In the back and forth that finally resulted in last week's list of the Screengrab's favorite leading men [favorite leading ladies list is being compiled now, will your favorites make the cut!?], one name that never seemed to come up was that of Christopher Walken. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I know that one reason that Walken's name never passed my own lips was that...well, I hate to say that I am not worthy, but it's kind of like that. It's not even that Walken is such a great actor (though on many occasions he has proven himself to be just that) but that he's turned into such a strange mixture of artist, self-parodying comedian, cultural icon, and "X" the unknown: who wants to take on a subject that slippery? The answer to that last question turns out to be Patrick O'Sullivan, a San Francisco standup comic and creator of (in the words of Lisa Marks in the Guardian) "a partly scripted, partly improvised, partly biographical" Los Angeles stage show called All About Walken. O'Sullivan has his own measure of Walken's place in our world: "Here was a man doing big-budget movies, independent movies, music videos, Saturday Night Live - and standups were impersonating him. So all around there was this melding of Walken and pop culture. Not everyone knows his name, but they know his persona, from little kids who know what 'More cowbell!' means, to 65-year-olds who admired him in The Deer Hunter. He floats across it all."
The show grew out of O'Sullivan's experiences with his college pals trading impersonations of celebrities, a common enough experience that in his case somehow led to assembling a cast that includes two women and five men in a theater on Hollywood Boulevard doing Christopher Walken impressions. They also do impressions of other actors, including Woody Allen and Robert De Niro, recreating scenes from Walken's movies, as well as impressions of other actors, including Jennifer Tilly and Colin Farrell, doing their Christopher Walken impressions. They take suggestions from the audience, which, on the night that Marks caught the show, resulted in a missing scene from the Sex and the City movie in which Sarah Jessica Parker got to meet you-know-who. The show has been successful enough that it's scheduled to move to San Francisco, after which O'Sullivan hopes to take it to New York. O'Sullivan told Marks that Walken himself hasn't seen it yet, "But some of his family have, and also his agent, who thought it was fantastic. One time, one of the guys in the show was at the agent's office and had a speakerphone conversation with him ... as Christopher Walken. Walken told him he was very flattered." Anything that brightens Christopher Walken's day is all right with us, but there are other social considerations to take into account. "I've had many calls over the past two years that go something like this: 'Hi. I went to the show last week with my husband and now he will not stop impersonating Christopher Walken. I ask him to put the trash out and he answers as Walken. And I just want you to know that you're responsible for that.'"