Cake or Death's Groovy News

EPIX HD is showing Believe online and you can get a free four day pass HERE…first come, first serve.

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

Eddie will be on the Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson Thu, Jan 28, 12:37 AM (check local listings) and on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross Tue, Jan 26, 3:00 AM on BBC America.

[from monstersandcritics.com]

Touring comedian and actor Eddie Izzard is confirmed as host for the 25th Film Independent Spirit Awards to air March 5.

Izzard will serve as Master of Ceremonies for the 25th Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Organizers cite Izzard’s “absurd, bizarre, and surreal” comic narratives as suitable attributes to lead the irreverent, laid-back style of the Spirit Awards.

The milestone anniversary will be a late-night celebration on Friday, March 5, 2010 at LA Live’s event deck in downtown Los Angeles.

The 25th Film Independent Spirit Award nominees were announced on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 and the ceremony will air live and uncut on Friday, March 5, 2010 at 8:00 p.m. PST/11:00 p.m. EST on IFC (Independent Film Channel).

“The Spirit Awards are known for celebrating filmmakers who can challenge audiences with their original storytelling and art, and the same applies to Eddie,” said Film Independent Executive Director Dawn Hudson. “We are thrilled to have such a talented and daring performer host the 25th Anniversary for us. There’s a wealth of memorable moments from past shows and independent film history to draw from, so audiences are in for a treat!”

“Eddie Izzard will bring his hilarious energy to this year’s ceremony, while paying tribute to the independent spirit and artists who have produced some of the world’s best original films,” said Jennifer Caserta, EVP and GM of IFC. “The Spirit Awards are the pinnacle celebration of independent work in the film industry, and we are proud to have been a dedicated partner and television broadcast home for the awards for more than fifteen years.”

Izzard is completing his “Stripped Too” arena tour across the U.S., the UK and Europe including a recent sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.

Izzard will next be seen in the independent film, Every Day opposite Liev Schreiber, Helen Hunt and Carla Cugino, and Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, a documentary on his rise to fame – from his early influences to now – which was released last fall and will air on EPIX this spring.

Izzard recently ran 1,100 miles through England, Wales, North Ireland and Scotland for charity. He raised $250,000 for Sports Relief, which helps the less fortunate in Britain and poor countries worldwide.

The Film Independent Spirit Awards are given in the following categories: Best Feature, Best First Feature, Best First Screenplay, Best Director, Best Screenplay, John Cassavetes Award (given to the best feature made for a budget under $500,000), Best Male Lead, Best Female Lead, Best Supporting Male, Best Supporting Female, Best Cinematography, Best Foreign Film, Best Documentary, and the Robert Altman Award. The Filmmaker Grants include Acura Someone to Watch Award, Truer Than Fiction Award, and Piaget Producer Award.

Read more: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/smallscreen/news/article_1528267.php/Eddie-Izzard-hosts-Spirit-Awards-on-IFC-March-5#ixzz0deRWc4Js

[from the latimes.com]

Most people know that Eddie Izzard is perhaps the world’s most famous Transvestite Comedian (even without much makeup, as my Sunday Arts & Books profile reveals) but very few know is that he’s also arguably the most famous Yemeni Comedian. (His only competition, at least in the west, is Fahd Al-Qarani, who gained notoriety when he was jailed for a comedy sketch that mocked Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh).

Izzard is indeed a British subject, but on his UK passport his birthplace reads: Aden, Yemen — a seaport town near the Red Sea where Izzard’s father and mother met. He lived there only until he was 12 months old, but given Izzard’s passion for history, he’s well aware of what’s been goingon there since his family left for Great Britain: “Yemen is a big deal for me…I’ve never really articulated that before, but it made it all happen.”

Izzard went back to Aden for the first time two years ago. The visit, as well as old family pictures (some of which he showed me on his iPhone during our interview) and films of the Izzard family in Yemen can been seen on Saturday night as part of the documentary “Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story,” which airs at 10:30 pm on the recently launched EPIX Cable Movie Channel. Izzard — sans makeup, pearls and heels — can be seen at the Nokia Theatre this week.

[from LATimes.com]

The comedian enjoys turning past turbulence into present comedy, but for this tour, no cross dressing allowed.

Eddie Izzard at Madison Square Garden, where he has a one-night show as part of his 2010 American Tour called The Big Intimacy Tour Stripped Too (Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times / January 16, 2010)

Reporting from New York – Fans of Eddie Izzard and his over-the-top-fabulousness beware: His attire on stage at the Nokia Theatre this weekend will be a decided departure from his earlier flamboyance.

Wrapping up lunch at a Lower East Side bistro, Izzard warns that on this current tour he’s in “boy mode” and will be wearing just “a certain amount of makeup — but no more than Keith Richards.” Sure enough, for his debut at Madison Square Garden, Izzard is au naturel: jeans, boots and a jacket with tails, but the only hint of the fabulous is his jacket’s red lining.

The man who has stalked concert stages in high heels, a minidress and full makeup says simply: “I’ve been in boy mode for a wee while. I can go between boy mode [he makes a whoosh noise], girl mode, like a superhero. I’m like the Human Torch: ‘Flame on.’ ‘Flame off.’ ”

For his latest outing, an extension of his Stripped tour — called Stripped Too, Izzard says, “as in ‘Stripped, As Well,’ like the last one was stripped, this one is stripped too, or ‘Stripped Also.’ It’s not a sequel” — Izzard has made a conscious decision to be in “boy mode.”

“Starting out, I had to establish I was a stand-up comedian, and I also tell everyone I was a transvestite — it was a two-step thing,” he explains. “When I got to America, I thought, ‘I’ll do this as one step.’ Here I am, transvestite, boom, comedian, boom — but then people thought, ‘Oh, you’re a transvestite comedian, that’s how you do it, it’s the makeup.’ Then I realized, it got merged. So now I’m de-merging — because they are not linked. I am a transvestite, and I do comedy. Luckily, I’m in the place where I can turn up in makeup or no makeup and people won’t be too bothered.”

Izzard is fond of merging things, whether it’s acting and stand-up, his nationality (“I’m very positive on the EU. . . . I call myself a British European. I’m encouraging people to say ‘Français Européen,’ ‘Deutsch Europäisch,’ because we can be both things at the same time”), and, of course, history, of which he calls himself, “slightly encyclopedic.” As this phrase — and others he employs, such as “big intimacy,” “passive research,” “cozy arenas” — shows, Izzard sees no problem with contrast. “I love juxtapositions, smashing together stuff that just shouldn’t be together,” he says.

Over the course of a long lunch, it’s clear that this crashing together of history and absurdity — what he calls “dumbing up” — is the key to his particular and popular sense of humor.

The best example is a gag he dissected that then showed up in the act at the Garden. “I’ve got this piece, which I love saying, which is, ‘After the Romans, classical thinking died and a lot of advanced thinking disappeared from the planet and then it came back with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and then in 18-whatever-it-was Charles Darwin wrote his famous book ‘Great Expectations.’ ”

“And the laugh on that is so nice, because they know they’ve got to be smart enough to know there were two Charleses — two Charleses with last names beginning with a ‘D,’ both around the same time, and that book is not his book . . . I just love smashing together this weird stuff — it’s so stupid it’s smart, or it’s so smart it’s stupid. It’s somewhere there.”

Izzard’s act may include references to dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, strategies from the Battle of Thermopylae or esoteric biblical figures, but these erudite topics don’t stem from a classical British education. Unlike Beyond the Fringe or Monty Python, the illustrious sketch comedy troupes that his routine recalls, Izzard didn’t attend Oxford or Cambridge. He dropped out of the University of Sheffield and spent his college years as a street performer in London.

Izzard says that street performing taught him valuable lessons about the art of entertaining. “I did sort of lose myself, I lost my confidence street performing and then re-found it,” he recalls. “It sort of broke me and then remade me, which is what drama school is supposed to do — or the Marines.

“I learned how to have confidence in the pit of my stomach.” He also learned to be himself in front of a crowd. “At the beginning of each show actually we used to try to talk to the audience to try and bring them forward to make a semi-circle, because once you made an outside semicircle you can build up an audience.

“And so my partner Rob Ballard, he would talk to the left side, and I would talk to the right side, so in doing this on the right side, I found I was becoming a solo performer for the first time,” Izzard says.

This ability to speak directly to an audience can be seen in his act today, even though he’s now performing in front of tens of thousands.

At the nearly 20,000-seat Garden, Izzard came out and simply started making conversation. “Everything I do on stage is ad-libbed, not necessarily that night — there’s probably 5-10 minutes that night that’s ad-libbed — but everything has been ad-libbed at some point,” he says.

Eleven years after his breakthrough in the U.S., Izzard insists that neither his success on Broadway (a Tony nomination for his turn in Peter Nichols’ “Joe Egg”), on television (his Emmy-winning HBO special “Dress to Kill,” the FX series “The Riches”) and films (the “Ocean’s Eleven” sequels, the “Narnia” films) nor his current preference to dress in boy mode has altered his view of comedy. “I don’t feel I’ve changed,” he says, “I might have gotten better at doing it, better at feeling stupid juxtapositions.”

Izzard is insistent, though, that the history he juxtaposes has to be well in the past. Though Izzard certainly follows recent history like Tony Blair, Obama, Palin, Bush — the day we spoke, he couldn’t believe Pat Robertson’s comments on Haiti — he says he steers away from inserting recent history and politics into his act.

“It doesn’t record well. A year later people say, ‘Who’s this?’ Anything that’s going to date is like, ‘I don’t want it,’ ” he says. “I try to focus on history that stays when the sieve comes. Only some bits stay. Hannibal crossing the mountains with elephants for some reason stayed.”

At the Garden, Izzard did break this rule once or twice. But his biggest laughs came from Moses, dinosaurs getting pulled over for speeding and vomiting as a five-act grand opera.

In the brief, riotous history of Eddie Izzard, has anything besides his wardrobe changed? “I used to be specific with dates,” Izzard says, “the whole reason I got into history was you’re looking for things that make you stand out — I hadn’t told anyone I was a transvestite at that point — and I thought, ‘No one’s doing history, I just go into the history thing,’ but a good stand-up comedian friend, an Irishman, said, ‘Don’t bother about the dates, don’t be so precise,’ just be loose about it.”

He affects a “Masterpiece Theatre”-high British tone, “In seventeen hundred and something — huzzah, hmmm,” with a very big smile replacing the imprecise years.

[from ew.com]

Eddie Izzard, actor, comedian and “executive transvestite,” has never been at loss for material. Meandering hilariously through topics as wide-ranging as The Battle of Hastings, Medusa’s hairdresser, and cavemen inventing fire so they can eat something other than salad, the desultory stand-up comic uses all of history as his playground. “It’s fantastic,” he says. “I’ve discovered that history was this amazingly unkept place. It makes you sound so clever to know that Alexander the Great’s dad was called Phil.” Now, with his latest special, Eddie Izzard: Live From Wembley, and the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story airing back-to-back tonight (EPIX, 9:30 p.m. EDT), Izzard talked with EW about his loose, often ad-libbed style of comedy, and told us five of the strangest tangents and detours it’s gotten him into.

1. “I was talking in Dallas of all places about opera, and in these arenas they have these huge PA systems, and if you shake the microphone in your hand you get this vibrato and you sound like an opera singer because the sound is so big. So I said that this is all opera is, but then some bloke started singing from the arena. In the American Airlines Arena in Dallas, I had a male soprano on the left start singing. I was trying to shut him up, but then I just thought to let him go. So he sang a long, strong note of opera. And then I said OK and everyone reacted and gave him applause, and then a woman piped up from the other side. So this woman started up, so I said I OK, I have to let her go. Then another woman joined in. So we had about five opera singers singing last night, separately. I was trying to say that there was a ghetto of opera singers in Dallas, who were sent away from New York or something.”

2. “I was talking about the Battle of Thermopylae and I said it was made into a film by Shirley Temple, set onboard the Good Ship Lollipop. And I said that they were anagrams, which they’re not, but the key thing is that lollipop and Thermopylae sound like they could be anagrams of each other. So then I said last night that the Greek for “lollipop” is Thermopylae, so it was the Battle of Lollipop. But then I realized that if I tried that at gigs in French, lollipop would be something completely different so it wouldn’t work.”

3. “There was a strange bit in the documentary Believe that I’ve not really used much, it’s just so weird. It’s about Papa Doc Duvalier, the old Haitian president, and Baby Doc Duvalier, and it’s a bit like the Three Bears story. It’s quite alarming and extreme, this bit. Idi Amin goes around to a house in the woods and there the Duvaliers live. Papa Doc Duvalier’s porridge is too cold, Mama Doc Duvalier’s is too cold, but Baby Doc Duvalier’s is just right. Then he goes upstairs and there’s three beds. And he’s sleeping in Baby Doc Duvalier’s bed when the Duvalier’s come home…and they skin him. It’s a fairy tale, and those fairy tales should be alarming, but this one’s so extreme, because these people are just horrible people, so I had to put something extreme into it.”

4. “I once had this idea of molten material, because when someone comes up with new material, it’s fantastic and fresh and exciting. But then it gets more leaden and set in concrete as time goes on. So I thought, why don’t I always keep my pieces molten, flowing around like mercury, so I can constantly change them and then maybe it’ll stay always fresh. So I said, I know, I’ll just take the structure of the whole thing and cut it up and do everything out of order, but that really blew my mind and I had no idea what would come next. It can get a bit scary, and scary’s not good in this game.”

5. “I was in Canada, and I used to have this piece of material, where I said “What’s your national anthem?” And I said that I’m sure that in Canada it’s: “We’re great, but not that great, la-la-la.” So I said that I feel that they should change their national anthem to “Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada” [to the theme of “America” from West Side Story]. That was kinda fun because it fits nicely, and I said that if you do that, everybody at the Olympics would want you to win because they’d just love having that go off when the flag goes up. And I’ve done this a few times, and I was in Vancouver and I said, “Well, what really is your national anthem?” Then, just like the opera singers, I let them sing it. But because they were socially progressive people and not strong nationalists, they sang it very quietly. So the entire audience sang “O Canada” under their breath. Just whisper-sang it, the whole way through. It was eerily beautiful.”

(thanks Annette!)

[from dallasnews.com]

When comedian and actor Eddie Izzard explains early on in a show that what you’re about to see “seems logical in my brain,” take that as a hint that you’re in for a wild ride the next 2 ½ hours.

At Thursday’s American Airlines Center gig, he promised the show would include “everything that’s ever happened, with gaps,” and that turned out to be an amazingly accurate description of the genius-level lunacy that followed.

>> REST OF ARTICLE

[from thebookseller.com]

Little, Brown this week snapped up rights to a memoir by comedian, actor and, latterly, marathon runner Eddie Izzard.

Antonia Hodgson, publisher of the commercial division at Little, Brown, bought British Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) from Conville & Walsh agent Jo Unwin after a seven-way auction concluded in a “very significant six-figure deal” according to C&W.

Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man will be published in September and will cover the comedian’s feat of running 43 marathons in 51 days last year as well as a wider story about his inspirations and experiences around the UK.

Unwin also agented a “high six-figure” deal for literary debut Pigeon English.