Views On Reporting and the Media

Publicity gets misused. People who are stars are taken advantage of by so many people in so many areas that it’s a real turnoff.

I have no time for those people. I think it’s the most wretched thing that anybody can do, and if there was a way that I could legally sue those so-n-so’s, I would and win. But I can’t do that. I’m public domain, and they know I know that, and they play that game. I mean you want to talk about violence, talk about the violence done to the human spirit by the same people who will sensationalize their papers to the point so they can sell more papers in the next. Then they start talking about public conscience in terms of violence. It’s bullshit. It’s hurt me a lot, and I don’t like it, and I don’t like to see that happen to people.

Regarding his lawsuit against The Mirror for their then-columnist Matthew Wright’s bad review of The Dead Monkey without his actually seeing it: My feeling was that one of the foundations of journalism is that you have a right to report facts as you see them — that’s right, that’s the way it should be; and though we hate critics, they work symbiotically with the theatre. We may not like what they write, but it’s their right to write it. But God damn it, you gotta actually go and see the fucking play, you know. And [though we didn't win in court] we were acknowledged as winning, because normally you don’t do this with reviews. It was the first time in 100 years that a review had been challenged and that the plaintiff had won against bad reportage.

I’ve been in this business for 45 years. I didn’t have a television set back in 1960, you know, and now I’ve made a whole life out of it. What’s happened is that communications and technology and all this kind of stuff has opened up the doors, and I think with that … it’s encouraged people in the best sense of communications and technology to come in with new ideas, new ways of looking at things — ways that may have been ‘pooh-poohed’ or ‘shut up’ back years ago in the 50s and 60s and early 70s even. And I think that’s a healthy thing.