Crispin Glover’s waiting for me in his temporary “office” and informal screening room, the IFC Center café. He's in town to promote Bob Zemeckis’s
Beowulf, in which he portrays Grendel, as well as for the New York premiere of the film he co-directed with David Brothers,
IT IS FINE! Everything Is Fine. I’m getting a private screening of the flick on Glover’s own laptop, watching the 72-minute DVD as he runs behind the bar to find me a bottle of Poland Spring. Worried he’ll be bored waiting, I watch him out of the corner of my eye pace around talking on his cellphone. He then sits by the window overlooking Sixth Avenue. He’s extremely polite but it’s eerie how much time he offers, unlike most frenzied actors on a star trip.
Aren’t you unusually accessible, I ask him? “Maybe it’s unusual in 2007, but it wasn’t unusual in vaudeville, in 1935.” Glover has an aesthetic derived from the past, putting him ahead of his time—back to the future, if you will—which is one reason why he tours personally from theater to theater, accompanying the screenings at IFC with a slideshow and Q&A. Glover’s switching gears from being merely an actor to his role as a director with two films in the can. Although his critical reception has been mixed, he’s hoping to be added to the list of auteurs, along with his friends David Lynch and Werner Herzog. His whole life nowadays is geared around his own films, and he spends endless hours talking and thinking about them.
Crispin Glover is a dweeb and an eccentric, but at 43 years old, he’s also a well-built handsome man who's dressed impeccably and is blessed with a healthy mane of hair. Is Glover at all like the bumbling George McFly, the character that catapulted him to fame back in 1985? In
Back to the Future, he played the 47-year-old father of Michael J. Fox at the tender age of 21. He earned kudos for his next role in the much smaller, independent film entitled
River’s Edge, playing Lane, a fingerless-gloved, high-strung maniac. He’s a character actor who’s been in almost 50 motion pictures and acted professionally since the age of 13.
Glover’s career is distinguished by his roles in mega-blockbuster films paired with riskier work in small independent films.
Beowulf and
IT IS FINE! premiering simultaneously is ironic, considering how different they are. But he's had a symbiotic relationship with Hollywood for some time. Playing the Thin Man in the
Charlie’s Angels earned him the money to pay for his current film, but when I asked him how much he made, he demurred: “It wouldn’t look right for me to say, but I make more than some actors, and less than others.”
Although critical of vapid filmmaking in general, he never disparages his work in mainstream motion pictures and doesn’t distinguish films made by larger corporations from his own. “
Beowulf’s a good movie, intelligently done,” he enthuses. “I like the movie, was paid well, and I’m riding on the coattails of that publicity.” Indeed, years back he had sought acting parts in smaller independent films but lately his quest to fund his own films has motivated him to accept roles in blockbuster pictures, which ultimately has raised his profile and salary in Hollywood.
One of his unique promotional tools is traveling with his films in the tradition of vaudeville or the 1950s horror film director William Castle who, like Glover, went to each theater to provide an in-the-flesh element to a celluloid art form. At every screening, Glover presents the slide show of images from his art books, screens the movie and then conducts a Q&A session which always drags on for more than an hour since, like an absent-minded professor, he’s apt to ramble. (Tonight is the final performance in NYC.)
IT IS FINE! is the second installment in a trilogy and stars Steven C. Stewart, who had cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair. Glover first heard about Stewart and the screenplay he’d written in 1987 through a friend. Unlike your usual confessional memoir, the screenplay was based upon Stewart’s fantasies.
“It lets truer elements come through,” Glover explains. “If he had written a standard autobiography, there would have been no women with long hair he had sex with and then murdered.”
In 2001 Stewart developed a problem swallowing his saliva and one lung collapsed, and asked Glover if there were enough footage to complete the film—so he could go off life support. The director felt conflicted about telling him to go ahead, but Stewart died only one month after the shooting was over.
Other than silent films and Lassie, few feature films have a lead that cannot speak and is barely understandable. Glover himself couldn’t understand much of what Stewart said, estimating that he was 95 percent unintelligible. “It would have been condescending to use subtitles,” Glover told me. Stewart has a fetish for women with long hair. Glover calls the sexy female actresses in the film, “apple pie perfection.”
Despite major physical ailments and his inability to speak, beautiful women throw themselves at Stewart and literally die to have sex with him. Here’s a guy who knows how to score but unfortunately, he strangles all his conquests. There’s no “money shot” but no condom, either. As I mentioned to Glover, Stewart’s penis is actually one of his better features, judging by the footage. Despite finding the sex scenes disturbing and unappealing, there’s something titillating about the sordidness of the whole thing.
Glover’s first film,
What Is It?, relies far less on dialogue and narrative and was widely criticized by the unusual casting of actors with Down Syndrome. But Glover explains that he intentionally selects real people with handicaps, disabilities and flaws to shake viewers out of their seats. Certainly, he’s employed actors who would never be considered by most directors. Stewart wanted to play a “bad guy” since the portrayal of most people who are “cripples” (in his terminology) tends toward the saccharine. Using the soundtrack to
The Sound of Music and Tchaikovsky’s “Sugar Plum Fairy” to accompany the sexually provocative scenes with a disabled man is especially jarring.
“David Brothers, my co-director, and I wanted to retain a certain naiveté in the screenplay but also make it as opulent and beautiful a fantasy as possible,” he said. The film actually works as a highly stylized film noir, and the director compares it to a 1970s murder-of-the-week teledrama. It reminds me far more of a Joan Crawford lurid melodrama. A luminescent light in hues reminiscent of Technicolor bathes the lushly designed sets, and all interiors except one sequence were filmed in a nursing home. That combined with his non-traditional casting of real people, flaws and all, creating a dichotomy between smoothly stylized shots combined with the grittiness of non-actors giving the film a tinge of neorealism.
After I finished watching the movie, a reporter for another paper arrived to take my place watching the DVD. Crispin and I retire to the basement to conduct the interview. Of course, he chooses a spot which anyone in their right mind would avoid, directly in front of the men’s room. Sometimes the door swings open and I wince, expecting an accident, but Glover doesn’t flinch and holds his ground. Periodically, filmgoers streaming out of the daytime shows interrupt our conversation in search of the toilet. Nobody recognizes Glover without his usual costumed getups. The interruptions are frequent but it’s clear the actor is used to odd random occurrences.
As day turned into night, I took a few photos of Glover, but despite starring in dozens of films, he’s a bit camera shy, or maybe he himself is shy. One-on-one connections are trickier than Q&As and hamming it up. “Crispin, look at me!” I scold, and he tries to comply, but his gaze is almost always off kilter. “What is it? What is he looking at?” I wonder. But Crispin Glover is moving on to the next town, ready to promote his film again, and everything is fine.
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