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"I'm Just a White Guy from Orange County"
Elvis Mitchell
American Film
Nov. 1988, pp. 19-25
"I'm just a white guy from Orange County," says Steve Martin. It's odd
hearing Martin, whose comedy is infused with a perfectionist's precision,
whose Beverly Hills home is stocked with the smartest of modern art, who,
even in the wispiest of screen trifles, appears in beautifully tailored
clothes, nail himself down as a scion of Southern California's most
notoriously conservative enclave. this admission brings to mind other
incongruent images: that Cary Grant, the heart of film sophistication, was a
Cockney; that existentialist philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was said to
love Carmen Miranda. If we can accept Wittgenstein's splitting into a grin
whenever he saw a pile of bananas on a hat, anything seems possible.
And as Martin makes this seemingly contradictory confession, he . . .
smiles. Of course, even G. Gordon Liddy would develop a happy calm in the
South of France, where Martin and costars Michael Caine and Glenne Headly (a
member of Chicago's guerilla theater company, Steppenwolf, where she and
husband John Malkovich met) are filming Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a
remake of the 1964 Cool-Whip comedy Bedtime Story.
Often, movie sets are filled with more fake bonhomie than The CBS News
with Dan Rather, underlying tension so palpable it could be transferred
to Scratch 'n' Sniff cards. For some reasons -- and who knows, it could be
the old-world charm of Nice -- this is not the case on the Scoundrels
set. The set of Bedtime Story, which starred, of all people, Marlon
Brando and David Niven, had been relaxed, too. In a interview,
"Bedtime Story" was one of the few movies that Brando referred to without
being asked. He said that he and Niven "giggled like schoolgirls" throughout
the making of the picture. Brando and Niven's looseness made for a powerful
and distinct combination of professionalism and sheer star-power and turned
the film into a one-of-a-kind outing, something you'd see on the dessert
tray at Lutece.
In the current version, due for December release, Martin plays Freddy, the
rambunctious, crude American hustler who stages a battle of wits with
Lawrence, a suave European con-man who radiates a slightly rotted suavity
over a deliciously soft mark (Headly). (Caine, with slicked back hair and a
trim-line moustache, looks like a combination of Niven and an escaped war
criminal.) According to Scoundrels co-executive producer Dale Launer, the
film's title came from Martin, who wanted the high-concept magnetism of
something like Ruthless People. This cheered Launer no end; he wrote
Ruthless People.
Caine remembers seeing Bedtime Story, and not liking it. "I don't
think at that time people were ready to see Brando in a comedy, and they
didn't laugh. I know I didn't," Caine chuckles. "I know that he and David
liked making that movie. But whenever we laugh too much on the set, I always
say 'Remember what David told me: "We laughed all the time making that
picture and when it came out, no one else did."' But we still laugh
sometimes, because if you do a comedy and it's good, it's going to get
laughter. So I guess it can be a good sign. But it can be too good a sign;
David and Marlon had tears coming down their cheeks. touch wood, we don't
get a sycophanitic kind of laugh for the stars from the crew. And Steve's
just a tremendously hard worker."
There's certainly professionalism on the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
shoot. Everyone here seems so at ease that the only hint of controversy on
the set stems from The Last Temptation of Christ, which was
photographed by Scoundrels German cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus.
Some crew members, who worked on an upcoming Thriller-with-a-Big-Name-Cast,
contrast Scoundrels director Frank Oz with the Thriller director.
It's evident that, if Oz isn't the nicest guy in the world, then he will be
called in to take over should the Nicest Guy in the World be unable to
complete his term. There's a little wear-and-tear showing, however. Even
though organization and efficiency have shaved a week off the shooting
schedule, this has been a lengthy shoot. The stay has led Caine to coin a
phrase -- "I'm Riviera-ed out" -- which would probably bleach the
sunlamp tan from Robin Leach's face.
So it's not as if a heaping helping of fun-in-the-sun has made Martin a
changed man. Nor is it that being interviewed in the same studio, La
Victorine, where Hitchcock filmed Cary Grant in To Catch A Thief has
loosened his tongue. The actor-comedian has been described as serious,
aloof, remote -- a Grimsky-Korsakov. One expects to be ushered into his
presence by a somber, slightly sweaty man-servant who resembles the Peter
Lorre of "M," and find Martin, dressed in slate-grey Yamamoto woolens,
contemplating a dolorous Bach cello suite playing in the background. But
Martin does not present an imposingly mirthless figure, wearing his
character's comfortable jeans, T-shirt and worn-down shoes. In expressing
his contempt for that brittle, solemn image, Martin rolls his eyes so far up
he looks to be achieving a REM state and laughs, "You've got to dispel that
myth."
Lots of things strike Martin as funny. One such strike is a People
Magazine item about his ignoring Roxanne on an airline flight, a piece
of reporting that continues to bewilder Martin: "I read that thing; I'm on
the plane, the guy sitting next to me says, 'Aren't you gonna watch it?' I
say, 'No.' And they report this story! What's interesting about it?
I'm not gonna sit there and watch a movie I've seen twenty-five times. It
amazed me to think they actually thought this was printable as an item. It's
like somebody writing: I saw Dustin Hoffman, and he walked across the street
and there was a 'Tootsie' poser up, and he didn't even look at it. I
don't know if they thought it was funny or what. They gave no perspective on
it." Martin eventually wrote a satirical Rolling Stone piece
explaining that the whole incident was staged just so he could get his name
in People.
The fact that he gave a second thought to the phenomenon Erik Estrada once
called "celebritydom," instead of just enjoying the publicity, reveals the
presence of an offscreen sense of humor. He is reminded of when he and
Roxanne producer Dan Melnick first screened this sunny-dispositioned
modernization of Cyrano de Bergerac, Martin thought "there were two laughs
in it. That's how vulnerable I was about the movie.
"My fear was," he continues, "that Roxanne would end my career if it
failed. Its failure would be a bigger failure than just another movie; this
would finish me. I know I'd been involved with other failures. Chuck Grodin
said The Lonely Guy was like a train, one of those things that was
gonna get done whether you wanted it to or not. But I knew if I tampered
with this classic and ruined it, it was my fault. If it'd failed, I'd be
foolish as a writer, as an actor, as a . . . tamperer. I didn't feel the
success of All of Me would've saved me, because anybody can have one
hit.
"[The play] was already perfect. The Jose Ferrer movie was perfect, too, and
you don't need to remake perfection. The changes took it out of the category
of remake; there's hardly a line left from the play, just the situations. I
mean, if you just want to see (Cyrano) die, you can go see the play. If you
want to see him get the girl, you can go see this. If I hadn't changed the
ending, there was no reason to make the movie."
In selecting Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Martin chose to act in a
straight-forward comedy, with a character close to that of his old
confident, uniquely American crass stage persona. "I told Frank that this
was a chance for me to be funny again," Martin notes, "instead of having an
edge of seriousness. And I think this movie can be as good as this kind of
movie can get. We looked at the script and there was nothing here to cut.
Every scene was propelled by the next scene; everything was always going
forward. Even the hard comedy stuff was inexorably linked to the story. I
like the script's precision. But I was laughing when I read it."
Martin was originally set to play the polished Lawrence, when an earlier
script focused on the characters' age differences, rather than a culture
gap. "After we talked about it for a while," the generous, courtly Oz
recalls, "Martin said, 'You know I could possibly do Freddy!' I
thought, no, that'd be a hard sell. At that point, we'd met with Bill Murray
and Kevin Kline as possible Freddys. But he convinced me. This way gives him
more of an opportunity to do comedy, especially after Planes, Trains and
Automobiles where he was a straight man. And I don't think it would've
worked out for the movie. We needed someone uniquely funny, like Steve at
his best."
Oz directed Martin once before, in a bravura sequence in the movie of
Little Shop of Horrors. But the first time the two of them worked
together was on the old Muppet Show. Martin appeared in an episode of
the show which dispensed with the laugh track and was used as a series of
auditions for new characters, while Oz was literally the driving force
behind Miss Piggy and some of the other characters. "I was just a performer
then. I just barely remember anything specific about his appearance, but I
knew I was excited to have him on the show. I remember that we were filming
in England and, at that time, nobody on the show except the performers knew
who he was."
Martin's work as a stand-up comic and Oz's experience contribute to their
rapport. "Between Frank and me, we must know about a million old jokes,"
Martin says. "It helps, because that's groundwork for a collaborative
atmosphere and then we can improvise and take off. About half the laughs in
my pictures are made up on the set. That scene in Roxanne where Rick
Rossovich throws the rock at her window and breaks it wasn't in the script.
I knew it was an old joke and that it might work. I didn't know.
Sometimes the tried-and--true doesn't. But when the conditions for
collaboration are there, then you'll more likely get good stuff out of it."
Because of his concert-stage experience in physical comedy, Martin owns a
pedigree in movement that few current screen comics have. His physicality
seems just short of grace. Rather, it's more the product of an athlete's
coordination and sheer willpower, a work ethic that polishes facility into
skill; his pinpoint concentration is reminiscent of Buster Keaton's. His
stage work provided him with the arena (he was the first comedian with
rock-star stature, filling sports coliseums and the like) and foundation to
hone reaction and reflex into craft.
"I never really aspired to [physical comedy]," he explains. "When I was
onstage, I became physical. As the theaters got bigger, the actions and
gestures got bigger. It really got me into extremes. I've gone so far that
some of the stuff we do in movies doesn't even seem like trying that hard.
It's strange that nobody's really doing it, that the current school of
acting doesn't support that kind of stretching of reality like Kevin Kline's
work in A Fish Called Wanda. I loved that and I thought, wow, would I
have gone that far?"
This type of attack, wrestling comedy to the ground, brings to mind one of
the genre's last popular practitioners, Jerry Lewis. "He," Martin says,
shaking his head, "is such an enigma, so difficult to categorize. Because I
think he's great. I'm not that familiar with The Nutty Professor. But
I'm really familiar with The Busboy and The Errand Boy, which
I think was his peak. If you took out the sloppy sentimentality, you'd have
a masterpiece. I think he went all the way. He was really popular, too,
which was great. But I think that a lot of comedies don't get funny until
three years after they're released. The audience is not quite into that
moment. It's almost like the [comedy] creator is ahead of the audience, and
then three years later, what they hated they start to love."
Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours is mentioned as such a treasure.
But what would be Martin's example of a recent ignored ore that went
precious after it's release?
"Hmmm, that's a good one," he replies. "Now, if Airplane hadn't
caught on, my theory would be perfect. Here's an example in drama:
Heartburn. I think it's a great film. I saw it again on TV, or tape, or
something, and seeing it again, you can feel the masterstroke. The whole 'My
Boy Bill' scene, with Jack and Meryl, is charged. And I thought Cry
Freedom was great. I really felt informed after that movie. And I was
not a fan of Gandhi. A perfect example of a comedy was Heartbreak
Kid. I was not into movies, or in the movies when I saw that. It just
grows on you. I think we'll all be surprised by what will be big twenty
years from now."
One such film of Martin's, which has already begun to see the light of
revisionism, is Pennies From Heaven. This Depression-set musical,
thick with a voluptuous despair, was audiences' first film exposure to
Martin after his huge hit, The Jerk. He discusses Pennies with
a fervor absent from other personal assessments. "I had to do it," he says.
"I had just finished The Jerk, and I was sick of my act. If there are
any articles on me that make me sound depressed or depressive, I bet they
came during this time. What was I going to do next? The Jerk II? I
thought, is this it, am I 'The Wild and Crazy Guy' for the rest of my life?"
At the time, Martin was working in Las Vegas, under circumstances that
bespeak an emotional isolation so pronounced that it's easy to see what
attracted him to the overspill of feeling in Pennies, an adaptation
of ironist Dennis Potter of his six-part BBC miniseries. (The series starred
Bob Hoskins.)
"I wish I had pages and pages to describe to you how low I was," Martin
says, daubing bleak tones in creating a picture of his life. "In Vegas, you
do shows at night and you sleep in the day. They give you a house that has
curtains so that you can block out all the light. It's pitch black during
the day. So I'd wake up at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the sun's going down,
and go to bed at 7 a.m., when the sun's coming up. Which has an amazing
psychological effect. There was no audience feedback. No creativity. I was
emotionally dead. My agent called and told me about Pennies, which he
said was a remake of the old Bing Crosby thing. But when he told me about
it, I knew it wasn't the old Bing Crosby thing. I'd seen the [BBC] show. So
I had him send it to me. And reading the script was like reading the Bible.
It was magic, such good writing. It was so honest and compelling, so
melancholy, that I knew I had to do it. It didn't matter what I was supposed
to do next."
Martin committed himself to the project with religious passion. The hot,
possessed quality that sometimes shines in his eyes -- a forlorn
intelligence that makes him look like an animal struck by lightning -- was
central to his conception of the role and its portrayal. The movie was so
startling a departure for him that the shock of the new probably robbed him
of any of The Jerk's momentum. His subsequent films, Dead Men
Don't Wear Plaid, The Man With Two Brains, and The Lonely Guy
failed to regain him popular appeal. He recaptured audiences, and pleased
himself, with All of Me, the first comedy in which he gave an adult,
movie-star performance. "All of Me was probably the first whole
comedy movie I ever starred in: it had a beginning, middle and end. There
was a story, you could see it an think, 'I wonder what's going to happen
next.'" In other words, it was a conventional narrative movie.
Martin has appeared in a few of the '80s comedies that actually have a look:
The Man with Two Brains glows with a shimmering vitality; Roxanne
was done with a bold, romantic widescreen sweep. And whatever else you might
say about Planes, Trains and Automobiles, it has the vividness of
cinematographer Don Peterman's urban grit. "That's one of the reasons that a
lot of comedies aren't taken seriously," Martin says. "Because most of them
look like shit.
"You know," Martin says, "somebody called me from a museum once and said,
'We're doing an avant garde film thing, and we think it'd be great to get
you involved. We'll put you with an avant garde filmmaker and you'd be doing
your thing and we'd project film over you and . . . ' And I said, 'It's so
hard to just make a good movie that entertains people and it's so easy to do
that performance kind of thing.' It's my goal just to do a movie as simple
as Father of the Bride. A movie with a story and emotions."
But true to his contradictions, Martin's next project is neither. It's
Samuel Beckett's absurdist play Waiting for Godot, to be directed for
the stage by Mike Nichols and featuring Robin Williams, F. Murray Abraham
and Bill Irwin. Godot, as Kenneth Tynan puts it, has no beginning,
middle or end -- no denouement. In theory, it sounds like what he wanted to
move away from.
["Godot's] not a movie. It's a special case," he responds, "just like
Pennies From Heaven was a special case. It's a work of art; that's
the genre it's in. With Godot, it wasn't like (slipping into an oily
actor's voice), 'I need a play. I want a show that I really act in and then
I can be onstage . . .' I don't really have any career plan.
"But movies are different. Movies are entertainment. I'm gonna ask a studio
to put out millions and millions and millions so I can make a work of art?
No. The audience is number one; always think about the audience, don't bore
them, let 'em know what's happening -- entertain. Frank Oz thinks that way,
Carl Reiner thinks that way, I believe (Roxanne director) Fred Schepisi
thinks that way too. Now I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and
can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot. I'm not
criticising that, but that's not my business. My real interest is to make
original entertainment. And when it's done right, it becomes art."
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