Over their film collaborations, Frank Oz and Steve Martin made comedies that delighted in letting us in on their tricks.
, Steve Martin wraps up a section of anecdotes from his film career by alluding to the difficulty of making movies. He’s not describing the physical or logistical challenges, but the part that’s supposed to make it all worthwhile: the result. He says that he worked at such a steady pace in film for so long, amassing around 40 major credits, because he thought that was the approximate number you need to wind up with five really good ones.
Martin doesn’t then call out which five of his movies he thinks qualify for this title, or even whether the numbers added up as he expected . Based on his anecdotes, he likely feels warmly toward more than five movies—though he also mentions that he’s long believed that you can’t even tell whether you’ve made a good movie until at least a decade after its release.
Given the competition, it may be hard to make room in Martin’s personal canon for the majority of the movies he made with Frank Oz—tied with Carl Reiner as his most frequent director, though that title is always in danger so long as Shawn Levy continues to draw breath. Martin has seemed to depend on these kinds of comedy pros—Reiner in the first five or six years of his career, Oz in the decade following—to keep his gears moving, while saving his biggest emotional breakthroughs for other films.
It’s probably not entirely intentional that Martin and Oz have gravitated toward con artist stories in their films together, but it does make sense: The elaborate deception of a con job lends itself well to old-fashioned farce, a genre Oz obviously appreciates for the money and/or affection of Janet Colgate , while Oz rides the line between comedies of sophistication and outright vulgarity.
Indeed, many of Oz and Martin’s movies trade on a different form of the snobs-versus-slobs dynamic than something likehas Martin further downgraded to a buttoned-up amateur, almost an aspiring snob. His character Newton Davis, a straitlaced architect, falls into a long-term deception thanks to blithely expert liar Gwen , who pretends to be his wife in order to avail herself of his vacated dreamhouse.
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