Beaks here...
UPDATE (9/26/10): According to Michael McKean, the eighty-seven-year-old Grand Dame of Dish is mistaken. Per his Twitter account: "Sorry: it's nonsense. This story is about Liz Smith's meds, period."
Pity. My desire for a Bobby Bittman/Lola Heatherton movie remains undiminished.
Please disregard the below story.
They've lampooned community theater, dog shows, folk music and Academy Awards whoring; now, after a four-year layoff, Christopher Guest and his improv company are reuniting to have a go at the retro-collector subculture.
According to the eighty-seven-year-old "Grand Dame of Dish" Liz Smith, Guest has been kicking around ideas with longtime collaborators (and Spinal Tap bandmates) Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Smith doesn't have any specific information as to how wide a net they'll cast (i.e. whether they'll focus on movie memorabilia hounds, toy collectors or kitsch hoarders), but she does seem to think that Michael Patrick Higgins, Parker Posey and the suddenly high-profile (thanks to GLEE) Jane Lynch will return to the fold.
As a fan of every movie Guest's directed (including the little-seen THE BIG PICTURE and the somewhat misunderstood FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION), I'm thrilled. Two questions, though...
1) What about Eugene Levy, who's written with Guest on every film since WAITING FOR GUFFMAN? And...
2) Wasn't Corky St. Clair a collector?
I'm on board regardless, but if Guest is considering a resurrection of his most beloved big-screen character... god, that'd be amazing. And, while I'm dreaming, if they're dealing with the movie memorabilia subculture, perhaps we could see one of these guys ambush Bobby Bittman and/or Lola Heatherton for autographs. When I interviewed Levy back in 2005, he seemed open to playing Bittman once more. Here's what he had to say...
[Bobby Bittman] is a great character, and it was probably my favorite to do on the show because, unlike any of these other characters that I like to do, Bittman was a very obnoxious Vegas comic whose real life I kind of borrowed from Jerry Lewis. Very, very unlike me. When Martin Short had his talk show prior to the Jiminy Glick talk show – it was The Martin Short Show, I think – he was doing Jiminy Glick. And on the last interview, I saw Catherine O’Hara come on... as Lola Heatherton. Lola Heatherton today. And it was an amazing thing to watch because she had actually taken that character from what it was when we did [SCTV] to where it is now. There was something very Courtney Love coming through in the character now, and I said, “Man, how brilliant is what she’s doing on that show!” And I wondered what it would be like for Bobby and Lola to be in something, but today, as they are now. It’s something that we’re thinking about; we haven’t actually acted on it yet.
Act on it. Please.
[Bobby Bittman] is a great character, and it was probably my favorite to do on the show because, unlike any of these other characters that I like to do, Bittman was a very obnoxious Vegas comic whose real life I kind of borrowed from Jerry Lewis. Very, very unlike me. When Martin Short had his talk show prior to the Jiminy Glick talk show – it was The Martin Short Show, I think – he was doing Jiminy Glick. And on the last interview, I saw Catherine O’Hara come on... as Lola Heatherton. Lola Heatherton today. And it was an amazing thing to watch because she had actually taken that character from what it was when we did [SCTV] to where it is now. There was something very Courtney Love coming through in the character now, and I said, “Man, how brilliant is what she’s doing on that show!” And I wondered what it would be like for Bobby and Lola to be in something, but today, as they are now. It’s something that we’re thinking about; we haven’t actually acted on it yet.Act on it. Please.
