Irony versus reality

There's a fine line between clever and the stupid, goes the saying from This Is Spinal Tap. In Christopher Guest's new mockumentary, Waiting for Guffman, the fine line is between irony and the real thing. Directed by and co-written by Guest, who also stars as sibilant impresario Corky St. Clair, Guffman is a hilarious and touching portrait of small-town artistes putting on a local show in hopes of getting on Broadway. Easy targets to lampoon, perhaps. And for Guest, hard to resist embracing.

"I had been to several junior-high-school productions," he comments on the film's origins. "Some friends of mine had kids in Annie Get Your Gun and The King and I. I was much struck by the seriousness with which they took this whole thing. At the end, the director would come up and they'd be crying and getting flowers. There was something poignant about it, and I thought about doing a documentary tracing one of these shows."

Instead Guest decided to do another fictional documentary, like his Spinal Tap, but one that was so intensely improvised that it took on a reality of its own. "I am drawn far more to real documentaries than I am to conventional films. I guess I'm always searching for this reality, and I think in Guffman there are big doses of that because of the way we made the movie. It's a screenplay without dialogue, so the words you hear haven't been said before, and I think the audience will detect this spontaneity. People are behaving in a real-time way as opposed to some artificially constructed movie time."

Although they are in many ways ludicrous, Guest finds Guffman's fictional characters essentially admirable and sympathetic. "I like Corky because of his resilience and his optimism. It was a deliberate thing to have all these characters be the kind of people you would root for. Guffman is about these ostensibly normal people, though they were a little, you know, off, who have aspirations -- and how those are corrupted."

But do real small-town people see it that way? And how about gay viewers, who might find Corky a bit stereotypical? "Well, Parker Posey, who comes from a small town, Laurel Mississippi, showed it there and it was received very well. I think the movie is not a parody of a small town; it's about human nature. And I've been interviewed by quite a few gay publications and they've embraced the character of Corky. I think the reason is that the spirit of this is, `I like this guy.' This isn't a mean-spirited depiction of a gay person; the sexuality is essentially irrelevant. It's clearly an affectionate portrayal of this man."

Although he claims that he needs to spend at least 200 days a year fly fishing, Guest still has had time to work on two new projects. "I've done a historical comedy called Edwards and Hunt, about two men trying to beat Lewis and Clark to the Pacific in 1804. While I was doing research on this I got very drawn into the real story. I'm also doing a record this year about a group called the Folksmen, and it's three gentlemen who had a minor hit in 1962, and they are still singing union-busting and mining-disaster songs, but they're trying to work their way into what they think is the new folk boom."

With musical parody, Guest finds the line between the ironic and real especially fine. "I started playing professionally in 1970, but right away I joined the National Lampoon and wrote music that was associated with comedy. But if you're a musician, you can distinguish between the fact that maybe the words are funny but the music is what it is.

"Last week I wrote a song on Valentine's Day for my wife [actress Jamie Lee Curtis]. It's actually a love song, don't write about this, but . . . it's one of the first songs in many years that I've written that wasn't meant to be funny. It's without any irony."

-- PK