Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 2

 

[Good Night, and Good Luck, written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, adapted from their screenplay for the 2005 film distributed by Warner Bros. and based on the career of renowned newsman Edward R. Murrow, is scheduled to open on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre on 3 April (next Thursday).  The play stars Clooney, who played Fred Friendly, a CBS executive, in the movie.  It started previews on 12 March and is scheduled to end its limited engagement on 8 June.  

[The one-act, intermissionless performance runs about 1 hour 40 minutes and the story takes place in 1954, when on 9 March, Murrow attacked Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade on the reporter’s television show, See It Now.

[The production is directed by David Cromer, a 2018 Tony- and 2017 Drama Desk-winner for direction of The Band’s Visit (2017).  The scenic design is by Scott Pask, the costume design by Brenda Abbandandolo, the lighting design by Heather Gilbert, the sound design by Daniel Kluger, and the projection design by David Bengali. 

[In addition to Clooney as Murrow, his first stage role since 1986 and his Broadway début, the cast includes Ilana Glazer as Shirley Wershba, a reporter and producer on See It Now; Glenn Fleshler as Fred Friendly, creator, with Murrow, of See It Now; Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck, a CBS newscaster and commentator, and associate of Murrow and Friendly; Mac Brandt as Colonel Anderson, a fictionalized CBS executive who’s pressured by McCarthy to silence Murrow; Will Dagger as Don Hewitt, the first director of See It Now; and Christopher Denham as John Aaron, a member of the production team of See It Now.

[Despite the limited engagement, the word is that there are seats available for the entire run.  Center orchestra tickets are selling for as much as $775; however, there are $49 rush tickets available at the Winter Garden Theatre box office with a valid student ID, limited to two tickets per person (seats may be partial view) and a limited number of $49 tickets are also available through a digital lottery at Ticket Initiatives | Good Night, and Good Luck. 

[A limited number of standing-room tickets will also be made available when a performance is sold out.  These tickets can only be purchased in person at the box office on the day of the performance for $69 each and are limited to two tickets per person.]

“GEORGE CLOONEY SPEAKS ABOUT HIS BROADWAY DEBUT
IN ‘GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK’”
by Dave Carlin 

[This report was aired on CBS News New York (Channel 2 in New York City) on 7 February 2025]

NEW YORK - George Clooney [b. 1961] is getting ready to appear in his first Broadway production. 

In “Good Night, And Good Luck,” Clooney is making his Broadway debut, which is based on his movie. In it, he’ll play legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow [1908-65] in eight shows a week. 

Clooney, one of the biggest stars in the world, co-wrote the show, and spoke about his personal connections to journalism, and about tackling big challenges on Broadway. 

“[W]hat’s a part of it, is you want to hear Murrow, and those words are fun to hear,” Clooney said. 

The play is an adaptation of the critically acclaimed 2005 film Clooney co-wrote, directed and appeared in. It’s about Murrow and CBS news in the 1950s, investigating Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s [1908-57; Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57] much-feared campaign to root out communists in America. Murrow and his team exposed lies. 

“Journalism is always challenged. Power doesn’t like journalism. Never has, and didn’t like it when it was [Thomas] Jefferson [1743-1826; 3rd President of the United States: 1801-09] and [John] Adams [1735-1826; 2nd President of the United States: 1797-1801], and they don’t like it now,” Clooney said. “My father has been, was an anchorman for 40 years. And we really believe in the idea of holding truth to power.

[George Clooney’s father, Nick Clooney (b. 1934), is a former anchorman and television host, who started his broadcast career in 1958. In the early 1970s, he had great success with The Nick Clooney Show, a local morning show with a variety and talk-show format at Cincinnati, Ohio’s WKRC-TV (not to be confused with the fictional WKRP in the 1978-82 TV sitcom).

[Nick Clooney ran as a Democrat in the 2004 election for a seat in the House of Representatives representing Kentucky, his native state, but lost to the Republican candidate. He was also an activist, making a 2006 documentary film with his son in support of the people of the Darfur region of Sudan in its conflict with the government in Khartoum (TV special; A Journey to Darfur).  In 2018, Clooney openly criticized the current owners of WKRC-TV, which he’d left in 1984, for their conservative viewpoints and their dictating certain coverage in the station’s newscasts, according to Cincinnati.com.]

“It’s actually a story about us at our best as Americans, which is holding ourselves accountable, which I think is good,” Clooney added. 

So why do Broadway now?

“Well, it’s scary. But, you know, I haven’t done a play in 40 years, so it’s one of those things where, and I’ve never done the Broadway play, so I’m, of course, you know, petrified to do it. But it’s not such a bad thing being 63 and doing something that you don’t feel both your feet are firmly on the ground. That’s not such a bad thing to do,” Clooney said. 

[Clooney made his stage début and his last appearance in a play in 1986 in a Los Angeles production of a play about Sex Pistols musician Sid Vicious entitled Vicious by Denis Spedaliere, in which he played Champ, a prostitute and dealer.  The production was a revival at The Complex, a theater in Hollywood, of a 1984 première, also in LA. The play traveled to Chicago to play at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company from 4 June to 6 July 1986.]

[Dave Carlin has covered national news stories and events in the past four decades including Superstorm Sandy and its tri-state impacts, Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, and Iniki on Kauai, Hawaii.  He also covered the Space Shuttle Program; 1989 San Francisco Earthquake; numerous Southern California wildfires; the trial and execution of serial killer Ted Bundy in Florida; the 1994 police shooting death of Tyke, the escaped Cirus Elephant on the streets of Honolulu; 2009’s Miracle on the Hudson; the NYC Mayoral administrations of Michael Bloomberg through Eric Adams; and more.]

*  *  *  *
“GEORGE CLOONEY SHARES THOUGHTS
ON MAKING HIS BROADWAY DEBUT IN ‘GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK’”
by Joelle Garguilo 

[On 7 February 2025, Eyewitness News (WABC; Channel 7 in New York City), broadcast the report below.]

MANHATTAN (WABC) – It was a movie that became a box office sensation and an awards season darling 20 years ago.

[Good Night’s worldwide box office total was $56.6 million, of which $31.5 million was made in the U.S. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for Clooney and Heslov. Good Night also received nominations for six BAFTA’s, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay, and Supporting Actor (Clooney); four Golden Globes; and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, among many others—including several wins.]

“Good Night and Good Luck” told the story of Edward R[.] Murrow and it was spearheaded by George Clooney.

Now Clooney is reimagining the movie and bringing it and himself to the Broadway stage.

Entertainment Reporter Joelle Garguilo caught up with Clooney to talk about his Broadway debut.

Clooney held an old-school style press conference to announce his cast and chat about the project.

Clooney is starring in the stage adaptation of the 2005 film that he co-wrote and directed as the legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

A role that hits close to home.

“How much of you doing this is almost a love letter to your dad in some way?” Garguilo asked.

“It really it is. My father was an Anchorman for 40 years, and he’s still feisty. You know, . . . he’s gonna come see the play, and I’m sure I’ll get some brutal notes about journalism from my dad. But yeah, I’m very proud of the person that my father has been his whole life and career. He taught me all the things that I believe in, and I’m and it’s, and it’s, I’m proud to represent his craft,” Clooney said.

“What do you remember about like being a kid and going to visit him at work?” Garguilo asked.

“I used to run the teleprompter for him. . . . In the old days, and teleprompters in the old days was a camera on top of paper that was taped end to end, and you would run it underneath the camera with a big light on it, and then whenever they break, do a commercial break, they go[, “C]ut that segment,[”] and you had a giant paper cutter, and you cut it, and then you tape it back together. That’s how literally, that’s how old I am,” Clooney said.

The play follows Murrow’s historic confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy, a story Clooney says still resonates.

“Unfortunately, this is a story that has been relevant for 100 years and continues to be relevant. I think it’s a good time to always remind ourselves of us at our best. And Murrow was us at our best,” Clooney said.

Garguilo asked what making his Broadway debut means to him.

“It’s fear. It’s abject fear. Is what I have, the . . . wave of emotion. Yeah, I’m terrified. But, I mean, that’s not such a bad thing to be, you know, it’s a kind of a good thing in life to constantly be doing stuff that you don’t feel comfortable with and you don’t feel competent. And I love the story,” Clooney said.

“So, is Brad Pitt getting an invite to opening night?” Garguilo asks.

“No, he’s not. In fact, I don’t want him around. Apparently, we’re fighting. I saw some article the other day, we’re fighting. I don’t know, I don’t know what, where Brad is right now, he’s shooting a movie, so [h]e’s almost done, and then we’re gonna, we’re gonna do another film together soon,” Clooney said.

A strictly limited engagement of “Good Night and Good Luck begins previews March 12th and the show officially opens in April at the Winter Garden Theatre.

[Joelle Garguilo is an Emmy Award-winning entertainment reporter for WABC.  A native New Yorker, she began her career in broadcast television 15 years ago at NBC, interviewing hundreds of stars of the screen and stage including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Timothee Chalamet, Julia Roberts, Tony Bennett, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, among others.

[Throughout her tenure, she held multiple roles across the network.  Most recently, she worked as an on-air entertainment and features reporter for New York Live correspondent for E! News while contributing at the Today Show with Hoda & Jenna.

[Garguilo’s talents have earned her two Emmy Awards, one for the magazine program New York Live: Home for the Holidays and a second for Outstanding Entertainment: Program Features/Segment for New York Live Features/Segments.]

*  *  *  *
“GEORGE CLOONEY MAKES BROADWAY DEBUT,
TELLING THE STORY OF PIONEERING JOURNALIST EDWARD R. MURROW”
by Jon Wertheim  

[John Wertheim presented this report on 60 Minutes, the CBS News magazine program, on 23 March 2025, while the play was still in previews.  (The segment was recorded while Good Night was still in rehearsals.)]

Yes, in film, but even more so in theater, a sense of timing is essential. At age 63, George Clooney makes his Broadway debut this month, starring in an adaptation of the 2005 Oscar-nominated movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Clooney co-wrote both the original screenplay and this play, telling the story of pioneering journalist Edward R. Murrow, who took on strong-arming Sen. Joseph McCarthy, all while withstanding pressure not to make waves at his own news network—this network—CBS. The plot revolves around themes of truth, intimidation, and courage in the face of corporate media. It is set in the 1950s. Clooney always meant for the story to echo today. He just didn’t realize how loudly it would.

Deep February, Winter Garden Theater in the heart of Broadway [Broadway at West 50th Street in Manhattan], the set still under construction — George Clooney arrives in character. 

Ever the everyman, he doesn’t stand on ceremony; he hurdles over it. But now it can be told: Hollywood’s famously cool leading man has the jitters.  

George Clooney: I mean, look at this place. This is proper old Broadway. And it’s exciting to be here, you know? Um –look– let’s not kid ourselves. It’s nerve-wracking and there’s a million reasons why it’s dumb to do. 

George Clooney: Well, it’s dumb to do because you’re coming out and saying, “Well, let’s try to– get an audience to take this ride with you back to 1954. 

The play brings to life the humming CBS newsroom of the 1950s—all typewriters and smoldering cigarettes. Having dyed his hair—upsetting that familiar salt-and-pepper ratio [Clooney is 63; Murrow would have been 45 at the time the play is set]—Clooney plays the protagonist Edward R. Murrow, host of the weekly television news program “See It Now.”

Jon Wertheim: You wrote the script to the film more than 20 years ago. You played Fred Friendly [1915-98]. 

George Clooney: Yeah. 

Jon Wertheim: Murrow’s producer. You didn’t play Murrow. 

George Clooney: No. 

Jon Wertheim: Why did you not want to play him? 

George Clooney: Murrow had a gravitas to him that at 42 years old I didn’t– I wasn’t able to pull off. 

Murrow earned his gravitas during World War II, with eyewitness radio dispatches from London amid the Blitz [the series of air raids launched on cities in Great Britain by the German air force from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941; literal German meaning: ‘lightning’; from Blitzkrieg – ‘lightning war’]. His trademark signoff doubles as the play’s title. [“Good night, and good luck” was Murrow’s signature signoff for his London radio broadcasts; he brought it forward to TV back in the States after the war.]

Clooney wrote the story with his longtime friend and creative partner, Grant Heslov [actor, writer, and filmmaker; b. 1963]. 

Jon Wertheim: How does this partnership work? Who’s at the keyboard? 

George Clooney: Oh, you’re at the keyboard. (laugh) 

Grant Heslov: He doesn’t know how to use a computer. He can barely– 

George Clooney: No, I’m like this. I’m the luddite. 

They met in LA in the early 80s, when both were struggling actors. Now they run a production company together. (Full disclosure: the three of us collaborated on an unrelated sports documentary out later this year.) Clooney and Heslov conceived of the story of “Good Night, and Good Luck” in the early 2000s, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq [Operation Iraqi Freedom began on 19 March 2003]. 

[According to The Hollywood Reporter (Rick Porter, “George Clooney to Produce Ohio State Abuse Scandal Docuseries,” 22 Feb. 2021), “George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures will produce a docuseries about a decades-long [sexual] abuse scandal in the athletic department at Ohio State University.”

[“The series, [which is currently in production by HBO with the working title of “Untitled Ohio State Scandal Project,”] is based on an October 2020 Sports Illustrated story by Jon Wertheim, which detailed a long list of allegations against former Ohio State sports doctor Richard Strauss and university officials’ lack of response,” the THR article continued. Clooney, Heslov, and Wertheim are listed among the executive producers, and Wertheim is credited as writer. No release date has been announced.]

George Clooney: You know, I just thought it was a good time to talk about when the press held government to account. 

A show within a show, the play recreates the historic television face-off between Murrow and Joseph McCarthy [9 March 1954 on See It Now], with McCarthy essentially playing himself through archival footage.

At the height of the Red Scare, the Wisconsin senator led a crusade to weed out supposed communist infiltration of the U.S. government. 

Murrow and his team overcame the climate of fear and intimidation to expose and help take down McCarthy with measured, fact-based editorials.

Jon Wertheim: Are you guys using McCarthyism as a parable for today? 

Grant Heslov: Originally it wasn’t for today, today. But it’s– this is a story that stands the test of time. I think it’s a story that you can keep telling over and over. I don’t think it will ever– thematically get old. 

At the table read in a downtown Manhattan studio, Clooney met the cast and wasted no time addressing what he sees as the parallels to today. 

George Clooney: When the other three estates fail, when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us, the fourth estate has to succeed. Has to succeed – as 60 Minutes is here right now on our first day. (laugh)

[The term “fourth estate,” as Clooney is using it above, refers to the press and news media. It’s a relatively common expression but the other “three estates” are rarely invoked. The derivation of the terms is from the historical European concept of the “three estates of the realm”: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners.

[Clooney, however, is suggesting a slightly alternative use of the terms, implying that the press is a sort of “fourth branch” of the government, hence his reference to “the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches” as the other three “estates,” since the U.S. has no nobility or commoners in the European sense, and the clergy in this country have no “temporal” (that is, “governmental”) authority.]

Kidding aside, Clooney made the point: these are chilling times for the news media. 

George Clooney: ABC has just settled a lawsuit with the Trump administration. And CBS News is in the process . . .

[In Michael R. Sisak, “ABC agrees to give $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle defamation lawsuit,” 14 Dec. 2024, the Associated Press reported: “ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.” The trial in April and May 2023 concluded that Trump was liable for sexually abusing—but not raping—and defaming Carroll.]

The process he’s talking about: President Trump has lodged a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, making the unfounded allegation that 60 Minutes engaged in election interference. CBS has since filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit . . . all this as the network’s parent company, Paramount, is trying to close a merger deal, which requires approval from the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission. 

George Clooney: We’re seeing this idea of using government to scare or fine or use corporations – to make– journalists smaller. Governments don’t like– the freedom of the press. They never have. And– that goes for whether you are a conservative or a liberal or whatever side you’re on. They don’t like the press. 

Jon Wertheim: What does this play tell us about the media’s ability or willingness to withstand this kind of pressure

George Clooney: It’s a fight that is for the ages. It will continue. You see it happening at the LA Times. You see it happening at the Washington Post, for god’s sake.

George Clooney: Journalism and telling truth to power has to be waged like war is waged. It doesn’t just happen accidentally. You know, it takes people saying, we’re gonna do these stories and you’re gonna have to come after us. And that’s the way it is.

When we dropped in on rehearsals, the mood was as light as the material was heavy. 

Comedian and producer Ilana Glazer plays CBS news-writer Shirley Wershba [b. 1922].

Jon Wertheim: How is George Clooney doing– leading a troupe of stage actors? 

Ilana Glazer: It’s shaky. It’s shaky, Jon. It’s tough. No, I’m just kidding.

Ilana Glazer: We’re all, like, so focused on this material, and it’s serious, and we’re trying to make it as honest as possible. So George really, like, will– let the– the tension release and break the tension with a joke at the right time. 

One of Broadway’s most in-demand directors, David Cromer, is the man in charge.

Jon Wertheim: Your Murrow character is being portrayed by someone with– considerable star wattage. What challenge does that present to you? 

David Cromer: It doesn’t present a challenge. It helps. 

Jon Wertheim: Why– 

David Cromer: Edward R. Murrow was a star. He was the most-trusted man in America. He had this very serious news show, but he also had this incredibly popular entertainment show, which was on Friday nights. It was called Person to Person . . . 

David Cromer: And he went into Liberace’s house. And he went into all these people’s houses. [Pianist, entertainer, and showman Liberace (1919-87) appeared on Person to Person on 6 January 1956.]

David Cromer: If he were playing Willy Loman [lead character in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman], that would be different, you know what I mean– 

Jon Wertheim: A smaller figure than Murrow– 

David Cromer: If he were playing– a little man. If he were playing a little man. He’s playing a great man. And he’s a great man who’s playing a great man. 

As for the play’s setting, Clooney knows his way around a newsroom. His father Nick Clooney was a longtime journalist and anchorman.

George Clooney: When I was 12 years old, my dad was working at WKRC in Cincinnati. I would run the teleprompter. In those days, a teleprompter was– sheets of paper taped end-to-end with a camera pointed down. And you’d feed them like this, underneath the camera. And my dad would be able to read it on the teleprompter. And then at the commercial they’d say, “Okay, cut three minutes out of that story.” And you had at the end of it a paper cutter– 

Jon Wertheim: Literally cut– 

George Clooney: And you’d just go sh-dunk . . .

Grant Heslov: You really are old. 

George Clooney: I’m old, man. 

Clooney says he’s running for nothing, but he makes no secret of his politics. A lifelong Democrat, he made news last summer, when he wrote a pointed essay calling on Joe Biden not to seek reelection on account of his age [“I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” New York Times 11 July 2024, sec. A (news): 19].

Jon Wertheim: Looking back on that, happy you did it? 

George Clooney: Yeah. I’ll make it kind of easy. I was raised to tell the truth. I had seen– the president up close for this fundraiser, and I was surprised. And so I feel as if there was– a lot of profiles in cowardice in my party through all of that. And I was not proud of that. And I also believed I had to tell the truth. 

Truth: an increasingly elusive concept . . . Clooney says that for all the parallels between the play and these convulsive times we live in today, disinformation is one critical distinction . . . .

George Clooney: Here’s where I would tell you where we differ from what Murrow was doing. Although McCarthy would try to pose things that– he’d show up [with] a blank piece of paper and say, “I’ve got a list of names.” Okay, so it was– that was his version of– of fake news. We now are at a place where we’ve found that it’s harder and harder and harder to dis– to discern the truth. Facts are now negotiated. 

Jon Wertheim: You and I can agree or disagree, but if we can’t reach a consensus that this chair is brown . . .

George Clooney: Yeah.

Jon Wertheim: We’re in trouble. 

George Clooney: That’s right. 

By March, rehearsals had moved into the theater. A big production issue on this day: the prop cigarettes. 

George Clooney: The hardest part for me is smoking.

Jon Wertheim: What do you mean? 

George Clooney: Well, he smokes a lot. And we smoke a lot in the play. Everybody smokes in the play, so the place is covered in smoke. And smoking in our family’s a big, you know, problem. We grew up in Kentucky. 

A lotta tobacco farmers. And– almost all of my family members died of– of lung cancer. My father’s– sister, Rosemary [Clooney (1928-2002)], died of it. She was a wonderful singer, died of it. And my dad’s 91 because he didn’t smoke. So smoking has always been– it’s a hard thing to do. 

[Murrow was a chain smoker all his life; he smoked about three packs a day. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and had a lung removed in October 1963.  He died about two years later, on 27 April 1965, two days after his 57th birthday.

[On Broadway, the actors, including Clooney, are using herbal cigarettes on stage to portray the heavy-smoking characters to lessen the health risks associated with real tobacco.]

It’s easy to forget, George Clooney has been an A-lister for 30 years now.

In 2003, he was a bachelor living with a pet pig when 60 Minutes profiled him. 

Jon Wertheim: You were in the Sexiest Man of the Year– phase. [Clooney was named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine in 2006.]

George Clooney: Sure, that was a big time for me. I was very– 

Jon Wertheim: Not– not that you’re not sexy now. 

George Clooney: That’s okay. I’m not hurt, Jon. 

He’s married now. His wife and their two kids left the home they keep in Europe to spend this spring run with him in New York. Clooney is also in a different phase of his life professionally. 

George Clooney: Look, I’m 63 years old. I’m not trying to compete with 25-year-old leading men. That’s not my job. I’m not doing romantic films anymore. 

Opening night set for April 3rd, George Clooney’s turn on Broadway puts him a few feet from his audience.

Jon Wertheim: They can see you, you– you can see them too. 

George Clooney: I’m not looking at them. I’m putting my wife in the very, very, very back.

Jon Wertheim: You– you wish you had done this earlier in your career? 

George Clooney: I don’t know that I could’ve. I wasn’t– I didn’t do the work required to get there. 

Jon Wertheim: But I saw the smile when you came out here . . .

George Clooney: Oh, yeah. It’s cool. 

Jon Wertheim: and– looked out here.

George Clooney: –Anybody who would deny that would just be a liar. I mean, there isn’t a single actor alive that wouldn’t have loved to have, you know, been on Broadway. So that’s– that’s the fun of it. It’s– it’s trickier the older you get. But why not?

[This program was produced by Nathalie Sommer and Kaylee Tully with broadcast associates Elizabeth Germino and Mimi Lamarre. Edited by Sean Kelly.

[L. Jon Wertheim is an accomplished journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent.

[I don't entirely get why George Clooney keeps insisting that he's "old."  He's only 63—advanced middle age!  He’s not even old enough to remember Murrow (who died a little under four years after Clooney was born).  I’m a little over fourteen years Clooney’s senior—I’m legitimately an old man—and Murrow died when I was over 18, so I knew the name and the renown. 

[I vaguely remember seeing Edward R. Murrow on television when I was a boy.  See It Now was on from 1951 to 1958, when I was between 4 and 11.  It was a news show, so I wouldn’t have been watching it for most of its run, but maybe by the time I was 10, I might have watched it when it ran on Sunday evenings at 5, but probably not often.  The McCarthy shows would have been beyond me (though I do remember being aware of the turmoil of those years.  I was only 7 when the 9 March 1954 showdown aired, and 10 when McCarthy died.

[On the other hand, Person to Person ran from 1953 to 1961, when I was between 6 and 14, and I’m pretty sure I watched some of the later shows when Murrow would send cameras into the homes of celebrities.  I sort of remember watching some of the personalities from Hollywood and other fields as they sat in their living rooms as Murrow, back at the studio, interviewed them. 

[Murrow was my dad's first boss at the U.S. Information Agency back in the early 1960s.  (I’ve blogged about that time of my life in “An American Teen in Germany” [9 and 12 March 2013].)

[I’ve told the story of my father taking up President Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” in his inaugural address in 1961.  JFK appointed Murrow Director of USIA in January 1961 and Dad applied in May.  He went on active duty as a Foreign Service Officer in July ’62.  I have no idea if the two ever actually met, but Murrow was the first director of USIA under whom Dad served.

[Dad went overseas in October 1962 and didn’t return to the States until sometime in September 1963, when his father died.  Murrow resigned in ’64 due to illness and died of lung cancer in '65.  (Dad served until 1968 under two successors to Murrow: Carl Rowan (1925-2000), a well-known journalist, 1964-65, and Leonard Marks (1916-2006), a communications lawyer, 1965-68.)]

Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 1

 

[Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, written around 1603-04, opened in its latest Broadway revival with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 23 March. It started previews on 24 February and is scheduled to close its limited run on 8 June.  The two-act performance runs 2 hours 40 minutes and the production is set “in the near future.”

[The production is directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony-winner for direction of A Raisin in the Sun (2014) and a Drama Desk-winner for Some Like It Hot (2023).  Scenery was designed by Derek McLane, the costumes by Dede Ayite, the lighting by Natasha Katz, and the sound by Justin Ellington.  The fight direction is by Thomas Schall.

[In addition to Washington as Othello and Gyllenhaal as Iago, the cast includes Molly Osborne in her Broadway début as Desdemona, Othello’s wife.  Andrew Burnap is Cassio, Othello’s loyal captain; Julee Cerda is Bianca, Cassio’s lover; Daniel Pearce is Brabantio, Desdemona’s father; and Kimber Elayne Sprawl is Emilia, Iago’s wife and Desdemona’s maid.

[Despite the limited engagement, the scuttlebutt is that there are seats available for the entire run.  Center orchestra tickets are selling for $921; however, there are $49 student rush tickets available for every performance at the Barrymore Theatre box office with a valid student ID, limited to one ticket per person and a limited number of $49 tickets are also available through a digital lottery at Telecharge Lottery + Rush Tickets.] 

“DENZEL WASHINGTON, JAKE GYLLENHAAL
RETURNING TO BROADWAY IN ‘OTHELLO’”
by Katie Houlis

[This advanced report of the revival aired on CBS News New York (WCBS, Channel 2, New York City) on 6 March 2024.]

NEW YORK – Actors Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are returning to Broadway in an upcoming revival of William Shakespeare’s [1564-1616] classic play “Othello.”

Washington will star in the title role, with Gyllenhaal portraying Iago. Additional casting has not yet been announced.

The production, directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon, will open in spring 2025.

Washington was last seen on Broadway in the 2018 production of [Eugene O'Neill’s (1888-1953)] “The Iceman Cometh” [1939; 26 April-1 July 2018], for which he received a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play. He previously won the Tony for Best Actor in a Play for the 2010 revival of “Fences” [26 April-11 July].

Gyllenhaal was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2019 for his performance in “Sea Wall/A Life.” 

[This was a mounting on 8 August-29 September 2019 of two solo one-act dramas; Sea Wall was written by Simon Stephens and performed by Tom Sturridge; A Life was written by Nick Payne and performed by Gyllenhaal. Both actors were nominated for 2020 best-actor Tonys.]

Tickets for “Othello” will go on sale at a later date.

“Othello” was last performed on Broadway in 1982, starring James Earl Jones in the title role, Christopher Plummer as Iago and Dianne Wiest as Desdemona.

[Katie Houlis is a digital producer with the CBS New York web team.  She started her career as an intern with the Pittsburgh CW Green Team and the CBS Pittsburgh web team.  She later joined CBS Pittsburgh as a full-time web producer.  Houlis has also written for Tell-Tale TV, an entertainment news website.]

*  *  *  *
“BROADWAY SEEING STARS FOR OPENING NIGHT OF ‘OTHELLO’
STARRING DENZEL WASHINGTON AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL”
by Joelle Garguilo

[This Eyewitness News report was broadcast on WABC (Channel 7, New York City) on 24 March 2025, the evening after opening night.]

NEW YORK (WABC) – Broadway was seeing stars on Sunday night [23 March] for the opening of ‘Othello.’ [There is a post on another production of Othello in “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive” (22 December 2020), a Washington, D.C., staging with Avery Brooks as the Moor and the late Andre Braugher as Iago.]

Othello is one of William Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, and it has not been on Broadway since 1982. [I have a three-part post as a tribute to James Earl Jones, who played Othello in that 1982 staging, entitled “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024)” (22, 25, and 28 September 2024).]

The revival, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, is set in the near future. It is getting a fresh take thanks to director, Kenny Leon.

“I think Denzel has given his whole self on the stage eight shows a week. He doesn’t have to do that other than he wants to impact lives – his Othello is going on that spiritual journey. It’s just a real special production,” Leon said.

Molly Osborne plays Desdemona.

“It has been a dream working for this company. I hope audiences come and they see something new and fresh even though it’s a 400-year-old play,” Osborne said.

Jamie Lee Curtis [2023 Oscar-winner as Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022); she and Gyllenhaal have appeared in several films together over the years] was at the opening and said it was thrilling to watch Gyllenhaal’s performance.

“To know someone since they were five and watch them become an artist – to be able to watch Jake tonight to take on one of the most challenging roles is just thrilling,” she said.

It was a historic evening.

“Just appreciative that I get to be a part of history. This is a historic evening. Break legs all over the place – it’s gonna be amazing,” said Rosie Perez.

Othello has already broken records as the highest-grossing play in Broadway history. [The production has amassed $2.8 million from eight previews leading up to the official 23 March première. This surpasses the $2.7 million set by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in December 2023.]

It only runs through the first week in June, so those wanting to go are encouraged to get tickets immediately.

[Joelle Garguilo is an Emmy Award-winning entertainment reporter for WABC.  A native New Yorker, she began her career in broadcast television 15 years ago at NBC, interviewing hundreds of stars on the screen and stage including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Timothee Chalamet, Julia Roberts, Tony Bennett, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, among others.

[Throughout her tenure, she held multiple roles across the network. Most recently, she worked as an on-air entertainment and features reporter for New York Live, correspondent for E! News while contributing at the Today Show with Hoda & Jenna.

[Garguilo’s talents have earned her two Emmy Awards, one for the magazine program New York Live Home for the Holidays and a second for Outstanding Entertainment: Program Features/Segment for New York Live Features/Segments.]

*  *  *  *
“DENZEL WASHINGTON AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL
POWER “OTHELLO” TO ELECTRIC OPENING NIGHT ON BROADWAY”
by Dave Carlin 

[This report aired on CBS News New York (WCBS, Channel 2, New York City), also on 24 March 2025.]

Sunday [the 23rd] was opening night on Broadway for two of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are taking on the new production of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

The red carpet was full of VIPs, including Jennifer Lopez, Samuel L. Jackson, Anna Wintour, Colman Domingo and many more. And entertainers weren’t the only ones in attendance. Former President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, were also seen entering the Barrymore Theatre.

Washington plays the conflicted and murderous title character. His jealousy and violence is carefully orchestrated by his backstabbing confidante Iago, played by Gyllenhaal.

Prior to the show, members of the cast explained how horrors and thrills created by Shakespeare now land with a freshness in a modern setting.

“They’ve treated this like a new play,” said Andrew Burnap, who plays “Cassio.”

“I’m excited to share,” said Kimber Elayne Sprawl, who portrays “Emilia.”

“Even if you know it, seeing it happen right in front of you, the conflict that happens in the play, it’s just so human that it will always need to tell the story,” said Molly Osborne, who plays “Desdemona.”

Othello’s director is Tony Award winner Kenny Leon.

“Denzel is an emperor. He’s an emperor of the American stage, of the world stage. He has met this role head on and Jake has met Denzel head on,” Leon said.

In February, while Othello was in rehearsals, CBS News New York sat down with Washington and Gyllenhaal [this is a video; there’s no transcript that I can find]. Both described their roles as exciting, and for each star a dream come true.

“We are given the freedom to break the rules,” Washington said.

“I spent the past eight months really digging in because I’ve never done Shakespeare,” Gyllenhaal added.

Producer Brian Moreland [winner of the 2023 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play for The Piano Lesson; nominated for four Best Play or Best Revival Tonys] said a sizzling Shakespeare is what they were after and he credits the unbeatable cast and creators.

“It’s that good and they’re that good. Night after night they build that same journey, so that you get to the point that we all know is going to happen, it’s all inevitable, but yet you’re there with them on every single word they have to say,” Moreland said.

To call Othello, which runs through June 8, a financial hit is an understatement as it is expected to earn the title of highest grossing Broadway play ever.

*  *  *  *
“DENZEL WASHINGTON AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL’S
UNDERWHELMING BLOCKBUSTER”
by Adrian Horton

[Adrian Horton’s review of the Broadway revival of Othello was published in the U.S. edition of The Guardian on 24 March 2025.] 

The record-breaking take on the Shakespearean tragedy might already be a smash, but it’s disappointingly muddled

With the smell of doom and regression in the air, perhaps it’s not surprising that the hottest ticket on Broadway this season is for a 400-year-old tragedy. There’s been much ado about the box office for Othello, a new rendition of Shakespeare’s classic given movie-star wattage. The show at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, grossed $2.8m during one week of previews – the most of any non-musical during a single week on Broadway ever, in part because some orchestra tickets are going for a whopping $921.

The sticker shock is not just an Othello problem – tickets for two other celeb-driven plays on Broadway – Glengarry Glen Ross [31 March-28 June 2025 at the Palace Theatre, with Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk], and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck [see “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 2” (30 March 2025)], aren’t averaging much less, and it has already been a lucrative season for celeb-studded Shakespeare as Romeo + Juliet, starring screen-famous Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, recouped its $7m capitalization before closing last month. But before it even officially opened, Othello became emblematic of Broadway’s trend toward luxury experience and status symbol over popular entertainment, billing Hollywood names in a hyper-competitive, exclusionary market. (Full disclosure: the Guardian, denied tickets for review, paid $400 for a middle orchestra seat.)

Ticket prices, of course, are not the fault of the show itself, nor typically relevant to a review. But the astronomical ask hangs over this minimalist, almost dystopian production, which puts the burden of imagination heavily on the performers and largely fails to reach the level of transcendence demanded by its cost. Directed by the Tony winner Kenny Leon, who guided Washington to a Tony in 2010’s Fences, this austere, underwhelming take on Shakespeare seems to acknowledge that people are not paying for a revival of this particular play, which hasn’t been on Broadway since 1982 and still has rich insights on the masculinity, human fallibility and race more than 400 years after its debut. Instead, it’s for the opportunity to see Gyllenhaal, one of the most versatile and thrilling millennial actors, and especially the widely beloved Washington, rightly hailed in the Playbill as “the most lauded stage and screen actor of his generation”, without the mediation of a screen.

Othello does provide a showcase for these two heavyweight talents to bend iambic pentameter to their will – to convey, with their considerable magnetism, both the plot and the emotional nuances of this tragedy to an audience that probably does not totally understand what they’re saying. And it does not provide much else. Derek McLane’s scenic design keeps the stage bare except for some peeling columns, the props minimal save for occasional accoutrements of a modern military operation (army fatigues, Apple laptops). A lit message at play’s opening sets this medieval drama in “the near future” – still Venice (and later Cyprus), though when Gyllenhaal’s devious Iago first appears to set the stage for the fateful manipulation of the general, one might mistake him for a hustler at a basement club in Bushwick. His eyes near glow in the spotlight, and a preponderance on blue-white floor lighting (design by Natasha Katz) gives the production, particularly its monologues, the feel of a concert at the ruins of the Colosseum.

Star power does the heavy lifting, though not enough to elevate this Othello into the pantheon of Broadway greats. As expected, Washington, at 70, brings the bearing of an elder statesman to the fallible Venetian general, a role he first played at age 22 [at Manhattan’s Fordham University in March 1977, his senior year]. This has the double-sided effect of making the character feel especially tragic – the well-respected veteran general, imbued with glorious authority by one of the most well-respected actors, felled by a shocking streak of insecurity – and ill-fitting; his chemistry with Desdemona (a much younger Molly Osborne, an English actor with an unwieldy American accent) feels more father-daughter than new husband and wife, despite Washington’s best attempts at charming, sexy beguilement. Washington has moments of sublime melody as Othello descends into jealous delusion, the kind of rhapsodic deliveries that feel worth whatever price of admission, but the overall tone of his performance is one of perfunctory hyper-competence.

The show, instead, belongs to Gyllenhaal, an actor of singular intensity who makes a meal out of Iago’s desperate two-facedness. He opens the show with a hypnotic screed against “the Moor” he so loathes – a denigration of blackness (of soul and skin) in Shakespeare’s time titled just enough to resonate more clearly in ours, and never ceases to mesmerize. At turns preening, desperate, boastful, plaintive, easily convincing in his maneuverings of the guileless lieutenant Cassio (Snow White’s Andrew Burnap), as well as gullible townsman Roderigo (Anthony Michael Lopez), Desdemona and Othello, Gyllenhaal’s Iago is the one truly fun performance to watch throughout the show’s nearly three-hour runtime.

The rest is a muddled affair, in details and delivery – Italian polizia but American uniforms, Iago prejudiced against the black-skinned general yet married to Emilia, played by Black actor Kimber Elayne Sprawl. Even Washington seems, at the play’s ignominious and violent end, confused by his character, his grip on reality or his evolution from hero to villain slippery. His Othello is never not compelling; the whole thing, in fact, is consistently competent and spirited, though weighted down by expectation – enough that it should keep the green-eyed monsters who miss out at bay.

[Adrian Horton is an arts writer for Guardian US.

[After my “recovered” report on the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger’s 1990 production of Othello, I added a personal comment.  It’s appropriate to repeat here, I think, so I’m appending it to this post as well:

When I was trying to make a career as an actor, there were roles I ached to play—a phenomenon among most actors, I believe.  One I got to do was the title character in George Bernard Shaw’s one-act The Man of Destiny: Napoleon as a 26-year-old general.  [I was 31 at the time.]  Most of the others, I never got to.  At the top of that list was Shakespeare’s Iago, arguably one of the greatest villains in theater. 

I wanted to play Iago so badly, I could feel it in my bones.  I came somewhat close: I got to play Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, a kind of Iago-lite in a comedy rather than in a tragedy.  I loved doing that part, largely because Much Ado is my all-time favorite Shakespeare and it was a lovely production—but it wasn’t the brass ring.  Alas!

[I think most actors long to play Hamlet—including some women (though I believe many female actors long to play Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler as their most coveted classic role.  I went for the bad guy.

[This is the first part of a two-part post.  On Sunday, 30 March, I’ll run the second installment, a collection of pieces on another movie star-led Broadway show, Good Night, and Good Luck starring George Clooney as newsman Edward R. Murrow.  Please come back to Rick On Theater in three days to read the second part of “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way.”]

"Morley Safer's Infamous 1993 Art Story"

Morley Safer questions Jeff Koons, Jeffrey Deitch, and Hilton Kramer about contemporary art and whether it means anything at all. 

“YES . . . BUT IS IT ART?”
by Morley Safer

[Employing his signature wit, Safer (1931-2016), the longest-serving reporter on 60 Minutes (1970-2016), raised both of his eyebrows at some of the costliest pieces in the contemporary art, some of which—to Safer's amusement—featured household items like vacuums.  Or, in the case of a Cy Twombly piece that fetched more than $2 million, looked like the scribblings of a child.

[“Yes . . . But Is It Art?” aired on CBS’s weekly news magazine on 19 September 1993.  The report infuriated the modern art community, even years after it aired.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, for instance, denied Safer access to a Jackson Pollock retrospective (28 October 1998-2 February 1999) that the newsman had hoped to cover for CBS Sunday Morning.

[The video, labeled a “60 Minutes Rewind,” was uploaded to YouTube on 5 March 2018 (5 of Morley Safer's finest and funniest stories (cnn.com)).  There’s no official transcript, but I compiled the one below from the transcript attached to the video; there’s also closed captioning on the video itself, but the text is identical to the transcript. 

[Both texts are inaccurate and have no punctuation or identification of speakers.  (They’re “auto-generated” and clearly unedited.)  I have used my own judgment concerning paragraphing, punctuation, and identifying speakers, as well as correcting mistranscriptions.]

Morley Safer: It may have escaped your notice, but recently a vacuum cleaner just like this one and the one down in your basement was sold for a hundred thousand dollars.  Also a sink went for one hundred and twenty-one thousand and a pair of urinals went for a hundred and forty thousand dollars. 

All of the above and even more unlikely stuff is art.  That’s what the artists say, the dealers, and, of course, the people who lay out good money.

It all may make you believe in the wisdom of P. T. Barnum [American showman; 1810-91] that there’s a sucker born every minute. 

The noble auction house of Sotheby’s in New York last November, the long-anticipated winter sale of contemporary art [Contemporary Art Evening, 17 November 1992]—and here it is folks . . .

Auctioneer (Lucy Mitchell-Innes, Director of Contemporary Art at Sotheby's): (referring to a gray, monochrome canvas) At two hundred and forty-two, the Gerhard Richter [German artist; b. 1932].  Please know that the measurements for this work are reversed; it’s actually a horizontal painting . . . I’m sorry, it’s actually a vertical painting, 78 by 59 inches . . . and we start here at a fifty-thousand-dollar bid . . . 

Auctioneers: (montage of overlapping voices of auctioneers) I start here at ten thousand dollars but it’s now ten thousand . . . one million, eight hundred thousand; one million, nine, I have one million, nine hundred thousand . . . now say two million . . . .

Safer: This one, a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of the paintbrush, bears the imaginative title of “Untitled.”  It’s by Cy Twombly [American painter and sculptor; 1928-2011] and was sold for two million, one hundred and forty-five thousand dollars—and that’s dollars, not Twomblys.

Auctioneer: . . . and twenty thousand dollars . . . start this now at twenty thousand dollars.

Safer: There were bargains.  ‘Rat’ repeated three times [Christopher Wool, “Untitled”] reached thirty thousand.

Auctioneer: Sold at thirty thousand . . . .

Safer: And “Green Grass” [not the painting’s actual title]—the words, not the plant—went for thirteen thousand.

Auctioneer: Sold!  At seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.

Safer: The auction itself was a glittering affair.  A bank of phones connected Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, and London.  Among the hottest items . . .

Auctioneer: Lot number 72.  This was sold from the catalogue . . . .

Safer: Jeff Koons’ inspired work—three basketballs submerged in a fish tank [Three Basketballs: Total Equilibrium].

Auctioneer: Sold at a hundred and . . . .

Safer:  A hundred and fifty thousand dollars, giving new meaning to “slam dunk.”

Jeff Koons: Wow!  Dr. J . . .

Safer: And back in his New York studio, Jeff Koons [American artist; b. 1955] has more where that came from and a slightly shaky version of what it all means.

Koons: (looking at Equilibrium, a single submerged basketball) This is an ultimate state of being.  I wanted to play with people’s desires . . . that they desired equilibrium, that they desired pre-birth, or I . . . .

Safer: What did he say?

The language is “Artspeak,” the same pitch that convinced the emperor to buy new clothes or waterlogged basketballs.

Koons: I was giving a definition of life and death.  This is the eternal, this is what life is like also after death—aspects of the eternal.

Safer: Jeff Koons is a genuine phenomenon.  Still in his 30’s [he’s now 69], he’s become a millionaire since he moved on from commodity-brokering on Wall Street to art-mongering to the world. 

He doesn’t actually paint or sculpt; he commissions craftsmen to do that—or he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners.

What makes them art, Jeff?

Koons: I always liked the anthropomorphic quality.  They’re like lungs—so this object [a vacuum cleaner in a glass box] now is just free to eternally just to display its newness, its integrity of birth.

Safer: So what do you say to the man who said: “Fool. You went and paid one hundred thousand dollars.  I just got a genuine Koons for eighty bucks.”

Koons: This work would be a signed work by myself or would have a letter of authenticity.

Safer: He’s already had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [10 December 1992-7 February 1993].

Female Gallery Visitor: Do you think he’s making fun of everyone?  Do you think he’s making fun of the art world?

Male Gallery Visitor: No, no.  He’s making his money off the art world.

Koons: (in front of Schloss Arolsen, Arolsen, Germany – to workmen) I’m not saying to bring these closer.  I’m saying we need here (indicating the sides of his head) and we still don’t . . . .  We need out.

Safer: For his pièce de résistance last year, he hired a platoon of German workmen to erect a forty-foot puppy made of flowers.  And the art world cheered.

[Puppy was erected in the courtyard of Schloss Arolsen in Arolsen, a Hessian town near Kassel, the site of the Documenta 9 art fair (5 May-22 September 1992); it was created for an exhibit called Made for Arolsen, which ran from 13 June to 20 September 1992.]

Art Critic (Jeffrey Deitch): It’s very much about something extremely banal made into something terrifically heroic and important, so it kind of bespeaks of our own sense of ego at certain moments in our life.

Safer: Of course, most of this art of the ’90s would be worthless junk without the hype of the dealers and, even more important, the approval of the critics.  They write in language that, to this viewer anyway, sounds important, but might as well be in Sanskrit. 

Of the American artist Julian Schnabel [b. 1951], a critic wrote:

1st Voice: (reading) His is an eschatological art, appropriating the master meanings of life and the master languages of art to reassert the sense of hurt and loss that evades both.

Safer: A book on Christopher Wool [American painter; b. 1955], the ‘Rat, Rat, Rat’ man, said of his work:

2nd Voice: (reading) They communicate not like facile appropriations, but as a honed perfectionist idea of that discourse reduced to the irreducible, then starting all over again.

Safer: Arts magazine said of Robert Gober [American sculptor; b. 1954], who specializes in arms, legs, sinks, and urinals:

3rd Voice: (reading) Installations function as utopian and dystopian spaces.  The tableau arrests and its own stillness suspends social time.

Safer: And if you’re still stumped, let Jeffrey Deitch [b. 1952], critic, dealer, and fan, explain:

Jeffrey Deitch: This work in particular shows something of the uncertainty in which artists find themselves today in the human sphere.  They don’t quite know exactly where they stand.

Safer: So simple when you think about it—as simple as one of Mr. Gober’s urinals.

A major New York art collector, Elaine Dannheisser [1923-2001], has three, all in a row.

Dannheisser: (leading Safer through her private art display and storage space on Duane Street in SoHo, lower Manhattan) They look like urinals, but they really aren’t.

Safer: I know, because there’s no plumbing attached to them.  But, beyond that, does it comment on society in some way, do you think?

Dannheisser: I think it comments on things that we take for granted and that we really don’t see.  

[In 1917, French Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) submitted an artwork to the “unjuried” Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York—which claimed that they would accept any work of art.  Duchamp presented an upside-down urinal entitled Fountain, dated and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt, 1917.”  

[The Society’s board, faced wit what must have seemed like a practical joke from an anonymous artist, rejected Fountain on the grounds that it was not a true work of art.  A deeply felt and wide-spread debate followed.  One close friend and ardent supporter of Duchamp argued that it didn’t matter whether or not R. Mutt actually created the object, which Duchamp dubbed “readymades,” because he selected it, changed its context, and made us think about it in new way.  

[Thus, Marcel Duchamp forever changed the view of art from primarily an object to a concept.  (For more on this, see my post on “Dada,” posted on 20 February 2010.)]

Dannheisser: (stopping before a painting hanging on a wall) That is Robert Ryman [American painter; 1930-2019].

Safer: And that is a white rectangle.

Dannheisser: Right.  And Ryman has reduced painting to its very essence and a lot of people don’t understand that, but . . .

Safer: I confess, I’m one of them—on this one.

Dannheisser: Well, some of his work has a little more texture in it.  This one is a little flatter because he really has reduced it.  He’s a minimal artist and . . .

Safer: I would say so.

Dannheisser: (laughs).

[In 1998, a play called Art by Yazmina Reza opened on Broadway.  The play, a comedy, raises questions about art and friendship among a group of friends.  One has bought a large, expensive, completely white painting and one of the others is horrified.  Their relationship is strained as a result of their differing opinions about what constitutes “art.”  Art ran for 600 performances and won the Tony for Best Play.]

Safer: (they stop before a large pile of small, colorful, foil-wrapped objects on the floor in a corner) Now, this intrigues me.

Dannheusser: Yes, this is a young artist by the name of Félix Gonzáles-Torres [Cuban-born American visual artist; 1957-96].

Safer: May I touch it?

Dannheisser: You can.  As matter of fact, you’re allowed . . . .  They’re candies—they’re Italian candies and one is allowed to take them.

Safer: One would reduce the value of . . .

Dannheisser: Well, then, you just replace them.

Safer: I see.

Dannheisser: Yes.

Hilton Kramer: In my observation . . . .

Safer: Art critic Hilton Kramer [1928-2012; see my post “Culture War,” published in Rick On Theater on 8 February 2014] says that people who buy this stuff are victims of a trashy hoax.

Kramer: Just the act of spending that money on an object makes them feel that they are collaborating in creating the art history of their time.

Safer: But is it also a case of the emperor’s clothes? 

Kramer: Oh, it’s largely a case of the emperor’s clothes—but they don’t see it that way.

Brian Sewell: When I look at almost all contemporary art, I see nothing, nothing.

Safer: Brian Sewell [English art critic; 1931-2015], a London critic. Is appalled—no other word for it.  Imagine the outrage of a man steeped in the work of the masters, when he witnessed at an auction, the sale of a can of excrement, the work and waste of the artist Piero Manzoni [Italian artist; 1933-63].

Sewell: I suppose you could argue that he was making, as it were, a symbolic statement [that] all contemporary art is feces.

Safer: There was a painting—if that’s the word—at the Sotheby sale by a man named Wool—Chris Wool, I think—and it was the word ‘Rat’ repeated three times.

Sewell: Hmmm.

Safer: Art?

Sewell: Oh, I think we’re lucky to have the word.  We might just have had a blank canvas.  That’s pretty commonplace now.

Man’s Voice: It’s a standard assumption in the art world today that a work is anything that an artist says it is, and an artist is somebody who called himself an artist and there are no other tests.

1st Woman’s in Gallery: I don’t understand it one scrap.  I don’t understand it at all.

2nd Woman: We don’t belong to this generation.  We must retire.

Safer: The dealers lust after the hype-able, and a few years ago, they struck pure gold when Jean-Michel Basquiat [American artist; 1960-88] came on the scene.  His work—giant, childishly wrought graffiti—sent the art world into a spasm. 

Jean-Michel was heaven-sent for hype.  The story was that this poor, black kid was found in the street by Andy Warhol [American visual artist; 1926-87].  The fact was, he came from an upper-middle-class suburban family and had a keen eye for the marketplace. 

But the legend stuck and his work started selling for as much as a quarter of a million dollars per graffito.

Then in 1988, when his popularity was declining, his career was saved: he died of a drug overdose.  And now that there would be no more Basquiats, the market fell in love with him all over again.

He was officially declared genius last fall when the Whitney Museum in New York honored him with a retrospective [23 October 1992-14 February 1993].

(speaking to a group of preteens at the Whitney Museum of American Art surrounded by Basquiat paintings) You think you could do as well?

Boy: Yeah.  Better than that.

Safer: You could?

Boys: Yeah.

Safer: (pointing at a Basquiat painting on the wall) That looks like—what?  Some eggs?  Could you draw that egg better than that?

Boys: Yeah!

Safer: It was packed with people and it resounded with Artspeak.

Docent: So it has this multiplicity of potential meaning.  It doesn’t mean any one of them.  It may not mean a thing . . . .

Safer: I could not have said it better myself.

Auctioneer: (at the Sotheby sale) At one hundred seventy thousand dollars—sure now—at 170, 170 . . . .

Safer: The hammer’s down on the last lot.  The end of a successful evening.

Sotheby Employee: We were extremely pleased with the sale.

Safer: Total sales: twenty million, two hundred and sixty-four thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars, and until the checks come in, the treasures wait inside Sotheby’s storeroom.  It is, in a way, a little like your basement: the bits and pieces of a lifetime.

(in the storeroom) Is that ladder for climbing or is it for appreciating?  And that faucet—we all have one of those—it’s surely a neglected bit of plumbing at Sotheby’s.  But, no: it’s a genuine Jan Gibbens [?], bid up to $7,500, a bargain or junk soon to be consigned to the trash heap of art history.

Hilton Kramer is certain.

Kramer: Many of these artists, as I well know, live in great dread if waking up one morning and finding that it’s all disappeared, that somebody blew the whistle and they’re no longer going to be considered important.

Safer: That all the vacuum cleaner does is pick up dirt.

Kramer: That all the vacuum cleaner does is pick up dirt and the day Koons’s vacuum cleaner goes back to being a vacuum cleaner, then the curtain comes down.

[I watched the 60 Minutes broadcast that featured Morley Safer’s . . . what do I call it?  An exposé?  I’ve never really forgotten it.  As casual readers of ROT will know, I had a childhood experience with modern art that left a tremendous impression on me (see my post on “Gres Gallery,” 7, 10, and 13 July 2018).

[I conceived the idea of posting the transcript of this piece some time ago, but I was chagrined to find that there isn’t really one.  It’s taken me till now to put one together myself.] 

[I will be continuing the coverage of this incident and its repercussions in future posts.  On 5 April, I will be posting another transcript of a TV show, a panel discussion on the late PBS talk show, Charlie Rose, which featured Morley Safer defending his opinion of contemporary art from the objections of a group of art professionals.

[Following that, tentatively scheduled for 8 April, I plan to post a selection of the published responses of art critics and others after the 60 Minutes segment aired.  I hope interested ROTters will come back for those follow-up posts.]