The Red Herring: Crispin Glover

Our favorite renaissance man enjoyed his late-night sandwiches in Wild at Heart. In his appetite-suppressing What Is It? snails are taken with a pinch of salt. And in the upcoming Beowulf, his Grendel will presumably feast upon human bones. So what’s eating George McFly lately?

By Julian Sancton

“It’s easy for me to be this weird crazy guy,” Crispin Glover protests over lunch at SoHo House in Manhattan. But he doesn’t protest that much. Dressed in black, his pale eyes darting around the room, he seems comfortable with the typecasting.

There are two Crispin Glovers. They are the same person in the sense that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. There is the one most famous for playing George McFly in Back to the Future and the Thin Man in the Charlie’s Angels franchise. That Crispin is easy to swallow. The other is Crispin Hellion Glover, also the name under which the actor signs his own, more personal projects. Hellion has written several books, with such titles as Oak-Mot and Rat Catching, which he distributes through his company, Volcanic Eruptions. Scrawled and scratched onto existing 19th-century texts, they read like psychedelic Victorian screeds. And for the past ten years, Hellion has been working on a film trilogy that will—as long as he has anything do with it—never be released. 

Crispin is Glover’s public face. He’s the one you see on the red carpet. But the money Crispin makes from acting in mainstream movies goes straight to Hellion, who uses it to finance films that no investor in their right mind—with the exception of David Lynch—would ever go near. Hellion is the one journalists talk about when they describe Glover as a latter-day Vincent Price and write that he is a strict vegetarian, that he has a gynecological table in his house, and that he collects diseased eyeballs. (Perhaps it was Hellion that almost kicked Letterman in the face in 1987, thus banishing him from the show.)

After making Willard and the Charlie’s Angels sequel, Crispin bought Hellion a château in the Czech Republic, the stables of which he plans to convert into a soundstage. Built in the 1600s, the castle once belonged to Count Harrach, and the room Glover uses as an office is where the Bohemian composer Bedrich Smetana wrote his first opera. Smetana, whose work was haunted by the death of his three daughters, later went deaf from syphilis and spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum.

“I’m going to get that lobster bisque,” Glover, 42, tells the server. For all his fidgeting, he speaks deliberately and slowly, with a too-perfect diction that’s all the more pronounced when he tries his Czech on me. It turns out Glover has never in his life been a vegetarian.

“Things that are written are extremely inaccurate,” he says. The gynecological table was actually an antique, stainless steel operating table. “It was painted black, more like an art installation.” As for the eyeball collection, he says, “I have one piece from the late 1800s that’s made out of wax.

“I’d rather talk about the film,” he says. He’s referring to What Is It?, his directorial debut, which he also wrote and financed. Tagline: “Being the adventures of a young man whose principle interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home, as tormented by an hubristic, racist inner psyche.”

What Is It? is a disturbing, neo-Surrealist phantasmagoria featuring a principal cast largely composed of actors with Down syndrome. The two exceptions are a man with a severe case of cerebral palsy, Steve Stewart, and Glover himself. Originally conceived as a short to demonstrate the viability of using actors with Down syndrome in regular roles, the final result, at 72 minutes, would probably make Corky cry.

I say “probably” because I didn’t actually see it. The film will not be released—its raison d’être, in fact, is to be unreleasable—and Glover refuses to send out screeners. “I’d rather have a press that is uninformed than have the film leaked with piracy problems,” he says, tucking his straight hair behind his ears. For the past five years, he has been touring the country and personally attending every screening of his film. He’s leaving for California the next day, so it looks like I’m going to have to settle for remaining uninformed.

But then Glover says this piece would have no meaning to him if I didn’t see his movie. Faced with a logistical nightmare, I arranged to have my close friend John, who lives in Los Angeles, visit Glover at his house in Silverlake for a personal screening of the film.

The following evening, John passed through a darkened arch, and up a staircase to a heavy, wooden door, flanked by terra-cotta sphinxes. Glover lead John to his boudoir, where blood-red curtains surrounded the bed. Glover set up a projection screen, and made sure that John was comfortable on the divan. (Among the piles of books, John noticed The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tarot and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astrology.)

“The sound of an organ accompanied the dancing Gothic font, and then the movie began,” John wrote me in a long e-mail. “Snails are dissolved by salt. Others will be beheaded.” In a later scene, John wrote, “a mentally challenged actor smashes a snail against glass and cries. He tries to superglue the snail back together. This is interspersed with cuts of cartoonish violence as the Down syndrome actors slap each other.”

If I’d been there with him, John says, we would have laughed nervously and uncontrollably. Watching alone in Glover’s bedroom, though, he was transfixed by the increasingly grotesque, often disturbing images.

Over his bisque, Glover had told me, “I’m not interested in shock at all. There’s nothing shocking about the film.” In retrospect though, I can’t help contrast that comment with another scene John described: “A long and lingering shot of an image of Shirley Temple in front of a swastika, completely naked (she’s 8), masturbating with a riding crop, and wearing an SS commando hat with riding boots.”

Now I understand why Glover was so worried about piracy and why he insists on presenting every screening himself. If What Is It? were to hit the Web without a word of explanation, it would become a cult film for all the wrong reasons: a snail snuff movie or retard porn. Glover intends his movie to be a statement, but it’s an oblique one, and he has to be there in person to make it.

Like the films of Luis Buñuel, one of Glover’s main influences as a director, What Is It? is a hypersymbolist barrage of taboos, albeit with moments of genuine pathos. “Films that are financed through corporate media at this point in time necessarily must fit within the bounds of that which is considered good and evil,” says Glover. “It’s homogenizing the experience of movies for an entire culture.”

Glover says his parents, both actors, are proud of his work. They will appear in the sequel, written by Steve Stewart, called It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine! Glover will soon begin shooting It Is Mine, the third installment in the trilogy. “Like Star Wars,” he says, with an affable chuckle.

This year, Crispin will reunite with Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis. He is playing Grendel in the $70 million animated production of Beowulf, which stars Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. Hellion, meanwhile, will go back to his castle in Bohemia—his anti-Skywalker Ranch—to continue concocting undrinkable potions not for the masses. But 75 years after Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, it takes a lot more than an extreme close-up of an eyeball being sliced open to make an audience uncomfortable. It takes watching a man with cerebral palsy orgasm to the tune of Johnny Rebel’s “Some Niggers Never Die.”

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