tissue.
Then there are the 1971 Italian gothic “Lady Frankenstein” and the 2023 thriller “Birth/Rebirth,” in which the madman is in fact a madwoman.
“With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”— Victor Frankenstein, Chapter 5
The Moment of Reanimation
Shelley is surprisingly vague about how her scientist actually accomplishes his task, leaving remarkable room for interpretation. In a conversation with The New York Times, del Toro explained that he had embraced this ambiguity as an opportunity for imagination, saying, “I wanted to detail every anatomical step I could in how he put the creature together.”
Filmmakers have reimagined reanimation again and again. See Mel Brooks’s affectionate 1974 spoof, “Young Frankenstein,” which stages that groundbreaking scene from Whale’s first movie in greater detail.
Other memorable Frankensteinian resurrections include the 1987 sci-fi action movie “RoboCop,” when a murdered police officer is rebooted as a computerized cyborg law enforcer.
In the 2012 Tim Burton animated “Frankenweenie,” a young scientist revives his beloved dog by harnessing lighting.
And in the 2019 psychologically bleak thriller “Depraved,” an Army surgeon, grappling with trauma, pieces together a bundle of body parts known as Adam.
“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”— The creature, Chapter 15
The Wretched Creature
In Shelley’s telling, the creature has yellow skin, flowing black hair, white teeth and watery eyes, and speaks eloquently, but is otherwise unimaginably repulsive, allowing us to fill in the blanks. Del Toro envisions an articulate, otherworldly being with no stitches, almost like a stone sculpture.
It was Whale’s 1931 “Frankenstein” — based on a 1927 play by Peggy Webling — and his 1935 “Bride of Frankenstein” that have perhaps shaped the story’s legacy more than the novel. Only loosely tethered to the original text, these films introduced the imagery that continues to prevail: a lumbering monster with a block head and neck bolts, talking like a caveman.
In Tim Burton’s 1990 modern fairy tale “Edward Scissorhands,” a tender humanoid remains unfinished when its creator dies, leaving it with scissor-bladed prototypes for hands.
In David Cronenberg’s 1986 body horror, “The Fly,” a scientist deteriorates slowly into a grotesque insectlike monster after his experiment goes wrong.
In the 1973 blaxploitation “Blackenstein,” a Vietnam veteran who lost his limbs gets new ones surgically attached in a procedure that is sabotaged.
Conversely, in some films, the mad scientist’s experiment results in a thing of beauty: as in “Ex Machina” and Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 thriller, “The Skin I Live In,” in which an obsessive plastic surgeon keeps a beautiful woman imprisoned in his home.
And in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 sci-fi dramedy, “Poor Things,” a Victorian-era woman is brought back to life after her brain is swapped with that of a fetus.
“I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth.”— The creature, Chapter 15
The All-Consuming Isolation
The creature in “Frankenstein” has become practically synonymous with the concept of isolation: a beast so tortured by its own existence, so ghastly it repels any chance of connection, that it’s hopelessly adrift and alone.
What’s easily forgotten in Shelley’s tale is that Victor is also destroyed by profound isolation, though his is a prison of his own making. Unlike most takes on the story, there is no Igor-like sidekick present for the monster’s creation. Victor works in seclusion and protects his horrible secret, making him complicit in the demise of everyone he loves.
The theme of the creator or the creation wallowing in isolation, physically and emotionally, is present across adaptations. In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 adventure, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” a family adopts, then abandons a sentient humanoid robot boy programmed to love.
In the 2003 psychological horror “May,” a lonely woman with a lazy eye who was ostracized growing up resolves to make her own friend, literally.
And in the 1995 Japanese animated cyberpunk “Ghost in the Shell,” a first-of-its-kind cyborg with a human soul struggles with its place amid humanity.
“Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?”— The creature, Chapter 20
The Desperate Need for Companionship
In concert with themes of isolation, the creators and creations contend with the idea of companionship in most “Frankenstein”-related tales — whether romantic, familial or societal.
In the novel, Victor’s family and his love interest, Elizabeth, are desperate for him to return from his experiments and rejoin their lives. When the creature demands a romantic partner and Victor reneges, the creature escalates a vengeful rampage.
That subplot is the basis for Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein,” which does offer a partner, though there is no happily ever after for either.
Sometimes the monster finds love with a human, as in “Edward Scissorhands” or the 2024 horror romance “Lisa Frankenstein,” in which a woman falls for a reanimated 19th-century corpse.
In plenty of other adaptations, the mission is to restore a companion who once was. In the 1990 black comedy “Frankenhooker,” a science whiz uses the body parts of streetwalkers to bring back his fiancée, also Elizabeth, after she is chewed up by a lawn mower.
In John Hughes’s 1985 comedy, “Weird Science,” a couple of nerdy teenage boys watch Whale’s 1931 classic and decide to create a beautiful woman to elevate their social standing.
While the plot can skew sexual — as with “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Ex Machina” and “Frankenhooker” — it can also skew poignant. In the 1991 sci-fi action blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” a fatherlike bond forms between a troubled teenage boy and the cyborg sent to protect him.
Or the creature may be part of a wholesome, albeit freakish, family, most famously in the hit 1960s shows “The Addams Family,” with Lurch as the family’s block-headed butler, and “The Munsters,” with Herman Munster as a nearly identical replica of Whale’s creature.
In Shelley’s novel, the creature devotes itself to secretly observing the blind man and his family as they bond over music and stories. While sitcom families like the Munsters and the Addamses may seem silly by comparison, it’s a life that Shelley’s creature could only have dreamed of — and in fact did.
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