When Altman, Bogdanovich, Brooks and Capra Went On Cavett To Talk About Swine Like Harry Cohn

 

 

 It's just after Frank Capra who directed "It's A Wonderful Life" talks about Hobart Bosworth losing his upper jaw to a pill of dry ice he kept in his mouth to produce convincing breath for a movie set in the South Pole, that conversation turns to the subject of Harry Cohn: "At least that era is over," Dick Cavett suggests, as we now know completely mistakenly. But Capra, like Welles, was a fan: "If he could bully you, he didn't want you around, if you could stand up to him, he wanted you." 

Capra allowed to sit at Cohn's table (source)

 

 It's also possible Capra got on Cohn's good side just by being immensely successful, and Cohn got on Capra's good side by letting him know it. Also interviewed is Mel Brooks, who describes his own introduction to Cohn beautifully, watching him wheeled around on his back from messenger to messenger "like a piece of field artillery." Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich are there too, it's quite a line-up, although I've never seen Dick Cavett so watery and ineffectual, but Mel Brooks has some fun with that. 

 

Cohn with Larry, Mo and Curly 

(the latter of whom Cohn forced to continue working after multiple strokes nyuk nyuk)

 Cohn seems to have been as keen to be hated as Orson Welles was to be loved, I'm having a ball playing both without the aid of a cigar, and I cannot overstate how easy everyone is making it for me. Love Goddess, the Rita Hayworth Musical returned to the Cockpit tonight. I'm a huge fan of this show. Come and join me. Tickets here!

When Hoffa Went On Cavett

 

 It was 1973, and the height of Watergate (I'm using "height" here, in its current sense, to mean "first act"). He talks about his time inside, and prison reform, and where he was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and there's some gay panic - which Cavett surprisingly makes a slight apology for towards the end (not that Dick Cavett isn't hip: his "So much for those foreigners" at 39:17 is a typically dry puncturing) – and there's recourse to lie detector transcripts, then a lawyer called Melvin Belli comes on to talk about F. Lee Bailey's latest porn venture, then someone called Charles Ashman who's just published a book about corrupt judges, then they all start talking about "the system", with occasional breaks for messages from the sponsor. And then the credits roll, and they look like this:

 

 

 Like so much Cavett on youtube, it's electric. I sought it out because, as we he head into this third "lockdown" which looks like it's going to last until at least March, I finally today got round to watching all three and a half hours of The Irishman. I'd known very little about James Riddle Hoffa going into it; I didn't know our lifespans had overlapped, and I certainly didn't know he'd done the chat show circuit. But, despite the protests in the description of the Cavett video that "it's an awful movie, anyway" I don't think the former head of the truckers' union comes out of the film that badly, especially when I remember the episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars that detailed how atrocious working conditions currently are for those who work on ships. I really wasn't expecting to be reminded of that. And I thought I might be sick of gangster films, but I'd forgotten they're also secret histories, and everyone in The Irishman talks like Trump. Maybe it's all the Frankenstein movies I've been watching, but I didn't find the digital de-aging of De Niro that distracting either –

 

 It was less distracting than trying to work out where I'd heard the diegetic music, anyway. (Frontier Psychiatrist! That's it!)