Steve Martin and Frank Oz's con comedies pulled back the curtain

In his recent book Number One Is Walking, Steve Martin wraps up a section of anecdotes from his film career by alluding to the difficulty of making movies. He’s not describing the physical or logistical challenges, but the part that’s supposed to make it all worthwhile: the result. He says that he worked at such a steady pace in film for so long, amassing around 40 major credits, because he thought that was the approximate number you need to wind up with five really good ones. 

Martin doesn’t then call out which five of his movies he thinks qualify for this title, or even whether the numbers added up as he expected (though if they were significantly better, it’s implied that he might have phased out of the business earlier). Based on his anecdotes, he likely feels warmly toward more than five movies—though he also mentions that he’s long believed that you can’t even tell whether you’ve made a good movie until at least a decade after its release. Regardless, every time a star says something to that effect it causes understandable if beside-the-point speculation about which ones they’re talking about. With Martin, it seems pretty obvious: He’s made two with Shawn Levy, two with Adam Shankman, and one where he was the voice of a dog. The rest can go right in the trash.

Those less enamored of the Shankman-Levy alliance might reasonably assume that Martin’s personal canon includes Planes, Trains And Automobiles, a holiday classic that teamed him with the late John Candy; Father Of The Bride, which has endured as a family-friendly comedy extending beyond the reach of Martin fandom, plus includes his pal Martin Short; and at least a couple of the movies he wrote for himself, a list that includes The Jerk, L.A. Story, Roxanne, and Bowfinger. Really, though, Martin’s track record at the movies is surprisingly strong, especially compared to his peers. In fact, remove those Levy/Shankman pictures that brought him a second life as a 2000s box office star, and his filmography arguably outstrips any major mostly-comedy star of the past 40 years. (Bill Murray seems like the only one who might come close, with the major cheat code of his Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola relationships.) Even some of Martin’s flops, like My Blue Heaven and Leap Of Faith, feel like they come from a place that interests him personally.

Given the competition, it may be hard to make room in Martin’s personal canon for the majority of the movies he made with Frank Oz—tied with Carl Reiner as his most frequent director, though that title is always in danger so long as Shawn Levy continues to draw breath. Martin has seemed to depend on these kinds of comedy pros—Reiner in the first five or six years of his career, Oz in the decade following—to keep his gears moving, while saving his biggest emotional breakthroughs for other films. Martin projects like Roxanne, Father Of The Bride, or Parenthood have the extra emotional lift that can turn a funny movie into a beloved one, whereas three of the four Martin/Oz movies involve their characters pulling some kind of elaborate con. The outlier has him playing an abusive creep who gets fed to a bloodthirsty plant. 

It’s probably not entirely intentional that Martin and Oz have gravitated toward con artist stories in their films together, but it does make sense: The elaborate deception of a con job lends itself well to old-fashioned farce, a genre Oz obviously appreciates (sometimes to a fault, if you’ve seen his horrifically sweaty throwback Death At A Funeral), and which seems to connect with Martin’s intellect and self-image. 

One of the most unexpectedly delightful aspects of Nick de Semlyen’s comedy-history book Wild And Crazy Guys is the way the quotes and anecdotes de Semlyen finds about Martin continually undermine the love for the rebel-frat ’80s blockbuster comedies the book is chronicling. Martin is portrayed as backing away from National Lampoon-style raunch, dismissing a leg-humping gag from the Ruprecht the Monkey-Boy section of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels despite the laugh it gets on set. De Semlyen also quotes an interview with Gene Siskel from the late ’80s, where Martin, put off by increased levels of raunch in mainstream comedies, vows to work relatively clean, even when going for a big laugh, claiming that the big comedies of that era may not age well. Then again, laughter is supposed to be an immediate gut reaction, isn’t it?

That tension between the low and the elegant informs the whole of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Martin’s shameless, small-time con man Freddy Benson competes with his posher equivalent Lawrence Jamieson (Michael Caine) for the money and/or affection of Janet Colgate (Glenne Headly), while Oz rides the line between comedies of sophistication and outright vulgarity. It’s perhaps best encapsulated in that famous Ruprecht sequence, particularly when Martin, pretending to be Lawrence’s deranged brother in order to scare off various marks from their intention to marry Lawrence, asks to use the bathroom at dinner. Granted permission, he sits in his place, and Martin quietly and contentedly mimes soiling himself—admittedly, about as classy a way of joking about that as possible. There’s nothing notable in the shot except Martin himself, fully clothed, making goofy faces, yet it achieves just the right mix of disgust and laughter, maybe the biggest laugh in the movie give or take the cork affixed to Ruprecht’s fork.

Oz maintains this keen sense of what to keep off-screen, what to reveal, and when to reveal it throughout Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: A scene where Freddy, now pretending to be a wheelchair-user, fakes a dangerous tumble down a small cliff; another where Lawernce must materialize in a room seemingly out of nowhere; a gag with the delayed revelation that Freddy’s hand has been superglued to a wall. Perhaps Oz drew on his background as a puppeteer, who must both perform for and hide from the camera. And maybe former magic student Martin appreciated this tricky sensibility, as well as the opportunity, on the heels of twin humanist triumphs Roxanne and Planes, Trains And Automobiles, to play both the more morally questionable and the less overtly skillful of the two con men. The role allows Martin to gleefully play a buffoon without turning Freddy into a quasi-countercultural hero, celebrated for his slobbiness. 

Indeed, many of Oz and Martin’s movies trade on a different form of the snobs-versus-slobs dynamic than something like Caddyshack. Their next collaboration, Housesitter, has Martin further downgraded (at least as far as conning is concerned) to a buttoned-up amateur, almost an aspiring snob. His character Newton Davis, a straitlaced architect, falls into a long-term deception thanks to blithely expert liar Gwen (Goldie Hawn), who pretends to be his wife in order to avail herself of his vacated dreamhouse. When he realizes the presence of Gwen might make his ex-girlfriend jealous enough to lure her back, Newton agrees to the fake marriage, which of course comes to resemble a real one.

Housesitter isn’t actually a remake of an older film, the way that Dirty Rotten Scoundrels re-imagines the 1964 comedy Bedtime Story, but it feels like even more of a throwback. It’s easy enough to imagine a version of this same story produced around 1942 or so. It’s less sentimental than the other comedies Martin was making at the time, sandwiched between Father Of The Bride and Leap Of Faith, while also less edgy than Oz’s previous film, What About Bob? That Nick de Semlyen book about the revolutionary comedy of the ’80s sure as hell isn’t talking about movies like Housesitter, even as a postscript, and it wasn’t particularly beloved in its day, either. In a contemporaneous review, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly recognizes the movie’s screwball bones while insisting that the acting and filmmaking lacks the true zing of a classic. 

It’s true that Housesitter is sometimes more Newton than Gwen in its approach. It’s also true that there’s a lot of space in between screwball classics and bad farce where a movie like this can sit comfortably as a smoothly-made entertainment. That’s the zone where Oz steers Housesitter, with his classical sense of when not to over-cut the comic action—and, crucially, when to trim out the fat. Maybe the story’s potential falling action was eliminated at the screenplay stage; regardless, one of the most authentically screwball aspects of Housesitter is the way it’s allowed to end without big lies being exposed and a bunch of apologies issued to the victims of Gwen and Newton’s deception. Their relationship becomes more truthful than any make-good confessions. Ultimately, the movie isn’t enamored with meticulous con artistry so much as the spirit of improvisation; Gwen and Newton’s whole relationship is an exercise in “yes, and” improv, giving the movie an element of meta-comedy. 

Bowfinger goes even more meta, bringing a farcical deception to the broader process of moviemaking. (“The con,” as the poster blares, “is on.”) Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) is a Hollywood hustler pushing 50, and well aware that his time in this business is fast running out. Faced with another setback in the potential production of the sci-fi action movie Chubby Rain, he impulsively decides to make a movie without the participation of superstar Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), whom he briefly and fruitlessly pursued for a leading role. He will simply enlist his cast and crew to shoot around Kit, accosting him in public the minimum number of times needed to piece together the narrative. In his insistence that this plan will work, Bowfinger makes a surprisingly convincing case that this is not so different than moviemaking business as usual.

Bowfinger has some other, similarly cutting ideas and moments, but Martin probably could have scripted something even sharper. Going back to his stand-up act, he’s always communicated a satirical ambivalence about the very idea of showmanship. In his performances of performance, a category that his stand-up certainly falls under, there’s often something off-putting or downright sinister lurking beneath the mechanics of capturing an audience’s affection or attention. In Little Shop Of Horrors, his first film with Oz, Martin makes that explicit: His scenes as a nitrous-huffing, girlfriend-abusing dentist are out there even by the standards of a horror-musical about a carnivorous alien plant seeking world domination through the manipulation of a geek. His big number “Dentist!” with its greaser goofs and Elvis accent is a showstopper predicated on him dishing out horrific abuse (and we already know that he hits Audrey, his girlfriend), directed with undeniable flair (a from-the-mouth POV shot!) by Oz, a tribute to its own bad-taste bad behavior. On top of that, Martin’s scene-stealing is eventually upstaged by an even more extraneous yet uncuttable scene with guest-on-a-guest Bill Murray as a masochist getting off on the dentist’s procedures, in what amounts to symbolic comic-on-comic violence, leaving Martin momentarily defeated before his character’s on-screen death. It shouldn’t bode especially well for a collaboration over cheery comedies that the first Martin/Oz movie ends with Martin’s preening, self-loving showman dead from laughing gas.

Yet by the time Oz and Martin make it to Bowfinger, there’s no such darkness up their magicians’ sleeves. The movie even borders on cornball at times: the boomer-oldie soundtrack, the cutesy bits with Bowfinger’s dog (sure, it’s sort of funny to see a dog walking in high heels, but is that really what we need from a movie starring two comedy legends?!), the avoidance of showing any audience confusion or revolt upon finally watching the pasted-together Chubby Rain (though perhaps the implication is that Kit Ramsey’s more expensive “normal” movies aren’t much better), and so on. All of the Martin/Oz con movies have happy endings, and certainly Housesitter portrays serial untruths as mostly harmless and even romantic. But Bowfinger indicts a whole industry as, essentially, a series of interlocking cons (aggregating Bowfinger’s antics, Ramsey’s insulated fame, the money-sucking counselors at Ramsey’s Scientology-esque “MindHead” center, and the bed-hopping industry-climbing of Heather Graham’s character, among others), only to get sentimental about the magic of big-screen dreams coming true.

At the same time, the movie never feels like it’s yielding cynicism for sentimentality—even if that’s arguably what it’s doing—because it also represents Oz’s peak as a comic filmmaker. It’s understandable that he followed it up with the decidedly non-comedic, if still con-heavy, heist picture The Score; the crispness of Bowfinger’s pacing, the clarity of its characters, and the way Oz stacks its visual gags, verbal punchlines, and wild-card Eddie Murphy performances practically demand a new challenge in a new genre. (By accounts from the set of The Score, Oz got one, and then some.)

As funny as Bowfinger is, Oz doesn’t marshal Martin’s wildest or funniest comic performance; for pure laughs, there’s The Jerk, or Scoundrels, or the physical dexterity of All Of Me. Even in the realm of self-authored Los Angeles-based whimsy, L.A. Story might have Bowfinger beat. But Bowfinger may be the definitive airing of the more refined comic Martin persona, less cartoony than his early Reiner movies and less yuppie than Planes, Trains or Parenthood. Bobby Bowfinger issues lines that sound like the “real” Martin—that is, the public version he puts on in awards show appearances or SNL monologues, making a game of his ego’s credulousness. When he makes claims that all movies cost $2,184 cash or that Tom Cruise didn’t realize he was in “that vampire movie” until “years later,” he’s essentially a worn-out magician summoning the spirit for one last set of tricks—including movie-star-related misdirection. 

In a more subtly meta touch, Murphy’s participation in Bowfinger sometimes does feel pieced together; even adding in his scenes as Kit Ramsey’s nerdy brother Jiff, hired as a stand-in when Kit goes into hiding, he’s not in that much of the movie. He makes a huge impact, though, by managing to kill it for more or less every second that he’s on screen, delivering two of his funniest-ever performances. Murphy obviously doesn’t need a Martin screenplay or Oz direction to be hilarious, yet it’s hard not to look at Bowfinger as a glimpse into an alternate world where Murphy seeks out collaborators who mesh with his particular genius. (John Landis doesn’t count.)

Bowfinger can raise these feelings about its extremely successful real-life collaborators because despite its satire, it’s ultimately cheerful about why some people have that bottomless need to wedge themselves into such a difficult industry. The tail end of the movie, with Bowfinger and Jiff co-starring in a deliriously low-rent kung-fu epic called Fake Purse Ninjas with the rest of their friends, is exuberantly silly—and in a sneaky way, may also be the most moving scene in Oz’s feature career. There’s absolutely zero indication, even in the sunny comedy world of the movie, that Bowfinger or Jiff “should” appear together on screen, no hint that they have some hidden acting talent that’s gone overlooked or underexploited, or that Bowfinger has any real filmmaking talent (or even eye for talent!) to match his desire to make movies. Yet seeing them fake their way through a ridiculous fight scene inspires a rush of warmth, and not only from the meta-textual delight of seeing genuine stars Murphy and Martin teaming up. The movie shows a touching faith in the power of faking it—Bowfinger calls his barely-existent company Bowfinger International Pictures and, hey, that’s exactly what he ends up making—and the subsequent joy of creation, rather than the specifics of the final product. That joy separates a movie like Bowfinger (or even a more minor work like Housesitter) from the canned Shankman/Levy stuff Martin was making just a few years later.

Martin may not share that faith in the raw numbers, or in his obvious ability to beat the odds. (In the end, surveying those 40-and-change movies, I’d triple, maybe even quadruple, his self-dictated success rate.) Oz clearly feels more comfortable with scarcity; following his break from the Jim Henson Company, he’s directed just 10 live-action fiction features. Obviously, you don’t need the same approach to the numbers game of filmmaking to overlap on creating a proper illusion. In Number One Is Walking, Martin describes his initial entry into movies as an appealing way to keep his process hidden, comparing doing take after take on a movie set before releasing a perfect version to the public with his dissatisfaction in repeating a stand-up set night after night on a tour once it’s been honed. His movies with Oz point that craft towards characters who aren’t nearly so polished in their various deceptions, combining formal control with processes going off the rails. Together, Oz and Martin make a playful show out of peeking behind a well-placed curtain.