Steve Martin’s Lesson in Following Your Own Muse

For Vulture this week, Grierson and I ranked every Steve Martin movie. We actually wrote the piece several years ago but it never ended up running, for mundane scheduling reasons, with the understanding that whenever the next Steve Martin movie came out, we’d publish it then. And then the next Steve Martin movie just never happened: He hasn’t appeared in a film since the 2016 Ang Lee film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. We finally got our excuse with the release this weekend of the excellent two-part documentary STEVE! (Martin) on Apple TV.

As we noted in our intro to the piece, and as the documentary makes vividly clear, limiting Martin to just “movie actor” does him a tremendous disservice. To quote ourselves: “Plenty of aspiring artists spend their whole lives trying to perfect one discipline. Steve Martin has, arguably, conquered at least six.” Martin studied philosophy in college, started out as a magician, transformed himself into the biggest stand-up comedian on the planet, pivoted into becoming a legitimate movie star, wrote several best-selling novels and hit musicals (as well as multiple screenplays, including the ones to many of his biggest and best movies), was probably the best Oscar host we’ve ever had and has produced six albums of music with his bluegrass band the Steep Canyon Rangers. (He also married his New Yorker fact-checker, which might be his most impressive achievement; the last thing any writer or fact-checker has ever thought after a grueling fact-checking session is “hey, I should marry that person.”) Now, at the age of 78, he travels the country doing variety shows with his best friend Martin Short, with whom he stars in the Hulu show “Only Murders in the Building,” which turned out to be one of the biggest hits of his career and the primary reason anyone under the age of 30 knows him at all.

It’s an incredible American career, and as the documentary makes clear, it turned out the way it did not just because of Martin’s immense talent, but because of his inherent restlessness. Martin wanted to make magic, and he also wanted to make people laugh, and he also wanted to write a great novel, and he also wanted to play the banjo, and he also wanted to go on tour with his best friend. Steve Martin saw a whole universe of things he wanted to do. So he went out and did all of them. Why not? You…