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I want to spend a moment on the genius of @CrispinGlover, today is a very important day.
Exactly 33 years ago, July 28, 1987, Crispin Glover appeared on Late Night with David Letterman. He was there to promote his most recent movie River's Edge, which had been released two months earlier to very good reviews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River%27s_Edge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River%27s_Edge
Glover has a starring role in River's Edge as Layne, the speed freak in a group of friends trying to deal with the death of one at the hands of another. The movie is loosely based on a real-life 1981 California murder case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Marcy_Renee_Conrad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Marcy_Renee_Conrad
River's Edge is not the subject of this thread, however it is one of my all-time favorite movies and very well may be the first ballad of Gen X, it has an all-star cast (Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Ione Skye) and an incredible soundtrack. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qG8knJz9FQdO7ggDEOb2d
And so on this day 33 years ago, Glover appeared on Letterman as part of routine talk-show promotional appearances. It did not go as anyone expected, and the almost-five-minute segment may well be the first modern viral video.
Here is the segment, bless YouTube and the legions of people that upload old TV shows there:
If you have never seen this video clip, I won't spoil it for you, but I will motivate the scene: Glover is coming off a starring role in a small but critically-successful indie flick, which in turn was *after* he played Marty McFly's father in Back to the Future.
So one might have expected him to be somewhere on the normal actor spectrum between the Ryan Reynolds/Brad Pitt type 'cool dudes' and the Daniel Day-Lewis/Marlon Brando 'no patience for small talk' serious performers. He was not.
He appeared in 1970's attire, including pin-striped bell-bottom pants and a floral pattern shirt, with platform-heeled shoes and long hair wig. From the beginning he is agitated and is upset about tabloid accounts of him. With him is his collection of human ears.
He begins to rave and flounder about, eventually yelling, "I'm strong! I can kick!", at which point he high-kicks in front of Letterman's desk, nearly kicking him in the face. Dave abruptly departs his own set. After the commercial break, Glover is gone.
There are some things that tie me personally to this experience, that kept this interview segment kicking around in my brain since that night.
In July 1987, I was one month out of high school and in the dead zone before college. I do not remember much about what I did nightly, but I had a hard 11:30 pm weeknight curfew, and I watched Letterman *every night.* I was very much an aficionado.
Also, as indicated above, River's Edge was just out and already it was one of my favorite movies. Of all the characters, Glover's Layne is the most over the top, all hopped up on amphetamines and trying to help hide the murder while his friends don't seem to care.
I was watching Letterman with my brother, and immediately after the bizarre segment, I ran downstairs into the basement to turn off my Atari 1200 computer and came off the last step awkwardly, spraining my right ankle badly.
The wailing woke up my parents and when my father's prescription of soaking the ankle in a lobster pot of ice did not take down the swelling,he finally took me to the hospital. All photos from the rest of the summer are of me on crutches.
I always knew these two things happened the same night, Glover's bizarre appearance on Letterman and my badly sprained ankle, but over the decades it began to fade, and I wondered if I had not conflated two different big events in the blur of summer before college.
Then a few years ago my mother brought the medical file from that night, and yes, it is stamped 'July 29, 1987' (because we arrived after midnight). This file exists but I am unable to put my hands on it, alas I hope I did not purge it.
Just a month later, on August 21, 1987, Crispin Glover returned to the David Letterman show, and this second appearance is no less bizarre than the first:
Glover cannot stop laughing for the first half of the interview while Dave tries valiantly to get Glover to explain the previous appearance. In the second half, Glover shows off some pretty freaky artwork he's created and will be showing the next month at a show in LA.
And so here is where I stop the simple chronicle and get to the point, to the genius: In that first Letterman appearance in July 1987, Crispin Glover was not appearing as himself. He was appearing as Rubin Farr, a character Glover portrayed in the indie movie Rubin & Ed.
But here is the kicker: RUBIN & ED HAD NOT EVEN BEEN WRITTEN AT THE TIME AND WOULD NOT BE RELEASED FOR ANOTHER FOUR YEARS!
In appearing on Letterman in character as Rubin Farr, Crispin Glover was playing a very long game, and on one of the most popular TV properties of the time. It took me years to figure all this out.
And Letterman obviously knew nothing about it, this is clear from the two 1987 interview segments with Glover, and a third in 1990 (we will get to that one in a moment).
Would Letterman have rolled with it if he was in on it? Can't say for sure, but he was no stranger to quick wits and bits and plausibly-extemporaneous interviews on his show.
He was friends with Andy Kaufman (author of the proto-Glover performance on ABC's 'Fridays' in 1981) and would have known from seeing Milton Berle and Don Rickles and Mickey Rooney to stay on his feet against someone with prepared material.
Just in case you have never seen 'The Andy Kaufman Incident,' here it is from February 20, 1981. Kaufman breaks character, then he and show regular (and future Kramer) Michael Richards exchange insults, then there is a fistfight on set. It was all a bit.
So back to Crispin Glover. He is a rising star, with Back to the Future and a starring role in River's Edge under his belt, and he appears on Letterman half-psycho and blows up the show. Then a month later he is back and we still have no idea what's going on.
You never can tell with real performers, but here is what I was able to dig out of the internet: In an media interview for his 2003 remake of Willard (the rat movie), Glover told a story about auditioning for a part, even before Back to the Future, which came out in 1985.
That part was going to be a guy who had been 'locked away' since the 70's, and he bought thrift store clothes for the part. He ended up in Back to the Future, so that project never happened, but Glover had a friend, indie director Trent Harris.
Harris loved the look Glover had put together and started writing a screenplay about that character. That became the Rubin & Ed screenplay. But that screenplay did not even exist in 1987.
Glover puts on the clothes and inhabits Rubin Farr, an incredibly insecure and socially-awkward dude who has a predictable meltdown when forced into public. It was like a meta-tryout.
The second Letterman appearance, from August 1987, tells us nothing, except that Glover is an oddball. But it is the *third* Letterman appearance, on March 28, 1990 that it begins to become clear.
Here is that third Crispin Glover appearance on Letterman, from March 28, 1990:
Glover does not appear to be promoting a movie in this appearance, instead he is promoting an album he has made. Letterman does not really want to talk about the album, he wants to go back to July 1987 and try to unpack what the hell happened.
Glover starts a long story about how there was kid at his private school growing up, and everyone thought the kid looked just like Glover, and his name was Rubin Farr...
And right there Letterman gets bored with the story and asks about the album. BUT THE ALBUM IS ALL A RUSE TO PROMOTE THE MOVIE RUBIN & ED, which had not even started filming and would not come out for more than a year.
I seem to have forgotten a link, here is the link to the 2003 interview in which Glover talks about Trent Harris writing a character around Glover's 70's attire:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011192730/http://crispingloverinfo.com/bizzareinter.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011192730/http://crispingloverinfo.com/bizzareinter.html
Back to the 3rd Letterman appearance. The first half of that segment is Glover trying to introduce the Rubin Farr character via backstory, and the second half is about Glover's album, and features a clip from a music video from the album.
The song is called 'Clowny Clown Clown,' and there is a full video for it:
Rubin Farr is namechecked in this video and appears twice in it. It someone (does not look like Glover) dressed in the same clothes from Glover's July 1987 Letterman appearance. The whole album is sub rosa promotion for the movie he is about to start working on!
Over the decades, I had heard of the movie that tied in to Glover's 1st Letterman appearance, but for some reason I thought it was some legit 70's period piece that was in the same section of Glover's filmography as River's Edge. I was looking in the wrong place.
4 years after the Letterman appearance, Rubin & Ed was released. Glover is Rubin Farr, a socially awkward shut-in and Howard Hesseman (Johnny Fever from WKRP In Cincinnati) is Ed, a loser trying to get rich quick with real estate. Together they team up to bury Rubin's frozen cat.
That's the actual synopsis.
Once I bird-dogged the movie, I tried to find it. Not on streaming, not available (conventionally) on DVD. There are clips on YouTube, but I was not able to find the whole movie.
Eventually I found my way to Trent Harris' website, where he sells his movies on DVD directly to fans:
http://www.echocave.net/rubin_ed.html
http://www.echocave.net/rubin_ed.html
For $25 I got an autographed copy of Rubin & Ed from the director himself.
Naturally Rubin & Ed has its own bizarre story. Despite the low budget, director Trent Harris managed to wrangle Glover, Hesseman, and the great Karen Black, who plays Hesseman's Ed's horrible ex-wife.
Peter Boyle was originally cast as Ed, but had a stroke two weeks into filming. Harris still managed to complete filming in just five weeks.
(Peter Boyle for me will always be Con-Am 27 general manager Mark Sheppard from 1981's Outland)
So I finally managed to get a copy of Rubin & Ed and I watched it for the first time Saturday night. It is weird. It is a buddy film/road movie, with Rubin & Ed getting lost in the Utah desert looking for the perfect spot to bury Rubin's rapidly-defrosting cat.
Hesseman does most of the acting, with Glover getting to be a physical weirdo. Here are a couple of reviews and stories about Rubin & Ed:
From 1991: https://www.deseret.com/1991/6/6/18924287/rubin-and-ed-fulfills-dream-for-filmmaker-with-utah-roots
There is some humor in my going through so much to research and find this movie only to learn this week that Rubin & Ed is getting a wide blu-ray release in two weeks. Maybe that makes me the herald:
https://www.amazon.com/Rubin-Ed-Blu-ray-Crispin-Glover/dp/B08DC5LB2Y
https://www.amazon.com/Rubin-Ed-Blu-ray-Crispin-Glover/dp/B08DC5LB2Y
And so, mystery solved, 33 years later: Crispin Glover dressed up in some old clothes to play a character in an unwritten movie, freaking out David Letterman in the process, then spent the next four years subliminally promoting said movie into existence.
Happy I'm Strong, I Can Kick Day. Thank you @CrispinGlover
