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If you were a little apprehensive when you heard that Robin Williams (he of the thousand characters so desperate to burst forth from his hyperactive, improvisational-genius brain that they're willing to disguise themselves as one of the four endlessly recycled, annoying entities that finally emerge from his mouth) was going to portray a retarded janitor in House of D, fear no more. He's not going to go for the Oscar-baiting approach taken by Sean Penn in I Am Sam or Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister. He's got his own ideas about how to do things, and they involve ridiculous make-up:

"[A] lot of people haven't seen too many characters like that, with a high-functioning handicap." To play Pappass, the actor immersed himself in research, and says there was plenty of material at his disposal. In addition, he worked with Duchovny and makeup artist Cheri Minns to achieve Pappass' look. "I had fake teeth and my ears pushed forward to transform the face," he says. "There's a certain disorder where people look very elf-like, and we went with that one."

We can't wait until the movie arrives on DVD, where Williams can finally shed the limitations of cinematic storytelling to show us the retarded masterstrokes of his improvised outtakes—the Ebonics-talking, seemingly gay, differently-abled genie who's presiding over an imaginary Bar Mitzvah at the craft services table.