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Features
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Crispin Glover, Unplugged
Weary of media conglomerates and their faux independent labels, multimedia artist Crispin Glover takes to the road with a slide show and his feature length directorial debut.
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
By Brett Buckalew
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Glover at Sundance festival
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In the world of screen actors, perhaps being a hero is measured not by how many Oscar nominations you’ve racked up, or by how many younger thespians you’ve influenced, but by how fiercely you maintain your creative integrity over the years.
Ever since first commanding attention twenty years ago as the neurotic, likeably nerdy George McFly in Robert Zemeckis’ sci-fi hit Back to the Future, Crispin Glover has worked at honing his singular, idiosyncratic persona in small, arty films (Wild at Heart, Bartleby), as well as in bigger studio projects (Willard, the Charlie’s Angels movies). Describing that persona is next to impossible, but here goes: proudly eccentric and mannered, with an air of gothic melodrama, possessing funny, sad, and scary facets.
That unique mixture of high acting style and intense emotional engagement has won Glover a rabid cult following, and more recently, helped nab him the Maverick Award from Method Fest, a film festival dedicated to the craft of acting that runs through this Friday in Calabasas, CA. The career-recognition award was presented to Glover by another iconoclast, filmmaker Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God).
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Columbia Pictures
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As Thin Man
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But of course, iconoclasm is what the Maverick Award is all about, or as Glover himself puts it during a recent phone interview with FilmStew, “I looked up ‘maverick’ in the etymological dictionary, and it basically was a kind of cattle that had been owned by somebody named Maverick that had not been branded. And so I believe the poetry of it is somebody that’s unbranded.”
During an enjoyably digressive discussion that lasts over an hour, Glover proves to be someone who delights in the poetry and intellectual complexity of words and concepts, as when he uses the term ‘pro-cultural’ to describe mainstream studio filmmaking, only to arrive at an even more satisfying description.
“I’ve noticed that what corporations have been funding are very narrow elements,” he analyzes. “Perhaps a better way to describe it than ‘counter-cultural’ and ‘pro-cultural’ is that there’s a title of a book called Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.”
“And basically, anything that fits within that idea of good and evil is what’s allowed to be produced right now,” Glover continues, “within what I’ve been calling the ‘pro-cultural’ film state that exists. Although Werner Herzog almost argued that that was really - I don’t want to put words in his mouth - but from that point-of-view, it could also be looked at [that] what studios are doing is ultimately counter-cultural, because that definition of counterculture on some level is the concept of destroying culture.”
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New Line Cinema
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As Willard
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“I feel that the corporate entities, by and large right now, are only funding things that fit within this very narrow point of thought.”
When asked to elaborate on what kind of morality exists in that space ‘beyond good and evil,’ Glover introduces the laws of nature in the animal world as an analogy. “If a lion kills another lion, that’s not really considered evil, or good,” he observes. “It’s just considered something that happens, versus a man kills another man. That’s considered evil.”
“But to go beyond that concept,” he suggests, “beyond the concept of good and evil, is really just looking at a man killing a man as just that. This is something that happens.”
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CrispinGlover.com
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A 72-minute 'apocalyptic symphony'
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Another illustration of Nietzsche’s vision, and one that’s just as bizarre, is Glover’s debut film as writer-director, What Is It?, the story of a young, snail-killing man’s (Michael Blevis) dual with his psyche. Filled with images of blackface minstrels, nude women in creature masks, and Shirley Temple (!), the surreal film understandably divided audiences when it premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival. Variety panned it, while the more renegade Film Threat gave it five stars, praising it as nothing less than ‘an apocalyptic symphony of the auteur’s unconscious.’
Openly critical of contemporary indie-distribution practices, Glover has chosen to get What Is It? to audiences by distributing it himself. Pairing the 72-minute film with a slide show he narrates, the actor-filmmaker has toured through several American cities to personally show his work. Later this month, for example, he will be in Michigan and Arizona.
Unconventional as it sounds, this distribution plan has already yielded positive results, including a Best Narrative Film award for What Is It? from the Ann Arbor Film Festival. “I haven’t found on the whole that audiences disagree with the film,” Glover insists. “I’ve found that people in the media will report that audiences disagree with the film, and it really isn’t the case.”
“If I show the film to between 300-500 people at a time, I watch and see how many people get up and leave from the film. And there will be between five and seven people that will get up and leave…but that’s out of 300-500 people, so really that’s a very low amount. There’s probably more people that get up and walk out of an average film that just isn’t engaging.”
Not only is Glover not skittish about exposing middle America to his brand of surrealism; he claims that What Is It? was in fact made for middle America, and that the most negative experience he’s had showing it so far came not from there but rather via the allegedly sophisticated realm of the New York Underground Film Festival.
“Wherever it was that I was intellectually coming from with the film, I feel that somehow it was not fitting into what their particular intellectual circle was, and I feel like I offended them on some level,” he relates.
To fund his incendiary personal projects, Glover has no qualms about taking the occasional Hollywood gig, as long as he can put his own creative stamp on the material. It was his artistic control that helped shape one of his more well-known characters, the deadly, silent Thin Man from Charlie’s Angels.
“A strange experience that surprised me actually was how much influence that I ended up having on one of the larger-budgeted films that I’ve been in, [which] is Charlie’s Angels,” the actor shares. “There were so many things in that character that were not originally written in the script.”
| “Originally, the character had dialogue,” Glover explains. “When they first wanted me to come in and read, I did not think that the dialogue was good, and I was not that interested in meeting on the film, but they really said they wanted to hear my ideas and thoughts. And I came in, and I told them I thought the character shouldn’t have any dialogue, and [director] McG immediately said, ‘That’s it! That’s exactly what we want to do!’”
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Altering a mega-budgeted action-comedy around his character ideas is yet another accomplishment that solidifies Glover’s status as a genuine maverick, as does the fact that the next sequel he’s working on isn’t Charlie’s Angels 3, but a second installment of What Is It?
[Crispin Glover's big slide show and screening of What Is It? checks into L.A.'s Egyptian Theater the weekend of December 8-10, 2006. For more information, go to CrispinGlover.com.]
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