CraveOnline: I’ve seen clips of Rubin and Ed online, but the only way I can find the film is Amazon.com has a VHS for $69. Is it worth paying $69 to see Rubin and Ed?
Crispin Glover: There’s an unfortunate element with the film. There are people that like that film and there are qualities about it that are very positive. I talked once with Sony and they told me that they would like to do a proper release of it at the time, this was a number of years ago, as an on demand DVD. There has not been a proper remastering of it and there are bootlegs unfortunately that are going out that are not remastered specifically as DVDs. People take the VHS and then put it out.
It’s too bad because there should be a proper DVD or digital release of it that’s taken from the negative. Because of the bootlegging, that’s not happened. It’s unfortunate with what the state of digital piracy is right now that part of what people don’t really realize about it is ownership of the negative. Like I say I tour around with my own films. If people want to know where I’m touring with my own shows and films, they can go to CrispinGlover.com and it will let them know. I have a show next weekend in fact in Ottowa and the weekend after that near San Diego, La Paloma.
In any case, I own my negative and it’s expensive. Even now, even with year nine of touring, there are certain things I’m having to deal with. But because I can bring some income, it’s not a huge amount of it, but something, it makes sense for me to take care of the negative. When piracy happens, like what’s happening with Rubin and Ed, it makes it so that it’s not valuable for the people that own the negative, Sony, to be putting money out into it in order to make it properly released.
So Rubin and Ed is sitting in an era of filmmaking which is late VHS, ‘90s, and I would assume it’s not the only film that’s sitting in that era that’s going to have a lot of trouble from the piracy. It devalues the ownership of the negative which is troublesome. It’s expensive to deal with. It’s not expensive to get bad bootlegs, but it is expensive to make sure that you have proper conversion to the most current technology. That has not happened with Rubin and Ed, like a proper release with commentary and that kind of thing.
Just to touch on the films you direct, I know one film had a cast of actors who had Down syndrome. Are you continuing to work with those actors?
The film you’re talking about is called What Is It? Most of the actors in the film have Down syndrome, not all of them. It’s not about Down syndrome. What it really is is my psychological reaction to the corporate constraints that have happened in the last 30 years of filmmaking, where anything that can possibly make an audience member uncomfortable is necessarily excised. It will not be corporately funded or distributed, which I think is a very damaging thing because it’s that moment when an audience member sits back in their chair, looks up at the screen and thinks to themselves, “Is this right what I’m watching? Is this wrong what I’m watching? Should I be here? Should the filmmaker have done this? What is it?” That’s the title of the first film in what will be a trilogy.
What is it that’s taboo in the culture? What does it mean that the taboo has been ubiquitously excised. I think it’s a very damaging thing because it’s those moments when an audience is genuinely asking questions and they’re having real thoughts that they’re having the etymological meaning of education, which means to learn from within. What happens when we ubiquitously remove that which can be truly questioning? It becomes the opposite of education and what is that? It’s propaganda.
I do think that’s what’s happening in our corporately funded and distributed media right now. What Is It? is a specific reaction to it. The second film was written by a man who is in the film named Steven C. Stewart who’d been born with a severe case of cerebral palsy. He’d been locked into a nursing home when his mother died when he was in his early 20s. He did not want to be there, and the people that were taking care of him there would derisively call him an MR, “a mental retard,” which is not a nice thing to say to anybody.
No, we don’t use that word anymore.
People do use that word derisively. Of course this was back in the ‘70s and they did use that word with Steve. He was difficult to understand his words, so the 10 years that he was locked in that nursing home, I can’t even begin to imagine. When he got out, he wrote this screenplay in the style of a 1970s TV murder mystery movie of the week where he’s the bad guy. This is something that was very important to Steve.
If you think about it, and you think of a corporately funded and distributed film and they’ve got a character that has a disability, basically that character will be a benefactor to society. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s plenty of people with disabilities that are benefactors to society, and Steve wrote and talked about this. What was important to him was that he was a person with a disability, emphasis on person, and people can have dark thoughts. He wanted to play a guy who had dark thoughts and did dark things. That happens in the film.
He had a sense of humor and a sense of rebellion of course as well, which is a big part of what I related to, but when the whole trilogy is done, that film will be the best film of the trilogy. Not only that, I feel like it’ll be the best film I’ll have anything to do with in my whole career. There’s an emotional catharsis that happens and I hold that in a very high value.
What is the third subject in the trilogy?
I want to be clear. Sometimes people think that I’m saying that working people with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy is uncomfortable. That’s not what it is. Specifically in What Is It?, what is a taboo is that the actors that have Down syndrome are playing characters that do not necessarily have Down syndrome. You’ll see corporately funded and distributed where the characters are played by actors with Down syndrome, but those characters inevitably are supposed to have Down syndrome. That’s not taboo.
In any case, the whole trilogy is not specifically about one taboo or a different taboo, but it does have a thematic element. It’ll be many years before I make the next film. The screenplay was written a long time ago. I actually am shooting a different film right now. My father’s an actor and he and I have never acted together before. This is the first time he and I have ever played a scene and I’m showing 10 minutes of that on my tour right now. I shot last October and 10 edited continuous minutes of the film [are done]. I’m excited about this movie. I still have a lot more to shoot, but again people can find out where I’m touring with the films on CrispinGlover.com. I’m in the midst of the tour.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
