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90 | Sight&Sound | May 2020THE DAVID SUSSKIND ARCHIVES
INTERVIEW WITH NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV
US 1960; Wienerworld/MVD Visual; region-free DVD;
215 minutes; 1.33:1
INTERVIEW WITH DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
US 1963; Wienerworld/MVD Visual; region-free DVD;
102 minutes; 1.33:1
TRUMAN CAPOTE TELLS ALL
US 1979; Wienerworld/MVD Visual; region-free DVD;
112 minutes; 1.33:1
David Susskind (it rhymes with ‘find’ rather than
‘pinned’) was, for me, one of those people you can’t
believe you’ve never heard of. After leaving the
giant talent agency MCA in the mid-1950s to start
his own firm, he branched out into producing,
mainly for TV – an awful lot of dramas of the kind
that are clearly angling to be labelled prestige, often
based on established successes in the theatre (a Bob
Rafelson adaptation of Henry IV) or the cinema
(Mrs Miniver, Ninotchka), plus cop shows, comedies,
whatever. He also did stuff for the big screen; again,
‘prestige’ projects, like A Raisin in the Sun (1961) –
Sidney Poitier in Lorraine Hansberry’s play – and
the cinema version of Requiem for a Heavyweight
(1962); in the 70s he produced Scorsese’s Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) alongside,
incongruously, a pair of James Herriot vet stories.
But his greatest fame came as a talkshow host –
and it was talk rather than chat. In 1958 he started
a late-night show on New York local TV called
Open End, the initial gimmick being that he and
his guests would keep the conversation going
until they ran out of things to say and/or energy.
(In the UK, After Dark, which ran on Channel 4
for ten years from 1987, was a version of the same
idea.) He sometimes allowed a trace of levity to
creep in (a famous 1970 edition had Mel Brooks
and George Segal on a panel discussing ‘How to Be
a Jewish Son’), but leaned more toward weighty
issues – drugs, race, gay rights, the Vietnam
War. And at times he stretched up to attain real
historical importance, as in his interviews with
Nikita Khrushchev and Martin Luther King.
The Khrushchev interview took place in
October 1960, during the Soviet leader’s second
visit to the US, three days before the shoe-banging
incident at the UN, a few months after US pilot
Gary Powers had been shot down over the USSR.
Tension was high and the announcement of the
interview turned Susskind into a target for abuse
of a kind we tend to assume belongs to the age
of the internet – hate mail calling him ‘kike’ and
‘commie’, protests, talk of advertising boycotts,
accusations that he was legitimising a murderer.
Perhaps that explains a confrontational
tone that probably didn’t do anything to ease
the encounter. Susskind starts off by asking
why Khrushchev talks of the American people
as peace-loving, the American government
as warmongering and imperialist, when he
must know that to all intents and purposes
the people and the government are identical,
and without imperial ambitions. Even at the
time, this must have looked idealistic – three
months later, the outgoing President Eisenhower
was warning America of the danger posed
to democratic government by the influence
of the “military-industrial complex”.
The interview is often frustrating to watch,
the two interlocutors talking past each other,neither willing to budge from their world-
views. Both Susskind and Khrushchev are
longwinded, and every question and answer
has to go through a (heroic) interpreter: even
short exchanges drag. The video tape is ancient
and often flawed, at times going full Ipcress,
zigzag blizzards of black and white flakes, while
Khrushchev jaws on in Russian. Nobody could
pretend this is entertaining, but it is far more
vivid than any fiction could be. Stick around
for the panel that follows, in which a number
of journalists – one of them’s even a woman, for
gosh sakes! – sift through the meaning of it all.
The interview with Martin Luther King Jr is
a calmer affair, though it took place at a point of
maximal turmoil, after he had led demonstrations
against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.
Susskind was an admirer and sympathiser – the
cast of his series East Side /West Side (1963-64),
about New York social workers, included Cicely
Tyson, the first time a black actor had a leading
role in a networked drama; and he had already
attracted the attention of the FBI, and irritated
his commercially sensitive station bosses, with
an edition featuring the author James Baldwin
and the singer and activist Harry Belafonte. Still,
aspects of his questioning now feel jarring – the
vocabulary of race is long outdated, of course, and
his characterisation of “the negro-white struggle”
seems bizarre. But Susskind also manages a
frankness that might be harder today, asking
King about the white fear of “miscegenation”,and how come he hasn’t been assassinated (yet).
Throughout, MLK’s answers are thoughtful,
measured, straightforward; it’s a marvellous
demonstration of how even the most visceral
political arguments can be conducted with
dignity. We’ve come a long way since then.
The other disc I’ve watched – there are more to
come – is a very different affair: a 1979 interview
with Truman Capote. In the early interviews,
Susskind is lean, his hair clipped; here, he has
filled out and has a thick white thatch. The
interview itself is flabbier: Susskind and Capote
were friends, supposedly, but there were clearly
tensions, and Susskind’s questions are largely
attempts to push Capote into admissions and
apologies – for being seen drunk in public (Capote
says it was his medication), for hanging out
with shallow people at Studio 54 (Capote thinks
they are the most interesting people alive), for
portraying friends unflatteringly in his fiction
(Capote doesn’t see a problem). A compliment on
Capote’s health is a dig at how fat he used to be.
In the face of this passive-aggressive onslaught,
Capote maintains a benign, slightly puzzled air
and, uncharacteristically, gets all the sympathy.
These programmes are, from a British
perspective, strange glimpses of a history that isn’t
quite our own, a society that is subtly different- in, for one thing, the confidence of its moral
judgements. But they’re also reminders of an
important truth: that the thing we do best, and
the thing we have to keep on doing, is talk.
Archive Television by Robert Hanks
The David Susskind Archives He sometimes
allowed a trace of levity to creep in, but at times
stretched up to attain real historical importance