A Dream Comes True

Craig Ferguson, best known to fans of “The Drew Carey Show” as the comic’s unctuous boss Mr. Wick, doesn’t have the biggest trailer on the Warner Bros. lot where the ABC sitcom shoots. In fact, it’s pretty small and nondescript.

The cramped quarters haven’t hindered him creatively, however, although his most productive work hasn’t been for the TV show.

“I’ve written four movies here,” Ferguson says proudly. “Two of them have been made. Another one was a commission from Paramount and the other one, I hope to make this year.”

First out of the starting gate is “The Big Tease,” a quirky little comedy that opens today. Ferguson plays ace gay Scottish hairdresser Crawford Mackenzie, who departs Glasgow for Los Angeles mistakenly thinking he’s received an invitation from the World Freestyle Championship to compete for the prestigious Platinum Scissors Award.

With a British documentary crew in tow, he arrives in La-La Land to be informed he was merely invited as a guest to observe. MacKenzie, though, is determined to participate in the contest. With help of a powerful Hollywood publicist (Frances Fisher), MacKenzie gets his chance to tease, comb and mousse his way to the top.

Ferguson, who speaks with a thick Scottish brogue, came to America five years ago because he was bored with his career in England. But the main reason is that he wanted to be a movie star.

“I think I felt it was time for a change,” he says. “I can’t explain it. My whole life I have wanted to make pictures in Hollywood and realizing that I was 32, I knew I had to get on and do it.”

The actor had tried more traditional jobs in his native Scotland, but always wound up getting fired. He began to realize that “show business is very forgiving of certain modes of behavior. At that time when I was a young man, I was a big drinker and drug-taker. I don’t do anything like that now. I was drawn to the kind of shininess of show business.”

After doing theater in Scotland, he moved to London and found employment in TV and the theater. When he came to Los Angeles in 1995, Ferguson landed a role on the short-lived Marie Osmond sitcom, “Maybe This Time.” After that series went off the air, Ferguson says that’s when the “schlepping began,” when he knocked on doors for nearly a year before landing the role of Mr. Wick on “Drew Carey.”

During his downtime while filming the series, instead of playing cards or surfing the Net, Ferguson decided to try his hand writing a screenplay.

He actually had come up with the character of Crawford MacKenzie before the movie. Ferguson concocted the character to see if he could make his friend and the film’s co-writer, Sacha Gervasi, laugh.

“We love movies and we decided to write a movie only if it made us laugh,” he says. “We wouldn’t be trying to sell it or make it. It was only a way to make us laugh as an exercise.”

After completing the script, they at first had no intention of sending it out. But Ferguson gave the script to his manager, and Gervasi showed it to his then-agent. “They were very enthusiastic about the script,” he says. “But we never really sent it out in a big way.”

Ferguson got an offer of $4,000 from an independent company for the total rights to the script. But the agents told them to wait for a better offer. Eventually, Warner Bros. optioned the film.

Philip Rose, whom Ferguson met on a plane several years ago, was brought on board as the film’s producer. The script “was the funniest thing I have ever read,” Rose says. “I have to say [producing the film] was the most fun I ever had. I was shocked every time I got a paycheck.”

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Rose, who had produced “Red Rock West,” says he came through the “The Big Tease” learning a lot more about movie making. “I couldn’t have paid for this education,” he says. “It was trial by fire--the little movie that could in a huge studio system. What made it a little easier is that we were so little, nobody at the studio took us seriously.”

Frances Fisher echoes Rose’s sentiments about the shoot. “It was fun,” she proclaims. “Craig comes out with zingers. He has always an interesting point of view about things that is uniquely his own. He would keep us laughing constantly.”

Kevin Allen, who directed the dark 1998 Scottish comedy “Twin Town,” was the only person Ferguson saw for the job as director. “We had a conversation with Kevin and he said before we asked him any questions, everybody had to be real in the film,” Ferguson recalls. “He got the job.”

Allen describes making the film as “marvelous. It was enjoyable for me to make a baby film in Hollywood.”

He admits, however, he wasn’t that keen on the script when he first read it but was a “bit desperate” for a job.

The director also acknowledges it was a challenge to break Ferguson from his broad sitcom-acting style. “He’s basically a comedian,” Allen says. “He had to be comfortable with himself and not act. Sitcom actors have funny concepts of what acting is. It took a lot of hard work.”

Ferguson points out that “The Big Tease” is not a gay movie nor is it a hairdressing movie. “It’s an immigrant movie for one,” he says. “It’s an underdog story. It’s a sports movie. It’s not a perfect movie. There are mistakes here and bits I would love to change, but what it celebrates from start to finish is what we meant to do--the punch in the air of triumph, classic American movie.”

It’s also Ferguson’s own coming-to-America story.

“This happened to me,” he says. “It is really about how to fight your way into show business. It seems impossible. But what we did try to get in the film is that you do meet nice people along the way. My manager is the same guy I had when I arrived. My lawyer is the same guy I had in the first couple of weeks. My friends are the friends I made in the first year I was here.”

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Since completing “Big Tease” in the summer of 1998, Ferguson has starred in another one of his screenplays, “Saving Grace,” an independent production that screened earlier this week at Sundance and has been picked up for distribution by Fine Line.

He’s also written a screenplay at Paramount for Mick Jagger and hopes to direct and star this summer in another of his scripts, “All-American Man.”

Despite his blossoming film career, Ferguson has no plans to leave “The Drew Carey Show” any time soon. “I like it here,” he says. “I’ll be here as long as they want me to be. Drew Carey is my buddy. Why would I leave? I feel like I belong on the show. And they pay me a fortune to be here.”