Transcripts For CSPAN2 John Lithgow Trumpty Dumpty Wanted A

CSPAN2 John Lithgow Trumpty Dumpty Wanted A Crown July 12, 2024

Church dispensation for six royal marriages. Court yearcourt years installedn Supreme Court and royal beheadings, if only for sport. He craved the occasional royal procession and gasp, the eventual royal succession. He gets his way and lets the public have something to say. If we let him all have his favorite things, the divine right of kings. Hello everyone and welcome to the Virtual Program at the Commonwealth Club of california. Im a senior partner emeritus at mckinsey and company and a member of the Commonwealth Club board of directors. Today i will be moderating the program. We would like to thank our members, donors and supporters for making this and all of our other programs available. We are grateful for your support and hope others will follow their examples to support the club, particularly during these uncertain times. Today im particularly pleased to be joined by john lithgow, an awardwinning actor and author of a new book, trumpty dumped wanted a crown. He is known for his contributions in theater, television and Film Industry throughout the years with rules and things and my personal favorite, the world according. After receiving degrees in history and literature from harvard, john went on to study the performing arts at the London Academy of music and dramatic art on a fulbright scholarship. From then he went on to become a notable awardwinning actor with two tonys, two Golden Globes and six emmys under his belt. In recent years, john has taken a public stance on political commentary and is known for his critiques of the Trump Administration through satirical art, Trumpy Dumpty uses the traditional childrens rhyme to criticize president ial decisions made in the last year and covers recent events such as trumps impeachment, the covid19 pandemic, the black lives matter protest and much more. We will be discussing a lot in the next hour and i want to ask your questions as well. If you are watching along with us, please put your questions in the text chat on youtube and we will be getting to them a little bit later in the program. So, thank you john lithgow for joining us tonight. Its a pleasure. Guest thank you. Nice to meet you and talk to you. Host we are especially pleased to have you after the newest book came out which is out this weekend i had the pleasure of reading it. Also had the pleasure of watching you on Stephen Colbert last night so joining us after the cold air show. Did i make a fool of myself. Host fantastic. Appreciate you joining us today and talking about the book and more of a chance to get a feeling for it including what we sought to kick off the program with a reading of one of your poems. Before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit about why poetry. We all know you as an amazing actor and all kinds of wonderful things as i mentioned earlier. And relatively recent what made you do that . I certainly didnt set out to write political satire in verse. Ive always written verse just occasional. I had written funny poems that include everybodys name in the cast of a play on closing night. Ive actually done to two commencement speeches at private schools for small graduating classes, in which i used the names of every single one of the graduates in poems, completely to their surprise. Talking to the dean of the school about all the scandals theyd been involved in within the last couple of weeks. The Little Things like that. And then around about the late 1990s, id been doing a lot of entertaining of children. Concerts with orchestras. In fact even the San Francisco symphony and doing videos for kids and albums for kids. I began writing rhyming verse stories and picture books and i wrote nine of them, some of them times best selling picture books. But in all of that i was never serious about it. Im still not serious about it, but im viewing serious subjects now. Host guest i rewrote the third verse of gilbert and sullivans i am the very model of a Major General for new york public outdoors at central park a couple of years ago and it was just after Michael Flynn had been charged and apprehended and fired. He was very much in the news, and i sang the entire song in the character of Michael Flynn. When i unleashed my own verse when president obama made me head of all things and realized he brought to life a governmental frankenstein but that made killing in the pillory by shouting lock her up, et cetera. When i told my literary agent about this, it was like the sun coming up. He immediately saw a book. We had gotten together to discuss. Youve got to write something. What are you going to write. He knew exactly and said i could sell this book tomorrow. That was two years ago. I set off to write my first book, simply Trumpy Dumpty the age of trump in verse. It was a smash hit covering the first two years of the administration that my publisher, chronicle prism in San Francisco, pride and joy, begged me to write another one and i said i just cant. Its so hard thinking about all of those rhymes. And besides, im working. Im working a lot. I just wont have time to do it. But once again, my agent who thought of the first book, a fantastic literary agent said youve got to do this. Theres going to be an election in november. If you get this book out before then, you can discharge your political duties, and he was absolutely right. So i said yes and i thought im never going to be able to do this. A along comes the pandemic and sheltering in place and walk down with nothing to do, except i have something to do. Thats when i wrote all of those poems and i had extraordinary subjects. I had the impeachment pandemic, the incredibly inept handling of all of that and then the black lives matter movement. That was at my deadline but i even got to address that. Why in verse, i dont know. You dont come to me for political punditry. You come to be for entertainment. Thats what you would expect. So i thought what better use of my entertainment skills than to skewer this man and expresse exy own anger and rage and pessimism and fear through lighthearted and very funny, witty poems. Inevitably, just as happened with the first book, the poems get more savage as the book goes along because you are dealing with some very, very dark subjects. But theres something fascinating about that. I love dealing with dark subjects in a lighthearted manner. Thomas nast and jonathan swift, great satirists. I am not. Im a total beginner at this, but its struck a cord and im just delighted. Host thats fantastic. Talk a little bit about the illustrations as well. To get a sense kind of visually about what we are talking about. Guest the same as i dont really consider myself a professional poet or a professional humorist, im not a professional illustrator either, but my original ambition was to be an artist. I grew up in a theater family and i had no intention being an actor. I didnt want to go into the family business. As long as i could remember, i had a certain facility with art. Age seven and 8yearsold, people would ask what i want to be when i grow up, it was an artist and i say very serious by osmosis i was becoming a very experienced actor. My father produced shakespeare festivals, and i appeared in about 20 shakespeare plays by the time i was 20yearsold and arrived at college as a fully formed actor and became a campus star and that was that. If you get a big enough response as an actor, youre doomed. Youre not going to do anything else with your life. Host wonderful. Guest the wonderful thing about doing the poems is i would imagine the illustrations even as i wrote them. The by the time we finish, i will be reciting a poem, Joe Mccarthys lullaby, and i knew exactly the drawing i was going to make of that. Calling it a little baby donald trump in his lap in a rocking chair wailing away. Its wonderful to find a visual joke to go along with a verbal joke. Host as you said, it was at a pretty dark time and a serious topic. You throw covid on top of it and have many cases not happy about the world. Is this cathartic for you and feel to be part of your own release in dealing with these times or what is it for you . Guest that is a good question. I am not sure catharsis is the right word but its pretty close. There is a certain iteration to the creative process. I can look at Something Like that and i remember the moment when i thought of every single one of those rhymes and you think of it as a kind of mini orgasm, a way of saying it. Its very, very hard work. Its dogged drudgery because you sit in complete silence. We talk about if a pickup truck backs up and makes that little sound three blocks away, i go into a fit. You have to go into this trancelike state which is why i was hesitant to do it again. But when you think of the last line of the last stanza of the poem, its cathartic. They are very savage. I take a few people completely to pieces like eric prince, john mack at the, elaine chao, but i myself am not the kind of person who would get on msnbc and forth. With my own anger and wrath, a man i absolutely loved listening to but i cant do that. I could be very plovers and subversive and get at it in my own way which is with satire. Host you have a chance to do readings of your poems and have other actors and actresses read them as well. How did that come about and what does that feel like . You couldnt do a proper book tour. When i was releasing the first book just a year ago, i was there in San Francisco at a lecture for an audience of a thousand people having a fantastic time and doing book readings and book signings everywhere. I went to three different cities. All of that was out this time. We arranged things like this. A lot of virtual interviews and appearances. A couple months ago i thought lets get creative about this. Why dont i i was being asked to do all sorts of things. Talking into my iphone, they are on dropbox. I made a little list of my favorite people and favorite actors and i mixed in some politicians and journalists and epidemiologists and i asked if they would be willing to record themselves in their home reading a few of my poems. I got in touch with a director, a good friend of mine. I said what about this, what about making videos of my poems as a way of selling the book and he said yes, immediately. He was a van and he loved what i was doing. So i contacted and they all said yes and this is meryl streep, glenn close, Joseph Gordon levitt, on and on and mixing in steve schmidt, james carville, the epidemiologist and they did a wonderful job. Tim works for these young men. Eight of them will have been posted there will be another 15. They managed to illustrate in a simple way. Another way to bring something to life. We are rolling them out one after another. Look forward to those. Have you gotten any reaction from the administration at all . There probably. I was hoping everybody would hope we would get a couple things from him. Did you watch the debate . Guest yes, i did, an unbelievable spectacle. Who would have thought our politics would be so debased. The only thing not while it was happening. While it was happening i wanted to vomit but as soon it was over and i saw all the commentary which was completely appalled by donald trump, i began to feel a certain elation as we had just watch him. For three or four years now we have been thinking hes done it now theres no way to recover from this and we have always been wrong. I dont know, i remain optimistic. He is certainly given you a lot of material. In december and january of last year when we were talking about what this book should be i said you know, this is bad. This book has to be tough and dark. Hes now behaving like a king. Why dont i make up an opening poem and make that the title of the book. Look how precious that was, not to congratulate myself but that is how hes operating now more than ever. I wrote that lighthearted problem back in january. Its taken on such dark meanings when i say for example court years installed in his own Supreme Court and royal beheadings if only for sport thats a much better line now than it was eight months ago. I think you were going to read another problem for us. Yes, fake news. I urge you all to go to the Youtube Channel i was talking about. I will read it but not as well as my friends, whoopi goldberg, sam jackson, just completely wonderful. Taking me a moment. Im not sure where it is in my own book. This explains why my career has faltered. Fake news. Its one of the firsts. Page 15. And i will show you the illustration just for the fun of it. You have the illustration. This is his pedestal. People say here to four i kept black tenants from my door using legal trickery but fake news doesnt bother me. They say falsifying facts is how i skirted my taxes. People call it larceny but fake news doesnt bother me. Constantly i am charged with sexual assault, harassment and adultery but fake news doesnt bother me. Students had their futures ripped away but fake news doesnt bother me. Things like payoffs with my feelings. People say i i monetized. All my president ial ties boosting my prosperity but fake news doesnt bother me. They say my meddling in ukraine left a stain tantamount to treachery but fake news doesnt bother me. They say coronavirus i propelled the downward spiral of but fake news doesnt bother me. Notwithstanding crimes like these i will continue as i please, fake news doesnt bother me i will just rewrite history. Fantastic. If we had an audience there would be a lot of applause. Had you seen his income taxes . No, thats what, i mean. I wrote that early on in january, one of the first ones i wrote. Coronavirus had never even been heard of but i was able to put that last one in. By the way, it was a wonderful event i can tell you about. I had written three or four of these poems, one about roger stone, one about the fake news and one called twinkle twinkle Kenneth Starr about the defense team and i was invited by Debbie Stabenow to be the after dinner entertainment at the library. I flew to baltimore and i read my first four poems from the book. It was the first time i ever read them aloud for anybody and i was reading them to the United States democratic senators. They laughed and applauded and gave a standing ovation. For me it was a historical night. That would be great after dinner entertainment. Im sure they will look up the book in the meantime. Ive sent to the book to all of my democratic friends. Great. In the course of writing this, theres a lot going on every day in the news and the president doing something else. What prompts you that this is something i want to write about or something that gave me an idea is it pick up the paper and look at twitter and find something or things become selfevident. With both books i sat down and wrote down a database of 40 great subjects were characters. There were fantastic subjects when they hired john magid he to be the head of hiring and firing in the White House Personnel Office at age 29 and any number of the others. Its escaped bulls notice or theyve forgotten about it. I would weave those into the poems those were the subjects of the poems. Peoples response would be my god i forgot about those people and i began to realize thats what im doing to these books. I am writing an offbeat history but it is a history book and history books are there to remind you about what happened. You may have forgotten this, but it was important and in my mind its even more memorable if its told in rhyme. A little firecracker goes off in your brain when you read that line and you just remember i did an entire lion in the first book and it was on the subject of scott pruitt. Everything rhymed with pruitt but you didnt hear the word until the last line. You dont forget scott pruitt after that. I will say when i was reading the book in the introduction and then read the book, it did remind me that if this were a film you would say theres too many characters. It all happens like slowdown i cant handle this, which is what everybody is feeling in this administration. Somehow or another, volume one and volume two putting the stories together it has an incredible impact just how grotesquely bad this presidency was and this administration. Maybe you could name a couple of people who are long gone and left with their head held high, people like jim matus but you cant name any other. Theres only four people that truly lasted from day number one, trump, Jared Kushner and that little creep, stephen miller. They are the only ones that are still around. How grotesque that those are basically the people running the country. As you are out having these virtual conversations what do you like to have people take away. You ask such great questions. The entertainment in me wants them to be delighted if you have a wonderful time, ironically enough a wonderful time contemplating a terrible time. I feel ambivalent in many ways about the whole process because i know that im preaching to the converted and i know the only people enjoying the book are people who agree with me. People who dont agree with me hates this book. I always say i hope you will sell copies because they will only want to burn it but then they have to buy it first. That would be a laugh line if it were a lecture last year. Are you worried at all we are doing this discussion. You cant have a live audience. Are you worried about what is going to happen . Im deeply worried and its been an economic catastrophe. I dont think i know any actor that has been paid to act for the last ten months. I could go back to work on a tv series that was suspended and im one of the lucky actors. Its been a catastrophe again the optimist in me says it may take a while but they will be back. People are desperate but its very hard because you cannot convey the arts without connecting with people and the saddest part is how lonely we all are. Were just not used to being so isolated. Thank god i have a wife id rather be with her than anybody else, so sheltering in place has been a sweet experience but its been very melancholy and the news is so disturbing every day. We will recover from this. My own grandfather passed away when my dad was 4yearsold and the spanish flu epidemic and during that epidemic it must have felt like the world was coming to an end but we did recover and we will recove

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