Christopher Guest

[Read the sidebar to this story where Harry Shearer and Michael McKean discuss Christopher Guest here.]

(How I Plumbed the Depths of a comedic MASTERMIND in Just 23 Minutes!)

I’m a pretty fast typer but I’ll be LUCKY if my fingers can keep pace with my thoughts. My mind is racing. My mind is Jeff Gordon. There are streaks of burnt rubber smoking faintly on the inside of my SKULL! This is afterglow. This is heaven. Seventh heaven. No, wait…SEVENTY-SEVENTH heaven! Hey mom and dad! I’m having a TICKLE fiGHT with seventy-seven spotless virgins in seventy-seventh heaven!! Confucius say best: “Oh my my, oh hell YES!”

Wheeeeeeeeeee!

I should’ve GUESSED I’d end up dreaming about Christopher GUEST, most famous for his HILARIOUS portrayal of dimwitted lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel in the 1984 comedy Spinal Tap, but also for directing and acting in a handful of DEVASTATINGLY funny documentary-style comedies—Waiting For Guffman (1996), Best In Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003). It’s hard to believe, but not a SINGLE one of these films employed scripted dialogue! I KNOW! CRAZY! They relied 100 percent on the actors’ improvisational CHOPS! Guest’s career highlights also include a writing gig at National Lampoon in the ’70s and a brief stopover at Saturday Night Live (or SNL, for you KIDS out there!!) in the early ’80s! Not to mention the fact that he plays several instruments and was part of the DECADE-DEFINING New York folk scene in the ’60s. PHEW!

Why WOULDN’T I have a dream about Guest? Of course I would. I mean, C’MON! After an interview as good as the one I just nabbed yesterday, you’re all but handed a notarized form ENTITLING you to a blissed-out fever dream. It’s like an acid trip where the drug is instead grade-A, career-making journalistic PAY DIRT! That’s right, baby, this pint-size 23-minute interview is going to catapult me to the BIG TIME! (I need to HURRY UP and learn how to hold a Cuban cigar between my TOES!!)

The details of the dream are sketchy but I remember we were in a house. Wait, yeah, definitely a house. And I could hear Christopher Guest upstairs talking in a hushed voice to the one-and-only MICHAEL MCKEAN (who played bandmate David St. Hubbins in Spinal Tap). Granted, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was kind of like Charlie Brown’s mom talking with the volume turned way down. I think it had to mean something about how they share this KINSHIP, how they understand each other IMPLICITLY but people in another room 30 feet away just can’t seem to RELATE!

But, GET THIS, in the dream I’m lounging on this pullout hide-a-bed next to HARRY SHEARER! That’s right, the final piece of the Tap trio! Or should I say…TRINITY! Anyway, for some reason Harry’s got a blanket pulled up to his chest and he’s watching the first Harry Potter movie on network television, a highball of Maker’s Mark in his right hand.

I’m not quite sure what the Harry Potter bit means, but I think it’s significant somehow. When Shearer played Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap, they did that one song about DRUIDS and I think druids and wizards are really part of the same ILK! And it has to be significant because—guess WHAT, Einstein—they’re both named HARRY! The subconscious mind is smarter than you think. Despite what you learned in high-school Latin class, the “sub” part here doesn’t mean INFERIOR!

Anyway, I just woke up from the dream a few minutes ago and my pulse is still racing. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning and I can’t get back to sleep to save my LIFE. I told myself I was going to get a good night’s rest and start transcribing the interview tomorrow, but what if the magnetic tape in the cassette gets demagnetized somehow while I’m SLEEPING? I mean, if cassette tapes were super-reliable, the CD never would’ve taken over, right? I’ve got to start the transcription ASAP!!

You don’t understand. This interview was a once-in-a-lifetime THRILL. It was amazing. SPECTACULAR! I was an idiot for listening to all the crybabies, all the mommy-clutching journalists who warned me Christopher Guest was a tough interview. That he was uncooperative, closed-off, evasive, curt, defensive, untalkative, condescending. After listening to them, I thought getting him to open up about the creative process was going to be like pulling TEETH! I guess those other (LESSER) journalists simply didn’t have my skillz! I don’t mean to brag, but if I’d had just five more minutes, I could’ve gotten the BIG CONFESSION!! What kind of confession, you ask? Hello, dummy! The BIG one! Can’t these other journalists TELL when a person is simply MISUNDERSTOOD? And to think I was THIS close to buying into their jive-talking nonsense after observing Guest at the photo shoot for this story.

Because of all the photographer’s high-wattage lights, it was STIflINGLY hot in the second-floor suite at the Sutton Place Hotel—ground zero for press activities during the 2006 Toronto International film Festival. The cast of Guest’s BRAND SPANKING NEW film, For Your Consideration, were in town for the world premiere.

The director’s first words after walking into the room were NOT “Hello, I’m Christopher Guest, it’s nice to meet you” but, instead, a gruff “where do I STAND?” Then I realized: This is how you get movies MADE, people! (Be careful here, you just might LEARN something.) Whether it’s a movie or a photo shoot or whatever, you don’t get a successful finished product by trading dumb pleasantries. You get results by STANDING places and, by extension, showing the rest of the crew that they need to stand someplace and do whatever it is they DO! And those two seconds spent saying “Hello” could go to much better use getting the PERFECT shot!

And get this: the rest of the cast is cutting up, having a good time, thinking this is some sort of Canadian MARDI GRAS! Jane Lynch is a ball of friendly energy, smiling and chatting up anyone she doesn’t already know. Later when the photographer instructs four of the crew squished onto a small couch—Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer—to exaggerate their discomfort by drawing in their shoulders, Catherine quips, “If you want to see CLEAVAGE, just ASK for it!” Without missing a beat, Harry volleys back, “Ask for it by NAME!” I’m sitting off to the side, DYING! The photographer’s laughing so hard he can BARELY hold the camera still! Guest just grimaces and crosses his legs tighter. He drapes his hands (one of them cradling his cell phone) across his lap as the peripheral flash bulbs pop again. He assures the photographer, “We don’t need to ACT uncomfortable. We’re ALREADY uncomfortable."