Eccentric film to premiere at Warhol

“What Is It?”

Directed and presented by Crispin Glover

Tonight at 8:00 p.m.

The Andy… “What Is It?”

Directed and presented by Crispin Glover

Tonight at 8:00 p.m.

The Andy Warhol Museum

117 Sandusky Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15212

(412) 237-8300

Tickets: $25, museum admission included

Must be 18 years or older

“I’m George. George McFly. I’m your density.”

This may be one of the least bizarre things to ever come out of Crispin Glover’s mouth. He’s a man with a tremendous talent for character acting, someone who can steal any scene he enters. Glover virtually never receives top billing in any of his movies, but never fails to command all of the audience’s attention while on screen.

Glover was born in New York City in 1964, the son of actor Bruce Glover. A successful childhood actor, Glover had an agent by the age of 13 and was working regularly in television by the late ’70s, including appearances in hit shows such as “Family Ties,” “Happy Days” and “Hill Street Blues.” Feeling creatively confined by the limitations of television, Glover moved on to film in the ’80s.

While he’s best known as the geeky, awkward father of the time-traveling, Dolorean-driving Marty McFly in Robert Zemekis’ 1984 blockbuster “Back to the Future,” it’s in his off-screen persona where the rubber really meets the road to total insanity. Glover, a bona fide auteur, is known in Hollywood for his strange behavior and even stranger independent projects. His less well-known work ranges from unforgettable bit parts in decidedly more bizarre cinema fare (see him as the cockroach-loving Lionel in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart”) to a spoken-word and cover album titled “The Big Problem does not equal the Solution. The Solution = LET IT BE.”

But perhaps his most intriguing project is “What Is It?” Written and directed by Glover, the film chronicles “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe and how to get home, as tormented by a hubristic, racist inner psyche.” In addition to writing and directing, Glover also appears in the film as both “The Dueling Demi-God Auteur” and “The Young Man’s Inner-Psyche.”

The film is part of a network of pieces created by Glover dating back to 1995, each of which is part of his pursuit of what he describes as “the aesthetic of discomfort.” Snippets of the film have been incorporated into Glover’s traveling one-man show, “The Big Slide Show,” which also utilizes material from his musical works and themes introduced in his article in Adam Parfrey’s 2000 essay compilation, “Apocalypse Culture II.”

In Glover’s contribution to the book, an essay comprised mostly of questions, he implicitly indicts Steven Spielberg for promoting groupthink in his art, and questions whether the desire to sexually violate the Academy Award-winning director is merely “the manifestation of a cultural mandate.” This is a piece that he considers “self-explanatory.”

Glover views “What Is It?” as something of a companion piece to the article “The Big Slide Show” and his other independent works. He considers his works culturally reactionary, and their often-shocking contents are certainly consistent with that view. He seems to be a man hell-bent on outright defiance of convention and cultural normalcy.

The aforementioned “aesthetic of discomfort” manifests in Glover’s use of words and imagery that violate our most basic assumptions about acceptable behavior and thought. Much like the shock-inducing ideas that Glover expounds in “Apocalypse Culture II,” the images in “What Is It?” seem intended to flagrantly violate and dismantle the viewer’s intellectual and emotional comfort zone. Viewers describe it as disjointed and nightmarish, containing shocking scenes such as Shirley Temple cavorting about in front of a swastika and a man with cerebral palsy being pleasured by a naked woman. Clearly, this isn’t a film for the faint of heart.

The film has made a few appearances in the past, including a viewing at the Ann Arbor Film Festival where it won Best Narrative Film of 2005. Appropriately, the film makes its debut in Pittsburgh at the Andy Warhol Museum (an artist he portrayed, incidentally, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” in 1991). The screening will be accompanied by a performance of Glover’s one-man show, “The Big Slide Show” and followed by a question-and-answer period, which ought to be plenty interesting considering the puzzlement and intrigue that the film will no doubt incite.