By Andy Bailey

Veterans of the stand-up circuit often insist that comedy isn’t pretty. But what happens when comedy becomes monstrous? Such is the premise of Behind the Smile, the directorial debut of comedy veteran Damon Wayans who also appears in front of the camera as a comic superstar who takes a vampire-like interest in a young stand-up comedian from Cleveland (played by Wayans’s younger brother Marlon) who comes to Los Angeles seeking fame.

Behind the Smile is not a horror movie per se — it’s a small, independently financed character drama about the trappings of fame. The story is far from the giddy comic shenanigans of Mo’ Money and White Chicks, which elevated the Wayans brothers to Hollywood royalty. This horror-like drama’s co-producer Clark Peterson was responsible for Monster, Patty Jenkins’s biopic of serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

As I drive up the Santa Susana Pass in Chatsworth, another monster haunts my thoughts. The northern end of the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles, where Smile filmed for four days during its 22-day shoot in late July, is where Charlie Manson’s gang of hippie friends retreated into the rocky hills to what was once the Spahn Ranch. The mansion which the crew map guides me to is not Manson’s but rather a garish stone heap belonging to Damon’s character, Charlie Richman.

After leaving my car in the parking lot of a megachurch, I’m whisked via shuttle through high-security gates to the behemoth mansion where a party scene is underway. In the foyer of a mock Tudor rented for the week from a family with negligible taste lies sweeping bubble-wrapped balustrades, lacquered furniture, vast stretches of white marble, faux Doric columns hollow to the touch and a dripping chandelier that looks spun from sugar.

These are fitting furnishings for a jaded Hollywood legend desperate for fresh blood — and I’m not talking about Damon Wayans slumming in Indiewood. After a quick briefing from co-producer Peterson I’m escorted back to a dimly lit den that suggests a gothic lair, with its Mephistophelean life-size photograph of Wayans as Charlie Richman and a shabby chic chenille sofa on which sits Damon himself, surrounded by several curvaceous and scantily clad party guests, swilling champagne (ginger ale, actually) and sucking up to the swaggering comic superstar’s diminishing limelight.

The camera crew behind Damon is ready to capture the back of the director’s head as he chops up several lines of cocaine (milk sugar, if you must know), sparks up a joint (an herbal cigarette), and directs (in character) his brother Marlon, who as Danny Styles prepares to audition for Richman’s favor. Richman will later steal Danny’s shtick and incorporate it into his own act, something Damon likens to a vampire’s kiss.

Damon and Marlon Wayons on the set of Behind the Smile.

“When Madonna kissed Britney Spears [at the Video Music Awards last year],” Damon would explain later, “Britney didn’t kiss her because she was cute. She was giving life to Madonna, who’s a vampire. It got people talking about Madonna again. That’s what comics do — whenever Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis needs new life, [producers] get some hot, funny young guy and put him alongside them. That [reinvigorates] the guy who’s gotten a little too comfortable — who no longer possesses the eye of the tiger.”

The a.d. calls for quiet on the set and Marlon roars into action, riffing ferociously for Richman’s approval, the young upstart aching for a taste of the elder statesman’s glory by poking fun at Richman’s lavish lifestyle. Revered for his quiet intensity in Requiem for a Dream, the youngest Wayans has so far eluded the stand-up comedy milieu that birthed his elder siblings, having segued instead into dark indiedom followed by mainstream comedies like White Chicks and the Scary Movie spoofs. His range of work serves him well here — he’s harrowingly unfunny, which takes some effort.

Marlon later admits he watched Damon like a hawk during his stand-up days and even sought his approval through his own comedy. “Being the younger brother, I always wanted to hear Damon laugh,” Marlon says. “That approval to me means more than anything. I know if I can make Damon laugh, I’ve done good work, because he’s a tough critic.”

But improvising as Danny, pulling unfunny bits out of thin air about the outlandish performing styles of Patti LaBelle, Prince and Teddy Pendergrass, Marlon’s more Requiem — revealing the studied work of a gifted character actor. Damon as Richman isn’t laughing, nagging Danny through snorts of coke to dig deeper for material. Nothing in the scene is funny, which is the point, but the brothers will laugh raucously at Marlon’s footage on the A and B monitors in the foyer after the scene has wrapped. Marlon has pulled it off.

Damon wrote Behind the Smile after his dream project of bringing Richard Pryor’s life story to the screen fell apart in development. “I was frustrated about that,” Wayans admits during another break in filming. “I really wanted to do a movie about comedy, so I wrote my own Richard Pryor story. This movie is about everything I’ve seen and heard in my 22 years in stand-up comedy.”

Structured as a mockumentary, Behind the Smile intersperses Danny’s precipitous showbiz odyssey with vérité-style footage of real-life comics reflecting on the volatile state of the comedy business — for every Damon Wayans who has maintained a stable career in Hollywood, there’s a Sam Kinison or John Belushi who couldn’t transcend his personal demons. Cameos from working comics Bob Saget, Jimmy Brogan, George Wallace, Patty Ross and Kat Williams infuse the production with the gritty patina of real life. It’s a sobering cautionary tale about the horror lurking behind the laughs.

“When I first came out to L.A. in 1982,” Damon tells me, “a guy had just jumped off the roof of the Hyatt across from the Comedy Store because he couldn’t get spots. That was my introduction to the comedy game. Most of the guys I came up with know that story. They know the Kinisons and the Freddie Prinzes. This is a tribute to comics, and to the hard work we do to make people laugh.”