An oral history of 'Clifford,' the 1994 cult comedy about a deranged little boy played by Martin Short
Martin Short in Clifford. Photo: Orion Pictures This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Steven Kampmann : You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this at all. And not because I’m sensitive. It’s just … there’s no reason to discuss it. No one’s ever approached me about the making of the movie. Will and I had been partners onstage at Second City in Chicago. When we wrote together, we recognized that the voice that we used was neither his nor mine but kind of a unique voice. Because we performed for two years together many, many hundreds of shows and improvs, we had a very easy way of improvising. I would say, in general, in my career, I’ve been considered the structure person. Will had a great strength for dialogue. And together, we both had a good sense of building the character.
Kampmann: I’d been in the Chicago company [of Second City] for two years. I found all the people in Canada very funny. I wanted to work there, so I went up and performed there with [Short] and Robin Duke and occasionally Catherine O’Hara. That’s where our friendship began. Marty was a fan of The Bad Seed.
Kampmann: So I said, “Why not try Marty? It’s risky. But if anyone could pull it off, he could pull it off.” Short: I wasn’t sure if this was just too insane an idea. And nor was my manager, who produced it. I tend to be very pragmatic. To me, it was like, Let’s do a screen test; we’ll have an answer.Kampmann: I played Charles Grodin’s role. That’s where we improvised the world of “Steffen,” the dinosaur.Short: Everyone found the screen test improbable and hilarious.
David Letterman : If they’d had a child actor in that role, I’m not going to see that movie. But you put Martin Short in that role, and where do I get my tickets? I’m coming. I’ll be there. I remember Chuck questioned, like everyone questioned, “Can Marty play a 10-year-old?” You know, one, he’s, what was he, in his 30s? And two, he’s not five feet tall. Those were the two things. But that really wasn’t a concern for Chuck. That was a concern for the producers and the movie makers.
Photo: Orion Pictures Dettmer: Chuck was very affable. You go to dinner with him, it was an hour full of entertainment. But he wanted out after an hour. Chuck would tell jokes, we’d laugh, and after about 80 minutes, Chuck would say, “Look, I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable. I don’t want anyone to leave. But I’ll be in the car.”
Dettmer: The one thing that I would say is that the bit was a bit, and that actually, he was the opposite of the bit. He was the nicest, sweetest, most generous person that you can imagine. Kampmann: If I had to do it over again, I would probably just have said, “I’m happy to get it made. Go make it.” I think it took a lot out of me to get it to the point that it got to. Because it was really discouraging. You had to come back and resell it. And then there had to be a screen test. And you never know how that’s going to go. Getting it just to the point of getting it made was a lot of work.
Kampmann: With a real child, you have as many scenes as you want. But when you are doing something of that kind of risk where you’re taking an adult and making them into a child, you’re not actually looking for more scenes, you’re looking for probably less scenes. Kampmann: Larry Brezner had a lot to say about who the producers were going to be and how things worked. I’m not gonna get into all that, but it was an environment where decisions weren’t happening right away.
Short: There is a trust factor that if someone comes up to you, and they’re laughing and saying, “That’s what we should do,” you feel confident. When you’re working with someone you don’t have any trust for — and I have been in situations like that in my career — you then make everyone love you and you weasel out as many takes as you can.
Steenburgen: John Alonzo was really brilliant. Probably one of the most underrated DPs I’ve worked with. What was crazy was that before Steadicams came to pass, John Alonzo was hand holding and shooting a huge percentage of the movies that he was doing. And it was every bit as effective and steady as a Steadicam.
Jennifer Savidge : I got a call for it. I read what the character was, and I thought, Well, I could be drunk. Short: I remember in the scene at the party, all the extras who were dancers and teenagers were six-foot-two or something. Even in the clothes that they would make for me, everything was oversized. They probably used the same thing for The Incredible Shrinking Man. So for the vest, the buttons would be bigger than normal to make me seem like a smaller person in a big vest. And when Grodin could be on a box, he would be. I’d be in a chair, and the chair would be designed to be a little bigger.
“Those Are Words You Don’t Say to a Child” Short’s co-stars all found different ways to bring a level of reality to their relationship with Clifford. Savidge: I don’t recall treating him like a 10-year-old. I treated him as a brat, you know? There are a lot of adults who are brats. Kind: Mary Steenburgen is a woman who is incapable of lying. Every word out of her mouth, no matter what it is, is sincere. Take a look at her in Step Brothers. It’s sincere; she doesn’t know how to lie. I know how to lie. I’m not that good. My performance is over the top. She’s never over the top. Every line she ever commits to has only reality to it. She plays inside the scene and lets it be funny. But it’s not that it’s funny; it’s funny in the context of the scene. That’s how good she is.
Tom Scharpling : There are moments when the acting is, for comedic acting, at the highest possible level. When they’re sitting there, and Clifford is playing with Steffen [the toy dinosaur], it’s some of the best acting I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not joking. For two comedians to build a scene that’s just nonstop tension …
Short: All the me touching him and the dinosaur stuff, I would change that in that moment from take to take, and he loved that. He loved responding to the moment. Platt: Watching it as they were shooting it, those scenes are unbelievable. I haven’t seen the movie in many, many years; I have to tell you the truth. I will never forget seeing those exchanges. Just the two of them improvising. It was special and kind of genius. They fed off each other.
Brugge: I remember shooting the big scene with a train out on the train station, and Marty going down the length of the train, his arms spread. I mean, isn’t that a really indelible moment in the movie? Taran Killam : It’s such a good performance. There is an authentic nuance to it that speaks to me. He’s taking mannerisms and facial expressions and the speech patterns of a 10-year-old and then just ratcheting it up to 11. And it’s the type of broad, intense commitment that only Martin Short could pull off.
“There Is Very, Very Little Real Ride in That Movie” The most technically challenging part of the shoot was filming the harrowing climax, in which a crazed Uncle Martin kidnaps Clifford, taking him to Dinosaur World and forcing him to ride the Larry the Scary Rex over and over again. Flaherty: [Composer/former Oingo Boingo keyboardist Richard Gibbs] wrote the whole Larry the Scary Rex song.Richard Gibbs : When a composer is hired to score the movie, he goes away and writes the themes and — at least this is the way I would do it — I just think about it and go over to the piano and noodle it out, and then write down sketches of what I think. I had written those main themes: the main Clifford theme, the mischief theme, and the love theme for Miss Sarah.
“Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?” After the initial cut of Clifford was completed, the film was screened for test audiences. The results were … not what was hoped for. Platt: I do remember there was some reshooting, that the picture did not work as well as we had hoped, at least with the test audiences, and that we did need to do some additional shooting, which helped. I don’t think it ever tested as great as we’d hoped it would. Whatever flaws the movie may have had creatively, it’s also probably the kind of idea that, to some, can be brilliant and to others can be, That is just too weird for me.
Flaherty: I remember being so sick and tired after all these screenings. I remember one of the Orion executives saying, “I would say, conservatively speaking, that about 40 percent of the people that saw it just really hate it.” And then he got around to saying, “We’ve got to make some changes.” I said, “Well, how much do you want me to change?” And he said, “I don’t know, maybe 40 percent.”
Marty kept denying that he had been working out, but he was! All of a sudden, he didn’t fit his Clifford costume anymore. His biceps were bulging in the Clifford jacket. If you watch it, you can see it in that scene. He’s too big for that jacket. Kampmann: It wasn’t a perfect situation when we saw the movie. I just didn’t think it was great. Orion themselves hadn’t done anything with it. And after all the work that I put into that movie to get it to that place, if you take your name off of a movie, you won’t get paid. So I just used the name Bobby Von Hayes, which is named after a baseball player that I loved named Von Hayes. Will did the same.
“Nobody Sets Out to Make a Cult Movie” Despite a seemingly warm reception at some press screenings, critics were not kind to Clifford. No major publication gave it a positive review. Its current Rotten Tomatoes score is 13 percent. Short: I put that [Ebert review] in my book to symbolize what the critical response to the movie was. But no, I didn’t care about Roger Ebert. I didn’t know him. I didn’t have particular regard for him either way, you know? He was a nice man, but the thing about reviews is the only time they hurt is when you know they’re absolutely right, and then you’re kind of caught.
Short: I’m not trying to profess anything is ahead of its time, but most of my career has been spent in not worrying what people thought of it. What was important to me was what my friends would think of it. And in a way, that’s how we did SCTV. We assumed that the audience was as bright as we were, and we were a bright group, and that our level of satire would be appreciated.
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