Who are you?
Isa Toledo on Bowfinger
I discovered Lisbon-based writer and artist Isa Toledo through her videos on Instagram. It’s actually impossible for me to sum her up in a bio. But before we started talking about Bowfinger (1999), she had described an online performance she had done earlier this year, which was a perfect way to introduce our conversation.
A curator invited me to do a performance earlier this year. I hadn’t done anything quite like it before. It was real…experimental. I'd written out the logos of every institution that I’d interacted with that week: either they owed me money or who I owed money. The performance was like this recording of me flipping through the logos of these institutions, just improvising. It was funny because the audience was in the dark, and whenever I’ve given lectures, I could usually see people's faces. And halfway through, I was like, this is a fucking flop. No one is laughing. And my sister was like, No, everybody was laughing. They just didn't think they could laugh. And I was like, Oh, how awkward for everyone.
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Before we get into it, here’s a little bit about the movie. Bowfinger (1999) was written by Steve Martin and is about an aspiring filmmaker trying to get his first break. He puts together a film crew, rallies actors played by Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, Jamie Kennedy and Eddie Murphy and tries to shoot a blockbuster. The only catch is that his star doesn’t know he’s actually in the movie. For the entire picture, he has no idea what’s going on.
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How much does the audience impact your performance or experience of one?
It's interesting because my first idea of an audience was very much an online one, so I had a very clear guideline as to what is a response: likes and comments, the bread and butter of the attention economy. And then when they introduced reels, it was the sense of like, how long do people watch for? How often did they replay it? Because I remember when Instagram was a 15-second video. There were real benefits to a 15-second cap. And then finally, I think about the move to lives – which I've only actually done live things a couple of times – I realized I'm very sensitive to faces.
Do faces make you more self-aware? Are you looking for a reaction to see if something you’re saying is landing?
When I couldn't see faces, that was destabilizing. And when I could, I think it's a kind of people-pleasing thing. I'm like, You got it, you got it, you got it, you got it, you gotta go to it. It's an internalized thing. So in the performance kind of world, I think when it comes to online things, it's more art-like in that it can be shared. Of all of the online things that are responses, the sharing, for me, is the most profound. That’s something that you can't do live. You can't share something live. The only thing that's shared live, maybe, is laughter?
Do you mean when someone shares your posts?
Yes.
Today you have to build an audience, capture their short attention span and sustain it – all online.
I agree. On the one hand, I think that I think we kind of have to respect things where they live. Do you know what I mean? It's so funny because the thing with a phone is that it's used in so many ways. If someone's picked it up at the end of the day to relax, then sees a 3-minute post on chinos, they might be like Let’s get into it. But if I'm waiting for the bus and I take out my phone and a company is like, turn the phone over, I'm like, Who do you think you are? There’s this sense of what I’m willing to engage with at the time. And I think there's something about the attention economy to consider from a marketing perspective because I do work with companies for that too.
We’re straddling both extremes, right? Marketing and writing work against each other. One form is fighting to keep things long and the other is cutting it down as much as possible. Sometimes constraints are great, but yes, you have to consider when a reader might be finding a post, an ad, or a longform article. It feels pointless because you never have access to that information.
I think about my own relationship to attention. I prize brevity, in the sense of distillation. I used to work on these little note papers, what I was doing was getting to the nub of whatever worked, and so I spent a long time cultivating brevity or paying attention to it. But then, when it comes to the sort of argument for length, I think that it's interesting because we’re supposed to be talking about movies, today right? And I realized that I really enjoy comedies, and there's something in the relationship to length in a comedy that is different from dramas. I’m thinking of this as I'm saying it, so we'll see if it lands.
Go for it.
There's this sort of planting and sowing that happens in comedy. It happens in drama, but it's inherent to comedy. A joke works better with time or with repetition, or this kind of cyclical circling back, so a joke that's good on its own, and gets a laugh the first time is empowered by the third or the fourth time it occurs. And you see this in stand-up a lot: it's using length and it's using time as a medium, for the comedy itself. In a drama, it'll be for sadness, emotion, and the mundanity of whatever, you know what I mean? It’s always aiming for something else, whereas I think that this relationship that comedy has to time is its own reward. And you can't shortcut that because you can undermine it.
I remember reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up where he talks about building on a joke. It requires assessing the audience: seeing what’s landing and then making split decisions that affect the trajectory of the joke. How fo you see this play out in film?
There's this phrase in stand-up where they'll be, like, I have a tight five.
What have you got?
I've got a tight five.
I've got a loose six.
So there's an internal relationship to time in the writer's mind. Steve Martin is a great segway into Bowfinger.
I love that you wanted to talk about Bowfinger because it’s so underrated. I think more people are coming around to it now though.
Bowfinger has a lot going for it. I rewatched and the jokes stand in a way that a lot of others don't. You could probably make a good link between maybe Bowfinger and then A King in New York. If you think about it, the premise of Bowfinger is a filmmaker who cannot afford to make a film in LA and he's connected to people who are beholden to him because they, too, are desperate, right? And everyone's trying to find a way to make it work. And what do they do? They decide that they're going to film this man against his will.
There's this first layer, which is, doing whatever it takes. Then there's the layer of subterfuge, where Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy) is excluded from the plan but Bobby Bowfinger (Steve Martin) lies to the crew and his friends about it. He's like, “You can't talk to him because he practices something called cinema nouveau.” So how do you create an aura of authenticity when you're lying to everyone? It's a very sincere film, but it’s fraught with dishonesty. And I think performance really hinges on this relationship between sincerity and honesty.
And they did something really clever in the plot – they had to come up with a reason for the Kit character not to call the cops. And it’s that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks aliens exist. That’s where that becomes believable because everyone has a kind of lie that they're very close to.
There are people who are lying to themselves and are willing to be deceived. And that even starts with Bowfinger when he has the conversation with Robert Downey Jr. in the cafe. He places himself next to Robert Downey Jr, and insinuates himself into this, producers’ conversation:
And he's like, I'll get you Kit. And this is one of the best Robert Downey Jr. performances, because he’s like, okay, you get me Kit Ramsey, and I'll get you funding. And Bowfinger leaves the restaurant jumping up and down, and it just cuts to Robert Downey Jr. with his assistant, going, what was that? But Bowfinger believes that he's gonna get the money if he does it — or he wants to believe it.
You’ve brought up a great point: Bowfinger wants to believe the lie. He’s got tunnel vision or he’s delusional because he’s so desperate to make his dream come true.
A great actor in this (and example) is Heather Graham. It’s a classic gag, like this ingénue comes in and she sleeps her way to the top. It just keeps mounting up and it builds on this idea of seeing what you want to see. They use this person who outwardly presents as naive and has just come in from Oklahoma but she’s actually calculating. These guys believe the lie, meanwhile, she’s finding out who has the real power and who’s in charge.
She sleeps with people based on the power they wield. And everyone else keeps falling for it. Sometimes manipulation can go both ways and that's part of the performance too – there’s a fine line between what you'll believe and what you want to believe.
There's a really good point in that, which is that she'll be on a date with Bowfinger, and say, “I'll never use you.” He's like, “I'll never abuse your trust.” And then he reaches into her purse and gets her credit card out, and then goes and buys all of the new equipment. The film is really effective in the way that it is explicit with some folks – like this is the gag. And then it’s not so explicit with other ones. One of my favourite things in Bowfinger is when they go to the premiere and he’s seated in the first row. Bowfinger sits back and says, “Great seats!”
And the Jamie Kennedy figure is like “what”?
Is that Jamie Kennedy?!
It is! I completely forgot too until I watched this again. In Bowfinger, he’s a voice of reason…or more truthful and honest? Like he falls for Heather Graham’s character, but it’s because of him that she discovers Bowfinger is lying and that this production is fake.
Yes! And when it comes to disguise versus not, the central kind of duality in Bowfinger rests on Kit and Jiff.
They do look so much alike (they’re both played by Eddie Murphy) and yet no one realizes he and Kit are twins until Jiff drops it in a conversation.
There’s this line of Jiff’s that I love: “I’m the one that grabs the coffee. I’m the one that got the napkins. I made sure the stirrers were in there.” For some reason, the errand thing really stuck with me as a child because I had no clue what that was. But now, if we’re talking about LA or hierarchies or things, the fact that he’s Kit’s brother and is running errands is something.
As opposed to an actual role.
Even as a body double. What is incredible about the Kit/Jiff thing is that it shows what a good actor Eddie Murphy is. And the opening Kit Ramsay speech is such a well-balanced race critique:
Kit: White boys always get the Oscar. It's a known fact. Did I ever get a nomination? No! You know why? Cause I hadn't played any of them slave roles, and get my ass whipped. That's how you get the nomination. A black dude who plays a slave that gets his ass whipped gets the nomination, a white guy who plays an idiot gets the Oscar. That's what I need, I need to play a retarded slave, then I'll get the Oscar.
And then when he and his agent go over the script, he says he’s calculated the number of times the letter K appears in the script:
There’s so much typecasting or playing to type in Hollywood.
This is what’s interesting about this role for Eddie Murphy. By splitting the role, it ends up being a meta-commentary on typecasting. In his typecast role, as an action star, you recognize the power that he has to carry a film. If his name is mentioned, you've got to go pitch him. He’s got all the power. And then you have the second layer, which is his own kind of understanding of what he wants. He wants an Oscar, he wants to be taken seriously, or he wants his catchphrase. And then you get this third layer, which is the MindHead cult. That is how Bowfinger gets him the script initially:
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He's like, who are you? Why are you on my property? And then Bowfinger goes, “That's okay. I gotta get to my MindHead.” He's like, “MindHead? Who's your guy?”
I wanted to talk about another bit. There’s another major payoff/branding moment in the movie and it’s the FedEx bit – at the beginning and end of the film.
As in product placement?
This was hot off the heels of Cast Away. FedEx was in there and there’s something about that OG product placement in a film. Bowfinger says that he’ll know he’s important when the FedEx guy tosses some packages across his desk.
Right – FedEx delivers. There’s also so much tension around how you start and end a film so product placement is an interesting choice.
Yes. I used to have this theory that all of Mad Men was a Lucky Strike ad. Lucky Strike got together and was like, How do we make smoking cool again? Let’s set a show in the 50s.
But Bowfinger is making fun of itself. It’s making fun of everything that makes the film Bowfinger possible. They are all caricatures of an industry but then succeeds! We get that FedEx ending, that payoff message.
It’s a long con. I’ve been thinking a lot about grifters and cat burglars and how building trust and flirting are just ploys to access the reward.
You’re making me think of my other favourite film – Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. And it links with Bowfinger in its relationship to duplicity. It is a functional doubling for a payoff. Where Bowfinger differs is that it’s literally 2 different people: 1 actor splitting himself into 2 people who are playing 1 person. It’s a sophisticated long con within the film. We allow ourselves to believe that this is actually 2 people but you also forget.
In life, we all play different roles too, in a way, even though we’re the same person. Who I am at work is not who I am around close friends, etc. I think about all these crime shows that are like “This person was living a double life…” Don’t we all in some ways? (Without harming people.) We seem to associate this duplicity with something more sinister. Here, it’s funny.
It’s the flashing, right? Kit Ramsey disguises himself and flashes the cheerleaders and it is this terrible thing – especially in MindHead. You cannot expose yourself. And there’s this relationship between the face and the body in the film that is interesting because what they're using is Jiff's body for Bowfinger’s movie. They’re initially casting for the ass. In the film, this doubling comes back to the idea of performance, right? Because there's a sense of who you are when no one's watching; who you are when someone closer to you is watching; and who you are when everyone is watching.
As a Hollywood actor, your image is an investment. And nothing can go wrong or look wrong.
Right, and there’s that element of what’s happening when you don’t know you’re being watched. That surveillance in the 90s with the paparazzi, which you never get in this film. There’s never any paparazzi around. No one else is chasing Kit. What’s even more hilarious about this film is that Bowfinger’s movie, Chubby Rain, is nonsense.
Do you think this plot would be ruined by a smartphone?
I feel like it would probably be one of these things where someone makes a film with an iPhone. You wouldn't need the crew or anyone else because you could just pass yourself off as an influencer. I even do this thing when I want to photograph in public and don’t want to be noticed: I pretend it's a selfie pointing the other way, and it's the easiest way to photograph.
I wanted to ask: Kit is obsessed with having a signature punchline – his “Hasta la vista, baby!"W were there any lines that stuck with you from Bowfinger?
You know, the one line that we would say in my family after Bowfinger was keep it together. As a motto, it’s strong. It’s what they’re doing. There's like a togetherness, this interconnectivity – none of these elements could work on their own. There's this relationship to subterfuge and sincerity. I think there are so many little payoffs, like even Robert Downey Jr. has that car which he says is the only one in LA. And then it shows up later in the film, and he makes a face that could be interpreted as: “Is that my car, or is my car not the only one?”
No matter what he says or how he reacts, the show must go on. Everyone stays in character. Let’s talk about another payoff – that final scene in Chubby Rain – where Kit finally gets his signature line – “Gotcha, suckas!”
We got an ending. Everything’s been constructed for this final scene.
I feel like this conversation has come full circle – we were talking about brevity in our copywriting jobs. And now we have this one-liner for Kit (and even Arnold Schwarzenegger), whether it tells us anything about the movie or not.
What you want is this moment of reproducibility. It’s something memorable. And it’s something that sticks.
