What’s Funnier: Hillary’s Jokes or the Resulting Spin?
Well, duh.
Among revelations scorching the airwaves last week was this shocking bulletin:
Hillary Clinton, the nation’s first lady and unofficial candidate for a New York Senate seat, had help from professional comedy writers (gasp) in preparing the top 10 list she ticked off during her Wednesday appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman.”
Get outta here.
Yup, they’re saying that she didn’t originate the 10 reasons she cited why she at last agreed to appear on Letterman’s CBS program after he had been on her case for weeks about not joining her expected foe, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in accepting invitations to come on with him.
Democrats--can’t trust ‘em.
This means that dilly of a dig, “If Dan Quayle did it, how hard can it be?,” may not have been hers. It means her brilliant comedy mind may not have generated that edgy line, “I have not been to the Ed Sullivan Theater since I was dating Ringo.”
THROW THE PHONY OUT!
Actually, she’s not in, and may never be, despite coming across as the smiling, assured first lady of cool in her chat with the usually unpredictable Letterman. As if that should affect her candidacy one way or another, any more than Giuliani’s numerous gigs with Letterman, two days before he underwent quintuple-bypass surgery. Not that her late-night appearance should influence voters. If we want funny guys in office, why not nominate Letterman or Jay Leno?
And about that list. Did anyone really buy that she alone had created the “top 10 reasons” that she read from a card? Or that, despite what the Letterman show has said, she collaborated on any of it? Does anyone believe that Letterman writes the popular top 10 lists that he reads nightly? Or that he and Leno read from cue cards monologues that they personally wrote?
Is this disillusioning for you?
Some on TV think it may be, apparently. Why else would CNN’s “Crossfire,” for example, devote an entire episode last week to dissecting Clinton’s performance with Letterman as if it had significance beyond its marquee glitz? Talk about comedic, you should have seen these people going at it with straight faces: Did Clinton give a good performance or not? Did she write her own stuff or not?
“Crossfire” needed not only to get a life, the show needed to get an issue.
Why should it matter, anyway, that Clinton was operating from a script when Americans don’t appear to care that candidates and politicians give speeches that are written by their staffs?
Do New Yorkers believe that Giuliani and Clinton write the speeches they are making on the stump? Do Americans think that her husband or any other president wrote his own State of the Union address from scratch? Or that op-ed pieces appearing under the bylines of office holders are necessarily written by them?
Ghost writing is endemic to the nation’s political and pop cultures. Coming to mind is what Jack Benny told his old nemesis Fred Allen after getting demolished in a battle of ad-libs with the brilliant, quick-witted humorist: “You wouldn’t be doing that to me if I had my writers here.”
Almost surely, Clinton would not have been as witty without writers working on her behalf. Less certain is whether she was given an advance peek at the pop quiz about New York that Letterman gave her, and which she passed. The show says she wasn’t fed the answers, others charge she was.
In any case, it was a soft interview compared with the masterful jabbing for which Letterman is famous. Because she is the first lady and commanded respect? Nah. Because Letterman knew his ratings for her appearance would be huge, and he wanted her back.
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KILLER DOC: That’s what Tuesday’s excellent “Frontline” program is. In 1998, Kip Kinkel, 15, shot dead his mother and father and then murdered two students and wounded 25 others at his high school in Springfield, Ore., for which he was sentenced to 111 years in prison with no possibility of parole.
Produced by Michael Kirk, Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, and reported by Peter J. Boyer, “The Killer at Thurston High” is a sad, chilling and methodical retelling of Kinkel’s progression from a kid who was “kind of mad at his parents” to one who coldly blew them away and targeted others.
“What would you find if you opened the door into a young life that had produced an unspeakable horror?” asks Boyer in a flat voice congruent with the grim investigation on the screen.
We learn that Kip’s parents were outstanding teachers who sought to impart good values to their children, but that his father was especially demanding of his son and, Kip believed, automatically expected “the worst from him.”
We learn also that Kip was small, dyslexic and for a time took Prozac for a “major depressive disorder,” that he fell in with a bad crowd and became fascinated by guns and explosives which he set off to “vent feelings of anger.” We hear, too, that his father finally “relented” and bought his son the guns he had aggressively lobbied for.
Yet, what ultimately drove this despairing youth to the extreme violence that he began by shooting each of his parents in the head?
Was it his earlier expulsion from school for having a loaded gun in his locker? His taking notice of school shootings in Pearl City, Miss., Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark.? Or was it the 1996 movie version of “Romeo & Juliet” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes that he saw in his freshman English class?
We hear that Kip loved the story, that students who watch it inevitably blame the dead young lovers’ parents for its tragic conclusion, and that a CD from the film was on continuous play inside the Kinkel home when the bodies of his mother and father were discovered there.
The violence of an earlier DiCaprio film, “The Basketball Diaries,” was cited by some as motivating the trench-coated pair of young gunmen in the Columbine High School shootings. Shakespeare, too, launching a killer? If so, it may be impossible to predict what movie or experience might set off a troubled mind.
The “Frontline” program raises questions without drawing conclusions, except as Boyer notes ominously, “Some of us are raising killers in our homes.”
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ZZZ-ZZZ-ZZZ: USA’s new movie, “The Mary Kay Letourneau Story: All-American Girl” is as passive and lethargic as the Kinkel documentary is intensely dramatic.
It’s just deadly, despite Penelope Ann Miller playing a 35-year-old Seattle elementary school teacher whose notorious affair with a student, Vili Fualauu, was so repulsive on every level that you’d think this movie, at the very least, would have quite a story to tell.
It doesn’t. When it concludes, you’re no smarter about Letourneau and her liaison with Vili (Omar Anguiano)--which produced two children--than when the movie began.
Following it will be “Letourneau: Live,” a one-hour special featuring Letourneau “direct from prison” and other “key players involved in this real-life drama.”
Written by Julie Hebert and directed at a creeping pace by Lloyd Kramer, the “All-American Girl” crawls forward in whispery and confusing flashbacks as prison inmate Letourneau speaks to a psychiatrist (Mercedes Ruehl) about her life and her first brush with 12-year-old Vili in 1995 when she was an unhappily married mother of four.
He comes on to her first in this account, and instead of flatly rejecting his advances, she lets them linger, becoming a giggly girl and ultimately channeling her emotional immaturity into a fixation as full-blown as his.
During a six-month period in 1997-98:
The real Letourneau pleaded guilty to two counts of child rape. She gave birth to her first child with Vili. She was sentenced to 7 1/2 years, with all but six months suspended on the condition that she enter a treatment program for sex offenders and have no contact with Vili.
She was paroled and released, but the next evening was discovered by cops with Vili in her van, with $6,200 in cash, her passport and some baby clothes, suggesting they were about to flee the country. Several days later she was back in prison, and nine months after that a divorced Letourneau gave birth there to their second child.
No wonder this movie is so barren and uninvolving. No one here earns your sympathy except, in the aftermath, the two children produced by this pathetic union.
* “The Mary Kay Letourneau Story: All-American Girl” can be seen Tuesday at 8 p.m. on USA.
* “Frontline’s” “The Killer at Thurston High” can be seen Tuesday at 9 p.m. on KCET.
Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.