- Description
In an exclusive hour-long conversation, Charlie sits down with Nobel Prize winning playwright and actor Harold Pinter to discuss his legendary career in drama. Pinter discusses the intersection of his art and his politics, as well as his current battle with cancer. Pinter's friends and colleagues, including David Mamet, Richard Eyre, Sam Mendes and Bill Nighy, also offer their thoughts on his life and work.
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esantoro 09/12/2009 04:41 PM Report
Charlie suggests very naively that Pinter, with his great skill at expression, innuendo, and insight, should write a play that examines how America has gotten itself into its current economic, political, and social malaise.
Not only is such a broad national scope not Pinter's forte, but such a play would have to give journalists like Charlie Rose, as well as a slew of other folks in the national spotlight, a very sound beating.
For a while now I have been entertaining myself with two ideas for just such plays as Mr. Rose seeks. One is entitled "The Pequod." Imagine Melville, Twain, DeLillo, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, Albee, Williams, Coover, Miller, O'Neil, Barth and others all thrown together with a healthy dash of Mel Brooks and Pinter. Shake, cap, and run the hell away as fast as you can for a four-hour romp that will leave you crying and pulling your hair out. It's a play about how national dysfunction is held together for nearly 240 years through myth, disinformed and misinformed history, deceit, stupidity, cruelty, inferiority, and a warped sense of national pride.
This one is the whole enchilada. While thinking through some of its parts, I conceived a precursor, a shorter 90-minute diddly. This one is titled "The Trial of Charlie Rose." Of course, this play isn't an attack on Charlie Rose the person, as few of us have ever met him or even know him (we might even like him); it is an attack on Charlie Rose the public persona who poses as a journalist eager, willing, and interested to ask the real questions that need to be asked. This persona is on trial because it is integral to keeping a rickety "Pequod" afloat -- through naiveté, pseudo-pomposity, fear, and an unquenchable desire to be liked.
Whenever I see Charlie interview Ivy League university presidents and their financial and corporate counterparts, I convulse in equal parts fear, joy, and loathing in the recognition that I have the perfect epigraph -- for both plays:
"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages [...] will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without suspecting that the system is inimical to their best interests."
- Rothschild Brothers' of London communiqué to associates in New York June 25, 1863
Robert Price 03/29/2008 05:39 PM Report
Thanks for the tremendous conversation.
Kim 11/10/2007 01:56 AM Report
Harold Pinter has always written about universals. If he would write about Iraq specifically; it would lose meaning in a couple decades. He's much more effective when speaking about the bigger picture. Our leaders could do well to look at the bigger picture themselves instead of focusing on the next prefabricated struggle.
Joanne 08/04/2007 08:17 PM Report
Absolutely wonderful...thank you.