Sometime in early 1995, Lou Holtz Jr., a prosecutor in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, completed his first screenplay, a comedy called "The Cable Guy," and sent it to some friends who are producers. They introduced him to two agents, Tom Strickler and Ari Emanuel, at the fledgling Endeavor Agency.

Within days the agents had received an enthusiastic phone call from Bernie Brillstein, a top talent manager. He said the script was a perfect vehicle for one of his clients, Chris Farley, the former "Saturday Night Live" comedian whose movie career had taken off with the teen-age comedy "Tommy Boy."

The agents, with Mr. Brillstein and an associate, Mark Gurvitz, promptly took the script to Columbia Pictures. Desperate for a comedy to release in the summer of 1996, Columbia bought the script for $750,000, plus an additional $250,000 that would be paid to Mr. Holtz if the movie was made. Mr. Holtz took a leave of absence from his job, flew to New York and began meeting with Mr. Farley to discuss his potential role as a lonely cable repairman who makes a house call on a yuppie customer and then tries desperately to befriend him.

"It was a comedy about a needy cable guy you can't get rid of," Mr. Holtz said in an interview.

From this relatively modest start, "The Cable Guy" grew into a monster, though not, unfortunately for Columbia, one of the box-office kind. The final version, released two weeks ago, cost $60 million to make and market. Of that, $20 million went to the star, who was not Mr. Farley after all but the biggest and most-sought-after comic in the movies, Jim Carrey. By then Mr. Holtz was long gone, replaced by friends of Mr. Carrey, and the screenplay had been rewritten many times. Along the way, the quintessential Carrey character -- silly, sophomoric but essentially winning -- was lost. In the final version, the repairman is a violent, maniacal and generally unfunny person who almost destroys the life of the customer, a young architect played by Matthew Broderick.