95-Year-Old Attack Dog Bites Bill Maher
With his stroke-slurred speech, my ancient friend Kirk Douglas the other night responded to Bill Maher’s aggressive ignorance with the anatomical suggestion that so many of us, liberal and conservative, have been longing to hear someone make on bleepless HBO.
Ostensibly congratulating Kirk on a book about restoring screenwriter Dalton Trumbo from the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s with a credit on his 1960 movie “Spartacus,” Maher could not resisting tweaking the 95-year-old actor, “You changed your name to Kirk Douglas…you couldn’t admit back then that you were Jewish.”
As usual, Maher misses the point. Kirk Douglas’ career was at the heart of a larger 20th century American story: how the children of refugees from European cruelty went to Hollywood and, as John Updike put it, “out of immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”
After World War II and the growing popularity of foreign films had paved the way for more realism, Issur Danielovitch followed a generation of Jewish studio heads and writers out there to explode on the screen with the kind of passion and intensity unseen in pretty-boy Hollywood heroes until then.
The studios changed his name, of course, and Kirk Douglas became the angry star of “Champion,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Young Man With a Horn” and “Detective Story.”
Along the way, according to his first biographical book, “The Ragman’s Son,” Issur-turned-Kirk played his role of sex symbol as avidly off screen as on.
He went on to become a producer who finally buried political blacklisting by giving Trumbo, who had been writing under aliases, credit for the screenplay of “Spartacus.”
MORE.
Photo via s_bukley / Shutterstock.com
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I saw that program. It was followed by Mort Zuckerman practically cringing between Rachel Maddow and a libertarian type guy. Not his type of show, better to stay with a more civilized show like McLaughlin.
Interesting how it is OK and just “fine and dandy” for Bill Maher to use the term “Mental Patients” in such a derogatory fashion to describe his disdain for the ‘current crop’ of Republicans. I wonder if the media would have given Mr. Maher such a pass for doing this had he used other derogatory terms such as ‘useless as cripples’ or ‘cheap as Jewish bankers’ or ‘lazy as a welfare moms’ in order to describe politicians and/or political parties that he does not happen to care for or like?
He is just using comic rhetoric to entertain his audience and himself, just like the unfunny Rush L.
Switch him off, next time.