You know Crispin Glover from Back to the Future. Even if you have never seen his infamous appearance on the David Letterman show, odds are you have heard about it. Glover has cultivated dual reputations as an eccentric genius and an unpredictable pain in the rear. Crispin Glover followed his own path and it lead him to the Czech Republic.
What the hell happened?
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Back to the Beginning
Crispin Glover’s dad is character actor Bruce Glover. He’s best known for having played the assassin Mr. Wint in the James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever. Bruce Glover’s credits include a lot of B-movies. He’s worked steadily from the 1960’s all the way through the early 21st century including appearances in movies produced by Crispin.
Glover’s mother was a dancer. Betty Glover danced under the stage name Mary Elizabeth Lillian Betty Krachey. She retired from dancing when she became a mother, but she has a few acting credits to her name. Most but not all of her acting work was tied to her son.
Crispin got into show business at a young age. “I started acting professionally at age 13. This was something that was my own decision. I had seen how the business worked because my father is an actor and my mother retired as a dancer and actress when I was born. My parents were not super famous or super wealthy. I grew up middle class. But I could see it was a good business to be a part of and I had a realistic understanding of the benefits and difficulties of it.”
At thirteen, Glover appeared in a couple of commercials. His first long term job as an actor was in a production of “The Sound of Music ” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles in 1978. Glover was fourteen when he landed the role as one of the kids cared for by Florence Henderson’s Maria.
Best of Times?
Glover was cast as the lead in a pilot for a kids’ sketch TV show called Best of Times in 1981. For his audition, Glover improvised a scene which was rewritten into a sketch for the show. In the bit, Glover tried to convince a shop owner played by Jackie Mason to listen to a song. The show was not picked up to series, but it marked the official acting debut of Glover and one of his co-stars.
“Nicolas Cage was also cast in it from the same “Cattle call” and he and I were the only two actors that were of the age that were still in school. So we had a tutor that we would have to be in a special room or trailer and do a certain amount of hours of school work each day. He and I shared a certain sense of humor of the absurd and became friends while making that show.”
In the early eighties, Glover appeared in several TV shows and made for TV movies. He did episodes of The Facts of Life, Happy Days and Hill Street Blues. Glover even appeared in a couple of episodes of Family Ties. He also showed up in TV movies like High School USA which starred a who’s who of 80’s sitcom stars; Michael J Fox, Nancy McKeon, Todd Bridges and Dana Plato.
“When I was 18, 19, and 20, I had three separate occasions where there were times when they wanted to develop situation comedies around me. It’s a true thing. I was always relatively uncomfortable with television. I don’t regret having done it, but I essentially stopped doing it after being a teenager.”
Early Movie Roles
Glover made his movie debut in the teen sex comedy My Tutor in 1983. It was about a horny, rich teen who flunks the sexiest of classes, French. So naturally his rich dad hires a young sexy tutor to teach him the language of love because… teen sex comedy. There were a lot of these things in the eighties for some reason.
The following year, Glover popped up in three movie movies none of which were about sexy tutors. Racing with the Moon was a coming of age drama starring Sean Penn and Glover’s old friend, Nicolas Cage. And Teachers featured Nick Nolte, JoBeth Williams and Judd Hirsch as frustrated educators. Ralph Macchio and Laura Dern were among their students.
But Glover’s most memorable movie from 1984 has to be Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr. really did plan to kill off Jason and end the series with the fourth feature. But then money happened and the franchise got a new beginning in 1985.
Glover openly admitted he made the movie for the money. “Just before I got Friday the 13th, I had moved out of my parents’ house, I only had a certain amount of money and I was getting low on funds. And then I got Friday the 13th: Part 4. I needed a job. I needed to work. I needed to continue working.”
Before dancing his way into horror movie history as only he could, Glover was unimpressed by the first movie in the series. “I remember when I saw the original one, not too long before it I’d seen the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and when I saw the first Friday the 13th, I thought, ‘Well, this is extremely derivative.’”
Back to the Future
Of course Glover’s big break came when he played George McFly in the sci-fi comedy hit, Back to the Future. Writer Bob Gale came up with the concept for the movie when he found his dad’s yearbook and wondered if he would have been friends with his parents if they had gone to high school together.
Back to the Future was a notoriously difficult movie to make. Director Robert Zemeckis always wanted Michael J. Fox as his leading man. But when Fox was unavailable due to his commitment to Family Ties, Zemeckis cast Eric Stoltz as time traveling teen, Marty McFly. Unfortunately, Stoltz’s performance wasn’t working, so Zemeckis let him go weeks into filming. By that point, his first choice was available.
The movie encountered several delays like this during which time Gale and Zemeckis polished their script. According to Gale, George McFly was originally written as “a young Jimmy Stewart.” But when Glover auditioned, he and Zemeckis knew that he would “make the part so much his own that I can’t even recall what we were thinking when we wrote it.”
According to Glover, he was hired before he had a chance to read the finished script. When he got to read it, he was disappointed with the ending. “I said to Robert Zemeckis that I felt the reward should be that the characters were only in love and that if there was a monetary reward at the end such as the son character having a new car in the garage it tainted the message and the message turned to ‘Money will bring you happiness’ as opposed to ‘Love will bring you happiness.’”
Against all odds, Back to the Future ended up as the highest-grossing movie of 1985. Universal was eager to make a sequel, but Zemeckis and Gale were reluctant to go back to the well. They saw Back to the Future as a stand-alone story. Eventually they gave in when they realized a sequel would move forward with or without their involvement.
To be continued…
On the Edge
Back to the Future made Glover famous, but it didn’t make him a movie star. The following year he had a bit part in the Sean Penn thriller, At Close Range. He also costarred opposite Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye in the indie drama, River’s Edge.
Reeves and company played a group of teens who discover that one of their friends has murdered another one of their classmates. Each of the kids reacts to the news differently. Glover’s character is almost pathologically obsessed with covering up the crime and protecting the murderer.
Producer Midge Sanford recalled Glover’s unusual audition,”I think Crispin Glover came in with a wig and an outrageous take on the part. He was so out there that Sarah and I were a little nervous about what he was doing. But we trusted him and felt like it would work out in the end.”
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Glover explained how he made the character his own. “The character could have been played as a person who sincerely wanted the best for the murderer character. But I made the choice to play the character as a person who wanted people to believe that intentions of the character were sincere in order for positive attention to be put on to himself. That is a different intention than what was written. The dialogue was not changed but the intentions was changed.”
River’s Edge debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1986. It proved to be a divisive movie initially. According to Sanford “Some executives from a small distribution company wouldn’t look at us [after a festival screening]. People either embraced it or were very put off by it. It didn’t get picked up right away.”
The movie finally found a distributor at Sundance and was released in the United States to critical acclaim in 1987. The head of marketing at Island Pictures loved the movie. Sanford said he promoted River’s Edge relentlessly.
Late Night With David Letterman
As part of the promotional push for River’s Edge, Glover made his infamous appearance on the David Letterman show. Glover behaved erratically. He was wearing a wig and platform shoes. Letterman, who was accustomed to the antics of Andy Kaufman, did not seem to be amused by Glover.
After proclaiming that he was strong, Glover challenged the late night host to arm wrestle. Things escalated quickly when Glover got out of his seat and attempted a karate kick that landed surprisingly close to Letterman’s face. Whatever patience Letterman had with his guest evaporated instantly and he pulled the plug on the segment.
Decades later, people still talk about Glover’s appearance on Letterman. This clearly delights the actor. When the subject comes up, he has a standard response. “What I always answer is, ‘I neither confirm nor deny that I was ever on the David Letterman show.’ Which, of course, there’s a sense of humor to it — you can make what you want.”
What do I make of it? Obviously, Glover was on the Letterman show. But it’s pretty obvious in retrospect that he was playing a character. Glover had refused to promote Back to the Future because he didn’t like the message of the movie. But he felt an obligation to get the word out on River’s Edge. He went on Late Night to provoke a response and boy did he.
At the time, there were rumors that Glover was out-of-his-mind on LSD. I remember hearing that he was the only guest ever to be banned by Letterman for life. This is a myth. In fact, Glover appeared on The Late Show again just a few weeks later.
Back to Late Night
The second appearance is still plenty goofy, but Glover is a bit more subdued. That may be why we’re not talking about his return engagement decades later.
Did the Letterman appearances help sell ticket’s to River’s Edge? Who’s to say? But it had a chilling effect on Glover’s career. He stepped back from making movies for a couple of years to concentrate on other pursuits. One such creative outlet was an experimental album titled “The Big Problem = The Solution. The Solution = Let It Be.”
When his record was released, Glover said he had fun with his weird talk show appearances, but he was ready to move on. “I found it frightening to do publicity, because what generally happens is writers put you in a certain category, and people are pegged, and I thought if that’s going to happen-what can I bring forth to make me interesting? But now that’s behind me. I feel I’ve grown up making this record.”
Naturally Glover returned to David Letterman’s show to promote his album.
On this appearance, Glover tries to convince Letterman that the person who attempted to karate kick him in 1987 was actually a look-alike named Rubin Farr. They also watched a clip from his music video for the song, “Clowny Clown Clown”. By now, it’s pretty clear that Letterman is in on the joke.
Recast to the Future
Glover returned to acting in 1989 with the indie comedy, Twister. Not to be confused with the big budget disaster movie of the same name, Twister was about an eccentric family headed by Harry Dean Stanton. Suzy Amis, Dylan McDermott and Jenny Wright co-starred.
Virtually no one saw Twister on the big screen. It played in only two movie theaters for only a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, Glover missed the opportunity to appear in a much bigger movie, Back to the Future Part II. Although audiences might not have realized that Glover was missing.
As I said previously, no one expected there to be any sequels to Back to the Future. As such, the actors were not contractually obligated to come back. Glover’s character, George McFly, was mostly written out of the sequels. He appears briefly in the second movie through the use of some movie trickery.
“The producers hired another actor and with a false nose, chin and cheekbones made him up to look like me then inter-spliced a very small amount of footage of me from the original film in order to fool audiences in to believing it was me playing the character.”
See You in Court!
Glover filed a lawsuit against Universal Pictures for violating his right of publicity. “Had they only hired another actor, which is kind of what I thought had happened, that would have been totally legal, and I would have been completely fine with it.”
He points out that the role of Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer, was recast without the use of prosthetic devices to make Elisabeth Shue look more like the original actress, Claudia Wells. According to Glover’s lawyer, Jeffrey Weissman, the actor who took Glover’s place in the sequel, was uncomfortable with the whole situation.
According to the lawyer, people on the set of Back to the Future Part II referred to Weissman by name as “Crispin”. “Jeffrey told me a story that one day, Steven Spielberg walked on set and laughed and said, ‘Hey Crispin, I see you got your million.’ To me, those anecdotes showed they were trying to take Crispin’s persona.”
Universal tried to get the judge to dismiss the case by claiming that they were trying to recreate the image of the character of George McFly rather than the actor who played him. Glover and his attorney argued that with advances in technology, this sort of thing would become more common in the future and protections were needed.
The judge rejected Universal’s request to have the case tossed out. Instead, she allowed Glover’s lawyer to depose several key players including Zemeckis, Gale, Spielberg and Michael J. Fox. They also asked for and received all of Universal’s accounting as related to the financials of the Back to the Future sequel.
The Settlement
At the urging of the judge, the case was settled out of court. Rumor has it that Glover received around three quarters of the one million dollars he reportedly asked for.
Since the case was settled, the Screen Actors Guild has adopted rules to prevent this sort of thing. Glover claims that this was a direct result of his lawsuit although in reality there were other cases that could have been influential as well. Glover’s legal battle certainly helped draw attention to the issue of publicity rights.
The downside was that the lawsuit also gave Glover a reputation for being a difficult actor. Spielberg and Zemeckis are a couple of Hollywood heavyweights. There are consequences to be paid for crossing them. Glover did eventually work with Zemeckis again on the motion capture movie, Beowulf but that was nearly two decades after the lawsuit was settled.
Supporting Roles
Through the nineties, Glover found steady work playing supporting roles in the kinds of movies you would expect Crispin Glover to appear in. Glover said he turned down the chance to appear in Back to the Future Part II in order to make the comedy Where the Heart Is for John Boorman. He also got to work with one of his idols, David Lynch, on the 1990 movie, Wild at Heart.
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“Erasherhead was a very important film to me at age 16. I went and saw Erasherhead at least 12 or 13 times at the Friday midnight shows at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles in 1980… I am very glad to have worked with David Lynch and he has been very nice to me professionally as an actor and filmmaker and personally as well.”
In 1991, Glover popped up playing Andy Warhol in Oliver Stone’s Jim Morrison biopic, The Doors. He appeared in several indie movies including Rubin and Ed. The movie is notable because Glover plays Rubin Farr, the character he invented for his first appearance on David Letterman’s show.
Glover worked with several of the most respected filmmakers in Hollywood. He was in Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Glover worked with Jim Jarmusch on Dead Man in 1995 and Milos Forman in The People vs. Larry Flynt the following year.
The parts were small, but the movies were on brand. It is perhaps surprising then to see Glover pop up in a piece of crap comedy like Chasers which starred Tom Berenger and Baywatch babe Erika Eleniak. Chasers was directed by Dennis Hopper who had costarred with Glover in River’s Edge so that must be the connection.
Glover admits that the indie movies he made helped define his public image. “Subsequent to River’s Edge, I was trying to find things that interested me. But, for the most part, the films did not reflect what my psychological interests were, and a certain persona was etched out that is essentially still with me, which is OK.”
Buying a Castle
In 2000, Glover appeared in Neil LaBute’s dark comedy, Nurse Betty. But he also played an assassin in the movie adaptation of the 70’s TV show, Charlie’s Angels. That seems about as off-brand for Glover as you can get. Glover said he initially turned down the part because he hated the dialogue for his character which he described as “expositional .”
Glover suggested that he would play the part of the villainous Thin Man if he could make the character mute. Director McG agreed to let Glover do his thing. And thus, Charlie’s Angels became an unlikely turning point in Glover’s career.
“I recognized in 2000 and 2001 that I really needed to make as much money as I could in order to fund my own filmmaking. So I switched my psychological perspective on how I choose movies and I now see acting as my craft but my films are my art.”
Around this time, Glover bought a very large castle in the Czech Republic. “My chateau’s official name is Zámek Konárovice. It was built in the 1600s in a quadratic structure that is basically now in a Renaissance style…”
“My property is very large and I will be maintaining it for my entire life. Most of the time when I am there has to do with meetings, business and maintenance, repair and restoration of the chateau and work for planning productions.”
Castle-Sized Mortgage Payments
In order to fund his own films, Glover began working more often in the early 21st century. There were plenty of oddball titles like Bartleby and Fast Sofa. But Glover also cashed paychecks in movies like Like Mike and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.
In 2003, Glover played the title role in the movie, Willard. It’s a remake of a the 1971 horror movie of the same name. The original movie spawned a sequel, Ben, for which Michael Jackson recorded a theme song. Glover recorded his own version of the song and released a music video to help promote the movie.
What Is It?
Glover made his directorial debut with the surrealist film, What Is It? The movie was considered controversial because Glover cast several actors with Down’s Syndrome in major roles.
“What is it? is not a film about Down’s Syndrome but my psychological reaction to the corporate restraints that have happened in the last 30 or more years in film making. Specifically anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable is necessarily excised or the film will not be corporately funded or distributed.”
Glover set out to create a trilogy of films that would challenge audiences. Typically his movies are accompanied by an hours-long question and answer session with the director. They may also include a multi-media presentation showcasing Glover’s other artistic endeavors.
The second film in Glover’s “IT” trilogy, It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE., was written by Steven C. Stewart who also played the lead role. Stewart was born with a severe case of cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair. His mother died when he was in his early twenties which resulted in Stewart being placed in a nursing home against his will. Glover described the movie as a “psychosexual, fantastical retelling” of Stewart’s life story.
Movies You May Have Actually Seen
Glover says he spent most of the money he earned from the first Charlie’s Angels movie to film It is fine! To replenish his coffers so he could finish his trilogy, he had to take on more mercenary assignments. That’s why you will see Glover playing Willy Wonka in the 2007 spoof, Epic Movie. Or doing voice-overs on the Open Season sequels and the animated movie, 9.
In 2010, audiences got more Glover than usual thanks to appearances in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and the time travel comedy, Hot Tub Time Machine. Both movies spawned Gloverless sequels.
Most of Glover’s movies in the last decade have gone direct to video in the US or had limited releases. He’s also made a few TV appearances most notably as Mr. World on the Epix series, American Gods. But Glover’s primary interest is in making his own movies. Everything else is just a way to keep the lights on in his castle.
Currently, Glover is working on his third movie with his father. Despite the title, It Is Mine., Glover says it is not the final installment of his “It” trilogy. “It Is Mine. is an even more complex project than the previous two installments put together, so it will be a while yet for that production. I will step outside of the trilogy for a number of films that deal with different thematic elements from the “It” trilogy.
So, what the hell happened?
Glover has cultivated a reputation as a weirdo. The truth is, yeah, he’s eccentric. He’s extremely passionate about topics most people I know never even think about. But a lot of the mythology around Crispin Glover is a put-on. Bored with the usual promotional interviews, Glover put on a show. And you can’t say it wasn’t memorable.
What hurt Glover’s career more than anything was his lawsuit against Universal Pictures and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. Glover stood up to some powerful forces in Hollywood and got branded as “difficult” for his efforts.
However, I don’t think any of those things hindered Glover’s career all that much in the long run. I mean, it wasn’t like Glover was pursuing the kind of roles that would have made him a movie star anyway. He was always much more interested in film oddities than mainstream movies. A career on the A-list was never in the cards.
That’s one of the paradoxes of Crispin Glover. He sees the world differently than just about everyone else. That allows him to bring a different perspective to the characters he plays. I don’t think you can over-estimate his contribution to Back to the Future. If George McFly had been performed as written, the movie would have lost a lot of kinetic energy.
But because Glover has a unique point of view, he’s not all that interested in making the kinds of movies that most of us want to watch. He’s built his life around making his own movies in the Czech Republic, working in LA to pay for them and touring the world to present them a bewildered audience.
According to Glover, he has never come close to getting married because his touring keeps him too busy to start a family. He may be a bit of a “goofball”, but I think you have to give Glover credit for doing what makes him happy.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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