The Screengrab : david letterman

Screengrab Flashback, 1987: Crispin Glover, Kicking Against the Prick

Phil Nugent — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

As our heroic Oscar show live-bloggers pointed out, the Academy Awards broadcast did clear up one pressing question: more than a week after Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre, bearded appearance on the David Letterman show, it's still open season on the actor turned rapper. This is kind of s shame, if only because James Wolcott seems to have been proven right in his speculation that all the slack-jawed fascination Phoenix inspired in his few minutes on Dave's couch has come at the price of a lack of serious attention and box office for the movie he was ostensibly promoting, Two Lovers, his latest collaboration with writer-director James Gray. Still unanswered, though, is the question of whether Phoenix is genuinely flaking out publicly (or worse), or if, as has been suggested, he's engaged in some Andy Kaufman-style prank or long-term Borat-type project. Though for some of us watching, the appearance summoned up not thoughts of either Sacha Baron Cohen or Latka's creator but Crispin Glover. If that's the role model that Phoenix meant to invoke, he's a rare bird indeed.

Glover's turn in the spotlight came in the summer of 1987, when he was supposed to be promoting Tim Hunter's River's Edge, the tragic-teen melodrama in which he had his biggest movie role to date. (Up to that time, he was best known for having played Michael J. Fox's father in Back to the Future.) Glover's freakish, hand-waving performance in River's Edge garnered mixed reviews at best, and it helped create a climate in which the still relatively little-known actor was widely perceived as something of an oddball. Even so, his Letterman appearance exceeded even the most baroque expectations. Acting as if he were about to keel over from anthrax, Glover boogied out onstage in thrift-shop clothing, platform shoes, and a fright wig, and began to frantically stammer about how the jackals in the media were writing about him as if he were some kind of weirdo. Apparently incited to demonstrate what a normal fellow he was by some girls in the audience who called out, "Nice shoes!", Glover made a muscle, invited his host to arm wrestle, then leaped up to demonstrate his ability to kick as high as the seated Letterman's head. He did in fact, kick very close to Letterman's head, which seemed to be the cue Dave was looking for to announce that their revels now were ended.

In those pre-Internet days, word of what had gone down spread rapidly across college campuses, in some cases with VCR-recorded evidence that was disseminated with what we used to call "tape trees." (And I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.) Word was slow to get out that Glover was playing a character, Rubin, who would eventually be the focus of a barely seen feature film, 1991's Rubin and Ed, co-starring Howard Hessman and directed by Trent Harris (The Beaver Trilogy). This explanation fails to explain how Glover thought anyone not privy to this information could have been expected to watch him unravel with anything other than open-mouthed bewilderment, or why he thought that the notoriously crankly control freak Letterman would be delighted to watch him melt down on his time and feel the draft from his oversized clodhoppers tickle the side of his face.

Coupled with his work in River's Edge, the Letterman show appearance cemented the direction of Glover's acting career, which is to say that it officially redefined him as an unvarying token of sheer weirdness. (His subsequent failure to appear in the sequel to Back to the Future, which he followed up by suing the filmmakers for violating his "image" by having the actor who replaced him made up to resemble him, also earned him the reputation of a weirdo who was hard to deal with.) By the time of his cameo in Wild at Heart, Glover was seen as the sort of person David Lynch shoehorns into a movie if he's afraid that it might not be strange enough. Although Glover's few opportunities to play a relatively normal person, in mostly small roles in such films as John Boorman's Where the Heart Is and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? have shown him to be a capable actor with a surprisingly sweet screen presence, his biggest roles and ripest paydays have been for flaunting his geek-show side in such films as Charlie's Angels, Bartleby, and Willard. (More recently, he reunited with the director of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, to incarnate the title role in Beowulf.) A well-established young actor with a string of successes to his credit, Phoenix will not be so easily pigeonholed. At this point, most people would be relieved to hear that he's having a laugh, even if he did throw a labor of love movie under the bus in the procession, and after a shave, the industry would welcome him back with welcome if wary arms. But is he kidding? It's a dubious sort of joke that serves to turn you into a punchline for Ben Stiller's use. Stay tuned.

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Charles H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78.

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York. His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins, was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.

Joffe's first film as a producer with Woody Allen was Take the Money and Run, the success of which he was able to leverage into a then-unprecedented degree of artistic control over his films for the director. He is listed either as producer, co-producer or executive producer on all of Allen's films up to and including the yet-to-be-released Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and when Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, it was Joffe who picked up the prize in Woody Allen's stead. According to the New York Times, he was a stern and frank figure in the careers of his proteges, and offered up the following advice to a young Allen, frustrated at the dues-paying period he spent making films like Casino Royale: "You're trying to get into the film business. It's going to be a big picture, and you're in it with a lot of stars. You're having a nice time in London, playing poker every night and visiting all the museums. Just shut up."

Shia LaBoeuf: Why Do You Think They Call It Special Magic Sauce?

Phil Nugent — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We happened to be reading a biography of Led Zeppelin just before seeing the footage of Shia LeBeouf's recent appearance on the David Letterman show, where he talked about his getting arrested on his twenty-first birthday for making serial nocturnal appearances at a Walgreens while "pretty wasted." And that may have had something to do with our first reaction, which was sort of along the lines of, they sure don't make bad boys the way they used to. We like LaBeouf, we wish him well, and we wouldn't want him doing anything that might force Harrison Ford to put the lad over his knee. But still, you only turn twenty-one once, and a lot of people turn twenty-one before they have access to fame, riches, and admiring young women whose appreciation for your natural delighfulness is thrown into even greater relief by all those riches and fame you're storing in the glove compartment. We're not saying that you ought to get arrested to commemorate the event. But if you do get arrested, the circumstances should in no way involve a late-night shopping trip in quest of Clearasil.

In what looked like a carefully-set-up and well-rehearsed explanation, almost as if he were performing under orders by someone who had the potential to do a lot of good or a lot of not-so-good for his career and who doesn't want parents keeping their kids away from the new Indiana Jones movie because they don't want them idolizing winos, LaBeouf explained that he had been enjoying a pleasant evening enjoying the intoxicants that he is legally entitled to as an adult and was just getting ready to bed down when he noticed that he had a pimplie on his noodle. So, as he related the events on the show, "I go to Walgreens and I go to the cosmetic aisle. And I see the security guard and he's looking at me, four in the morning, pretty disheveled, pretty messed up on the special magic sauce. And I get the pimple cream, and he's looking at me, he's kinda giggling to himself, and now I'm starting to feel like, `What? It's really not that funny, guy, you know?'" (LaBeouf starred in the Project Greenlight movie The Battle of Shaker Heights, in the process earning himself a Ph.D in "not funny.") LaBeouf made it back to his hotel room and dabbed the miracle ointment onto his forehead, then realized that he needed some cigarettes to enjoy in bed. So he returned to Walgreens, but the security guard gave him some shit again, and it got him so flustered that he bought gummy bears instead. LaBeouf returned to his hotel room and realized his mistake after failing, on his third try, to light a gummy bear. "I go back down, I got the hoodie on, [the security guard] goes, `Really? Really? Really?' And I'm like, `Yeah, really!' He goes, `Well, what are you doing here?' And I'm like, `Well buddy, it's your worst nightmare.'"

It was at that point that the security guard, recognizing a desperate cry for help when he saw one, slipped the cuffs on LaBouef and called the cops, who charged him with criminal trespassing. The charges were subsequently dropped, probably after the Walgreens CEO's teenage daughter threatened to hold her breath until she turned blue. The whole traumatic experience will no doubt be instructive for all involved; presumably LaBeouf has learned a hard lesson about the dangers of smoking, though if he quite cigarettes cold turkey, we worry that he might lose whatever control he still has over his gummy bears jones. We've also learned that there's still at least one Walgreens out there; we thought they'd all been turned into Duane Reades. That may have something to do with why the security guards there are so touchy.

Harmony Korine Settles Down

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

There comes a time when all of us have to put our skateboarding, glue-sniffing, bum-fighting, Meryl Streep-pushing, smoking-in-bed-and-burning-down-the-house days behind us, and if the New York Times is to be believed, that time has come for Harmony Korine. Perhaps the only man on earth who counts Werner Herzog and magician David Blaine among his close friends, Korine no longer wanders the mean streets of New York asking strangers to punch him in the face. He’s now married and living in Nashville, and as Dennis Lim reports, “this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.”

The old days were interesting, though – some would say more interesting than the movies he made then. (After Janet Maslin declared his 1997 white-trashterpiece Gummo the worst movie of the year, Korine recalls, “I got a call from Herzog, who was like, ‘This movie is now destined to live forever.’ ”) He managed to burn down not one house, but two. (“The first one I don’t know what happened,” he said. “The second one was my fault. I fell asleep smoking.”) He made a series of Crispin Glover-esque appearances on the David Letterman show, and embarked on a video project called Fight Harm, perhaps the single stupidest movie ever attempted by a name director. This is how Korine explained it at the time: “I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see.”

After trips to the hospital and jail, the project was abandoned. “I thought I was making the greatest comedy,” he said. “At the time I really felt like that’s what I was on earth to do — get beaten up.” Some of his critics agree, but Lim cites Mister Lonely as “apparent evidence of a kinder, gentler Harmony Korine.” We trust this means Korine won’t be going the Uwe Boll route and challenging his critics to meet him in the ring.

Last Night I Dreamed I Saw Alan Zweibel, Alive as You or Me

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

A business story by Brooks Barnes in The New York Times examines how the writers' strike is affecting social interaction "in the giant high school cafeteria that is Hollywood." As Barnes points out, "Only a rarefied circle of writers, of course, has the ability to truly mingle with Hollywood’s corporate royalty. The vast majority of writers are average folks who manage a middle-class existence or are unemployed in their chosen profession at any given moment. The union says the average income for a member is $60,000. But the union also counts as members dozens of creators of hit television shows, who can take home upwards of $5 million a year, and writers who command fees of $1 million for a screenplay or more." These are the ones who frequent the same restaurants, hotels, and luxury resorts as the bloated capitalist overdogs who run the studios, and who are finding themselves huddled in whispers about the greedy moneybags at the adjoining table at the Four Seasons, not the first place where you might expect to hear voices raised in a rousing, impromptu chorus of "Joe Hill." The strike does seem to be bringing inch-stained wretches of different tax brackets together: when David Letterman, having worked out a deal with the WGA to use his own writing staff (paid by his production company, not CBS), returned to the air last night, the ten "striking writers" who marched onstage to read the Top Ten list included Nora Ephron, the celebrity journalist turned Hollywood player (Sleepless in Seattle, the screenplay of When Harry Met Sally). In the meantime, writers and executives who were once nominally friendly and ducking past each other at grocery stores and their kids' school assemblies and being seated "selectively" at Campanile, whose manager, Jay Perrin, told the paper, “I don’t think a fistfight would break out. It is more like people cracking jokes about each other with more bite than normal.” The strike also crosses family lines; Barnes cites examples of striking writers who happen to be married to network executives, leading us to wonder if maybe Nora Ephron is taking notes for a future wacky romantic comedy while she's down there in the trenches. That might be reason enough to hope the strike will never end.