| By Fred Topel
In Theaters May 6
|
When Martin Short first came out with the character Jiminy Glick, an uninformed, unprepared journalist, reporters everywhere tasted their own medicine. But it turns out, Short was never out to indict the journalism community. Interviewing was just the optimal format for his latest character.
“Jiminy Glick to me is a moron with power,” Short said. “So he could easily work for the President. He could be the principal of a school. He could run a hospital, a bad hospital. It’s not about journalism, but when I created him I was doing a talk show, so I was doing show business. He’s just one of those guys who you see in life where you say, ‘How could they possibly have gotten to where they are?’”
Now Glick has his own movie. A prequel of sorts, Jiminy Glick in LaLaWood tells the story of how Glick went from an obscure local talk show in Butte, Montana to the Toronto Film Festival where he became a Hollywood sensation. You finally get to meet Glick’s sons, Matthew and Modine, and witness a sex scene with Glick and his wife.
“I think it was long overdue, don’t you? And what a sex scene. She’s drinking and smoking during it.”
Casting the sons was not difficult, despite all the buildup of hearing their names throughout two seasons of Prime Time Glick. “I didn’t actually cast them. I approved of the tapes that I saw.”
Short did not go into the TV series ultimately planning a movie. But the idea for the movie evolved out of some skits from the show.
“I had done a couple seasons of the TV show and I had this idea for a movie. But to me, all these things that enter your head are assignments. You write them up and you throw them out there. If someone wants to do it, great. If not, it doesn’t matter because it’s your assignment and it’s done. It’s like you are in your little attic and you’ve done a painting and said, ‘Does anyone want to buy it? Oh, okay. Then to hell with this painting.’ I just found that when I was doing the TV show we had a feature on it of home movies. Jan Hooks played Dixie and she came out for about five days once and we shot a whole bunch of improvised movies. We would run them in the course of shooting the shows. I always used to find it had a different energy to it. a kind of oddly realistic energy to it. I mean, they were insane but so are a lot of characters that you meet in life.”
The film was improvised at the Toronto Film Festival and features interviews with some of Short’s pals like Steve Martin and Kurt Russell. But improvising a fake interview is one thing. Improvising scenes that have to ultimately tell a story was a greater challenge.
“One of the tricky parts is that the camera operators are improvising too. So if you get up from over there and say, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll improvise my way to the window.’ So then the camera guy is trying to follow and suddenly he’s in the shot. And they don’t have coverage and you’re in the editing room and you say, ‘That’s a good scene. Can we cut to my reaction?’ ‘We don’t have it.’ So we have to lose that. All your trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room. So you try to create some kind of something so that you can release someday and then sit and talk about.”
Wandering around the festival in a fat suit was fun for Short, because he was back in his home environment. “They were very, very nice. I’m Canadian and I know a lot of those people. We went to a couple of parties and we went to a couple of premieres. It was all kind of loose. It’s insane. You’re working onto a red carpet in a fat suit without preparation to talk to people. You might as well have dropped acid and gone shopping.”
Though the Glick suit looks bulky, it is no burden for Short. “That is completely comfortable. All it is is foam. You step into it and it zips up the back. That takes 10 seconds. The face part is about 2 ½ hours. There’s only one piece of makeup. It fits under your eyes and they glue it down. It’s my chin, then it’s a fake neck. So it’s all one part and then they paint it to match the rest of your skin, to make it all real. But it’s not that uncomfortable. Actually, again, you forget that’s on.”
In addition to his pals, Short got interviews with the likes of Kiefer Sutherland and Sharon Stone on the red carpet. He has no problem convincing people to play along, though he knows some interviews may be out of reach.
“It would be great to do Clinton. It would be great to do a lot of people. But with friends, I have found by having my own real talk show, or faux talk show like Glick, you can’t phone up your friends. You can’t do it because if you phone them up, they can’t say no. So what you do is you go through the channels. You go through publicists because it’s easy for a publicist to say to another publicist, ‘No.’ In the case of Steve Martin and Kurt Russell, they said, ‘Hey, by the way, I know you’re doing this film. If you want me to be in it, I’ll be in it.’ So they make it easy.”
Even with their cooperation, Short manages to stump his buddies. “There’s a question that I ask Kurt Russell in the movie where I say, ‘You worked with Elvis when you were a kid. Did you know then that someday his daughter would marry Michael Jackson?’”
Jiminy Glick in LaLaWood may be the last time we see Glick. No matter how successful the film may be, Short has no plans to return to the TV series. “Being Canadian we’re more like the British. Like John Cleese did this brilliant TV series once called Fawlty Towers and he did 12 episodes. That was it. So I kind of felt after three seasons of doing. let’s face it, it is like you’re in latex. So we’d already talked to 60 Hollywood people for those 30 shows or whatever it was. So you kind of think, ‘I’ve done it.’ And then you do a film and you say, ‘Okay, that’s good. That’s the punctuation of that character experience.’”
Jiming Glick in LaLaWood opens in select cities May 6. |
