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."
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