In our FILMSTARTS review of “Glimmer Man,” we describe the buddy action film as a “decisive step in Steven Seagal’s descent from respectable action movie star to B-movie video store actor.” The film flopped at the box office, was of poor quality and was riddled with continuity errors and directorial errors.
However, the protagonist is largely responsible for this: “He suddenly wanted to act, be funny and at the same time bring his Buddhist faith to people,” we say in our review. What that last point in particular actually meant for the production of the film, however, only became known years after the cinema release…
Steven Seagal’s crisis of meaning
During the filming of “Glimmer Man,” Steven Seagal experienced a spiritual crisis of meaning, as actor Stephen Tobolowsky revealed in 2015. According to his statement One day, Seagal decided his faith would keep him from killing bad guys on camera – besides his spanking, he did exactly what his fans wanted to see him do.
Starting with his breakthrough with “Nico,” which made him an action star as a nameless with no screen experience, to his first No. uncompromising killing machine – until one day, in the middle of a shoot, he decided he didn’t want to be one anymore.
Seagal’s “spiritual crisis” manifested just before filming a pivotal scene in “Glimmer Man,” in which his character Cole would kill serial killer Maynard, played by Tobolowsky. Those in charge at the Warner Bros. production studio. were as close to a nervous breakdown as Seagal’s desperate co-stars. But Tobolowsky finally found a solution:
He convinced Seagal that his character Meynard would be reincarnated and redeemed if he simply killed him. But it’s best to watch and listen to how this conversation unfolded, because Tobolowsky is not only a great actor, but also a brilliant storyteller. In the following video he presents the events of the “Glimmer Man” shoot in a very funny way:
Although Seagal killed his opponent after Tobolowsky’s persuasion, the filmmakers’ nightmare was far from over: As Tobolowsky further reveals in the video above, he later had to return to film an alternate scene in which his character miraculously survives. Because as filming progressed, Seagal simply began stating this in improvised dialogue at other points in the film.
Ultimately, the version in which Seagal eliminated his opponent was used. So Tobolowsky’s comic performance was completely in vain. Warner was probably still sweating blood and water, as extensive editing work had to be done to make the result appear at least somewhat coherent. Nevertheless, numerous connection errors that were mentioned at the beginning still persist.
“Glimmer Man”: the beginning of the end
You’d actually think Warner would have had enough of Seagal. But the actor had a long-term contract with the studiowhich therefore had to finance his eco-flop “Fire Down Below”.
Filming for ‘Fire Down Below’ started before the cinema release of ‘Glimmer Man’ and therefore before the (financial) scale of the entire fiasco was known. After ‘Glimmer Man’ earned less than half of its $45 million budget at the US box office and ‘Fire Down Below’ earned just $16 million in North America for a $60 million tally, The long-standing marriage between the successful studio and the current B-movie icon came to an end – and Seagal’s career continued to spiral downward…