GLOVER - His independent films explore taboos.

"Don't you find a mad beauty in unorthodoxy?" Gee I wish I'd said that (but I didn't; Dick Cavett did, in an interview with Jimi Hendrix). Would have come in handy, particularly this weekend at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Mad beauty, or at least unorthodoxy, will be on the schedule for the live appearance by actor-filmmaker-media trickster Crispin Glover or "Crispin Hellion Glover," as he likes to bill himself.

The Hollywood character actor, lately motion-capture-digitized for Grendel in the all-CGI Beowulf, will preside at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday night in his first Cleveland visit (the closest to town he has come since shooting Teachers in Columbus back in the 1980s). This will be an evening of performance/readings, viewer Q&As and screenings of Crispin Glover's own idiosyncratic film work. We're not talking rare outtakes of Back to the Future here.

"I perform a one-hour dramatic narration of eight different books I have made over the years," says Glover in an e-mail exchange. "The books are taken from old books from the 1800s that have been changed into different books from what they originally were. They are heavily illustrated with original drawings and reworked images and photographs."

With titles such as Oak Mot and Rat Catching, these palimpsests and their tortured 19th-century Victorian verbiage transform into something like surreal poetry when recited by Glover, against a shifting array of rather bewildering images. Think dada-surrealism or the non-sequitur stand-up comedy of Andy Kaufman.

"The only way for the books to make sense was to have visual representations of the images. This is why I knew a slideshow was necessary," says Glover. "It took a while, but in 1992 I started performing what I used to call 'Crispin Hellion Glover's Big Sideshow.' People get confused as to what that is."

"What it is," or more accurately What Is It?, will follow. This is Glover's directorial debut feature, many years in the making (thanks to lab glitches and a long, fraught process of being blown up from 16mm), probably many more years in the trying to figure out. Using a principle cast of performers afflicted with Downs Syndrome, as well as a few porn starlets in animal masks, a demonization of Shirley Temple, and a minstrel in blackface, Glover paints a mythic inner-underworld, with himself presiding as a sort of god. Though Glover sells copies on his Web site (crispinglover.com), you can bet this won't be one of the comic-book-based summer action movies of 2008.

"What Is It? is my psychological reaction to the corporate restraints that have happened in the last 20 to 30 years in filmmaking. Specifically, anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable is necessarily excised or the film will not be corporately funded or distributed. This is damaging to the culture - because it is the very moment when an audience member sits back in their chair, looks up at the screen, and thinks to themselves, 'Is this right what I am watching? Is this wrong what I am watching? Should I be here? Should the filmmaker have made this? What is it?' And that is the title of the film. What is it that is taboo in the culture?"

Glover determined What Is It? to be part one of a loose trilogy of edge-pushing features. At the Cinematheque he will screen the trailer for It Is Fine EVERYTHING IS FINE, the second one, which he co-directed (and cast his father, veteran actor Bruce Glover). Continuing the thread of physical handicaps and deformities, the noirish psychodrama focuses on an institutionalized spastic (screenwriter Steven C. Stewart, who also appears in What Is It?) and his, er, rich inner fantasy life, in which his wheelchair and unintelligible speech are no obstacles to his becoming a world-class seducer and destroyer of pretty women.

"Steve had written his screenplay in the late 1970s. I read it in 1986 and as soon as I had read it I knew I had to produce the film," Glover says. "Steve had been locked in a nursing home for about 10 years when his mother died. He had been born with a severe case of cerebral palsy and he was very difficult to understand. People that were caring for him in the nursing home would derisively call him an 'M.R.,' short for 'mental retard.' This is not a nice thing to say to anyone, but Steve was of normal intelligence. When he did get out he wrote his screenplay.

"Although it is written in the genre of a murder-detective thriller, truths of his own existence come through much more clearly than if he had written it as a standard autobiography," he continues. "We shot It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE while I was still completing What Is It? And this is partly why What Is It? took a long time to complete. I am very proud of the film - as I am of What Is It? I feel It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE will probably be the best film I will have anything to do with in my entire career."

And this from the man who played a wicked Willy Wonka takeoff in the parody Epic Movie, so attend closely. Glover said he hopes to bring a completed print of It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE back to Cleveland on a return visit, but in the meanwhile What Is It? serves as an orientation: "It is important to show What Is It? first, because it sets up going into taboo subject matter to the extent so that when people view It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE the taboo element is not what becomes important, but the emotional content of the film."

Glover cites Herzog, Buel, Fassbinder and Kubrick as filmmakers he particularly admires, and he is looking forward to beginning the third in his "It" trilogy, IT IS MINE. He gives no details, only the circumstances, and the explanation that he will be doing various other projects in the meantime while It Is Mine takes shape.

"I own property in the Czech Republic and am making a small soundstage out there to continue making my own films," he says. "It is another culture and another language, and I need to build up to complex productions like What Is It? and It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. It Is Mine is an even more complex project than those two films were, so it will be a while yet for that production. I would say at least a few years."

An Evening of Crispin Glover: 7 p.m. Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., cia.edu. Advance tickets are available at Cinematheque film screenings or by calling 216.421.7450. Admission: $20, with a $5 discount for Cinematheque members.