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Diane Lane was 18 years old, sitting across from Johnny Carson, and she handled the whole thing better than he did She was there to promote Rumble Fish, her second film for Francis Ford Coppola. Carson opened by asking why she had kissed the previous guest and not him. "He's just a very attractive man," she said. "Well, I suppose he is more the grandfatherly type," Carson answered, then turned it into a bit for the audience about too much sexual attraction going on between them. She let it pass and went straight to the work. On the title: "rumblefish is sort of a slang name for Siamese fighting fish, which is symbolic of a relationship that goes on in the film between Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke." Then, almost in passing: "It's the second film I did for Coppola." And: "I'm doing a third one now as soon as I get done." She had just finished high school without attending the ceremony. Quintano School for Young Professionals. "Got my ring. Got it in the mail." The reason she was not there in person: "this is the 5-month anniversary date of the start of the film Streets of Fire." Five months on one production, at 18, with a Coppola film about to open and another one queued up behind it. She had been working since she was six. Carson asked what she did for her 18th birthday. "I did my laundry, actually." He waited for the punchline. There was not one. There was a reason. She explained that a surprise party had been thrown for her two years earlier, and that "it was a fiasco for me because I had to play hostess to a bunch of people I did not know and it was like a burden, you know?" So she made a decision about the next one: "I said, this one is going to be just another day in the life of, and I went out and I did my laundry." An 18-year-old actress, five months into a shoot, opting out of her own celebration because the last one made her responsible for entertaining strangers. Then Carson asked whether her parents were entertainers. He fumbled the question twice and had to rephrase it. Her answer: "My mother was a Playmate of the Month, October '57. I'm very proud of her for that." Carson asked if she realised it at the time. Lane: "Well, I was not even an idea at that point." He did the arithmetic out loud, 18 and '57, noted that her mother had been 19, and asked Lane directly whether she would do something like that. "No." He asked why not. "Well, because you have to reveal quite a bit more at this point. That's one good reason. There's many other good reasons why I would choose not to do that. I don't have to." And then the line that closes the whole exchange: "Mom wanted to get a lot of exposure and she did." Source: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
History Nerd780,924 просмотров • 5 дней назад
Marlon Brando once told Dick Cavett that everyone on Earth is an actor. Then he proved it, live on air, by dissecting Cavett himself. It remains one of the most disarming exchanges in talk show history. Cavett opened by pressing Brando on something he had read for years: that Brando considered acting "not a fit profession for a man." Brando deflected at first. "We can't believe the press; I don't know what we can believe in this country." But then, in his words, "in an effort to help your ratings," Brando laid out his real view of acting: "I think that we couldn't survive a second if we weren't able to act; acting is a survival mechanism, a social lubricant, and we act to save our lives every day." People lie constantly, he explained. By not saying what they think. By showing something they don't feel. By trying to give the appearance of feeling something they don't actually feel. Cavett pushed back: "But that's not acting." Brando disagreed: "That is acting. When you're nervous or frightened in this chair, or distressed and angry, you know that is not what is necessary to be shown here, so you control your face. You're a highly controlled person and you have to do that." Cavett argued there had to be gradations. He was motivated in the moment, but he couldn't wake up the next morning and repeat that same performance on command, take after take. Surely that skill, the thing Brando did better than almost anybody, was something different. Brando refused the compliment. He pointed to the office worker who hates his boss but performs enthusiasm for his "impossible notions" day after day to keep his job. Cavett countered that delivering the same line six times, getting "something deeper into it time after time," takes an actor. Everyday performances are one-time things with immediate motivation. "No, they're not one-time things because it's a daily procedure," Brando replied. "The dialogue changes but the motivation doesn't." Then came the moment the interview is remembered for. Brando turned the lens directly on his host: "Right now, you're thinking of 60 things at once: 'Is it getting dull? Is he upset? Is he bored? Is he offended? Here's a good time for a joke.' You're doing this editing at an insane rate with a demeanor of levity and zest, and that finally isn't what goes on in your mind or feelings at all." Cavett's response said everything: "I just feel like all my clothes have been taken off." Brando softened it. "I couldn't do what you do, and that's a different kind of acting; you're playing a different kind of role." Cavett tried one final test. He handed Brando a commercial script and challenged him to read it, any way he wanted. Brando refused flatly: "No, I won't do it." Cavett's closing line: "I'm glad you didn't. The man's incorruptible, and that's what I hoped." Source: The Dick Cavett Show, interview with Marlon Brando (1973)
History Nerd1,107,361 просмотров • 9 дней назад
Coal miner, union activist, and singer Nimrod Workman performs the traditional Appalachian folk song 'Oh Death'
History Nerd13,888,014 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
WWII footage showing a German soldier surrendering to U.S. forces in 1945
History Nerd670,372 просмотров • 7 дней назад
In 1956, Tom and Jerry aired one of the darkest and most philosophical episodes ever shown in a children's cartoon
History Nerd2,010,340 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Martin Luther King Jr. explained why comparing Black Americans to other immigrant groups misses a crucial part of history. When asked why Jews, Irish, and Italians had managed to escape poverty while many Black Americans remained trapped by it, King said the comparison overlooked two fundamental differences. The first was slavery. As he put it: "No other racial group has been enslaved on American soil." Unlike other immigrant communities, Black Americans endured centuries of slavery followed by legalized segregation, creating barriers that had no true parallel. The second difference was race itself. King argued that while many immigrant groups could eventually assimilate into the broader society, Black Americans could not because their skin color remained a visible target for discrimination. As he explained: "While other racial groups have been able to change their accents or names to assimilate, the Negro cannot." For King, that was why the comparison failed. History was different, and so were the obstacles that followed from it. Source: (NBC, March 29, 1964)
History Nerd139,952 просмотров • 3 дней назад
Sylvester Stallone on the "blissful stupidity" that got Rocky made Sylvester Stallone turned down $265,000 when he had $106 in the bank. He explained why to Johnny Carson, weeks after *Rocky* opened. Carson set it up by telling his audience he had watched the film with a room full of friends and everyone got up saying it was a knockout. "I have met no one yet really who has seen the picture who did not like it," he said. The film had already won best film of the year from Scholastic Magazine and Coronet Magazine. Carson's point: if somebody made a movie about how this movie got made, the audience wouldn't buy it. Stallone agreed, and gave the reason it worked anyway: "It was quite a long shot; if I had known it was gonna be that difficult I wouldn't have done it. I think it was a classic case of blissful stupidity because I didn't know you couldn't do something like this." His financing strategy was not sophisticated: "To me it seemed very normal honking your horn in the driveway of the producer and tapping on his window at all hours of the night and saying please, please, please. Eventually, I think they just gave me the money to go away." The script came out of his own dead end. He was turning 30, had been acting for ten years, and had concluded nothing was going to happen. So he took his own plight, "my inability to be recognized as an actor," and, in his words, put it in boxing shorts. "When you're a down-and-out underdog fighter, that's about as low down as you can get." The studio liked it. They also wanted somebody else in it. Stallone lists the names that came up: James Caan, Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds. All bankable. None of them him. So they made offers. First $100,000 for the script. Then, as he puts it, $150,000 "to take a walk." He said no. They came back at $265,000. Carson asked him directly what goes through your head when someone offers you two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. "Well I said that's a lot of bread. Well after I stood up, you know it's one of those things. I felt as though the money meant nothing when you haven't dealt in money that much; it really had no bearing." He had about $106 in the bank at the time. His explanation for turning down more than 2,500 times that: a number that large was so far outside his experience that it had no emotional weight. Carson compared it to a man at the racetrack who wins $100,000, loses it all by the end of the day, and reports his loss as six dollars. Stallone's summary of his own position was one line: "So it really didn't bother me, plus $106 was gaining interest." The thing he was protecting was not the script. It was the part. And the part was the point of the script in the first place. "Many people consider it a fight film which is not true; there's only like nine minutes of fighting." Source: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, NBC, Sylvester Stallone interview, airdate 16 December 1976
History Nerd63,581 просмотров • 2 дней назад
Robin Williams was sober for 20 years... then one thought in a small Alaskan town undid it all. In this interview, the comedian traces the full arc of his history with addiction: how it started, how he quit the first time, why he relapsed after two decades, and what finally broke the grip for good. It began early in his career, with cocaine. People asked why a man that fast ever needed it. His answer flips the assumption on its head: "I think I did it because it would actually allow me not to talk. It was like, you know, reverse medication... It just kind of shuts you down, which is a, you know, word: self-medication." The first turning point came in the early 1980s. Two things changed his thinking: the death of his friend John Belushi from an overdose, and the news that he was about to become a father. "I remember stopping it on my own because I was about to have a son... You don't want to be like that." On Belushi's death, he says it was the beginning of "thinking outside the box of 'you've got a responsibility and it's more than you'." He quit alone, without help. And it held for 20 years. Then came the relapse. "I was in a little town in Alaska. It wasn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there, and it was like all of a sudden I thought I could drink. It's also that same thought you have if you look off a large building and go, 'I can fly'. And within a week it was like gone." He calls the aftermath a gift: "Now, you know, I realize I can't." The second recovery looked nothing like the first. This time he went to rehab, and he learned why doing it alone had been the harder road. Surrounded by doctors and psychiatrists in treatment, he noticed a pattern: "The more intelligent you think you are, the harder it is to let go. Everything: 'I've got a solution, I'll just drink a little bit'." The lesson he lands on is surrender: "You gotta just say, 'I can't do it'... And then you have to go, 'Nope, you lose, you can't do it. You need help'. And at that point, that's the beginning."
History Nerd258,959 просмотров • 11 дней назад
Clint Eastwood on the night he saved the Oscars, and why "minor disasters" made live TV great: In 1973, at the height of the spaghetti western era, Clint Eastwood sat down with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Carson introduced him as an international star who had been described as "Huckleberry Finn with hormones". The conversation quickly turned to one of the most famous improvised moments in Academy Awards history. Eastwood was sitting in the audience that night, scheduled to do just one thing: present Best Picture at the very end of the broadcast. Then producer Howard Koch, visibly panicked, approached him with a problem. Charlton Heston had not shown up, and someone needed to open the show. Eastwood hesitated. His wife encouraged him to do it. So he walked out and read cue cards cold, with no idea what the dialogue was before he said it. Worse, the script had been written in "biblical terms" for Heston, the man who had played Moses. Eastwood eventually turned to the audience and admitted, "this is not my bag." Looking back, he did not treat it as an embarrassment. He reflected that such "minor disasters" are part of what made live television exciting. Carson then brought up the critics, joking that Eastwood had studied at the "Mount Rushmore Dramatic Society". Eastwood's response says a lot about how he measured success: Everyone is entitled to an opinion, he said, but he found the public's reaction more significant. At that point, his films had grossed approximately $200 million worldwide. The interview also captured a piece of film history in the making. Eastwood revealed that before the world settled on "spaghetti western", the films were initially called "macaroni westerns" in Japan when A Fistful of Dollars was first released. He clarified that they were Italian productions filmed in Spain. He also pulled back the curtain on how those films were actually made. In Italy, every movie is dubbed. Actors perform with a "cue track" during filming, then record a clean track later. Eastwood praised the skill of Italian and Japanese actors in syncing their voices to English mouth movements. Source: Clint Eastwood's 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
History Nerd206,606 просмотров • 9 дней назад
Major Frank Prentice was 18 years old when he dropped over a hundred feet off the stern of the Titanic into a sea full of ice. He survived. This is what he saw. Prentice worked in the Purser's office. He was in his cabin at midships when the collision happened. He describes no chaos, no impact, nothing dramatic: "It was just like jamming your brakes on my car. There was no great impact you couldn't feel. Just a bit of a shudder and she stopped." That quiet did not last. As the ship began to sink, Prentice moved through it. He helped stewardesses into lifeboats who did not know where to go. He helped a woman named Mrs. Clark with her lifejacket. She did not want to leave her husband. He told her the husband would follow on later. He would not. On his way back from the lifeboats, Prentice heard the band. They were playing "Nearer My God to Thee" and singing. He kept walking. When the end came, he made his way to the stern. He describes it as quiet up there. By the time he let go, the ship was nearly vertical. He had been hanging onto a board that read "Keep Clear of Propeller Blades." At the very last moment, he let go and fell. "I just missed the propellers on the way down." The drop was over a hundred feet. The water was packed with ice and chunks of berg. His watch stopped at 2:20 am. He was not alone in the water at first. Then he was. "I gave it a long thought when I was on my own and everybody else seemed to be dead round me." He had two life jackets and a cushion. He paddled toward a light he could still see from the rockets the bridge had fired. He reached a lifeboat and climbed in. Mrs. Clark was already there. She wrapped a blanket around him and tried to keep him warm. Her husband had drowned. When asked who was responsible for the disaster, Prentice did not hesitate. He blamed the bridge. He blamed Bruce Ismay, chairman of the shipping line, for pushing Captain Smith to maintain speed through waters they had been warned were full of ice. "We had warnings that there was ice. We had it from ships and shore, and we went straight ahead as if there was nothing there in our way." His verdict was simple: That ship was thrown away. Prentice was interviewed decades later. Asked if the memory still haunted him, he said: "When I'm alone tonight, I still think a lot about it. Can't help it, can you?" — Source: BBC Archive – The Great Liners (1979)
History Nerd643,755 просмотров • 28 дней назад
In 1980, a 22-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer walked onto The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson having never taken an acting class, never met anyone in the industry, and having found her agent through the Yellow Pages. She had been boxing groceries at Vons supermarket in Orange County. Then she got promoted to checker. "What am I doing here?" she asked herself. That question changed everything. It was her hairdresser who first planted the seed. He kept asking her why she wasn't pursuing acting. For a long time, she dismissed it. Fear of failure. What will people think? The usual voices that talk most of us out of the things we actually want. Then she stopped listening to them. "I said, 'What do you want to do?' And not what everybody else wants you to do. And acting was it." With no money, no contacts, and no roadmap, she did what any resourceful 22-year-old from Orange County would do. She opened the Yellow Pages and started calling agents. Her pitch to the first one she reached was almost absurdly direct: "This is what I want to do. I don't have any money to go through your school. I don't have any money to pay for pictures. I don't want to sign any contracts with you." She laughed recounting it to Carson, noting that somehow that call still worked. Within two years of that phone call, she was sitting across from Johnny Carson on national television, with two film credits to her name. She credited her naivety as a kind of protection. "I look back and I think it's been very fortunate because I was very naive and I could have been taken advantage of." The industry she walked into had a reputation for chewing up hopeful newcomers. She walked through it without knowing enough to be afraid of it. Her parents were worried. That was real. But the moment she showed them this was not a whim, that it was a genuine calling, the dynamic shifted completely. "I certainly had their support once they knew. I mean, this is really what I wanted to do. Once they knew that, I had their support 100%."
History Nerd876,968 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
When Idris Elba's wax figure unlocked his phone instantly
History Nerd1,353,217 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
J.R.R. Tolkien explains why he spent years building Middle-earth before writing The Lord of the Rings. In a rare interview, Tolkien is asked why he devoted more than a decade to creating the world behind his stories before writing them. He rejects the idea that Middle-earth emerged purely from his unconscious, describing himself instead as “a meticulous sort of bloke” who spent years working out timelines, languages, histories, customs, and genealogies until everything fit together. For Tolkien, the world existed before the story. He even says The Hobbit began almost by accident, explaining that the larger mythology was already in place and that the novel simply became absorbed into it. When asked why anyone would build an entire fictional world before telling a story, Tolkien points to what he calls “subcreation.” As creations of a Creator, he argues, humans naturally desire to create. Since we cannot create something from nothing, we instead reshape existing reality into new forms that are both imaginative and aesthetically satisfying. Tolkien also rejects the idea that art should be driven solely by moral purpose, insisting that beauty and aesthetics are just as fundamental to human creativity. Discussing good and evil, he explains that Sauron was not evil from the beginning but fell from grace, much like Lucifer. The One Ring, he says, symbolizes a power so absolute that even someone with good intentions would inevitably be corrupted by wielding it. He adds that this idea long predates the atomic age, noting that the foundations of his mythology were developed while he was still an undergraduate, not as an allegory for modern events. At the end of the interview, Tolkien is asked whether he would rather be remembered for what he said or for what he made. He dismisses the distinction, arguing that lasting creations endure precisely because they have something meaningful to say. Source: The Tolkien Professor interview with J.R.R. Tolkien (BBC, 1968), “J.R.R. Tolkien Interview (1968).
History Nerd210,216 просмотров • 12 дней назад
In 1978, a 13-year-old walked onto The Tonight Show and held her own with Johnny Carson. Her name was Brooke Shields. She had already filmed Pretty Baby. She had a book written about her. She was mid-production on Wanda Nevada, starring opposite Peter Fonda and Henry Fonda. And she had been in front of cameras since she was 11 months old. Carson opened the interview marvelling at the sheer volume of recognition she had already accumulated at 13. He told her he had seen her photographs hanging in Francesco Scavullo's studio in New York. "I did my first job with him," she told Carson. "How old were you?" "11 months old." Her first job was an Ivory Snow ad. She does not technically remember it, she says, but she remembers something: "I remember when I walked in there were like hundreds of screaming little babies and I just remember my mom holding me and just looking around to see what was going on." The earliest shoot she properly remembers was a Johnson's Baby Shampoo commercial. Then Johnson's Band-Aids. "I had a cut on one knee and I was wondering why they were putting the Band-Aid on the other knee," she recalled, a trace of the confused little girl still in the story. Carson asked her whether she found modelling and performing hard work or fun. Her answer was precise for someone her age. "It's both. I mean, it's work, but you have to make it fun, otherwise it won't be good."
History Nerd625,529 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Philip Seymour Hoffman on the moment he realized he had to get sober. In an interview, Hoffman was asked about entering rehab at a young age. The interviewer mentioned he was 25, but Hoffman quickly corrected him. "I got sober. I was 22 years old." When asked whether it was drugs or alcohol, he didn't hesitate: "Yes. All that stuff. Anything I get my hands on. I liked it all." Then came the obvious question: Why did he stop? His answer centered on one feeling: "You get panicked. You get panicked. I was 22 and I got panicked for my life." He didn't describe it as a dramatic turning point. Instead, he explained that he feared he was losing the future he wanted. "Whatever I was doing made me worry if I was going to be able to do the things I wanted to do with my life. And I was putting myself in situations and predicaments that were dangerous." Years later, he still remembered the clarity of that realization. "I do remember thinking there's things I want to do, you know, there's things I want to do and I'm not going to do them. If I keep doing this, it's not going to happen." Source: 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft (2012)
History Nerd65,067 просмотров • 4 дней назад