Steve Martin Interview

Steve Martin on Inspector Clouseau, Carson, and how he got so funny.

Related Topics:

•  

Wild and Crazy Guys

Steve Martin seems to have put off the big career decision. Sometimes, he's still a comedian. Sometimes, he's an actor. Sometimes, he's a novelist or a screenwriter or a playwright or a writer of comic essays for The New Yorker. Since Hollywood has no shortage of people who see versatility as a complication rather than a gift, it's easy to imagine a scene in which some manager or agent explains to Martin why it would make sense to settle on doing one thing, presumably the most lucrative of the many things he's able to do. The advisor arrives with charts and spreadsheets and a sad story or two about someone who was getting steady work as a leading man until he took it into his head that he wanted to direct.

It's also easy to imagine Martin smiling -- the smile he uses in the movies to indicate that a pretty conventional guy has again found himself in a goofy situation -- and telling the advisor that everything seems to be working out all right as it is. The credits of his latest project -- The Pink Panther , a movie based on the characters of the legendary Peter Sellers series -- list Steve Martin in the starring role of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, but they also list Steve Martin as the co-screenwriter.

In manner, Martin, who makes do without entourage or schtick, seems more like a novelist than an actor or a comedian. Although he put in years of hard time in coffeehouses and folk-singing bars pursuing a stand-up career, he tends to speak of himself as someone who became what he is more or less by accident. After his family moved to Southern California from Waco, Texas, when he was 10, he just happened to live near Disneyland, where he started out in high school demonstrating magic tricks in the gift shop. A girlfriend at California State College at Long Beach, where he was a philosophy major, knew that "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" was looking for a writer, and that eventually led to an Emmy. Because of another college friend who opened his eyes to art, he eventually became a serious collector. So, if his family had remained in Waco, would he now be the veteran professor in the Baylor philosophy department whose wittiness makes him the obvious choice to emcee retirement parties? No, he says: He only got interested in philosophy because of a friend he happened to meet well after the move to California.

Martin, who has been fascinated by comedians since childhood, was a particular admirer of Johnny Carson, another high school magician. Unlike a lot of people who have worked as comics, both of them were given the regular features associated with straight actors rather than comedians, and both turned that to their advantage. They used the comic persona of a respectable-looking person who was willing to do some things that were, well, wild and crazy. If you close your eyes and try to envision either one of them, the person who comes into your mind is likely to be wearing a coat and tie. A man who has just had a baboon from the San Diego Zoo jump into his arms, or a man who is doing a magic act in which he pulls items out of the fly of his pants is, as it happens, funnier if he's a respectable-looking person wearing a coat and tie. Martin, who hadn't done his Great Flydini magic act for years, did it on one of Carson's final "Tonight" shows.

• Robin Williams Grows Up (Just a Little)
• He's unscripted. He's uncensored. And you can expect the unexpected.
• 
• Bruce Willis Interview: His Way
• How a blue-collar guy with a stutter became a big, big star.
• 
• Tom Hanks: Memorable Movie Moments
• Revisit Tom Hanks' most celebrated celluloid moments.
• 
• Tom Cruise on Acting, Family, and More
• Outtakes from our interview with the actor.
•