10 Movie Stars Who Should Never Promote Anything (Ever)
3. Crispin Glover
Now, I personally absolutely love the man, the legend, Crispin Hellion Glover. Not many people watching Back To The Future in 1985 would have realised that the man who played Marty McFly's twitchy, geeky father George would turn out to be an idiosyncratic performance artist and filmmaker.
However, performance artists do not good interview subjects make.
Glovers guest slots on Letterman are gleefully baffling character studies, not promotional appearances. In the above clip from 1987, Glover is supposed to be plugging his upcoming film River's Edge, but instead chose to incoherently read newspaper clippings about himself while dressed as a hippie dropout, finally showing Dave his impressive biceps... and then trying to kick him in the face while wearing giant platforms.
It's been described as one of the first ever video clips to be played over and over again out of context. Had the appearance taken place today, it'd be a viral sensation. Brilliantly, Glovers strategy for explaining what on earth was going on involves the repetition of variations of the following phrase:
Crispin neither confirms or denies that he appeared on the David Letterman show and prefers to let people think for themselves.
Genius. Needless to say, River's Edge didn't get a look in.