Steve Martin Recalls How His Fans Lied About Seeing His Second Movie

Steve Martin and Martin Short keep making appearances to promote Only Murders in the Building/their never-ending game of over-the-top animosity. Most recently, the two amigos interviewed each other for GQ, and gave the finest acting performances of their careers by pretending like they hadn’t already heard every single one of each other’s anecdotes.

Soon, the subject turned to fan encounters. Short recounted how he can always tell which movie someone is a fan of when they approach him in public. “If it’s a 45-year-old guy, and if I’m in an airport, I know it’s Three Amigos,” Short mused. “If it’s a young lady in her late 30s, she will talk about Father of the Bride. And if it’s a guy who’s 28 who looks like he’s on meth, (he’s a fan of) Clifford.”

Martin replied that he can always tell when complimentary fans “haven’t seen the movie.” And this was never more evident than back in 1981 when he starred in his second film as a leading man: 1981’s Pennies From Heaven. 

For some reason Martin followed up the wildly successful, and unabashedly silly The Jerk with the Hollywood adaptation of a dark BBC series starring Bob Hoskins, which is by no means a wacky comedy. That may have been confusing to audiences at the time, especially because Pennies From Heaven reunited Martin with his The Jerk co-star Bernadette Peters. It’s a bleak movie about a sheet music salesman during the Great Depression, featuring an ending too dispiriting to even go into. 

Technically, it’s a musical, but like with many of writer Dennis Potter works, the actors just lip-sync to crackly recordings of old songs like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Let’s Misbehave,” which only serve to highlight the misery of the characters’ lives 

The movie was a major flop, costing around $20 million to produce, but earning only $9 million at the box office, which is too bad because the Christopher Walken dance number alone was worth the price of admission.

Despite its financial failure, Martin had no regrets about making the film. “I loved doing Pennies From Heaven,” he once stated in an interview. “You have to understand that I’d been doing comedy for 15 to 20 years, and suddenly along came the opportunity to do this beautiful film. It was so emotional to me. I loved it. I don’t think it was a good career move, but I have no regrets about doing it.”

But as Martin just revealed, even though hardly anybody saw Pennies of Heaven at the time, he still had fans enthusiastically praising him for it — because they were totally lying. “It is a dark, dark drama,” Martin said of the film, “and people would come up and say, ‘I saw Pennies From Heaven. Sooo funny.’”

It’s probably slightly funnier than Cheaper by the Dozen 2, but it’s still pretty sad.

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