The irony of Steve Martin’s life isn’t lost on him
NEW YORK: Steve Martin has long marvelled at the many phases of his life. There’s his youth as a Disneyland performer, surrounded by vaudeville performers and magicians. A decade as a standup before the sudden onset of stadium-sized popularity. An abrupt shit to movies. Later, a new chapter as a banjo player, a father and, a comedy act, once again, with Martin Short. It’s such a confounding string of chapters that Martin has typically only approached his life piecemeal or schizophrenically. He titled an audiobook “So Many Steves.” His memoir, “Born Standing Up,” covered only his stand-up years. In it, he wrote that it was really a biography “because I am writing about someone I used to know.” “My life has many octopus arms,” Martin says, speaking from his New York apartment. People participate in documentaries for all kinds of reasons. But Martin may be unique in making a film about his life with the instruction of: “See if you can make sense of all THAT.” Morgan Neville, the documentary filmmaker of the Fred Rogers film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” and the posthumous Anthony Bourdain portrait “Roadrunner,” took up the challenge.
Yet Neville, too, was hesitant about any holistic view of Martin. The resulting film is really two. “STEVE! (Martin) a documentary in 2 pieces,” premiering on Friday on Apple TV+, splits Martin’s story in two halves. One depicts Martin’s stand-up as it unfolded, with copious contributions from journal entries and old photographs. The other captures Martin’s life as it is today - riding electric bikes with Short, practicing the banjo — with reflections on the career that followed. It’s an atempt to synthesize all the Steve Martins, or at least line them up next to each other. The “King Tut” guy with the arrow through his head. The “wild and crazy guy.” The “Jerk.” The Grammy-winner. The novel writer. And the self-lacerating comic who says in the film: “I guarantee I had no talent. None.”
“I’m going to say something very immodest:
I have a modesty about my career,” Martin says, chuckling. “Just because you do a lot of things doesn’t mean they’re good. I know that time evaluates things. So there’s nothing for me to stand on to evaluate my efforts. But an outsider can make sense of it.”
Neville, who joined the video call from his home in Pasadena, California, didn’t set out to make two films about Martin. But six months into the process, it crystalised for him as the right structure. Through lines emerged.
“When I look at the things Steve’s done in his life — playing banjo, magic, stand-up — these are things that take great effort to master,” Neville says. “But in a way, it’s the constant working at it. Even seeing Steve pick up a banjo, it’s never, ‘I nailed it.’ It’s always: ‘I could do that a litle beter.’” Looking back hasn’t come naturally to Martin. He’s long resisted the kind of life-story treatment of a film like “Steve!” But Martin, 78, grants he’s now at that time of life where you can’t help it. Even if reliving some things smarts. “The first part, that’s what I really have a hard time watching,” Martin says. “When I’m on blackand-white homemade video being so not funny.”
Martin grew up in Orange County in awe of Jerry Lewis, Laurel and Hardy and Nichols and May. His first job, as an 11-year-old, was selling guide books at Disneyland. He drited toward the Main Street Magic Shop. Stage performers like Wally Boag became his idols. When Martin, ater studying philosophy in college and writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” began stand-up, he drew copiously from Boag and others, filtering the showmanship of vaudeville into an avantgarde act, just with balloon animals and an arrow through his head. Donning the persona of, as he says in the film, “a comedian who thinks he’s funny but isn’t,” his routine moved away from punchlines and toward an absurd irony with “free-form laughter.” Martin’s act was groundbreaking and, in the 1970s, when most comics were doing political material, it became wildly popular. “He’s up there with the most idolized comedians ever,” Jerry Seinfeld says in the film. Now, Martin doesn’t see much from those years that makes him laugh.