WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Oct. 1, 2000 — Tim Meadows knows the history.
He knows that for every “Wayne’s World,” there’s an “It’s Pat,” and recent attempts to parlay other “Saturday Night Live” characters to the big screen (“A Night at the Roxbury,” “Superstar”) have only furthered the idea that you can’t stretch a three-minute sketch into a 90-minute feature.
But the show’s veteran member — who left last season for “The Michael Richards Show” on NBC — won’t let it deter him from taking his own turn. Meadows takes to the screen what is arguably his best-known character: an Afro-sporting, lisping, bell-bottomed radio personality named Leon Phelps, aka “The Ladies Man.”
When one too many shocking on-air comments land Leon and his producer, Julie (Karyn Parsons), without a job, things look dim for The Ladies Man until a mysterious letter from “Sweet Thing,” who is apparently quite wealthy, begs him to return to her. Leon plots to find “Sweet Thing” and use the money to buy his own radio station. Trouble is, his little black book is a virtual phone book of names, and some angry husbands of Leon’s conquests are out there looking for him as well.
Hollywood.com recently asked Meadows to dispense his own advice, where the real “ladies man” lives and how he got Julianne Moore in the movie.
Have you or would you follow any of Leon’s advice?
Tim Meadows: [There’s] none that I could use. It would all result in me being in prison, probably. I think maybe the end of the movie is stuff I could use … but in meeting women or seducing women, I don’t think there’s anything Leon could teach me.
Then what’s your best advice when it comes to women?
Meadows: In my experience with women that I’ve dated and my wife now, is you have to know what they care about. And even if you aren’t a huge fan of it, you still have to have interest in it and it has to be genuine because women do it for men all the time. My wife didn’t even know basketball existed before she met me, and she became a huge Bulls fan. … I never watched ballet and never cared about opera. I started going to those things because she wanted to see it.
Is it true that “The Ladies Man” is based on a real guy — stuck in the 1970s and everything?
Meadows: It wasn’t just one guy; it was a bunch of people that I saw. These guys were very success
ful with women. I didn’t understand it. I had no idea how these dudes, they drove around in a Riviera that was being redone and … you think it’s gonna be painted but it would never be painted? These guys would always have women and women liked them. For me as a teenager, I couldn’t understand it.
Julianne Moore turns up in a surprise cameo as a girl in a clown suit Leon gets with. How did that happen?
Meadows: She was the first host to come on our show and ask to be on [“The Ladies Man”] sketch. So she was a fan of the character … when she was there she told us when she was in Boston in college she used to work in a bar where these guys existed. So she knew these dudes. We named the character Julie after her when we were writing the script because we just loved her.
When we started casting, we sent her the script and asked her if she wanted to do anything in the movie and we’d be honored to have her. And she picked the clown scene. … She said, “I want to do something different. I want to be one of the girls that he scores with.” So I was like [sarcastically] “NO! … [of course] I’ll make out with you.”
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When did you decide to leave “Saturday Night Live” and had you thought about leaving before?
Meadows: I had thought about leaving the year [Adam] Sandler [left]. … They wanted to fire everybody during that year, and they wanted me to come back as a writer. And I didn’t want to do that because that was like a demotion in front of the world. So I thought I’d try to get another job somewhere else, and then they brought me back. … At the beginning of [last] season I was tired [from] doing the movie, doing the show and I thought, “This is it for me. I can’t just keep writing three-minute sketches.”
Has it been a struggle, being one of the few African-American cast members on the show?
Meadows: You get a lot of Johnnie Cochran roles … those kind of things fall to you naturally becau
se of the color of your skin. You have to give them what they want. Yeah, I was a black actor on the show and Johnnie Cochran came, but I had to learn how to do Johnnie Cochran, make it funny. And the other thing is, it made me become a better writer because I wasn’t being written for. And I think that happens for women on the show, too. They come into the show just being actresses, and they need to show being writer/producers. You can complain about it, but you can also take advantage of it.
Now that the movie’s finished and you’re not on the show anymore, do you miss Leon?
Meadows: [You know,] the last time I did the character, I hadn’t done it for months and we shot a promotional thing for Comedy Central. And I couldn’t stop doing it because I hadn’t done it for so long. It was like my old friend was visiting me.
“The Ladies Man” opens Oct. 13.
