Skip to main content

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophistication to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Classic Interviews Online

Just as the avuncular presence of Ed Sullivan helped ease middle America into accepting Elvis Presley and The Beatles, the aw-shucks midwestern charm of Dick Cavett made Woodstock hippies seem almost cuddly when he had Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, and Joni Mitchell on just after the legendary music festival in 1969. He had a way of making everyone around him comfortable enough to reveal just a little more than they might otherwise. (See Jimi Hendrix talk about his National Anthem performance, below.)

Born in Nebraska in 1937, “the only persona [Cavett] bothered to, or needed to, develop for working on camera was of a boy from Nebraska dazzled by the bright lights of New York,” as Clive James writes in an appreciation of the TV host, who interviewed the biggest stars of late sixties, seventies, and eighties on the long-running Dick Cavett Show. Cavett’s easygoing Midwest demeanor disarmed both his guests and audiences. He kept them engaged with his erudition, quick wit, and breadth of cultural knowledge.

Cavett, writes James, was “the most distinguished talk-show host in America… a true sophisticate with a daunting intellectual range.” He was also an empathic interviewer who could lead his guests beyond the stock responses they were used to giving in TV interviews. (David Bowie, below, reveals how he was influenced by his fans.)

A trained gymnast and self-taught magician—Cavett met fellow magician Johnny Carson in the early 50s at a magic convention—the talk-show host left Nebraska for Yale and never looked back. (He once joked, quoting Abe Burrows, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen the farm?”) After college, he moved to New York to pursue acting. There, he got his first comedy writing job, when he handed some of his jokes to Tonight Show host Jack Paar in an elevator. He befriended Stan Laurel, Groucho Marx, and all the biggest names in comedy, and wrote for Jerry Lewis and Merv Griffin.

Once he had his own late-night talk show, however, which ran opposite Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, it became clear that he was doing something very different. “Cavett never mugged, never whooped it up for the audience, rarely told a formally constructed joke, and listened to the guest,” writes James. He became “famous enough not to be able to go out except in disguise,” but “his style did not suit a mass audience.” This is what made—and still makes—Cavett worth watching.

He had Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese on to talk about how they’re each other’s best critics, and Scorsese revealed that he did additional shooting for The Last Waltz after De Palma saw it.

Robin Williams came on to demonstrate his developing Popeye voice during the shooting of the Robert Altman film in 1979. In the clip above, he talks about feeling like “a monkey on a string” and working through his depression.

Lucille Ball told the story of her early years in show business, and her time working as a model, and Dick Van Dyke talked frankly about his alcoholism and the stigma surrounding addiction.

These are just a few of the 270+ surprising clips you'll find on the Dick Cavett Show YouTube channel, where George Carlin, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, George Harrison, John Lennon, Ian McKellen, Julie Andrews, and too many more stars to name say things they rarely said anywhere else, as Cavett draws them out and keeps them talking.

Related Content:

Dick Cavett’s Wide-Ranging TV Interview with Ingmar Bergman and Lead Actress Bibi Andersson (1971)

George Harrison in the Spotlight: The Dick Cavett Show (1971)

John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Two Appearances on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 72

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophistication to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Classic Interviews Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2tMts5m
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more