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The Screengrab

Portrait of the Artist as a McFly

Posted by Peter Smith
A few weeks back, I went to the Magno screening room in midtown Manhattan to catch a screening of Crispin Glover's new picture It Is Fine! Everything is Fine. Excitement abounded. I'd failed to catch any of the screenings of Glover's What Is It? when it premiered late last year and was still feeling pangs of regret. I'd developed an acute obsession with the man after finding his website in 2005. Yes, it's common knowledge that George McFly is a big weirdo, but I didn't really appreciate just how weird at the time. The trailer for What Is It? scared the shit out of me. The notion of a mad character actor creating humor through Dadaist films starring a cast of spastics was as entrancing as it was revolting. You see, I thought he was being ironic. It's not my fault though. "Clowny Clown Clown" leaves an impression. 

So I was excited to finally see one of the man's movies in full, excited to be shocked, excited to see just how weird it could get. I arrived a touch on the early side, and there was no one at the theater aside from a confused woman in her late sixties, waiting to see a picture called The Unknown Woman, and a couple of disgruntled projectionists, type of dudes who you see with cigarettes dangling from their mouths even when they aren't smoking. Fearing small talk with the elderly and suffering from a coffee-filled bladder, I asked the projectionists where the gentleman's room was and went off to kill some time. Then, refreshed, I headed back out to the waiting room, prepared to talk about the weather or feign being busy. I also considered faking a cell-phone call. That's when I almost tripped on Crispin Glover. He was unpacking the reels for It Is Fine and handing them off to the projectionists. I knew it was a possibility that he'd be there. What Is It? was only screened by Glover himself on tour. But here he was sans publicists, handlers, anyone. Just Glover sporting a Prince Valiant bob and a black suit. I rushed to the benches and the relative safety of the old woman but the projectionists called out and let her know that The Unknown Woman was just about to start, and I was alone. Glover walked down the hall and sat down to my right.

Fuck.

"Are you here to see the film?" That tremor in his voice isn't put on. Guy sounds like that.

"Yeah. Yes. I'm excited. Looking forward to it."

"Excellent. Good. Good. It's an excellent film."

He pulled out a laptop and I wondered if he was suffering from the same chat phobia I'd been feeling a few minutes ago. But for the next twenty minutes this back and forth went on. We talked about how What Is It? was received critically, and about aberrant sexuality in widely released movies. It was plain that this quiet man was very serious about his work, and this was more unsettling than had he been a jabbering psychotic. It meant he wasn't being ironic. Finally the publicist arrived along with a handful of other people and things got underway.

Glover opened with a truncated version of "The Big Slideshow", a surrealist spoken-word piece accompanied by slides of pages and art torn from old books that he'd mangled and scrawled over. He apologized for not having a spotlight, but the flickering screen he stood in front of gave a better effect. It was like sitting in a David Lynch scene. As Glover yelled, ranted about zoos and slaves and mollusks while pointing at broken images in the dark room, it was settled. He was definitely not being ironic. By the time It Is Fine! (which you can read about here) had finished, I was exhausted. My brain felt overheated, like I'd tried to think about too many things at once and it had made me stupid.

The afternoon had turned out weird in the end, but not in the way I'd expected, and the only thing that was shocking was the earnestness in the work and the artist who was presenting it. I learned a couple of lessons. The first is that going to the bathroom is not an effective way of killing time to avoid awkward situations. It only leads to things getting stranger on you. The second is that it isn't wise to assume that every piece of media is aloof and the people making them are at a distance smirking. Irony may be an abused commodity these days, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Sometimes the artist is going to pop up in your face, make you look at something, and ask you how it feels.

— John Constantine

[I had my own memorable chat with Glover last year, available here for the curious. — ed.]


+ DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
Posted Nov 14 2007, 04:00 PM
Filed under: , , , , , ,

Comments

Phil Nugent said:

That's funny; I was at Magno  a few weeks ago, to see a movie that, as it turned out, started around the time that "It Is Fine" ended, and I spent a few minutes sitting in the lobby with Glover and his publicist, though I didn't know that for awhile. The publicist, who I knew from a previous encounter, re-introduced herself and mentioned that she was working with Glover on his new film and offered to try to squeeze me in if there were any more pre-release screenings, and I still didn't recognize Glover; he was just sitting there quietly holding his laptop, and he seemed so meek and studious that I think I took him for the publicist's assistant. It wasn't until he got out his cell phone and started pacing about while talking in that strangled whimper that I took a better look at him and thought, Oh, shit...

November 14, 2007 4:39 PM

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