julia and david
I don’t care about Julia Roberts’ career but she was always one of my favorite guests on Letterman because there was something between them that seemed real, and that made for fantastic television. I recently watched her final appearance on The Late Show and in it she says that she was nervous about herfirst appearance on the show, because “I had seen you absolutely dismember young actresses of my kind of peer group, and I thought. ‘I’m gonna go on and he’s gonna know within ten seconds what my IQ is’ and you are going to like a samurai just sort of Benihana me into pieces and I’ll be left for dead and forgotten.”
And he asks her, what was it about him, back then, that led him to sometimes treat guests on his show that way, and she says “Stupid people annoy you.”
Nail on the head. That was, at least back on NBC, a big part of what made Letterman so compelling to watch; he still seemed like a kid from Indiana who had stumbled into having his own show but wasn’t comfortable with it. You could feel the tension inside him, the resistance to stooping to the level of vapid celebrity banter, the need to find some way of pushing things in an unexpected and sometimes slightly uncomfortable direction.
So then I watched that first appearance that Julia and Dave were talking about. It’s 1989, she’s there promoting Mystic Pizza. She’s 22 (!!) years old. (She is now only five years older than Dave was then.) And it’s just glorious. The lights so dim in that studio that it feels like a show NBC doesn’t even care enough about to pay the electric bill. Everything so haphazard it still feels like Letterman wound up with this show due to some kind of clerical oversight. Charlie the bubble-eating dog won’t eat the bubbles. Julia has a stuffed pig with her and the dog wants it. They end up bringing Daryl Hannah out for a bit and Al Marr looks spectacularly serious and the band sounds terrific and Julia looks at Dave admiringly and you can tell she thinks he’s hilarious and it’s all awkward and unrehearsed and messy and alive. Now, influenced by Letterman, lots of shows go for a similarly unrehearsed feel but they often make seeming unrehearsed feel rehearsed.
At some point, Julia got more comfortable with Dave. She started asserting herself, started giving him as good as she got, and started to kiss him during appearances. This, too, felt unrehearsed and messy and alive to me in the early days. (Here, on the final show, it’s a packaged “thing,” but I still feel like her affection for him is real.) What I loved about it when she would come on the show and kiss him was that you could tell that she really wanted to kiss him. Whether or not he deserved it, whether or not she should have wanted it, is beside the point for me now. Seeing her look at him the way she did, I understood exactly how she felt. Even in romantic movies, you almost never get the sense that the characters want something from each other as authentically as I sensed Julia Roberts wanting some of those kisses.
Recently Masha posted this Pauline Kael quote:
“One of the sad things about our times, I think, is that so many people find a romantic movie frivolous and negligible.”
and lately all I have been watching on Netflix and Amazon at night are romantic movies. I need images of love and stories of people finding love and losing love and expressing love and fighting for love. Nothing seems less frivolous and negligible to me right now. I watched one movie the other night, not a good movie at all, called Elena Undone, and what I liked about it in spite of it being a bad movie was the way that one character knew that the other character wanted her, and I thought about what that must feel like, to know that the person you want really wants you, and how that’s what I saw in moments between Julia and David, and how great it was to see something so real on television.
Notes
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