You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You'd come in, do a read-through, there'd be a few rehearsals, then you'd come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home.
The last president we had was the smartest guy anyone could remember and he did the dumbest thing anyone has ever seen in the White House so go figure.
I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.
I'm not sure that there's anybody else that's as psychologically complex and who's given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That's what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.
Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.
I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.
To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.
For a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, Nixon had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures.
I was a Political Science major.
Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk.
Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then.
I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.
I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed.
I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.
If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.
I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.
When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.
There were really funny characteristics about this guy [Richard Nixon], chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times - just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.
Anybody who says that having the public recognize them and relate to the work they do is irritating should get into another line of work. You're in this business for people to know what you do and like it.
I have a very strong visual memory of the first time I made him laugh. That was remarkable. I was like, "Oh, God, I just made Jack Benny laugh."
I always used to sit next to Mel Blanc when we'd do the shows. When you have Jack Benny on one side and Mel Blanc on the other, you're not going to go far wrong.
I was never into candy and games and clowns.
I'd always loved radio. I loved Bob And Ray. I loved Stan Freberg.
You can get an awful lot of effects into the customer's mind for a great deal less time and money in radio than you can in television.
The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.
