Feature: 3 Wild and Crazy Guys

The Millennium Biltmore Hotel, with its peach marble floors, gilt ceilings, ornate rugs, and statuary, is one of Hollywood's most well preserved and evocative landmarks. Classic black-and-white photographs of entertainment luminaries attending the Academy Awards and other historic functions at the Biltmore in the 30's and 40's are proudly displayed along its regal main hall. The hotel has since been a haven for heads of state and celebrity icons of all kinds. Even the Beatles managed a secret respite here during their first U.S. tour, in 1964.

Into this elegant locus of cinematic history stride three tall, nattily dressed filmmakers who dreamed up a scenario wherein the evil clown doll from Poltergeist gets strangled and sodomized by a vengeful elongated penis.

Yes, the Wayans brothers have arrived.

Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans have become one of the movies' most reliable comedy teams. Only the Farrellys have done more with sperm, dildos and defecation. Scary Movie 2 and White Chicks accumulated $140 million collectively. Keenan's influential sketch comedy series In Living Color was a benchmark for both the stretching of boundaries and the exposure of black performers on TV (it also launched an unknown talent named James Carrey). And his blaxploitation parody I'm Gonna Git You Sucka laid the groundwork for the silly, profane, mock-the-hottest-genre approach developed further in Shawn and Marlon's Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and the first Scary Movie films.

Today, the Wayans brothers have brought their current feature production, Little Man, to a high-ceilinged Biltmore lobby called Rendezvous Court, which is dressed to look like a fancy restaurant for a quiet dinner scene. Cowriter-director Keenen, 48, and cowriter-stars Shawn, 35, and Marlon, 33, are in the last week of filming their story of a well-meaning Chicago couple (Shawn and Ray's Kerry Washington) who take in the toddler they find abandoned on their doorstep. What they don't realize is that the youngster is actually a hardened Jewel thief of extremely tiny stature (Marlon) who is trying to recover the Queen Diamond, which he and his on-the-lam ex-convict partner (Tracy Morgan) dumped in the wife's purse.

“All the fun scenes are Marlon trying to take advantage of being the baby,” Keenen says of the typically outrageous set pieces euphemistically referred to as the breast-feeding scene,” “the kissing scene,” and “the thermometer scene.” “Its all the liberties that women gave a baby that they would never give a grown man.”

The central Gimmick of the movie, which is due out July 5, turns the six feet two inch Marlon into a little person only two feet six inches high. It requires more than 1,000 effects shots using a technique called 2-D split composite. After Linden Porco, a white nine-year old little person in body paint, performs the scene with other actors, Marlon sits in a swivel chair and, using only his face and head, precisely mimics Linden's movements against a greenscreen. Marlon's head is then digitally grafted onto Linden's neck in each frame. “I don't think that anybody else could do this,” Keenen marvels of Marlon's 10-12-hour sessions in front of the greenscreen.

The brothers “have the spirit and the imagination of kids,” says Washington, who got her first taste of Wayans madness when security kicked the boisterous cast out of a hotel conference room in Vancouver during an early script read-through. “They have no edit buttons. It's where their genius is. There is no filter.”

That unexpurgated Wayans experience is about to diversify-into a comic book (Super Bad James Dynamite, which Marlon has just finished writing), a series of joke books (101 Ways to Know You're a Golddigger, Know Your'e Having a Ghetto Christmas, etc), and three animated after-school specials for Nickelodeon. Meanwhile, 45-year-old brother Damon (The Last Boy Scout, TV's My Wife and Kids) wrote, directed, and costarred with Marlon in Behind the Smil, a low-budget dramatic exploration of the dark side of the comedy world, which premiered at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in March. “We're just branding the company right now,” says Marlon. “We're taking Wayans Bros. And putting it in all the media where there's a [comedy] void.”

Before the brothers became their own cottage industry, they did time on such TV series as Hill Street Blues, Benson, MacGyver, and Hangin' With Mr. Cooper. “[Keenen] has the worst stories,” says Marlon, “and he made it better for us.” Says Keenen, “My best worst story was this TV pilot that I did at a time when they didn't know how to light black people. I would stand there, and I would see the DP and the director whispering to each other, and they'd keep looking over at me. Then the makeup lady would squirt baby oil in her hand and slather me down. So when the thing finally came on, I'm just this black thing in the background, just glowing!” Laughs

Shawn. “You were a fire hazard!”

As they riff and reminisce about the Wayans oeuvre, the key to both the brothers' creative partnership and their commercial success becomes obvious: At any given time, at least one of them is laughing.

IM GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA (1988)
Keenen: That was such a great experience for me. I got a chance to work with guys that I had grown up admiring. Just them being open to making fun of themselves was a joy. To see a guy like Jim Brown, who's a really serious cat, just let it all hang out and be funny like that. It was hard and it was a great lesson, because I had never directed anything before, but it was so much fun.
Marlon: And for us as kids to watch that was great. Me and Shawn were on the set. It was like a big game to us. We were the “executive extras.”

IN LIVING COLOR (1990-94)
Keenen: We don't isolate any individual group. That was always the rule: If we're gonna make fun, everybody's getting it. Back in the day, people got upset because In Living Color was the first time that black celebrities have ever been lampooned. It was so sensitive.
Shawn: That's fightin' words! So there were a lot of bruised egos. But over time, once people realized you weren't just making fun of them-that this week it was Spike Lee and next week it was Arsenio-once they realized that that's what the show was and they put it in the context of Saturday Night Live, then it became hip to be parodied.
Shawn: Nor was the fact that Spike Lee was looking for Keenan scary. [laughs]
Keenen: Without Richard Pryor there is no In Living Color, so everybody passes the torch onto somebody else. I owe everything to him being that trailblazer. He was the first black comic to really be brazen and unafraid to tell his truth. He laid the groundwork for me and Eddie Murphy and all the guys of our generation. Then we were able to take it one step further.