Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker. Now with a link that works

[DanOregon]

Responding to concerns that a play he wrote might not be appropriate for an Oregon high school production, Steve offers to pay for a community production and let people decide for themselves. What a great letter.
http://www.lagrandeobserver.com/Opinion/Guest-Columns/Of-arts-and-sciences

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

No link

 

[Football_Bat]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

http://www.lagrandeobserver.com/Opinion/Guest-Columns/Of-arts-and-sciences

It's OK, Dan just goofed up posting it.

 

[EStreetJoe]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

great letter, great offer, but I doubt the community will take him up on it.

 

[I Digress]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

That's awesome.

 

[spaceman]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

hey, maybe we can get Steve Martin to buy some newspapers.

 

[Double Down]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

I love Steve Martin, and has as much respect for his talents as I do just about anyone.

Think about how diverse of an artist he is for a second. He started his career in show business as a teenage magician who was good enough at magic that he actually performed it for a living. He managed to land a spot on the Smothers Brothers writing staff and eventually won an Emmy. He decided he really wanted to focus on performing, specifically stand-up, and then he became, arguably, the best stand-up comedian ever. He co-wrote The Jerk and starred in it, a movie generally regarded as one of the 100 funniest movies ever made. He moved fairly effortlessly between dumb comedies to romantic comedies to serious comedies, he writes very dry and very funny pieces for The New Yorker, he authors two novellas which are sad and funny and beautiful in very subtle ways, both of which receive pretty good critical reviews, he writes a memoir about stand-up comedy that is universally praised, and he's also written plays that are both commercially and critically successful.

Throw on top of that the fact that he plays the banjo well enough that he actually released an album of original recordings that went to No. 1 on the bluegrass chart.

I'm not sure we'll ever see another artist like him.

 

[JR]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

Kapow!!!

I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as “people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.” With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle. T

 

[The Big Ragu]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

The best way to deal with ignorance and close-mindedness is with reason. That was a lovely contrast to the type of jerk who shouts at, or insults, people and things he doesn't understand, or which he doesn't agree with. Martin may or may not have an impact with that letter, but that was reason over emotion, done really adroitly.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

OTOH, that line about intepreting Hamlet as being "a play about a castle" is pretty damned barbed.

 

[Evil Bastard (aka Chris_L)]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

I've seen Picasso at the Lapin Agile and I can tell you that the show is no less or more sexually suggestive than Anything Goes which I saw again last night and which has been performed by countless high school drama groups throughout the decades. There is a large amount of drinking, references to cocaine, racial stereotyping and homosexual double entendres in Anything Goes - moreso than anything in Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

It would be interesting to compare what shows the school board had no issue with in the past to Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

 

[alleyallen]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

Great letter from a great guy. I met Steve in 1990 in the buildup to Desert Storm when he visited our ship with his lovely and talented wife Victoria Tennet (sp?). He was gracious, funny (even off the cuff) and very appreciative of us.

I really do like his approach. Not arrogant, although some lines certainly could have gone that way.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Re: Steve Martin is one cool motherf**ker.

OTOH, that line about intepreting Hamlet as being "a play about a castle" is pretty damned barbed.

I thought that was a beautiful example of restraint. For one thing, that barb was in defense of his play, not about them as people or as a community. He could have written something like, "Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, you are a bunch of kindergartners who don't understand the world the way I do. I am more enlightened and brilliant than you are!" (without any evidence that he is). Or maybe he could have expressed his disagreement by calling them dipwads. In my experience, people who try to shout down others like that, often do it because their ideas don't have merit when they're put to the test. So they avoid confronting a disagreement head on, and they can't behave reasonably. Martin is confident enough to let his play speak for itself. Being reasonable doesn't mean he shouldn't have stuck up for his play, and done it pointedly, with something like the Hamet analogy. His reasonableness was in his approach. He was smart enough to know that just because you shout the loudest, it doesn't make you right. That approach rarely influences anyone, either. It may not make a difference, but he's more likely to reach people with the kind of letter he wrote and the offer he made, and even if he doesn't, he walks away looking like the more enlightened person to anyone who's objective.

 

[DanOregon]

Sorry about the link - I was posting by a certain lake that is a popular tourist spot at SportsJournalists.com. For anyone not familiar with the area, LaGrande is east of the Cascades, a more rural and conservative area of the state, not far from a town where a mayor was recalled after pictures of her bodybuilding efforts were found on her Facebook page and her attire of a sportsbra was found scandalous.
Here's an update from ew.com: The play is a go.
Steve Martin: comedian, actor, playwright, novelist, and...first amendment activist? The multi-hyphenate may have to add this title to his job description now that he's helping Oregon-based La Grande High School perform Picasso at the Lapin Agile after its school board canceled the production due to parents' concerns over the play's content. Martin, who wrote Picasso back in 1993, sent a letter to the La Grande Observer's editor, which was published in its paper Friday, describing his intent with the play and offering a proposal to the school's director and his cast. "I will finance a non-profit, off-the-high-school campus production (low-budget, I hope!)...so that individuals outside the jurisdiction of the school board but within the guarantees of freedom of expression provided by the Constitution of the United States, can determine whether they will or will not see the play, even if they are under 18."

According to the Observer's article on the decision, the school board's superintendent canceled the show after a parent filed a complaint accompanied by a petition signed by 137 community members. The parents objected to the play's bar locale and its sexual references. The play depicts an imaginary meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at the Lapin Agile bar in Montmartre, Paris. The comedy has been performed professionally all over the U.S. and in quite a few high schools and colleges, too. Said Martin in his letter, "I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as 'people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.' With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle."

La Grande's version of Picasso at the Lapin Agile will now be performed at the McKinsey Theater at Eastern Oregon University, May 16-18. Martin will not be able to attend. "His presence will be palpable even if he can't come," La Grande English teacher Kevin Cahill, the director of the play, tells EW. "We will leave a seat open to him in the middle of the front row."

 

[Angola!]

That this happened in La Grande amuses me to no end.

 

[Bubbler]

I love Steve Martin, and has as much respect for his talents as I do just about anyone.

Think about how diverse of an artist he is for a second. He started his career in show business as a teenage magician who was good enough at magic that he actually performed it for a living. He managed to land a spot on the Smothers Brothers writing staff and eventually won an Emmy. He decided he really wanted to focus on performing, specifically stand-up, and then he became, arguably, the best stand-up comedian ever. He co-wrote The Jerk and starred in it, a movie generally regarded as one of the 100 funniest movies ever made. He moved fairly effortlessly between dumb comedies to romantic comedies to serious comedies, he writes very dry and very funny pieces for The New Yorker, he authors two novellas which are sad and funny and beautiful in very subtle ways, both of which receive pretty good critical reviews, he writes a memoir about stand-up comedy that is universally praised, and he's also written plays that are both commercially and critically successful.

Throw on top of that the fact that he plays the banjo well enough that he actually released an album of original recordings that went to No. 1 on the bluegrass chart.

I'm not sure we'll ever see another artist like him.

You forgot that he was born a poor black child.

I liked his "dumb" comedy period a lot ... especially since they were never as dumb as they outwardly appeared.

He lost me a bit in the 90s when it seemed he kind of became a gear in Hollywood's marketing machine as far as movies are concerned, but he's an undeniable talent.

 

[SoCalScribe]

I love the tagline at the bottom of the story. It's always amusing to me when famous people get tagged, e.g. "Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States."

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

He's good enough to make me forgive him for what he's doing to the Clouseau character these days.

 

[DanOregon]

If you haven't seen it, rent "The Spanish Prisoner" by David Mamet. A great performance by Martin that will help you forget Clouseau and the father of the bride stuff.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

He's good enough to make me forgive him for what he's doing to the Clouseau character these days.

What a weird step into the quicksand for him.

Incomprehensible.