The Inspiration for Jiminy Glick: “I will tell you he is based on no one from LA. No, no, no. But I’ve done so many characters and so many people have told me who they are based on. I always go, ‘Hmm, no.’ Actually Jiminy Glick is more like a guy I knew in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. There’s a couple of other people. There’s a little bit of Merv Griffin in there. But I’ve been told they’re based on certain people.“
Jiminy Glick’s Secret to a Good Interview: “Jiminy would say, ‘Don’t listen and don’t prepare.’ And I’d say pretend you’re at a dinner party and you’ve had a couple of drinks and you say, ‘Oh, there’s Sarah Gellar beside me. Hey, what would I ask her?’”
Fat Suit Facts: “That is completely comfortable. All it is is a foamy…You step into it and it zips up the back. That takes 10 seconds. The face part is about 2 ½ hours.” Martin Short says the facial part looks so real because it’s only one piece of makeup. “It fits under your eyes and they glue it down. It’s my chin, then it’s a fake neck. So it’s all one part and then they paint it to match the rest of your skin, to make it all real. But it’s not that uncomfortable. Actually, again, you forget that’s on. David Lynch was longer. Jiminy Glick is about 2 ½ hours. Lynch was about 4 hours.”
The Unobtainable Interview: “I mean, it would be great to do Clinton. It would be great to do a lot of people. But with friends… You know, I have found by having my own real talk show, or faux talk show like ‘Glick,’ you can’t phone up your friends. You can’t do it because if you phone them up, they can’t say no. So what you do is you go through the channels. You go through publicists because it’s easy for a publicist to say to another publicist, ‘No.’ In the case of Steve Martin and Kurt Russell, they said, ‘Hey, by the way, I know you’re doing this film. If you want me to be in it, I’ll be in it.’ So they make it easy.”
Jiminy Glick’s Interview Preparation: “I don’t prepare the questions. I do have notes on, as if I’m doing a real interview, like their life, what they’ve done, what they’ve been in. But the questions? No, I don’t think I even think of… There’s a question that I ask Kurt Russell in the movie where I say, ‘You worked with Elvis when you were a kid. Did you know then that someday his daughter would marry Michael Jackson?’ I look at it now and say, ‘Wow, that’s a convoluted journey of a question!’ But no, I didn’t prepare it.”
Why Martin Short Decided to do a Glick Movie: “I had done a couple seasons of the TV show and I had this idea for a movie. But to me, all these things that enter your head are assignments. You write them up and you throw them out there. If someone wants to do it… If not, it doesn’t matter because it’s your assignment and it’s done. It’s like you are in your little attic and you’ve done a painting and said, ‘Does anyone want to buy it? Oh, okay. Then to hell with this painting.’
I just found that when I was doing the TV show we had a feature on it of home movies. Jan Hooks played Dixie and she came out for about five days once and we shot a whole bunch of improvised movies. We would run them in the course of shooting the shows. I always used to find it had a different energy to it. A kind of oddly realistic energy to it. I mean, they were insane but so are a lot of characters that you meet in life are insane. I’ve met those women.”
The Dangers of Doing an Improvised Movie: “One of the tricky parts is that the camera operators are improvising too. So if you get up from over there and say, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll improvise my way to the window.’ So then the camera guy is trying to follow and suddenly he’s in the shot. And they don’t have coverage and you’re in the editing room and you say, ‘That’s a good scene. Can we cut to my reaction?’ ‘We don’t have it.’ So we have to lose that. All you’re trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room. So you try to create some kind of something so that you can release someday and then sit and talk about.”
