That Time When Norm Macdonald Cranked the Valve and Ripped the Knob Off

This video came up on my YouTube homepage again, and I just want to put out there for posterity why it was such an incredible moment.

Let’s go back to 1984.  Mark Amin, who started his film career earlier in the decade working with the rental chain 20/20 Video, formed a company called Vidmark Entertainment to capitalize on the budding home video market, focusing first on distributing made-for-TV movies on VHS.  In 1987, Vidmark began distributing new movies to theaters, including the universally-panned 1988 slasher flick American Gothic.  I mean, Leonard Maltin gave it his lowest rating of “BOMB” and noted that “even [co-star Rod] Steiger couldn’t save this one.”  And Leonard Maltin gave Laserblast 2.5 out of 4 stars, so…

In 1988, the company began producing its own films, starting with that year’s direct-to-video Demonwarp.  A name change to Trimark Pictures came the following year, along with their first theatrical release — and Adam Sandler’s film debut — Going Overboard. Trimark quickly became known for their prolific output of comedy, horror, sci-fi, thriller, and martial arts films throughout the early 90’s.  Titles like High Stakes (with a young Sarah Michelle Gellar), Frankenstein Unbound (including stars John Hurt, Raul Julia, and Bridget Fonda; and directed by Roger Corman after a 15-year hiatus), Kickboxer 2, Charles Bronson’s final theatrical outing Death Wish V: The Face of Death, and perhaps most infamously, the Leprechaun series up through the fifth entry, at which point Trimark was bought out by Lions Gate… but we’ll get to that.

In 1995, Trimark signed prop comic Carrot Top to a three-picture deal.  Scott Thompson (his given name) had quickly risen to fame in the comedy world of the early 90’s with performances on Star Search and various other TV shows, as well as club appearances across the country.  Trimark VP Phil Goldfine reportedly believed Thompson had “the ability to become the next Jim Carrey” and “the potential to become Trimark’s tentpole.”  It was because of this that Trimark, while holding the rights to Broken Lizard’s Puddle Cruiser and Super Troopers, began work on Carrot Top’s lead-role debut first.

You have to understand that the hype behind this project was absolutely insane. Not quite the level of Star Wars: Episode I, mind you.  In fact, nothing like the hype behind Star Wars: Episode I. But that hadn’t happened yet, and so “the Carrot Top movie” — title to be announced — was what, at the time, set the new bar for being the talk of filmdom.  You could not escape it.  By the standards of that era, it was unreal how much attention this thing was getting.

Above all else, the topic of discussion was that everyone knew this was a risk.  Carrot Top is a prop comic.  And yes, he’s very funny when he’s writing his own material, which is mostly satire and self-deprecation.  But how would he do with someone else’s material?  He wasn’t an actor.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean he’d be bad at it; there are plenty of stand-up comedians who successfully transition to acting.  But he’s a prop comic.  How’s he going to do with someone else’s writing and without his most famous tools at hand?

The film was finally released in March of 1998, but it was originally scheduled for late October of 1997, hence this appearance of Courtney Thorne-Smith on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in mid-May of ’97.  She was riding high on the popularity of Melrose Place, and had somewhat surprisingly left the show to stretch her legs and make this movie, as discussed in the interview.

Norm Macdonald was there because he was a regular guest of Conan’s in those years, at the time being the wildly popular Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live.

Now, up until this point, the film wasn’t being advertised to the public.  The TV commercials hadn’t even started to run — again, the release date ended up getting pushed back, so this publicity tour that Thorne-Smith was on ended up taking place much earlier than it needed to.  In fact, this was not her first stop on that tour, and people had already begun to notice that Carrot Top, himself, was conspicuously nowhere to be found.  He may have done some promotional appearances at the time, but I don’t remember them, and if he had, they were few and far between.  It seemed apparent that Trimark was intentionally hiding him, and in Hollywood, that usually means the studio knows the movie is going to flop.

But Carrot Top is almost universally known as a genuinely nice guy.  Nobody faulted him for wanting to branch out.  In fact, most everyone hoped he could surprise the world and make it work!  But with his co-star doing the talk show circuit instead of him, and with the lack of a publicly-known name for the film even after two years of planning and production with the intended release just a few months away, it had already become clear that it was going to suck.  Just… nobody wanted to actually say it.  In an exceedingly rare show of kindness and compassion in the entertainment industry, nobody wanted to be the one to hurt his feelings and come out to say, before anyone had even seen it, “hey, that Carrot Top movie?  It’s gonna bomb.”  Everyone knew it, but nobody wanted to be the bad guy.

Nobody except Norm Macdonald, legendary truth-teller. The man was later fired from SNL because Don Ohlmeyer — NBC Vice President for West Coast Programming, so he didn’t even have this authority — was friends with O.J. Simpson, so he ordered Lorne Michaels to fire Norm for all the O.J. jokes. Jokes that were proven to be ENTIRELY justified when the family of Ron Goldman won a civil suit; in which Simpson was found to be liable for the deaths of Goldman and Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Because, yes, literally everyone knew that O.J. murdered Nicole and Ron, and nobody made it so absurdly clear, based merely on what was happening in the criminal trial, than Norm Macdonald. He had the most brilliant, scathing, relentless way of driving home an obvious reality that the rest of the media, for fear of lawsuits, didn’t want to acknowledge.

I think you can see where this is going.

Watch now as Norm hijacks the interview and says what literally everyone was thinking.

Just listen to that RIOTOUS laughter.  It’s not that funny of a joke, it’s elementary school wordplay.  That’s nearly two full years of stress over not attacking this poor guy’s starring debut, being let out all at once.  Norm opened the fire hydrant full blast and walked away.  From that point forward, everyone was free to say it.  It was liberation.  It was that moment when we were finally allowed to ask “who in the hell thought it was a good idea to make Carrot Top a leading man?!”

(Phil Goldfine, apparently.)

And yes, in line with literally everyone’s prediction, Chairman of the Board bombed.  BADLY. On a budget of what was, even for that time, a low $7 Million, it took in a mere $306,715 at the box office.

Not three million.

Three.  Hundred.  Thousand.

It was panned by nearly everyone for being formulaic, Carrot Top’s weaknesses away from his prop comedy act were on full display, and both he and Raquel Welch — yeah, this thing had the legendary Raquel Welch in it! — got Razzies out of it.

It currently has an 11% rating on the Tomatometer with 9 reviews and a 20% rating on the Popcornmeter with over 2,500 ratings.  Two of those professional reviews are from the web site Film Threat, which reviewed the movie twice; once in 2002 and again in 2005.  Both times, they rated it 0.5 out of 5.  Only one professional review included in Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregation is positive, written by Brian Webster of Apollo Guide in 2000, who gave it a stunning 71 out of 100.  His contemporary, Madeleine Williams of Cinematter, gave it zero out of four.

Former MST3K host and current RiffTrax star Mike Nelson has ranked it, in his opinion, as the fifth worst comedy ever made.

Hell, even Laserblast-loving Leonard Maltin didn’t hold back.

And make no mistake about this: it wasn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Norm Macdonald didn’t curse the movie’s success.  It is genuinely that bad.

Courtney Thorne-Smith herself has stated multiple times over that she didn’t really have much faith in it.  She told Vanity Fair in 2021 that she didn’t want to be doing promotion for it, that she knew it wasn’t going to win anyone an Oscar, and that when Norm started in, she was actually happy, because she didn’t know what she was going to say about it, and that moment has become one of the highest points of her entire life.

And to Norm’s credit, he later apologized to Carrot Top, admitting that he felt badly about the whole thing when he realized he’d basically just trashed the poor guy’s entire future in the feature film business.  Which, again, to be clear, would have happened anyway.  But as Norm was wont to do, he ran point on saying it out loud, and he understood that he had been rather mean.

After the bath that Trimark Pictures took on Chairman, there really was no recovering.  Their days as a production company, at least in terms of making major, theatrical-release motion pictures, were pretty much over.  They continued on as a distribution company for a few years — even scoring quite a get with the independently produced and unnecessarily controversial transgender- and lesbian-positive romantic comedy Better Than Chocolate in 1999.

But even that couldn’t last.  In the last two years, between 2000 and 2001, only six of the 25 films they were involved with were theatrical releases.  The rest were direct to video or made for TV, including 2000’s Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, known for being the teen slasher parody that wasn’t even as good as Scary Movie (which had come out in theaters three months earlier).

So, in June of 2000, Lions Gate Entertainment bought Trimark for $50 Million, taking on the acquired company’s $36 Million in debt.

So what ever became of Trimark founder Mark Amin?  Well, as a result of the sale, he became the largest shareholder and vice chairman of Lions Gate.  He helped the company grow from $184 Million in revenue to $1.2 Billion, and among their cinematic successes under his leadership are Halle Berry’s triumph Monster’s Ball and the all-star 2004 Crash. He also has his own separate production company, Sobini Films, which produced the 2003 Sundance award-winning Streets of Legend. He’s also involved with a variety of other businesses and investments.

It’s probably safe to say that Trimark’s downfall was not exactly his fault.  Sure, Phil Goldfine answered to him.  But everything I can find indicates that the decisions to sign Carrot Top and make Chairman of the Board were Goldfine’s.  Maybe Amin was letting Goldfine take the fall.  Maybe he was just letting Goldfine operate autonomously under delegated authority.  I don’t know.  I don’t really care, either.  All I can say is, given the success that Amin had before and after that ordeal, it doesn’t seem to have been his doing.

And as for Carrot Top?  He actually weathered the storm pretty well.  He had to lay low for a while, but when he came back, he came back in full force.  He continued touring.  He was THE face of 1-800-CALL-ATT in the early 2000’s (remember collect calling?).  He’s been on numerous TV shows, including as a guest judge on Last Comic Standing in 2008.  He was in the music video for Toby Keith’s song “Red Solo Cup” and later appeared with Keith onstage to perform the song at the 2011 ACM Awards.  He continues to have a residency at the Luxor Las Vegas dating back to 2005.

He’s doing just fine.

He didn’t deserve what happened in 1997 and 1998.  He just wasn’t the right guy for that job, and he wasn’t ready for it yet even if he had been.  Even he will tell you that.  He apparently was overplaying early in the shoot and had to ask why everyone else except him was getting laughs when watching the dailies.  He didn’t know how to play subtle or straight.  The whole thing was a learning experience for him, and it showed.

And if not for Norm Macdonald going just a little too far one night, we might not have been allowed to say it until the movie actually came out.