In 1981, Steve Martin was in London, shooting the musical “Pennies From Heaven,” when he got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick.
The acclaimed director wanted to meet with the upstart comedian, suddenly a sensation after his first movie, “The Jerk.” “I went to his house, and he told me he was thinking about me for a part in a film,” Martin says. “He gave me this book, `Dream Rhapsody,’ and I read it. I was interested, but he never contacted me again. Obviously, he had trouble getting it made.”
Seventeen years later, Kubrick finally got the movie in the can: “Eyes Wide Shut.” “It was really meant to have starred Steve Martin and Nicole Kidman!” Martin says. “Of course, she was 4 at the time, so it would have been a very different movie.”
Martin then grins broadly, amused by his own joke, his eyes crinkling into narrow slits. It’s one of the few times in the course of the next half-hour that he will say anything overtly humorous. Away from the camera, Martin is known for being anything but a wild and crazy guy. Stiff and dry is more like it.
It’s a label Martin considers unfair. But he acknowledges it’s a curse common to comedians, who are often expected to be funny on demand.
“In interviews, you get a lot of weird questions that are supposed to be funny, and you’re supposed to come up with something really funny back, and you start thinking, Oh, don’t put me on the spot,” he says. “As soon as someone is waiting for you to be funny, that’s the last thing you can be. Besides, if you study my career, you’ll see that I don’t tell jokes.”
Though he did begin as a standup comedian, Martin never has been an on-screen joke machine. His specialties have been physical comedy (“All of Me”), intrinsically funny characters (“The Jerk,” “The Three Amigos”) or, more recently, ordinary men who have funny things happen to them (as in the remake of “The Out-of-Towners”).
In “Bowfinger,” which recently opened, Martin does a little of all three. In the film, which he also wrote, he plays Bobby Bowfinger, an aspiring director who makes up for his lack of talent with a mischievous resourcefulness. When Hollywood’s biggest action hero, Kit Ramsey (played by Eddie Murphy), declines to star in his newest production — the sci-fi epic “Chubby Rain” — Bowfinger decides to shoot the movie around him, having his actors simply walk up to Kit on the street and say their lines to him, with hidden cameras filming the action.
Reminiscent in spirit of 1994’s “Ed Wood,” “Bowfinger” is a comic love letter to the Hollywood fringes, the place where the luckless — and the talentless — dream about stardom and will do just about anything to achieve it. Though broadly comic, the movie also doubles as a deft satire of Los Angeles culture at its most shallow, with well-placed jabs at self-help cults, power lunches and the all-consuming insecurity that plagues even the most successful actors.
“Most actors and actresses aren’t college-educated, because a college education does you no good at all in show business,” Martin says. “So they grow up and they never stop looking for things. They’re always searching. Anything that will give you confidence is sought after, especially in Hollywood. Rejection is the same in any business, but if you’re a CPA and you get a review, it might say, `Hey, this column doesn’t add up.’ In Hollywood, the review says `You personally stink. I don’t like the way you look.’ It’s brutal.”
While writing “Bowfinger,” Martin says he drew on his own early, lean years in Hollywood, a time spent writing skits for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Show” and eking out guest appearances on variety programs. “There’s no place to apply for a job in Hollywood,” he says. “There’s no college degree you can earn, no nothing. You just have to worm your way in somehow. Bowfinger is like a lot of desperate people I knew when I was starting out, people who had the potential to be brilliant if they were just given the opportunity.”
But autobiographical elements aside, Martin admits he wanted to make “Bowfinger” for a much simpler reason. “The real goal was just to write something funny,” he says. “I think of `Bowfinger’ as a test of myself, to see if I could write a contemporary comedy that would be accepted.”
That remains to be seen. “Bowfinger” might be too tame for audiences that have made gross-out humor king of the box-office this summer. For a comedian once known as edgy and unpredictable, Martin, 53, knows the times have more than caught up with him. Compared to “American Pie” or “Big Daddy,” the humor in “Bowfinger” feels rather . . . polite.
“George W.S. Trow wrote this book recently where he said that the movie `Bullitt’ forever altered the way we think about car chases. Because after that, everybody thought, Well, we can’t just do the same car chase, so we’ll use three cars. Then it had to be a longer car chase, more exciting. And it just kept escalating and escalating, until it finally just collapsed.
“I think that’s what’s happening now with raunchiness. Oh, we gotta have this scene, and it has to be raunchier than the last scene, or it won’t work! Well, there are only so many openings in the body. Maybe `Bowfinger’ does run contrary to what’s popular now, in the sense that it’s not vulgar. But then the other day I thought, Wait a minute, I’ve got a scene here where Eddie Murphy is (exposing himself) to the Laker girls! So maybe relatively (speaking), it’s not vulgar.”
There is also the problem with Martin’s public profile: It doesn’t exist. Unlike contemporary superstars like Jim Carrey, who use every public appearance as an opportunity to extend their schtick, the press-shy Martin keeps to himself. Though he’s been a brand-name star for 20 years, his off-screen persona remains a well-guarded mystery. Even in interviews, he refuses to reveal very much of substance about himself.
“I think it’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” he begins in perfect deadpan. “If a scientist looks at a cork under a microscope and tries to examine it, he can’t really see it because it’s altered by the fact that he’s looking at it. Photons are being sent to the cork by the microscope, and they’re altering the composition of the cork.
“That’s the way I feel about my persona when I’m being interviewed. I change. I’m not going to be my real self, because you have to protect yourself. Besides, nobody knows what people are really like. I don’t know what you’re like. Do we know what Tom Cruise is really like? No. I’m sure some people do. His friends do. But we don’t.”
And then Martin suddenly leans forward in his chair, sticking out his naturally goofy face, and asks “Do I still seem very serious to you?”
The answer, of course, is no. Hearing that, Martin smiles, still elusive, but satisfied. And not so dry and stiff after all.
