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TRIUMPH OF THE WILLARD
Waiting for Guffman, which was shot in Central Texas last year, opens March 21 in Austin and other Texas cities. The plot centers on the fictional town of Blaine, Missouri, and its coming sesquicentennial celebration. To commemorate the anniversary, the town decides to put on a play depicting its storied history, and hilarity, as they say, ensues. Shot as a mock documentary, the movie's closest philosphical heir is Spinal Tap ... which makes sense, since Guffman director/ star Christopher Guest was a star and co-writer of that classic flick, and Guest collaborated with Michael McKean and Harry Shearer on the musical numbers, just as the trio did the songs for Spinal Tap. Besides Guest, who plays flamboyant director Corky St. Clair, Guffman stars SCTV standbys Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, indie princess Parker Posey, character actor Bob Balaban, and comedian Fred Willard, whose clean-cut looks and pompous persona were honed on the TV show Fernwood 2Night and are played to perfection in his role as Martin Mull's lover on Roseanne. During the publicity tour for Guffman, Willard took time out to talk to the WWW Ranch.

TM: So how did the movie come to be shot in Texas?
FW: I have absolutely no idea why it was done here. Orignally it was going to be set in Blaine, Kansas, but there is none, so we changed it to Blaine, Missouri. And yet they decided to do it in Austin. I guess if there was a movie about Austin, they would have shot it in Missouri. I loved Lockhart. It's the kind of town that if it was in L.A., they would have paved over it long ago. The only problem was that we were staying at the Sheraton in Austin, so it was an hour's drive out of town. Fortunately, we shot the last two weeks in Austin right up there on 11th street, at the Dorothy Miller recreation center. We were here in March, so we had all the extremes of weather: cold rain but also heat. The high points of my stay were (1) going to see a UT baseball game, because I'm a big baseball fan, and (2) driving out to Luckenbach. I really like country music, and one night, at my friend Marty Stuart's suggestion, I went to the Broken Spoke. I don't remember who we saw, but I like whatever band was there, kind of like an electric fiddle thing. I also saw Junior Brown at the Continental. Marty told me if I was in town I'd have to go see him.

TM: Had you ever been in Texas before?
FW: I had. I spent time in both Houston and Dallas doing stand-up. In fact, I worked Austin, too, with my partner at the time, Vic Greco, at a club that's long gone. It was very plush and it was somewhere off I-35. We were called Greco and Willard, and we did comedy sketches. I think we played about a week. After Fernwood 2Night, I did comedy with a group called the Ace Trucking Company. Then I went out on my own and performed standup for about a year. We had a band--it was music and comedy.

TM: So you'd done musical comedy before?
FW: Well, I've done one stage musical, Anything Goes. But this movie really put me through the paces. They brought in a choreographer, and every Saturday we had dance practice for four hours. It was really the toughest part of the movie. All the dialogue, of course, was ad-libbed except for lines and songs in the show. Like the scene at the Chinese restaurant with Eugene Levy and his wife. The cameras rolled for like an hour and a half, and we just went with it.

TM: Had you ever ad-libbed in a movie before?
FW: Yeah, when I did Spinal Tap.

TM: The famous scene of you at the military base was ad-libbed?
FW: Yeah. I went to the Virginia Military Institute and then spent some time in the army, so I know the military mentality.

TM: What else are you doing now?
FW: I just did two Lois and Clarks and two Roseannes, including the series finale. And I just finished a project with Dave Thomas, also of Second City, called Contempt of Court. It's a spoof of these criminal trials. I play an egotistical news anchor person.

TM: Don't take this wrong, but you seem to do well playing jerks and assholes.
FW: Thanks. Acutally, I wanted to be a cowboy star when I started out. I had great admiration for those old westerns, where people ride and shoot backwards and seem to be nine feet up in the air. Or I thought so, until I had to ride a horse in a movie called Sodbusters. It was made special for Showtime by Eugene Levy. I was playing oppositie Kris Kristofferson, who knows how to ride horses--and I saw him almost get thrown. Other than a western hero, I always wanted to play Ted Williams. The closest I came was when I was called in to audition for Major League. I wanted to play an aging first baseman or a coach, but they wanted me for the Bob Uecker part. They probably made a good choice. By the way, that movie was set in Cleveland, but they shot it in Milwaukee. That's Hollywood, I guess.

BULLISH ON HOLLYWOOD
Favorite movie-themed web site of the year: www.hsx.com. It's the Hollywood Stock Exchange, and it works just like the real thing. You start with $2 million--their money, not yours, and fake, not real--and you get to buy "star bonds" and "movie stocks." The star bonds are bonds whose value are determined by the value of a given star at the moment. I own fourteen star bonds chosen mostly because I like the people and respect their work--but as I'm quickly discovering, liking someone doesn't make them increase in value. Ewan McGregor of Trainspotting, Will Smith, Julianna Margulies of E.R., and Brenda Blethyn of Secrets and Lies have all made me money, but Dennis Franz and Janeane Garofalo have done bupkus. As for the movie stocks, they're just what the name implies: stock in a movie. If the movie is doing well, or if it isn't out yet but the buzz is good, your stock goes up; if it isn't doing well or sounds like it won't, the stock tumbles. I bought lots of stock in the Selena movie, though it hasn't helped me much yet. The X Files movie has done pretty well. Donnie Brasco has been really bad. And, sorry to say, Suburbia keeps going down. So much for loyalty to Texas film.

See Evan's Oscar Predictions.