By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
November 11, 1994
Crispin Glover, a character actor, also is quite the character.
He once lived in an apartment painted all black, kept an operating table rumored to have been used for gynecological exams in his living room and gave new meaning to the word “hyper” when he greeted David Letterman with a kick-boxing move that got him booted from the show.
After appearing in such films as “Back to the Future,” “River’s Edge” and “The Doors,” the 30-year-old actor now is concentrating on directing and writing. A little bit of all his careers are meshed into his latest project, “Crispin Glover’s Big Slide Show.” It incorporates slides from Glover’s eight books, his live narration, and a screening of his 1983 short film “The Orkly Kid,” in which he plays a guy who dresses up as Olivia Newton-John.
Performed only twice before, at a film festival and on the late “Dennis Miller Show,” Glover’s 90-minute presentation will make its campus debut Sunday at Northwestern University, where Glover’s father went to school.
“I’d been offered spots to do readings of my books before, but I never did them because my work is very visual and I didn’t think they’d work just reading from them,” he said, phoning from his Los Angeles home. “I’d been talking with various people like Henry Rollins about going on tour with them, but it just never worked out. And then it just made sense for me to go out on my own.”
One of Hollywood’s smarter, quirkier actors, Glover doesn’t mind when a reporter describes him as eccentric.
“Eccentric is a mathematical term, and it means when something does not follow a line,” he said. “I find it to be a poetic usage of the term, and that’s fine with me. I don’t think I would want to be considered as something standard.”
During his infamous Letterman spot, Glover swung his platform-shoed feet at Letterman’s head in a martial-arts style kick.
“I’ve been back on the show (since then) and Dave’s had me on four times, so everything’s fine between us,” Glover said. “I’d rather not say whether there was anything more than what you saw going on because I think it’s better to leave it a mystery.”
