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Martin adds award to bag of tricks

American Film Institute honors his movie career

The Columbian
Published: June 7, 2015, 12:00am

LOS ANGELES — Since his breakout role as the sweetly naive Navin Johnson in director Carl Reiner’s 1979 hit “The Jerk” and the three Reiner collaborations that followed — “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” “The Man With Two Brains” and “All of Me” — Steve Martin has made about 40 films, most recently the animated hit “Home.”

Two days after this interview, he was to report to work on Ang Lee’s forthcoming “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” in which he plays the owner of a professional football team.

“I never had a vision for my career,” Martin said. “So I kind of do what comes along that I like.”

What comes along next is the 43rd American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, which Martin received at a Thursday gala at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. He joined an elite group of actors and directors who have won the honor, including fellow funnyman Mel Brooks, who presented the award, as well as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Al Pacino, Shirley MacLaine and Jane Fonda.

The company is so profound, said Martin, who will turn 70 in August, “the only thing I can think is, ‘What am I doing up there?’ “

His good friend and frequent co-star Martin Short (“Three Amigos,” “Father of the Bride”) said the answer is obvious: Martin takes the craft of comedy awfully seriously.

“He will phone me up and say, ‘Tell me if you think this joke is funny,’ ” Short said. “He likes to have fun on the set and is loose on the set (but) he’s very prepared. I don’t think Steve has walked through anything in his life.”

Best known for comedies including the late ’80s hits “Roxanne,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” not to mention the 1991 film “L.A. Story,” Martin has taken his dramatic work just as seriously.

After the success of “The Jerk,” he made a bold choice by not doing another comedy. Instead, he chose for his second film “Pennies From Heaven,” a dark Depression-era tale in which the characters lip-synced to songs of the era. The film was not a hit when it came out in 1981, but it has grown in admiration during the last three decades.

“I loved ‘Pennies From Heaven’ so much,” Martin said. “I really didn’t have the option to wait. The movie was there, then. It was also an escape for me from my own persona, which I had been doing for essentially 18 years. So it represented so many things to me. I found it very emotional. Probably in truth, it was too soon for me to do something like this.”

Since then, Martin has been able to transform himself into a modern-day renaissance man. Besides an actor and screenwriter, he’s a best-selling author, playwright, producer, magician and fierce banjo player. (His 2013 bluegrass collaboration with Edie Brickell, “Love Has Come for You,” won the Grammy for American roots song.) He’s also the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor and an honorary Oscar.

“He is very, very smart and enormously curious,” Short said. And he’s a great dinner guest. Just the night before, Short said, the two were at a dinner party where Martin performed two mystifying card tricks.

“Everyone at the table was saying this is insane, this is impossible what he had just done,” Short said. “Then he could have taken the lemons in the middle of the room and started juggling perfectly. Then he is a novelist, writes plays, knows every painting on anyone’s wall and its origin and history and why it’s good or bad. And, oh yeah, he plays the banjo. There’s a lot going on with that young man.”

That’s high praise for someone who came to fame as a stand-up comic wearing bunny ears and a fake arrow on his head and proclaiming, “I’m just a wild and crazy guy!”

In his best-selling memoir “Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life,” Martin recalled the summer of 1965, when he stayed in an $8 hotel room in San Francisco while performing for free at the club Coffee and Confusion.

“At this point, my act was a catchall, cobbled together from the disparate universities of juggling, comedy, banjo playing, weird bits I had written in college, and magic tricks,” he said. “I was strictly Monday-night quality.”

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Fifty years ago, Martin said, he never would have dreamed of what his career would become.

Just a few years after his gig at the Coffee and Confusion, Martin worked as a writer on the CBS series “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” winning an Emmy. After years of struggling and fine-tuning his comedy routine, Martin developed a surreal performance-art style of stand-up that captured the zeitgeist of the 1970s. He sold out arenas. His comedy albums were best-sellers. His novelty tune, “King Tut,” which he introduced during one of his many hosting gigs on “Saturday Night Live,” was a surprise hit in 1978.

Martin has discovered over the years that the comedy bits he loved but didn’t think would get a laugh “those are the bits that people actually remember, that grow on them,” he said.

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