EDMONTON — It was in early December when the more devoted element of Crispin Glover’s fan base kept the actor at the historic Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, until the wee hours of the morning.

Despite sitting through an hour-long presentation dubbed Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show, the screening of his unsettling sophomore directorial effort It is Fine! Everything is Fine and a lengthy Q&A session, the audience’s thirst for all things Crispin apparently wasn’t quenched. So the 46-year-old actor embarked on a marathon book-signing and meet-and-greet that lasted deep into the night.

He estimates the final book — he has written several — was signed somewhere between 4 and 4:30 a.m.

“It’s like a 1,200-seat venue, which I could never begin to hope to sell,” says Glover, on the phone from another tour stop in Detroit. “It’s fun to play those venues. I had a good crowd there, close to 400 people. I was there until 4:30, 4 o’clock in the morning, doing the book signing. . . . But I’m happy to do it, because a big part of recouping of investments in the films is done through the sales of the books. And that means I’m selling books, which is good.”

In the past decade, Glover has been forced to balance his wildly off-kilter artistic vision as an avant-garde auteur with a more mercenary approach to his career. Whether it be signing books for hours on end or lending his decidedly strange screen presence to mainstream Hollywood fare such as Charlie’s Angels and Hot Tub Time Machine, Glover says recovering the costs and further bankrolling his left-of-the-dial adventures in cinema have become a priority.

This has been good news for his fans, because it has led Glover to the sort of higher-profile films he tended to avoid after his star-making turn as Michael J. Fox’s befuddled teen father in the 1985 time-travelling comedy classic, Back to the Future.

Which is not to say he now plays romantic leads, grizzled detectives or crusading lawyers. Even in mainstream films, he tends to add a dash of weirdness to the mix. He played a silent assassin named Creepy Thin Man in Charlie’s Angels and its sequel; the Knave of Hearts in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland; a one-armed bellhop in Hot Tub Time Machine; the monstrous creature Grendel in Beowulf; and a nasty alien in the goofy Alberta-shot comedy, Freezerburn: The Invasion of Laxdale.

“I realized that I needed to make money from acting in films to fund my own movies and not try to get funding from corporate entities,” Glover says, who will be in Edmonton at the Metro Cinema on Saturday and Sunday for screenings of It is Fine! Everything is Fine and his directorial debut, What Is It?

“That’s how I’ve run my career in the last 10 years. It’s not like I put something in a different category at this point in time. I wouldn’t put Alice in Wonderland in a separate category, or Beowulf or Freezerburn. Any movie I made in the last 10 years has been part of a shift in how I think about working.”

Certainly, the topics of his two directorial efforts are not the sort that would win over Hollywood producers looking for box-office gold. Not completed until 2007, It is Fine! Everything is Fine was written by writer-actor Steven C. Stewart, who died in 2001 of complications from cerebral palsy a month after principal filming was completed. It’s apparently a fantastical “psycho-sexual” look at Stewart’s “point of view of life” that was recently proclaimed one of the 15 most disturbing films ever made by the website Pop Crunch. Glover’s directorial debut What Is it?, released in 2005, is an experimental film performed mostly by actors with Down syndrome. It’s about a boy who is obsessed with snails and struggles with a “racist inner psyche.”

“What Is It? is really my psychological reaction to the corporate restraints that have happened within the last 30 years, where anything that could possibly make an audience member uncomfortable is necessarily excised, not funded or not distributed,” Glover says. “I think that’s a very damaging thing. When an audience member sits back, looks up at the screen and thinks to (him- or herself), ‘Is this right what I’m watching? Is it wrong what I’m watching? Should I be here? Should the filmmaker have done this? What is it? What is taboo in the culture and what is it when the taboo has been ubiquitously excised?’ When people are asking questions, genuinely asking questions, that’s real education.”

Movie preview

It is Fine! Everything is Fine

What Is It?

Director: Crispin Glover (in attendance)

Classification: Both 18A

Theatre: Metro Cinema at the Citadel Theatre

When: It is Fine! plays Saturday at 7 p.m. What Is It? plays Sunday at 7 p.m.

Postmedia News