Stand-Up Survivor: The Story Behind Bobcat Goldthwait’s New Doc
“It would’ve been easier to get actual Bigfoot footage,” Bobcat Goldthwait says, on having to unearth clips of razor-tongued comedian-activist Barry Crimmins, the subject of his emotionally rich documentary Call Me Lucky. Though the Boston-based stand-up was an influence on no shortage of East Coast alt-comics in the Eighties and Nineties, Crimmins was the guy who bellowed biting jokes about the HUD scandal on Comic Strip Live, thus making his television footprint was relatively small. “It would’ve been easier to do a Gallagher doc,” the director admits.
With movies like 2006’s Sleeping Dogs Lie and 2009’s World’s Greatest Dad, the comedian-turned-director established himself as a filmmaker who could lace outré comedy with an unexpected sense of warmth; his first nonfiction movie proves that he’s equally capable of subverting the usual post-podcast looks at comedy-fringe heroes. Call Me Lucky starts by asking what happened to this charismatic cult figure, but it’s also about a childhood-abuse survivor whose bile-spitting monologues and venom-tongued political work are rooted in finding goodness and truth in the world — Crimmins even gave an impassioned appeal to Congress about the plague of child pornography on the nascent Internet in 1995. (The movie hits theaters on August 7th.)
We met with Goldthwait and his subject to find out how the longtime friends collaborated on a heart-wrenching, hope-filled portrait of a someone who stared down his demons and stood up for those who couldn’t speak up.