Everyone, or almost everyone, knows what to expect from Martin Short.
The elfin clown has given us (first on the ”Second City Television”
series and then, for one season, on ”Saturday Night Live”) such characters from the beyond as Ed Grimley, the geek whose hair comes to a point; Jackie Rogers Jr., the epitome of show-business sleaze; and the cantankerous old vaudevillian Irving Cohen. And that list doesn`t begin to exhaust Short`s vast comedic repertoire, which also includes devastating takeoffs on the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Jerry Lewis and Montgomery Clift.
But in his new film, ”Cross My Heart”-a romantic comedy now showing locally about the trials of contemporary dating-Short plays a rather normal fellow who is found attractive, we are supposed to believe, by the very sexy Annette O`Toole.
The role, as they say in Hollywood, is quite a ”stretch” for Short-whose two previous films, ”Three Amigos” and ”InnerSpace,” found him working variations on his familiar wimp-geek persona. And Short admits that, during and after the making of ”Cross My Heart,” he had some doubts about whether his pairing with O`Toole would come across on the screen as wildly implausible.
”I remember,” Short says, ”watching the film with (producer) Larry Kasdan and saying to him: `Well, this is great-you`ve got Meryl Streep and Joel Grey up there.` But Larry and my wife both reassured me that I was being too hard on myself.
”On the other hand, the role really wasn`t that much of a stretch for me,” says the 34-year-old Short, who hails from Hamilton, Ontario. ”For the bulk of my career in Canada, I`d done straight acting, including Shakespeare on the radio. And my first American job was a television series called `The Associates,` where I played a guy who was a lot more normal than anything I did on `SCTV` or `Saturday Night Live.`
”When I was on the Second City stage in Toronto, I usually played characters. I wanted to come out each time with a new look, which was kind of cheap in a way-because if you can get a laugh with your appearance, then you don`t have to write as much. And if you fall down, that`s two laughs right there.
”But I always wanted to balance that, so in every show I also would play someone the audience could identify with-a person as close as possible to my real self.”
Short`s real self, by the way-while undeniably that of a man who likes to get laughs whenever he can-is totally lucid and very articulate, especially when it comes to the details of his craft.
”While I tend not to want to analyze what I do,” Short says, ”I guess I`ve always been a mimic-getting the teacher`s voice down real fast and things like that.
”Making `Three Amigos,` right away I could do (director) John Landis. I also can do a perfect Joe Dante (director of ”InnerSpace”) and a perfect Larry Kasdan. Then to any of those people I can add a layer of someone else and put that composite character in a situation where the original person is commented upon or satirized. That way you have something to say.
”I`ve heard it said that out of great tension comes great comedy; but when I get tense, I get very depressed. So to keep things loose on the set, I perform constantly, bounding around and doing jokes. Some say I show off, although I don`t think I`m obnoxious about it.
”But the ground rule on the character I play in `Cross My Heart` was that even though he is a funny guy, he is not a professional comedian.
”Now I suppose that if I had wanted to, I could have added a billion lines to the script-but then I would have been fired. `This is not going to be ”An Evening With Marty,” ` Kasdan told me, `because if it`s going to be that, we have other actors who want to do this film.` And I knew what he meant and agreed with it.
”You can augment the script, because I think that at a certain point the actors know the script even better than the writer does. For instance, when I bring Annette back to the apartment, there`s this neon sign over the bed that spells out my friend`s name. (Short`s character is pretending that the apartment, his friend`s glitzy pleasure dome, is his in order to impress his date.)
”Well, on one take, after Annette asks, `What do the initials ”B.G.”
stand for?,` and I explain that it means `Big Guy` and was given to me by my college fraternity, she adlibbed, `And what does the squiggle stand for?`
(referring to a final swirl of neon tubing). And I said, `I was so honored, I never asked.`
”I think that`s the kind of stuff that can be added. But it shouldn`t be like the end of `The Golden Child,` where Eddie Murphy makes a joke about
`Star Search.` You can`t do that.”
Perhaps the funniest moment in ”Cross My Heart” comes when Short, having brought O`Toole to his friend`s apartment, launches into a sublime parody of Montgomery Clift singing and playing some cocktail-lounge piano. But it`s a tricky moment, too-because the takeoff is so perfect that the audience could decide that this man is no longer a more-or-less realistic character but Martin Short doing his patented shtick.
”Yes,” Short says, ”that was a problem. In the original script, which was not written for me, they had the guy sit at the piano and do a kind of cocktail-lounge parody.
”But that was too identifiable with me, satirizing show business. So the idea was that while I would do this obscure impersonation out of nervousness, and she would think it was good but wouldn`t know enough about Montgomery Clift to really be able to gauge it, the important thing was the attitude I would adopt when I was finished.
”That is, when a comedian finishes doing something like that, he looks around for his response. But I played it so that when the bit is over, I`m even more self-conscious than I was before.”
Short`s film career, like those of most of his compatriots from ”SCTV”
and ”Saturday Night Live,” has been heavily conditioned by his television work-so much so that, with the exception of Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray, none of that group has proved to be as funny or as popular on the screen as he has been on TV.
Well aware of that problem, Short says that ”when I went to Hollywood, I certainly didn`t want to do the `Ed Grimley movie`-if only because I love Ed Grimley and don`t think that you can take these characters that have their three dimensions in 5-minute sketches and say, `Let`s open them out and put them in a 95-minute movie.` If you`re going to do Ed Grimley, why not just do some more sketches?
” `SCTV` was such a wonderful, luxurious show to do-it was the inmates running the asylum-that you sometimes feel, `Will I ever be able to top that?` But even though a great deal of care and work went into `SCTV,` the reality was that the show did lose money and that it was canceled twice, first by NBC and then by Cinemax.
`I was approached by `Saturday Night Live` at the end of `SCTV,` and my first reaction was: `Are you kidding? How can I do this after having done the best sketch show?` Then it dawned on me that this is my job, that I was out of work and there was no other sketch-comedy on TV. So I agreed to do `SNL`
for one year.
”I remember, though, when we were preparing for that season, people would come up to me and say, `Oh, we loved you on ”SCTV,”` and I would want to say to them, `Then don`t hate me this year, when I fall on my face and fail.`
”Well, we didn`t fail that year. And the fact was that it was easier to get into films from `SNL` than it was from `SCTV`-because even though it became very hip in Los Angeles to say you loved `SCTV,` you`d look at those people and know John Candy was in it and that was about all. And they probably knew who John was only because they`d seen him in `Stripes.` ”
While Short`s second film, the science-fiction comedy ”Inner Space,”
got some favorable reviews, it was not a popular success. And his first movie effort, ”Three Amigos,” in which he, Steve Martin and Chevy Chase played film cowboys of the silent-screen era, is commonly regarded as one of the great comedy disasters of our time.
”Steve and I are very good friends,” Short says, ”and while the `Three Amigos` experience was less difficult for me than it was for him-he was one of the writers and the executive producer-it was painful for all of us to put a lot of time and effort into a project and then have it received that way.
”It was amazing to me how much people wanted to hate that movie. I was interviewed in Dallas and this girl said, `Now, ”Three Amigos,” which was savaged by the critics . . . ,` and after she left I thought, `Hey, the film got great reviews in Newsweek, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.` But there`s a perception that it got savaged by all the critics, apparently because that`s what people want to believe.
”Now I`m not about to defend `Three Amigos.` I wouldn`t want it shown at my funeral. But if I want to be really negative, I can still count five or six laughs in it-plus we sang some songs, jumped on horses and it was in Technicolor. That should be worth something right there.”
One wonders, though, whether the experience of making that film and
”InnerSpace,” in both of which Short played farcical roles, is what led him to chose the rather ”straight” part he has in ”Cross My Heart.”
”Well, there really is no grand scheme to it,” Short says, ”because it`s not like `Should I do this interesting or that interesting thing?`
Usually there`s only one at a time.
”I certainly don`t want to be told, `You just play characters; somebody else plays the regular types`-because I know that I am a better actor today than I was a year ago, before I made `Cross My Heart.` And I think that I will continue to grow, as long as I get to work in situations that are a little intimidating-as opposed to saying, `This is my bag of tricks, and I`m going to play with them for the next 20 years.`
”That way, I`m sure I`ll have a much happier career than the other. But the secret is, you can`t let that go too far. You don`t want to have to go back and say, `Hey, remember me-I`m a clown!`
