Friday, April 2, 1999

By Erik Floren

LOS ANGELES -- Humour is not easily defined. What makes you laugh may not be funny to others. Defining the particular humour of Steve Martin may be even tougher.

 Don't laugh, but Elvis Presley took a shot at it.

 According to a story told to a reporter a few years back, Martin was playing Las Vegas in the early 1970s when Presley caught his act and paid him a visit.

 "He came backstage with Priscilla," as Martin told it. "He saw me in my dressing room and he came in. He was very imposing. He looked at me and said, 'Son, you have an oblique sense of humour.' "

Oblique.  

Clearly, that floorshow must have left poor Elvis picking his pompadour. Back then Martin - on stage wearing a prop arrow through his head, twisting balloons into animal shapes while telling existentialist jokes - teetered between ironic and idiotic.

From a teenaged classroom cut-up, Martin graduated to showbiz writing comedy for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He suddenly seized the celebrity spotlight with several hilarious appearances on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show during the mid-1970s. Critics, sometimes at a loss for words to explain the Steve Martin phenomenon, called his visual style a throwback to earlier comedians.

He was the rock 'n' roll of comedy. Indeed, so popular the prematurely greying Martin became and so quickly, he began playing the huge stadiums usually reserved only for the mega rock star.

His trademark "wild and crazy guy" routines fast became buzzwords, and he had several hit albums, including Let's Get Small and A Wild and Crazy Guy.  

By 1979, Martin launched his feature film career with The Jerk. He followed up with Pennies From Heaven, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and The Man With Two Brains.

He's never looked back. Or wanted to. He has disparagingly described his stand-up years as "the hardest time of my life. It was a new city every night."

Of course, time heals all. Today when asked about his early years, he's not quite so hard on the memory.

"Let's see, the hard times," says Martin, 53, who in person is articulate, bright, witty and immaculately attired. "Well, they're funny now, but the early days of doing stand-up were very hard.

"Mainly I'd be in small night clubs. I once worked a drive-in theatre outdoors. And the cars would come in and put the speaker in their windows and if they thought something was funny, they'd honk," he deadpans.

Over the years, his frantic film performances have slowly but noticeably toned down. Muted. Morphed into more gentle, family humour. Martin alternated his comedy roles with serious ones; his acting range expanded by performances in Little Shop of Horrors, All Of Me, Roxanne, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Parenthood and the two Father of the Bride flicks to Grand Canyon and L.A. Story and The Spanish Prisoner.

Which brings us to The Out-of-Towners, opening in Edmonton today. Same nuanced performance we've come to expect in Martin's more recent films - like Father of the Bride, but with a brief wild and crazy guy outburst.

"This is a movie that I actually liked myself in," says Martin. "Most movies I really don't. But I think there is something magical happening between me and Goldie - something you can't quite name."

The Goldie, in this case, is the bubbly Goldie Hawn. And this film reunites the duo, who last teamed up in the 1992 hit comedy Housesitter.

In the The Out-of-Towners, Martin and Hawn play an Ohio couple who suffer a series of misadventures as their predictable business trip to New York quickly goes awry. It's a remake of the 1970 film of the same name which starred Jack Lemmon and Sandy Duncan.

Since doing remakes is often fraught with peril, and you must be offered dozens of scripts daily, why do this?

"Goldie. I was reluctant and she said we have do this, because this movie is about what so many people are going through when their children are grown. And that's a very serious topic and we should do this film. And I said, 'I'm going with you, then. I'm going to trust your instinct.' And I said Goldie, 'but if you tell me a year later that your psychic said to do this movie - I'm going to kill you.'

"And then we were talking one day, you know, that we liked the movie and it was all done and she said, 'That's exactly what my psychic said would happen.' "

Despite being sucked in to the film on false pretences, Martin obviously enjoys working with Hawn.

"I think it's apparent on the screen that Goldie and I get along well. When you do comedy all the time, every day like she did and I did, you learn what it's about. You learn that it's not about yourself so much; that it's about a give and take between two people.

"When I worked with her on Housesitter I noticed that she did not care who had the joke. That it was a team effort. So if I had something funny, she would make room for that. If she had something funny, I would make room. You're not in competition with each other.

"And she's a cheerful person - that's always good. And she laughs at my jokes, so what could be better?"

And that brings us back to Martin's humour. Define it.

"I believe that the best source of comedy was that which made you laugh and you didn't understand why," says Martin. "And that's what I tried to do when I first started out. It's like, I'm going to try and be funny and I'm not going to know why. And I'm not going to do jokes and I'm not going to tell them when to laugh.

"They're just going to figure it out and it's going to be something funny in the spirit of things."

Something oblique, no doubt.

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from http://www.canoe.ca/JamMoviesArtistsM/martin_steve.html

March 25, 1999

By Jim Slotek

HOLLYWOOD -- Steve Martin admittedly isn't knocking himself out in the movie mill anymore. His last appearance was a serious supporting role in The Spanish Prisoner, and his last "wild and crazy" part was in the regrettable Sgt. Bilko.

 At 53, he's entitled to be picky. Plus, there's his writing gig -- which so far has included the play Picasso At The Lapin Agile, the upcoming Eddie Murphy film Bowfinger (in which he also co- stars) and a best-selling short story book called Pure Drivel.

 So what's he doing co-starring with Goldie Hawn, his erstwhile co-star in the hit Housesitter, in a remake of Neil Simon's The Out-Of-Towners? He admits he "got cold feet" and backed out after meekly saying yes to Paramount boss Sherry Lansing. Then Hawn started working on him.

 "Goldie came to me and said, 'I think this movie is about something really important! It's about what happens when the kids are grown and how does a couple reunite who've been busy for 19 years?' And I thought, 'Awright, that's a good topic.' And you can't say no to her anyway, she'll make you nuts."

 Indeed, where the 1970 original was about a couple (Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis) who have everything go wrong on a trip to New York, this Out-Of-Towners is about an empty-nest couple who have everything go wrong on a trip to New York, the better to learn valuable lessons about their relationship.

 "The only reason to do it would be that it was fun. Working with Goldie, we make each other laugh, and that gives you a lot of encouragement. We kind of boldly ad libbed our way through the movie. Some things worked and some things didn't."

 But of all the things he could be doing, Martin says, "I really enjoy writing the most right now.

 "In a weird way, it actually helped my acting because when you do something like acting as often as we all do, you may get better technically, but you also get disconnected. And when you find something that you get connected again to, like I did with writing, it's, like, you and the paper and it's coming out of your heart."

 Picasso, an imagining of a battle of wits between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, has become a regional theatre favourite. "When I wrote it, I thought, 'Why can't I write a screenplay in the same spirit, where I don't really care and I don't think anybody will actually see it?'

 "So I gave it that shot with Bowfinger (about "a loser movie producer who tries to get a movie made with a big star, Eddie Murphy, who refuses, so we decide to make the movie anyway without him in it and without telling the powers-that-be").

 Bowfinger, scheduled for release this summer, "kind of gave me the feeling of what it means to be connected again to something, and the inspiration to invest more in the acting."

 Martin clearly beats himself up on creative issues more than the average Hollywood denizen does -- starting from his initial career crisis of how to move on from the arrow-in-the-head wild- and-crazy guy of Saturday Night Live fame.

 "There've been so many highs and lows, depending on what era we're talking about," he says of his career. "There were moments in that (wild-and-crazy) era, moments onstage where everything was just miraculous. But that only lasted probably a couple of years, and you think if you can remember certain moments as being so great, then the rest of them probably weren't that good," he says with a wry laugh.

 "When I did The Jerk, I said, 'What am I gonna do next?' I didn't want to do Jerk 2. Then I did (the dark musical) Pennies From Heaven and I thought this was just way too extreme the other way." The closest to pleased he's ever been with his work, he says, was Roxanne (another self- penned script).

 Graded on a curve, his career holds up. I point out that a number of his films -- Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid comes to mind -- have survived on video as cult favourites.

 "And some of them you've never heard of again," he says. "I was talking to a friend about this the other day. The problem today is that the only success is a total success. And a lot of things don't fall into that category." \d "/JamMoviesGraphics/storymark.gif"

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April 18, 1999, 9:00 p.m.

Liane Bonin

Steve Martin (now in ''The Out-of-Towners'' with Goldie Hawn) may have built his early career by being a wild and crazy guy, but these days he's living proof that a life in comedy doesn't always create an upbeat outlook. Thinking back to his own stand-up shtick from the '70s, Martin doesn't even crack a smile: ''I can't watch it -- I don't know why -- even though it was 20 years ago.''

 Martin, 53, is nearly as glum when he considers some of his recent film work. ''It's hard to take pride in a movie unless it's a total success, and that's very rare," he says. "You can succeed artistically, you can succeed critically, but if it doesn't do big box office, it's not a success.''

 Considering that ''The Out-of-Towners'' took in a middling $8.2 million in its opening weekend, Martin could justify his disappointed tone -- and the mixed and negative reviews probably did little to cheer him. Then again, his expectations from critics are rather low: ''You can do the greatest thing in the world, and somewhere someone is going to say you're the lowest scum ever. There's always that little bit of take back.''

 In case you're wondering if Martin would be happier to extricate himself from the whole Hollywood racket, he has at least one reason to put up with it: ''The satisfaction I get from movies is the making of them.'' Of course, his satisfaction tends to diminish after the final scene is shot: ''Once a movie is done you don't know what's going to happen. Maybe it's going to be awful, maybe it's going to be good -- you don't know.''

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