From the October 26, 1995 issue of the Toronto Star :

BY ROB SALEM, TORONTO STAR

CRISPIN GLOVER was just starting to make a name for himself as an actor, known for memorably quirky performances in films as diverse as the teen time-travel romp Back To The Future and the harrowing adolescent psychodrama The River's Edge.

But then he stuck his foot in it. Literally. Inches away from David Letterman's face - a high kick, ostensibly demonstrating his newfound martial- arts prowess, during an appearance on Dave's old NBC show.

In fact, Glover was there in his new role as iconoclast artist, to launch his new publishing and recording ventures - the current synthesis of which, a touring live performance piece called Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Slide Show, he brings to Toronto's Opera House this Saturday night (and just in time for Halloween).

There would, of course, be more memorably quirky movie performances - most memorably, perhaps, his dead-on Andy Warhol impersonation in Oliver Stone's The Doors. He was also the Christmas-crazy cousin in David Lynch's Wild At Heart, an over-enthusiastic mortician in Lasse Hallstrom's What's Eating Gilbert Grape, a swinging Manhattanite in Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, and, coming soon, a portentiously verbose railway worker in Jim Jarmusch's surrealist western, Dead Man.

But nothing Glover could ever do would have the same kind of impact as the famous foot fiasco. In the time it took a shaken Dave to cut away to commercial, Glover was gone, having indelibly established himself as one of the entertainment industry's most notorious, possibly even dangerous, eccentrics.

It is in this spirit - and given the fact that it is highly unlikely he will ever again get within 10 feet of David Letterman or his show - that we present this recent phone interview in the form of our own "Top Ten" list, as in The Top Ten Reasons To Suspect That With Crispin Glover, Truth Really Is Stranger Than Fiction:

10) His middle name really is "Hellion."

"I always use my middle name for the things that I write. My father's middle name is Herbert. He didn't like that name. As a struggling actor in New York, he would walk about and say to himself 'I'm Bruce H. Glover . . . I'm Bruce Hellion Glover. I'm a hellion. I'm a trouble-maker.' And that would make him feel good.

"That's what he told my mother when they met, that Hellion was his middle name. Only when they were getting married did she find out his real name was Herbert."

9) He defies classification.

"I get bad images in my mind when I hear the words 'performance art' or 'poetry.' Maybe they don't conjure up the same things to other people that they do to me, but I don't like to call this either of those things.

"What it is is a slide-show of my books. There are slides of these books, and I narrate the stories. I think it's really accurate to say that it's a slide show. Of the books."

8) What books?

"I take old books from the 1800s and I rework them. Over the past decade or so. I'm very proud of the books, the way they look and feel and everything. I really like them.

"The way I first made one of the books was . . . I went into an art book store, and someone had taken an old book from the 1800s and put artwork into it. And I liked the idea, so I set out to do the same thing.

"Rat Catching was the first book I published. It was not the first book that I made. I have published some of my books out of order. I have many books that I am still planning to publish. I've published four altogether now. For this tour I've published a new book, What It Is And How It Is Done, which I've been wanting to publish for a long time. And I'll have three books available that people will be able to get hold of at the shows, and I'll have a signing afterward, if people want to get them signed, or whatever."

7) His debut CD, The Big Problem , includes a cover version of "These Boots Are Made For Walking."

"That's quite old now. That came out quite a while back. I think that came out in 1988. In fact, I've got another CD that I've been making, not consistently, ever since we finished that one, with one of the producers. I could have had it come out this year, but I'm working on two film projects right now."

6) He's working on two film projects.

"Right now I'm completing the editing on a film that I've written and directed. And there's this other project that's based on this new recording, but that's kind of been waylaid by this film project that I've just directed . . . which I'm very excited about, actually.

"The film is called What Is It, and all of the actors in it have Down Syndrome. But it's not about that condition. It's about this fellow who has a snail that he gets rid of. And he finds that he's not able to get back home without this snail. So it's (about) his journey, trying to find a new snail in order to get back home."

5) What he really wants to do is direct.

"I'm finding that for me, it's becoming harder and harder to find projects that I'm really interested in, acting- wise. I like acting when I can support something that I like the idea behind. It's very difficult to find that. So that's very much why I'm enjoying making my own film, because I like the idea behind it, and I can put all of my energies into it.

"It's also why I'm doing the slide show. When I'm acting in a film role, it's very all-consuming. And this film that I've directed is also all-consuming. So I can't go away from it and act in something while I'm working on it. But these slide shows I'm able to do and put just the right amount of concentration into it, because I've done the show, so I can go and concentrate on it right while I'm there, then go back to my other project. Whereas if I was acting in something, I'd have to be preparing for it for weeks, and all of that. "

4) He also wants to be his own distributor.

"What I've realized with these shows . . . I realized that I'm able to get a good amount of people to come. And I'm thinking that it might be a good thing for me, with this film, to actually go around with it personally and present it, much in the way I'm doing these shows.

"I like that idea, presenting my own films. You know, that's what Andy Warhol did with some of his early movies."

3) He actually met Andy Warhol.

"It was at Sean Penn and Madonna's wedding. I had already been a fan of (Warhol's) work. I had read about him a lot, enjoyed stuff that he'd done. I was there with a girl who had also been interested in his work, and she went up to him to meet him. And then she came back over to me and told me that he liked my acting - Back To The Future had just come out.

"I went over to him and told him how much I liked his work. He was very nice, very complimentary. He told me I should come out to New York. He died shortly thereafter.

"After I met him, I kind of stood back and watched him and thought that he'd be an interesting person to play. So when I heard about the role in the Oliver Stone film, that was something I pursued, peripherally. I just wanted to get a meeting with Oliver Stone - I had a feeling he might come up with that idea. And he did."

2) They had to hire another actor to play him in Back To The Future II.

"I was actually only in the first Back To The Future. They inter-spliced portions (of me) from the original film, but they put a fellow in with a false nose and chin and cheekbones and had him doing an impression of me.

"There was a lawsuit that ensued."

1) And the Number One Reason To Suspect That With Crispin Glover, Truth Really Is Stranger Than Fiction: Dave's afraid of him.

"You know, people always ask me about that (Letterman incident). The best thing, I think, is to kind of leave it a mystery. I think if I spoke about it a lot, it would spoil it for people."