You probably know actor Curtis Armstrong best as the vulgar, grubby, utterly lovable anti-frat boy character Booger from the 1980s teen comedy series Revenge of the Nerds. So you may be surprised to find out that in real life, Armstrong is articulate, cultured and polite - and that he’s one of the world’s foremost experts on pop songwriter Harry Nilsson.

This Saturday, Armstrong will be visiting Austin to host a screening of Nilsson’s 1971 film The Point!, as well as a screening of the original Revenge of the Nerds. We recently caught up with Armstrong to talk about Harry Nilsson, typecasting, and the difference between obsession and mania.

Firstly, how did you become an authority on Harry Nilsson?

Basically, I was a fan. And some years ago while doing research, I was talking to his label in New York, and I just sort of hit if off with Glenn Korman who is the head of the archive there. He invited me to come in and meet him the next time I was in New York, so I did, and at that point he recognized me – he hadn’t recognized my name, but when he saw my face he realized I was an actor. They were thinking about re-releasing some of his records because many of them had been out of print for a long time, and they initially invited me to help by picking out bonus tracks for the John Lennon produced album Pussy Cats. Then they asked me to write the liner notes, and the next thing I knew I’d become co-producer of the series. At this point we have eight or something out, but I don’t know if it’s going to go any further. He’s a niche artist, as they say, and in this market I don’t know that they can afford to continue. But we’ve had a lot of fun, and I’ve enjoyed it. But aside from having followed him as a fan since the late 60s, it was also through doing interviews with all the people that he’d worked with and acquiring an archive of material related to him that I wound up knowing a lot about him.

There is sort of a Nilsson resurgence going on right now – albeit a small one. For starters, The Walkmen just rerecorded Pussy Cats.

Right, they did - and it’s such an odd thing. Somebody emailed me about that, and I went out and got it. Some if it’s very good, and some of it’s awful, but I think you could say that for the original album, too.

I think there’s something weird about that. I mean, trying to exactly recreate an album…

Well, I’d never heard of such a thing. I mean, if this was an album that was especially significant for them for some reason, I suppose I could see it just as a band experiment, just for fun. But to have it be an actual album that you release? I got the album that has the DVD attached to it, and there’s nothing in the DVD or in the booklet that would lead one to think that these guys were lifelong Nilsson fans, or even lifelong Lennon fans. I can’t imagine where it came from.

There’s also a Nilsson documentary, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?. And, as you said, he’s sort of a niche artist. So it seems strange for these things to be happening at the same time.

Well, the documentary had been in the works for a very long time. And we’ve been re-releasing these albums since 1998 and people have been using Nilsson’s music for movies and commercials ever since he died, really. So it does seem like there is a confluence of events here, but it’s pretty much coincidental.

There is a real sense among musically astute people, though, that he was somebody to be reckoned with, but those are the same people who bought his records in the first place. Except for one album – Nilsson Schmilsson, which had “Without You” and “Coconut” and “Jump Into the Fire” on it – he never sold that well as an artist during the years he was actively recording, so it’s been pretty consistent as far as the response that we’ve gotten from these albums.

Do you think you have to hear his entire output to be able to judge him properly? Because clearly you can’t judge him based on his singles.

Well, you can’t judge him based on “Everybody’s Talkin’,” certainly. Or “Without You.” But I think the trick with him is that in ten or eleven years he went through three pretty obvious phases as an artist. If you get the 60’s albums (The Point! was in ‘71, but it was in the style of the 60’s albums), it is a sort of pop, baroque, Beatles-influenced, whimsical type of output. But then he teamed up with Richard Perry, and made a string of albums which were more sort of serious rock n’ roll -- and that was where he had his big commercial success, in Nilsson Schmilsson and Son Of Schmilsson. Then he started just going off wherever he wanted to, and you have these weird side-projects like A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night that he did with Gordon Jenkins, which is an album of American standards. The Lennon album is a very hard-rocking album, and the ones he did himself are sort of a mélange of styles, and with every album, they sold less and less. But by the time he was done he had an incredibly eclectic legacy of recorded music behind him, and if you drop in at any one place in that eleven-year period, you’re only hearing one aspect.

Would you say that The Point! – the film you're showing this Saturday – is one of your favorite Nilsson film projects?

I like the film, but I actually prefer the album. The album was inspired by an acid trip, as many things were in those days, and in addition to the music, Harry narrates the story. And as he’s not an actor – he’s just a guy reading this story that he made up – it feels very much like a parent telling a bedtime story. You can hear the pages turning, and it’s just utterly charming.

The movie is significant because it’s the first feature-length animated musical made for television. It was original and critically very well received. Come to think of it, I’m not sure there have been many more feature-length animated musicals made for television; it may be in a class by itself, as far as that goes. But it was an hour and a half time slot – the old ABC movie of the week slot – so I think it was padded a bit to fill in the time allowed.

But it plays incredibly well now, particularly the version we’re showing because it’s the original one with Dustin Hoffman narrating. Harry had gotten Dustin to do this for practically no money because of their connection on Midnight Cowboy. But this was done in 1971, so there was no sense of this being something that would have a life in video or on cable, and the deal did not play beyond that. And when they came to want to release it to home video, they couldn’t afford Hoffman’s narration so Harry called on Ringo Starr to do it, because they were friends.

And Ringo has a decidedly less-cool voice than Dustin Hoffman.

Well, it’s not that it’s a less cool voice. It’s a great voice – if you like Ringo Starr. But it’s very much Ringo in that sort of laconic, straight-faced style. And it doesn’t really fit the story well. And subsequently two other people wound up doing it, one of whom was…he was on that TV show with Kirk Cameron….

I think its Alan Thicke.

That’s the one. I think Disney wanted to show it, and because they were producing the show that Alan Thicke was on, they wanted him to do it. But anyway - it wound up being seen by a lot of people in different ways. But the Dustin Hoffman version is still the best, and this is going to be a thrill for me because, although I’ve seen it many times, I’ve never seen it with the Dustin Hoffman narration on a big screen.

The second film you’ll be showing on Saturday night is Revenge Of The Nerds, which is probably the role you’re best known for. Or at least that character – it’s a similar sort of character in Better Off Dead and in most of the early teen comedies you were in.

I’d say so, yes. It’s called typecasting.

Right - but by now you’ve moved on to completely different things. You do a lot of voiceover work for animated projects, you’ve done a wide variety of serious film and television roles…

Well I would hope that after 25 years I’m doing something different.

I guess that’s my question – to go back and watch Revenge of the Nerds at this point in your life, do you love Booger or hate him?

I don’t know that I’ve thought about it in those kinds of terms. I don’t love him or hate him, but it’s something that I’ve come to live with, because it’s so popular. And it’s a character that people always talk about. I have people very often who’ll recognize me as Booger, and they’ll say, “hey, did you ever do anything else?” and they don’t get quite the response from me that I think they’re looking for. But they do relate to him.

To me it was really - honest to god - just a job. And not a job that I had any particular feelings about one way or another. And it’s become less “just a job” only by virtue of the fact that every single day people talk about him to me. I get fan mail and email about it, and because it means so much to other people, it stands out for me in everything that I’ve done.

But at the time it certainly didn’t. I’d been working in the theatre for almost ten years before that, and I did the same thing with that role as I would with any stage role I was doing. I think it’s safe to say that none of us were really confident that 20 years down the line it was going to be even more popular than it was at the time.

It’s certainly become a real “cult” thing, and I was wondering if you share that sort of mentality. Would you say you’re an obsessive? I mean, you’re an avid book collector, and I know you’re interested in horror films…

Well, kind of. I wouldn’t say that that’s on the same level as the book collecting, but I do love old horror movies – not new ones.

But you’re also obsessed with Nilsson in a way. Collectors are a generally very specific types of people, wouldn’t you say?

Well, it’s a form of mania, I suppose. You have that gene in you, or you don’t. And I certainly have it as far as the books go. The Nilsson thing I wouldn’t say I’m obsessive about. It’s something I sort of backed into, and I wasn’t aware of how it had taken over, in a lot of ways. And when I did realize that it had reached that point I really started pulling back from it, because I’ve got a family, I’ve got a daughter, and I’m more involved in my daughter than I am in anything.

My serious book collecting days are gone, because what money I have is going to my daughter. But I still love the writers I collected. So I’ve got these nice collections here, and I read the books, but I can’t say that I’m obsessive about it. When I find something that interests me, I start exploring it. I don’t just listen to Nilsson 24 hours a day, but I’ll move from Nilsson to other things – I’ll go to Van Dyke Parks, or I’ll go to Randy Newman. I’ll go around him. And it’s the same way with books; I’m lead from one writer into another through an interest in that writer.

So it comes from having a magpie sensibility about collecting. But it also has to do with, to a degree, being a frustrated scholar. Because when I was younger, before I wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a journalist. And then throughout my life my fantasy job would have been to be an English teacher, which is sort of the opposite of the way it usually is. If you’re a teacher, your fantasy is to be a baseball star or an actor, but for me it was the other way around. I love 19th and 18th century literature, and I guess I approach everything form a sort of faux-scholarly perspective, including Nilsson, and that involves research. How did this person end up doing what he did? What’s exceptional about him, and how is it that people found him so interesting? You have people like The Beatles and Fred Astaire and Ella Fitzgerald recording his music, and yet nobody knows about him. How interesting. And now that you mention it, I guess that’s a good way of describing who I am.

That’s a fantastic answer.

Well, nobody’s ever asked me that question before, and it was nice to hear it because I had to actually think about it instead of just answering the same things I usually do.

I just find it interesting that there are identifiable types of obsessives. I think if you’re truly fanatical about art itself, you work your way from one artist to the next – as you said – because you’re truly interested in the overall ideas rather than just hoping to be entertained by it.

Right – but I talk to people all the time who, I believe, are really genuinely obsessive on certain subjects. And it’s usually about a single book or single movie. They just dissolve into these things, and they really do become their life.

A few years ago, I was searching for Nilsson stuff, and I was looking for a copy of Skidoo. So I posted something in a newspaper or magazine about it, and I was contacted by this guy in Hollywood who said he had a copy. So I went to a little café on Hollywood Boulevard to meet him, and in walks this overweight, balding man with a very round cherubic face, and he sat down with me in this little dive to deliver these videotapes. So I asked what I owed him for the video, and he said, “well, I trade”. So I asked what he would want that I might have, and he said his main interest was Sheila Russell. And I thought, who the hell is Sheila Russell?

It turned out that Sheila Russell had been a starlet in the 50s; she’d come to Los Angeles in the late 40s from the Midwest, and she had done small parts in about five movies. But something happened to her – a car accident or questionable suicide - and she died. And this man…his entire life was dedicated to this woman. He saw something in her, clearly that he saw in himself, and he was determined to do everything in his power to make her as widely known as possible. It wasn’t even an erotic thing I don’t think – he struck me as being sort of asexual. It was on a different level that he connected with this woman. He’d seen her in these movies, but he hadn’t seen her the way everybody else had. He saw her on a level that was almost religious. And I went away from that meeting just dazzled by him.

So those are the kinds of things that interest me; I met this lovely guy named Christian Divine who has basically done this sort of thing with Skidoo – he believes that Skidoo is not only Preminger’s best movie, but one of the great American movies that somehow hasn’t been recognized. And he’s dedicated his life to it, and I find that intriguing, that people can get so worked up about something.

Ultimately, I don’t care whether people like or dislike Harry Nilsson or Washington Irving or anybody that I like. I like them, and that’s all that matters. But then, with somebody like this it becomes almost a crusade. I do run into people all the time who have this quirk about them, which I find interesting, and not at all particularly enviable.

The Point
Saturday, November 18
Alamo Drafthouse
7pm
[Tickets]

Revenge of the Nerds
Saturday, November 18
Alamo Drafthouse
9:45pm
[Tickets]