The Cavuto Ringer?

I don’t usu­ally reck art­icles in the Daily Beast but for some reas­on I still get the organ’s mail updates and this even­ing one caught my eye. “Tucker Carlson Couldn’t Debate The Anti-Trump Organizer He Wanted, So This Actor Stepped In,” is the rather unwieldy head­line, and that, too, is the story in a nut­shell, although, what the heck, you might as well read the whole thing as it is rel­at­ively short (not short­er than the head­line) and kind of entertaining. 

Are you sur­prised? Of course you are not sur­prised. I am not sur­prised either. Not to put too fine a point on it but Mr. Carlson strikes me as the kind of guy who’d sell his moth­er and/or his step­moth­er for a new chin, and only has­n’t as of yet because no one has stepped up to make the exchange. (I can­not stress enough, how­ever, that this is merely my per­son­al impres­sion of the man and could well be wrong. Just to be clear.) But the story did remind me of a thing that happened to me on Fox News many years ago, a thing that point to a poten­tial pat­tern of if not decep­tion at least hokey-pokey. 

The year was 2004, and it was around February, just as it is as I write this, and the movie on every­body’s mind and lips was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It did not screen for “long lead” crit­ics, which I was at the time, at the monthly magazine Première, but giv­en that it was very zeit­geisty my edit­or Tom Roston brought me into a screen­ing he was going to, at the now defunct Broadway Screening Room in the Brill Building, a facil­ity that Walter Matthau would char­ac­ter­ize as  “veray nassszzz.” Tom and I were actu­ally seated in front of a BUNCH of Fox News people. Brian Kilmeade sat dir­ectly behind me, awe­struck. I could have killed Roston, because dur­ing the movie’s Last Supper scene there was a shot of someone tak­ing what looked like a con­tem­por­ary flat­bread out of an oven, and Roston whispered to me “I did­n’t know they had Cosi shops in ancient Israel” and I star­ted gig­gling and I thought Kilmeade would have me arres­ted. Anyway, I was kind of flum­moxed by the movie, and some­where, some­how, I was put on the record as refer­ring to the kids who tor­ment Judas after he betrays Christ as “Jim Henson’s Satan Babies” and, apro­pos of the bit where the raven or crow plucks out one of the cru­ci­fied thieves’ eye, won­der­ing if the film’s source mater­i­al was The Gospel According to Tony Iommi. 

So some time after this I get a call from the media plan­ner at our par­ent com­pany, dear old Hachette. It seems that the Fox News pro­gram “Your World With Neil Cavuto” wants me to go on some after­noon very soon and dis­cuss the box office pro­spects for Mel Gibson’s film in Asia, where it’s due to open soon. (It’s already made all the money in the world in America.) I’m a little bemused by this, since as a box office ana­lyst I’m a pretty good third base­man for the Yankees, but I’ve been told to say yes to these pitches and the answer to the ques­tion seems pretty simple: few­er Christians in Asian than in the West means maybe not so great box office over there. So, I go. 

I gotta tell you people: Neil Cavuto has the most exquis­ite man­ners of any­one I have ever met in tele­vi­sion ever. Aside from look­ing super-crisp in those suit jack­ets and shirts and ties (con­trast him with O’Reilly some time; he makes Bill look like one of those poor encyc­lo­pe­dia hawkers in the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman), he’s just ter­ribly nice and kind. He even sent me a THANK YOU NOTE after the whole semi-débâcle. So they’ve got this setup where even though I’m in the same stu­dio as Neil, I’m not going to be in the frame with him; it’s a three cam­era setup, one for Neil, one for me, and one for the third guest who nobody had told me about. Who’s this third guest, I ask one of the people with clip­board bust­ling around me. “Oh, it’s Larry Thompson, vet­er­an film pro­du­cer, who’ll be chim­ing in from L.A.” Okay, I shrug. And soon it’s show time. It starts off gen­i­ally enough, with Neil talk­ing about how Mel’s movie is a box-office behemoth that has silenced the doubters, or some­thing, and say­ing it’s soon to open in Asia. Cut to me, I talk about how it CERTAINLY IS a SPECTACULAR and UNEXPECTED SUCCESS but we might not want to expect too much from the Asian mar­ket because film­go­ers in Japan, Korea, and China aren’t too big on the Jesus and maybe China does­n’t want much to do with the movie at all. Then Neil is like, for anoth­er per­spect­ive we go to Hollywood, where vet­er­an film pro­du­cer Larry Thompson, blah blah blah. I see Larry Thompson in my mon­it­or and he’s kinda sweaty and lean­ing to one side and he looks like a guy who just walked away from an auto acci­dent that did­n’t cause any griev­ous phys­ic­al harm to any­one but DID wake him up behind the wheel, pla­cing him in a dis­or­i­ented state. And Larry starts lay­ing into me, say­ing how can this crit­ic who called Mel Gibson’s won­der­ful movie “Satanic” sit here and try to dis­par­age the won­der­ful mes­sage that it’s bring­ing to Christians the world over.

Well you could have knocked me over with a feath­er, or some­thing. I tried to come back with a protest about how I was­n’t inter­ested in apply­ing my per­son­al opin­ion of the movie, which was indeed less than glow­ing, to my impar­tial box office ana­lys­is. But Larry just kept yelling and in mere second I did that thing that the fancy media train­er that Hachette had paid good money to instruct me and a col­league on how to Be Good On The Teevee told me and a col­league nev­er ever ever to do, besides say “I think,” which was ROLL YOUR EYES. 

It ended, and I went back to my office and I looked up Larry Thompson on the IMDB and found out that he pro­duced a pic­ture I rather admired, Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, but also, and more recently, tele­vi­sion biop­ics of both Desi Arnaz, Jr. and Lucille Ball and Sonny and Cher. Things have picked up for him since, what with the David Hasselhoff Roast and the motiv­a­tion­al speak­ing gigs I guess. Weirdly, des­pite my then-spectacular abil­ity to hold a grudge, I did not get overly hung up about the whole thing. I was ini­tially too stunned, because I thought it was such a dopey stunt to pull—bring in this snarky schmuck who had­n’t paid prop­er obeis­ance to Mel Gibson’s vis­ion and give him a little shit on the pre­text of Asian box office? Really. And then of course the thank-you note arrived and my recol­lec­tion of Neil’s man­ner made everything okay again. Reading about Carlson’s much more egre­gious stunt this even­ing made me won­der just where the line is drawn, at Fox or any­where else for that mat­ter. The way oppos­ing “teams” on TV news debates are thrown togeth­er makes for much more fraught mix­ing these days than it used to, as wit­ness Charles Blow’s “don’t touch me” reac­tion to being pat­ted con­des­cend­ingly by a Trump per­son on CNN the oth­er night. How soon before fist­fights, staged or oth­er­wise? Hmmm. (I clearly have no legit­im­ate kick­er for this anec­dote, my apologies.)