The Buzz Report: Bobcat Goldthwait's 'Greatest' hit

"Sometimes I think, '[Forget] it, I am going to write a Kate Hudson comedy,'" Bobcat Goldthwait said after the screening of his latest cinematic outing, "World's Greatest Dad" at an 8:30 a.m. packed house in the Prospector Theatre.

Audience members were extremely appreciative that the comedian-turned-auteur has stayed true to his own muse.

With his longtime friend Robin Williams in the titular role, Goldthwait has upped his game once again, improving on the work he began in the early '90s with the cultish "Shakes The Clown" and the disturbingly funny 2006 Sundance entry "Stay." Following a theme developed in the latter, Goldthwait uses a perverse sexual incident as the game-changer in his characters' lives. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue.

"Dad" revolves around a schlumpy high school poetry teacher (a wonderfully restrained Williams) who cashes in on his son's death-by-misadventure (autoerotic asphyxiation) and finds himself suddenly popular. And living a lie.

When the lights came up and the rapturous applause died down, Goldthwait faced the crowd, a somewhat shy presence compared with his stand-up routine, in which his voice often sounds like a creature yelping through a throat filled with phlegm.

"Oh, you're all taking pictures," he said. As cameras clicked and flashes flashed, he struck a few Vogue poses.

"You're smiling. That's all I care about," he declared. "Well, no, that's not all I care about."

Summing up his second Sundance experience, Goldthwait related a story from his first: "I told the audience this is the nicest thing that ever happened to me next to my daughter being born. Everyone thought that meant she was a newborn and went 'Awww,' but they didn't realize she was grown up and out there pounding beers with them."

"I want to thank you for making me so uncomfortable in my seat," said one audience member.
"You're welcome," Goldthwait replied with a bemused gurgle. "I felt like Margaret Dumont in one of those Marx Brothers movies with all these crazy people running around."

In a short cameo, the writer-director appears as a driver dispatched to bring Williams' newly famous character to a television studio. Goldthwait played it straight. "I'd feel nervous ad-libbing around Mork," he admitted.

It was Williams' idea to strip off his clothes in the film's final frames, Goldthwait said, a moment that provides a brief flash of full frontal (though filmed from underneath and underwater). "I got naked too," he added.

Asked about his writing process, Goldthwait had this to say: "I check into a chain-quality hotel so no one can call me up and say, 'Hey, do you want to go to the movies?' I pace the floor and smoke cigarettes. They think I'm the Unabomber."

-- David A. Keeps

(Photo: Bobcat Goldthwait and Robin Williams. Courtesy Sundance Institute)