Meet the 'Real' Crispin Glover

"What about the record, Crispin? Can you give me any clues?"

"Well, all the pieces are connected by a central theme," he says. "In each piece, there is a problem, and there's one big problem at the end. If you think you know what the problem is and you have a solution, you should call the number above. I'm really feeling good about the project." Crispin is feeling good about a lot of things. That seems to be the leitmotif of the interview. He tells me six, seven times how good he's feeling about the work he's done lately. I suspect this new joie de vivre is at least partly a result of shedding the old image. Posing as a weirdo had proved its own kind of straitjacket. The publicity had become the work. "I mean it was fun for a while, but after a few years, it became redundant."

"Why did you feel the need to do it in the first place?" I ask.

"I found it frightening to do publicity, because what generally happens is writers put you in a certain category, and people are pegged, and I thought if that's going to happen-what can I bring forth to make me interesting? But now that's behind me. I feel I've grown up making this record. When I began it, two years ago, I was a child. Now I'm an adult."

I ask Crispin about his plans. "I'm going to take may first vacation in almost a year."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to drive to Southern Utah, and get on some back roads, and drive around, and when I get tired, I'll pull over and fall asleep. I can sleep in may car."

"What kind of a car do you have?"

"I'd rather not say."

Crispin jumps up and opens the curtains. The sun is setting. Over Hollywood, the murky oxides pinken, and in a rooftop pool below, the water glistens. "I love the light in here at this hour," says Crispin. Indeed, a tin Buddha on a shelf catches the rays in such a way as to give off a kind of ethereal glow.

The phone rings. Crispin gets up and goes into an office. I poke around the apartment. There's nothing in the refrigerator except juice. I peek in the bedroom. Crispin's bed is covered by a black canopy. In the bathroom I notice a movie script. When Crispin emerges I ask him if he reads scripts on the toilet. "No, but I do like to read in the bath."

"Don't the scripts get wet?"

"Yes. He ha."

Before I leave, Crispin insists on reading me another one of his books. The first sentence is, "I saw Billow that day, but he didn't see me." I think to myself, "A beginning and a protagonist...so far so good..."

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Jeffery Lantos wrote about the production design of Eddie Murphy's Harlem Nights in Movieline's October issue.

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