What the hell happened to Crispin Glover?

To the question that heads this article, many of you could answer, not without reason, that with Crispin Glover nothing has happened. Nothing beyond the fact that the actor, born in New York in 1964, has limited himself throughout this time to staying true to himself, at the cost, without a doubt, of the status that he could have achieved in Hollywood thanks to the talent. of the. Glover is currently an actor, director, screenwriter, producer, painter, writer, musician, collector of objects and archivist of American esoteric. He is much more than most human beings but he is not a movie superstar. His personality, without a doubt, has had a lot to do with it.

Glover rose to fame in 1985 playing, in ‘Back to the Future’, George McFly, the father of Marty McFly in his adolescent (photo) and adult versions. He did not repeat in the two sequels and there are two different versions of why the producers decided to put another actor in his place, Jeffrey Weissmann. According to those responsible for the film, Glover got off the hook demanding to charge much more than what was offered, even more than Michael J Fox. The actor’s version is very different: he didn’t like the end of the first film at all because it seemed morally unacceptable to him that the protagonists had obtained an economic reward for their time travels. In addition, according to Glover, it is not that he demanded much more money, but that the producers offered him less than half of what they were going to enter. Lea Thompson Y Thomas F Wilson, and under these conditions he declined the offer.

The controversy did not end here, as the actor denounced Universal after the premiere of ‘Back to the Future II’ (1989) arguing that an attempt had been made to deceive the viewer into believing that he did indeed appear in the film, since unused footage was used of the first film, and Jeffrey Weissman was almost always filmed in long takes and using facial prostheses that recreated his face. As strange as it may seem to you, Glover won the lawsuit and was compensated with an amount never released.

It must have been a fairly buoyant amount, since Glover has since had enough liquidity to finance all his artistic whims. In 1989 he released his first (and only) album, ‘The Big Problem? TheSolution. TheSolution? Let It Be’, whose sound is certainly indefinable, as strange as the video clip of the only single from the album: ‘Clowny Clown Clown’.

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Glover’s musical career ended here, but back in 1989 some bookstores were selling his second book, ‘Rat Catching’, which is basically a collage of photographs from an 1896 British textbook cut out and rearranged across the various pages. Yes, it’s as “quirky” as it sounds. Glover has written between 15 and 20 books to date (the exact number is unknown), which he has self-published through his publishing company, Volcanic Eruptions, which in 2005 became a film production company to launch his directorial debut. .

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Actors with Down syndrome, elephants with breasts, snails, a telepathic doll… everything comes together in ‘What is It?’, the first part of a trilogy with which Glover wants to represent “the psychological reactions to corporate restrictions”, as he himself has explained. The second part of the saga, ‘It is Fine! Everything is Fine!’ it was released two years later, and the third is currently in post-production. These films have not premiered at any film festival, or in cinemas, or on VOD platforms, but rather it has been the actor himself who has been in charge of putting on a traveling show with them, which includes a screening of the film, a turn of questions of an hour and a half, and a slide presentation that he himself defines as “an hour of dramatic representation of eight lavishly illustrated books”.

Along the way, in 2001, the actor bought a 400-year-old castle in Prague that once belonged to a count who served as patron saint. Bedrich Smetana, the father of Czech music. Glover spends a lot of time there because the property requires a lot of maintenance. “It is a life project, a property that is going to be in a continuous flow of restoration over the next few centuries, just as it was being restored for centuries before I acquired it,” he explained. When he does not reside in her, the house can be rented on Airbnb (at 79 euros a night, it’s not that much either).

At this point, it’s obvious that Glover does too much in his life to worry about conventional cinema. In Spain, we haven’t seen a film of his released in cinemas since 2010, when the comedy ‘Jacuzzi al past’, by Steve Pink. In 2015 he appeared in the History Channel mini-series ‘Texas Rising’, and is currently shooting the Starz series ‘American Gods’ (photo), an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Neil Gaman. She will poke her head out from time to time, but in the meantime she will continue to enjoy her strange little pleasures.