By Ted A. Donner
Richard Thomas: I don’t know, right now just the touring companies, and I’m running some workshops. I have sort of an idea for a new improvisational form.
Close: I’m going to try and quit smoking, believe it or not. I’m never going to give up marijuana. I just love it. It makes me a better person, it’s good for me. But these things are–I’m getting particularly old now. I was boogying with a baroness in New York, and after six minutes I was gasping for breath. And you know, if I can’t even dance a jitterbug with a fucking baroness, you know, I’ve gotta give up cigarettes! It was a party at DC Comics. As you may know, I’ve been writing comic books with John Ostrander.
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Close: I guess it’s what every writer does. I mean you base your fiction on stuff that’s really happened to you. I took the kind of stories that I used to tell endlessly either onstage or in workshops, and of my own life, and I fictionalized them a little bit and made them into comic book tales.
Donner: How close to reality was that?
Close: It wasn’t so frustrating as it was just kind of a terrible, painful moment of clarity. Here, there’s always a way to fix it. You put off the opening another three weeks. Something can be done. But there, with all the machinery and all the stuff–none of us did a bad job, it just didn’t come together. So I got really lucky. The same day we made the decision to bag it I got on the phone with my agent here. And he said, “Well great, I’ve got you up for a movie and the director happens to be in New York right at the moment. Why don’t you go on down to his hotel?” So I did, and I got cast in the new $15 million Blob, which is why I’m going to be leaving tomorrow for Louisiana. Which is a lot of fun for me because I had just written a story in Wasteland about the last Blob movie, Beware! The Blob, starring Larry Hagman, Burgess Meredith, and all. So I’ll be the only veteran Blobster in this version of the Blob theme. I’m one of the few survivors. I play a Lutheran minister who suffers an attack of apocalypsosis, I suppose. He decides that this Blob is the thing that’s been predicted in Revelation and that he himself therefore must be the Antichrist. He’s got some fragments of the Blob in a mason jar and he’s waiting for the word of God to unleash this on the earth for the second and final time.
Donner: You quit drugs.
