Morgan Neville, who won an Academy Award for directing the documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, and later helmed Won’t You Be My Neighbor? about Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, turns his camera on Steve Martin. But for this effort, Neville decided he needed two different points of view. The first part, titled “Then,” charts a course through Martin’s childhood to his rapid rise to arena-level fame which caused the comedian such anxiety that he decided to quit stand-up in 1980. The second part, “Now,” catches up with Martin in 2021 where he’s planning a live tour with Martin Short and ready to re-examine everything in his life now that he’s finally happy in his own late 70s.
Opening Shot: We hear Martin asking a patron how much it cost get in to see his show. $5? “Let’s go with professional show business, let’s go, hey!” he says, now shown on camera in the late 1960s or early 1970s, with a banjo as he stumbles into the microphone for laughs.
The Gist: Cut to 1979 footage of Martin’s fans waiting to see him in concert, many of them wearing gag glasses and/or noses as Martin would wear onstage. We hear Jerry Seinfeld weigh in: “This guy was getting people so happy. He’s up there as most idolized comedian ever.”
After a few more testimonials, we’re flashing back to Orange County, California, circa 1955, when a 10-year-old Martin discovers that Disneyland is hiring kids. His first job: Selling the park’s newsletter, which somehow only required him to work until 9 a.m., freeing up the rest of his day to absorb other acts in the park. He focused his gaze on Wally Boag’s show at the Golden Horsehoe Revue. “I saw his show hundreds of times,” Martin said, and you’ll see later how some of Boag’s card tricks, balloon animals and one-liners seeped into the young Martin’s act.
There’s a cursory mention of a cold home life, which only gave Martin more reason to spend more time in the park, and his next job at the park’s magic shop “changed my life,” and you see how the bunny ears and arrows through the head he sold in that shop ended up on his own head onstage two decades later. He cites a bunch of comedians as influences, but laments: “I had absolutely nothing in common with what they did,” adding, “I didn’t have any bits. I felt uncomfortable without props.”
He moved on to a gig at Knott’s Berry Farm where, at 18, he fell in love with a coworker. He enrolled at Long Beach State to study philosophy, and all of that thinking led him to wonder what would happen if he subverted the classic set-up/punchline format of stand-up? “What if I created tension and never released it?” He goes on a cross-country road trip with a friend, landing in NYC in 1964 and wanting to get people talking about his act the way they talked about the paintings in MoMA. He grew his hair long and frizzy, with a full beard, rehearsing his act for the camera when he wasn’t performing for miniscule crowds in Los Angeles. He began dating Mitzi Trumbo (daughter of famously blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) and saw what “normal” family life could look like. And then there was the girlfriend who also was dating Mason Williams, head writer at The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which is how Martin got a writing gig on the show, and eventually onscreen, too.
But he still felt stuck, depressed, anxious. And he was getting awful reviews as a solo act, with one calling him “the world’s luckiest amateur,” and footage showing Martin bombing in Las Vegas. The late Bob Einstein (who also wrote/performed on The Smothers Brothers series) suggested Martin simply needed time, because his act was so juvenile that it’d age much better as he did. So Martin cut his hair and put on a suit, and began working the road as an opening act for bands, and also playing lots of college shows. The rock shows were raucous and hated him; the college kids loved him and would follow him outside into the streets.
Everything started to turn for Martin by 1975, with multiple Tonight Show appearances, and after his first time hosting SNL, he arrived at a gig on Monday to find 7,000 fans there to see him. People wanted to hear him say “I am a wild and crazy guy,” “excuuuuuuse meeee!” and “let’s get small” as he had done on SNL. He sold nine million copies of “Let’s Get Small.”
We see him entertaining the masses without the benefit of a big screen onstage to project him to the back of the house, which in the case of Nassau Coliseum, he sold 34,492 tickets for two nights of shows. The size of the crowds didn’t bother him. “It was the mania,” he said. “I thought I was still doing comedy. But really, I was a party host.”
At the same time, he’d co-written a hit film for himself to star in: The Jerk. So he decided to jump off the stand-up comedy train and throw himself onto the movie star train.
What Documentaries Will It Remind You Of?: We’ve been blessed with a bounty of documentaries and docuseries in recent years about several of Martin’s peers, including Albert Brooks, Andy Kaufman, George Carlin, and Garry Shandling.
Our Take: Folk musician John McEuen from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who knew Martin since both were in high school, described Martin “as the door out of the 60s” and all of the politically-charged feelings of that era, so “you could be silly” again. And Lorne Michaels, who has tapped Martin to host Saturday Night Live 16 times, hitting the Five-Timers Club just between 1976 and 1978, said of the comedian: “He reinvented stand-up. that doesn’t happen often. but he never thought success was a permanent state.”
How did it happen? Martin himself seemed surprised, saying: “I think if I had any guidance, nothing would’ve happened for me.”
That so much fell into place for him is worth exploring, but this first installment of the documentary doesn’t really do much exploring.
Rather, it’s a literally by-the-book treatment of Martin’s life and career as he described it in his 2007 memoir, “Born Standing Up.” It’s more than likely Neville even used Martin’s audiobook narration from the book in parts. Other archival audio of Martin seems spliced from multiple other sources, just from the obvious tonal changes in the comedian’s voice as he has gotten older.
When Martin decided that “instead of being at the tail end of an old movement, I’ll be at the front end of a new movement,” it should be noted that his decision to pivot wasn’t unique to the monumental comedians of the 1970s. George Carlin and Richard Pryor both already had undergone significant changes to their acts (Pryor even shares with Martin the fun fact of bombing in front of Vegas crowds in that era). And then there was Andy Kaufman, who played with the tropes and forms of comedy in unconventional ways and landed on SNL months before Martin had. The recent two-part Emmy-winning Carlin docuseries splits that comedian’s career at roughly the same period in the early 1980s, but while those films dug deep to uncover how Carlin overcame his stinging reviews from both critics and contemporaries, this first chapter of Martin’s docuseries doesn’t look under the rug. The closest examination we get is from one of Martin’s contemporaries, Martin Mull, who noted that Martin’s act “was aggressively stupid” but worked because he let audiences in on the act, allowing them to know “you’re both going to laugh at the same asshole,” the buffoon Martin played onstage being a character mocking show business itself.
Sex and Skin: Nope.
Parting Shot: A graphic card noting his last solo stand-up tour ended in 1980, followed by an interviewer asking Martin why he didn’t quit before then? “Too stupid,” is his reply, laughing. We then hear Martin in a more current voiceover, letting us know there’s more to his story. Which we already know because there’s a part two to view!
Sleeper Star: Although there are plenty of participants we see on camera in the second half of this docuseries, the first episode largely relegated everyone else to the background, and if they’re in it at all, the heard but not seen. But if anyone has a sleeper role to play in what happened to Martin’s career, it might be one of his former girlfriends, who just so happened to be dating the head writer of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and helped get Martin his writing gig on that show and, as he says in the doc, “from nowhere to somewhere in a week!”
Our Call: If you don’t consider yourself the biggest Steve Martin fan or you need a refresher course on how he became the most popular comedian of the late 1970s, then by all means STREAM IT to the first episode, but everyone should make sure to watch the second part, which provides a much richer, fuller portrait of the comedian, actor, playwright, art collector, and in his later years, husband, father and comedy partner.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
