Chutzpah vs. Chutzpah

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin heads up. In this episode, I interview an old school guy from New York who drops a lot of f bombs. Just so you're aware, say your name the way in Israeli would say Melia Vital and say my name is Millia Vital in hebrewal, my name is Malcolm Glodwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. So far in season four, i've talked about grand themes, huge issues. This episode is about something very specific a word. The word I'm interested in is hutzpah. I decided I would like to examine the phenomenon of footspot. Since Millie is my neighbor and in Israeli, she has agreed to help this teach Coushia Malcolm how to say this word appropriately. First of all, are we doing are we doing that kind of thing in the throat that so many the gutt do I have to the.

00:01:32
Speaker 2: Soft I think we have a closer to Arabic. It's deeper in the throat and there's a lot more contact of the soft palate.

00:01:41
Speaker 1: It's really deeper. Yeah, so so softer, not not a whole but footspa.

00:01:49
Speaker 2: No, who the this. Okay, So the sound is right, it is deep, but the vowel is not whole. It's who who.

00:02:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:02:03
Speaker 2: In Hebrew there's only I A E O. There's no diphthongs, and there's no awe in there's no book and book right, there's only woo. So you understand what I'm talking to myself. For me, it's very clear, because sadly I worked on it so hard. But okay, so it's not hootspa. Yeah, just like it's not Milli, it's meally Meali e oh ooh, so it's who. H's the team who, not who who? Yes, that's better enough. Who.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: It strikes me that there is a lot of Hootspa in the world at the moment, and that maybe it would be useful to find out something more about it. So I started with Millie and the first thing she told me is that there isn't one hood spot. There's actually two, the American version and the Israeli version. Hootspa I knew, but not this other one.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: Hoots Spa not bad, but it's not a paw.

00:03:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's baa.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: It's a bottle that doesn't exist sexually in England. Now you've got to have the say, you gotta say certain Yeah, he's hit the second syllable.

00:03:24
Speaker 1: Bats it.

00:03:27
Speaker 2: There's a lot of air coming out of the mouth.

00:03:29
Speaker 1: And he said, why so when? Uh? But in America, the accidents on the first syllable yeah hots right, huts ba and huts ba and they are worlds apart and maybe our hoods. But problem is that we've confused the two. When I was in Los Angeles a little while back, I went to see a Hollywood legend named Al Ruddy. Tall guy, lean close to ninety. He lives up in the canyons of Beverly Hills, one of those nineteen sixties houses perched on a hillside that looks like something off the set of a James Bond movie. I had a specific reason to go and see Ruddy, But Ruddy is the kind of person that when he starts talking, specific reasons go out the window.

00:04:19
Speaker 3: I was born in Canada. Also, now that I know everything about you, I was born in Montreal. I know.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: I saw that.

00:04:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I went to Montreal and then my mother, my mother snuck over the border with she divorced with three kids. We stuck over the border in New York. My mother said when they asked you junior and Junior highway you were born, saying, oh, no, what do you look like? A fucking mor I don't know where the fuck I'm born? You quit.

00:04:44
Speaker 1: Already was the middle child.

00:04:45
Speaker 3: So I was the one that worked harder for everything. I avercat because I had an oldest sister who was beautiful, and my brother, who was the baby. I was a schmuck in the middle, right, So I was always working harder. But I decided, and I learned it early, and it was it was actually a blessing, you know. I said, you know, I better learn how to take care of myself. No one's going to open the fucking doors for me anyone. I gotta do it.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: Al Ruddy way, we all right away meant going to Brooklyn Tech, then bouncing around working at a gas station, studying architecture at USC, and winding up with a job as a computer programmer at the Rand Corporation think tank in Santa Monica. While he's working at Rand, Ruddy meets an unemployed actor named Bernie Fine.

00:05:25
Speaker 3: So I tell Bernie, why don't I'm not Bernie? What the fuck they have they're not to write at a half hour show it's a one liner. It's the simplest format that the one act could break the high point and he resolve in an act too.

00:05:40
Speaker 1: So on the side, the two of them start to write a television pilot, a comedy set in a prison, not just any prison, a Nazi prisoner of war camp, and the comic leads are the head of the prison, Colonel Klink, and a prison guard, Sergeant Schultz, whose signature line is I know nothing, I see nothing, I hear nothing. Somehow, Ruddy gets the script to an agent named Mike Levy, and Levy gets them a pitch meeting with CBS. This was the mid nine teen sixties when CBS was known as a Tiffany Network. It was the most prestigious television broadcaster in the world, intellectual high class. Its president was the legendary William Paley.

00:06:22
Speaker 3: I'm sitting opposite William S. Paley, who fucking owns CBS. The whole room, CBS guys and me and Mike is that Mike discussed a show called Hogan's Heroes, Bill Pelley's across the table, and Mikey says, I find the idea of Nazis doing comedies. Those were totally reprehensible.

00:06:44
Speaker 1: Mike Leavy, the agent looks over at Ruddy.

00:06:46
Speaker 3: You tell him he blown away. Don't know what to say is oh, I'll have him tell you about it. He points to me. I never saw a fucking thing, right, I acted out the whole show idiotic. I'm jumping up and down. I know nothing but machine guns, and Bill Paley starts like he can't stop laughing. I swear to cross before I know it, the Paul romas clapping on the other side, So he got through and I thought it was Bill Pelly stands up. He says, I don't know if I can ever buy that show, but I said, I just want to commend you that that's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

00:07:25
Speaker 1: Hogan's Heroes runs for six seasons from nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy one. The show wins two Emmys, has a huge following, and makes CBS a fortune.

00:07:35
Speaker 3: Oh, I say nothing. I was not here. I did not even get up this morning.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: Now, since our topic is hutzba, let us break this down. A computer programmer named al Ruddy, who is Jewish, has his agent, who is Jewish, set up a meeting with Bill Paley, who is Jewish about a comedy starring two Nazis, and Paley says, I'm Jewish, I'm not interested. But then Ruddy, who is never who sold a screenplay before in his life, convinces him it's actually a great idea. And by the way, the lead Nazi in Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Klink, is played by Werner Klemperer, Jewish whose family fled Nazi Germany in nineteen thirty five, and the prison guard, Sergeant Schultz is played by John Banner, Jewish who fled Europe in nineteen thirty nine. The word hutzpa refers to audacity. This is audacious. Ruddy would go on to write The Longest Yard, starring Burt Reynolds, and Walker Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris. He was one of the producers on the two thousand and four film Million Dollar Baby, which won a handful of oscars. I could go on and now, sitting with him in his kitchen as he wheeled his wheelchair back and forth to emphasize the highlight of each of his stories, I realized what Al Ruddy is. He is hutzpa. But this is a very specific kind of hutzpa.

00:09:08
Speaker 3: Right.

00:09:09
Speaker 1: Remember this show is being made only twenty years after the Nazis stopped terrorizing Europe.

00:09:15
Speaker 3: This camp clink, this camp is a black page in the glorious history.

00:09:20
Speaker 4: Is a sad right, which I shall report when I get back to Berlin.

00:09:26
Speaker 1: Paley admired Ruddy for the way he behaves. He rewarded him. If you and Bernie Fine were not Jewish, could you have gotten away with it?

00:09:38
Speaker 3: Didn't that to It didn't even enter my mind in those says yeah, no, and no one asks. No one knew that, no one, There was never an issue.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: It's funny Ruddy didn't brazenly set out to violate social norms. It didn't occur to him that there was a social norm to violate. In America. This is what is meant by hutzba, but not in Israel. Houts ba is a whole different matter.

00:10:04
Speaker 2: Hutzpa.

00:10:05
Speaker 1: Hootspa.

00:10:06
Speaker 2: Oh, you also don't say hutzpa like with this sort of curl to it, like a cute kind of hootspa. It's hot spot, you say, like it's a hot spot, like what a what an insult? It's it's edgy and bitter. It's not like she's got so much hootspot. That's a totally different word. It has the connotation I would say is like it's a hot spot, like someone who's someone who has no care about anyone else's life or feelings, or like if your child is rude to you. If I say to Benjamin it's it's this is like as low as it gets. He actually wants like teared up when I said that, I could see his face like shocked. Yeah, he knows what it means, like no manners or no or no regard to someone else's feelings or condition. That would be the spa.

00:11:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, one word, two very different meanings, and we've been conflating the two. I'll get into the consequences when we come back. Let's do a second Hutzpa k study involving an exact contemporary of Al Ruddies.

00:11:29
Speaker 5: I'm not sure how to introduce my next guest. He's a businessman with leads the most colorful life. His name has been in the paper, is a great deal lately, and I just met him backstage, but I'm anxious to meet him further. We welcome, please, mister Joseph COLUMBOO.

00:11:46
Speaker 1: In the late nineteen sixties, and early nineteen seventies, Colombo began making the rounds of talk shows and news programs in New York City. Invariably, the interview would begin with the question of what Joseph Columbo did for a living, and invariably his answer would be the same. Here he is on the Dick Cavit Show in April of nineteen seventy one, explain.

00:12:08
Speaker 5: What you do for a living, as if I had never met you.

00:12:10
Speaker 6: Well, I'm a real estate salesman, and I own a piece of a funeral home, and and that wasn't meant to be now, funny, Vick.

00:12:23
Speaker 1: You may have noticed, by the way, there's a lot of Dick Caviot in this season of Provision is History. I love Dick Cabot.

00:12:29
Speaker 6: And anything I can do to iron a living, honestly and sincerely, I hope so cause and an a florist, and I own a piece of a cut room in New York that we cut material for dresses.

00:12:42
Speaker 3: Ah.

00:12:43
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a cut room. And with all these things put together, I iron eleven. Yeah, and I worked very hard at it, very honest and sincely.

00:12:53
Speaker 1: Colombo's media tour was to promote an organization he had started called the Italian American Civil Rights League.

00:12:59
Speaker 6: Well, we believe that we are escape goats. We have been labeled and stigmatized, and I maintain and I'll keep saying that it's each and every Italian American throu the United States that there is a conspiracy against.

00:13:13
Speaker 1: I asked the writer Nick Peleggie about him. Maybe you remember Pelgi from our fourth of July episode earlier this season, and what was he like?

00:13:22
Speaker 7: From everything I hear and I've seen him speak on occasion and live in rooms with him, he was as mild and calm and relaxed as you can imagine. He was like a dry good salesman.

00:13:37
Speaker 1: Pledge grew up with Colombo in benson Hurst, Brooklyn.

00:13:40
Speaker 7: He came up with this idea of the Italian American Civil Rights League. There are prebus was that Italians were being stigmatized by the mafia, that there was really no such thing as the mafia, but the media was going after Italian Americans and denying us our right place in the world, and we would be prejudiced against getting good jobs or because the New York Times couldn't stop writing the word mafia.

00:14:06
Speaker 1: Now, what was Joe Colombo's real job. Aside from running a funeral home and a cut shop and selling real estate, he was a big time mafia don the Profaci family. Old man Giuseppe Prafacci dies in nineteen sixty two. Colombo takes over the organization. American Jews had The Anti Defamation League formed in nineteen thirteen to combat the long history of antisemitism around the world. African Americans start the NAACP in nineteen oh nine because black people were being openly and ruthlessly deny their civil rights. The Italian American Civil Rights League was started by a mobster upset that the media was calling him a mobster. In April of nineteen seventy, Columbo and a group of his associates started picketing the Manhattan headquarters of the FBI. That protest eventually grows to five thousand people. They come up with a logo in evoking Christopher Columbus, the greatest Italian immigrant of them all. By the summer of nineteen seventy they have forty five thousand dues paying members. They throw themselves a big benefit concert in Madison Square Garden, starring, of course, Frank Sinatra. They go after Alka Seltzer for their most famous TV commercial, in which an Italian man, overseen by his doting wife, eats one too many spicy meatballs.

00:15:36
Speaker 7: Sometimes you eat more than you should and when it's spicy.

00:15:39
Speaker 5: Besides, Mamma Mia, do you need alca seltzer as.

00:15:43
Speaker 1: Italians eating meatballs, according to Joe Colombo, perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Italians.

00:15:50
Speaker 3: Mom of me, that's a spicy meat board.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: Here's my favorite story involving Joe Colombo. In the late nineteen sixties, Johnny Carson was the king of late night TV and one of the most famous television personalities in the country. According to his former attorney Bushkin, Carson was out drinking one night at Jilly's, a bar in Manhattan run by a close friend of Frank Sinatra's Jilly Rizzo. This is Bushkin telling the story on the Artie Lang Show a few years ago.

00:16:21
Speaker 8: It was on I think fifty second and eighth, a famous watering hole, and Johnny was in there one night with McMahon.

00:16:28
Speaker 1: Johnny being Johnny Carson, McMahon being his sidekick, Ed McMahon.

00:16:33
Speaker 8: And they try to pick up the wrong girls happened to be the wife and sister of a well known mafioso type of character.

00:16:44
Speaker 3: Who was not sensitive about stuff, like.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Not happy, irritated, you might say. Carson ends up being thrown down the stairs at Jilly's. He's so banged up there's no way he can go on television. Then he learns that the mobster in question has put out a contract on his life.

00:17:01
Speaker 8: What happened was they went looking for Johnny. Johnny holed up in the apartment at U N Plaza.

00:17:08
Speaker 1: He's hiding out. He takes the week off work. He's petrified. So what happens Joe Colombo makes a deal with Carson's network, NBC.

00:17:18
Speaker 8: The Columbus Day Parade was about to come up. It was like three weeks away and no network who would agree to cover it then, because they knew it was the five families of New York that were sponsoring this parade to make the Italian Americans look, you know. So Carson's hiding out and a deal was struck. If NBC covers the parade, they let Carson go. So that year, NBC is the only network that covered the parade.

00:17:46
Speaker 3: Carson gets.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: Oh, and what happens the following year, nineteen seventy one, when Joe Columbo stages the second, even more elaborate Columbus Day event, intended to show the world that the Italian American community of New York is peaceful and law abiding. Someone shoots him.

00:18:05
Speaker 3: That's right.

00:18:06
Speaker 7: They had the first one a Columbus Circle. In the second one, he shot Joe Colombo. I mean, it's just insane.

00:18:11
Speaker 1: But you couldn't make this up, like oh at the grants too.

00:18:16
Speaker 7: They could have done at any location in the city besides Columbus Circle.

00:18:22
Speaker 3: But in the middle of a rally.

00:18:24
Speaker 1: Of a rally intended to whitewash the Italian American community, somebody offs the guy trying to whitewash that. What I mean is this is hootsba all over the place. But it's not Al Ruddy's kind of hoods. But is it Having a Jewish actor play a Nazi prison guard who runs around saying in the middle of the Holocaust, I know nothing, I hear nothing, I see nothing in a primetime television sitcom is well, it's kind of amazing. But Joe Colombo, mob boss starting the Italian American Civil Rights League, this is hutsba on a whole other level. For goodness sake, At the time he was shot, Colombo was under federal indictment on charges of controlling a ten million dollar a year gambling syndicate. This is not audacity, This is shamelessness, the other kind of hutzba hutzpah. In the Book of Genesis, there is a famous passage where the prophet Abraham speaks to God about the moral outrages in Sodom and Gomorrah. God wants to destroy both cities, but Abraham says, wait, what if there are fifty righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah? Will you really sweep those cities away and not spare them for the sake of those fifty righteous people. So the Lord says, okay, if you can find fifty righteous men, I will spare the cities. Abraham then says, what if there are only forty five righteous men? You wouldn't want to kill forty five perfectly innocent men for the sake of five at the margin, and God says, you're right, let's sake it forty five, to which Abraham responds, why not thirty? I mean same logic. God says, okay, they keep going. In the end, Abraham gets him down to ten. Abraham is being very Israeli. Here, Israel is what is called a low power distance culture, meaning that it's a place where there is very little respect for hierarchy or formality in social interaction. France is the opposite kind of place, a high power distance culture. Nobody just calls up God directly in France. In France, Abraham would have had to file an application with the Department of Divine Communication, wait three months for an appointment, then present some kind of formal legal writ on behalf of the righteous of Gomorrah. Not in Israel. Here's another example of low power distance at work in Israel. It's the word new n you. New is what linguists call a reactive token, word used in conversation by the party that's doing the listening. Uh huh is a reactive token, so is really? The point of a reactive token is to signal involvement without claiming the floor from the speaker. I understand, I'm interested, keep going. But new is an unusual reactive token because it's not neutral. It's not I'm listening. It means hurry up, get to the point. New new now is new polite in virtually all cultures in the world. Of course, the answer would be No. New is not some gentle conversational nudge. It's a hijacking. The listener is interrupting the speaker in order to control the pace of the narrative. But in Israel this is not necessarily true. The Israeli linguist Isle Maschler has written extensively on new. She says quote. By exhibiting their impatience with the movement towards the climax of a story, to the point of taking the liberty of controlling the flow of another's discourse, hearers can show maximal involvement in the narrative, meaning we in Israel have no need to beat around the bush with neutral reactive tokens. We're a tiny country with zero power distance. What happens tell me I can't wait any longer. In Abraham's argument with God, Abraham talks God down very methodically, fifty righteous men to forty five to forty to thirty to twenty, and then ten, and surely, right around the forty mark, when it would have been obvious to any omniscient entity where Abraham was going. God must have interrupted. No, I love you, Abraham, you know that there is no need to drag.

00:22:54
Speaker 3: This out.

00:22:58
Speaker 1: My friend Milly says that since coming to America, she has struggled with the transition to a land of excessive social nicety, like this past winter when she was dealing with her children's school.

00:23:09
Speaker 2: If I say, for example, you know, can we have less snow days? Like even if there's a snow day, like, can't you just leave the school open? I'm just asking. My husband says, that's hot spot, Like you don't think about what their point of view is. You don't think about what the teachers have to do to get to school, you don't think about their safety, you don't think about the other kids. I'm not true, but I just want to know the like why can't I just ask the question?

00:23:32
Speaker 1: So that's you know, Yes, Let's say you were in Israel and the same scenario. I mean, I realize it's not snow days in Israel. But suppose you're making the same request at the school and I am the principal of the school and you're asked, I would like you to ask me, as an ISRAELI ask me why the school can't stay over more?

00:23:51
Speaker 2: Say excuse me, you know my kids at home, I don't have the time to take care of them. They need to be inside the school. You need to keep the school open so I can leave my kids there. And everybody else agrees with me. You want me to ask, I'm going to get twenty people who agree with me. Do you want to This would be like not and this would be very nice, by the way.

00:24:11
Speaker 1: And the principle in Israel would respond her.

00:24:17
Speaker 2: Excuse me, I'm not working for you. I'm running a school. I have a long way to come from home. Driving in the snow is not easy, so please. And also there's also insurance and all things that you don't think about, So please, you know what, call me later after I put my own kids down, and we'll talk on the phone. Okay, this would be the conversation. She wouldn't hate me. She would just like continue arguing with me, and then she'll tell me to shut up. But you wouldn't like here. They don't even like answer my email.

00:24:50
Speaker 1: It's so embarrassing. So we have two very different scenarios here, HOOTSPA. That's already convincing Bill Pelly to green light Hogan's heroes, and Israeli would look at that and say, already's just being direct. So what But Joe Colombo starting the Italian American Civil Rights League. That is not Abraham arguing with God to save the righteous of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is not new. That is not why can't the schools stay open on a snow day? That is an uffront. It's not the I do something and i'm you know, a dog has no who's ba right, a dog that's good?

00:25:33
Speaker 2: That was not bad, getting very close, very close.

00:25:36
Speaker 1: But the thing that's distinctive about this is the person who is completely unencumbered by shame exactly.

00:25:43
Speaker 2: Well, shame has nothing to do with it. They don't. They're so beyond shame. They don't even see they don't even see you to feel shame. It's their point of view, without any regard to anyone.

00:25:53
Speaker 1: Else's life, without regard to anyone else's life. Remember that, not long after I spoke with Milli Avatol, there was a hearing in front of three federal judges at a courthouse in San Francisco. It was about the treatment of migrant children detained at the border. At issue was whether the conditions under which the children were being held violated a previous legal commitment made by the government to provide safe and sanitary conditions in detention centers. The Department of Justice sent an attorney, Sarah Fabian, to make the case that the government was in compliance with the safe and sanitary standard. Her principal argument was that the term safe and sanitary didn't have an explicit definition.

00:26:50
Speaker 4: And that's any number of things might fall under those categories.

00:26:54
Speaker 1: That's Fabian, And this is one of the judges, Marcia Burzon.

00:26:58
Speaker 9: Yes, but sleep surely does. Right. You can't be safe and sanitary or safe as a human being if you can't sleep well. An you sent in your breeze, it doesn't say anything about sleeping, so therefore there's nothing in here about being able to sleep.

00:27:15
Speaker 1: The children, it turned out, didn't have beds or blankets or in some cases even room to lie down. So Burzon wonders, how is that not a violation of the agreement to provide decent living conditions?

00:27:28
Speaker 4: And Fabian answers, I think the concern there is, your honor. The court finding that sleep, for example, falls under is relevant to a finding of no safe and sanitary conditions. It is one thing, but the ultimate conclusion is safe and sanitary is a singular category in the agreement.

00:27:46
Speaker 1: You probably need to be a lawyer to understand what Fabian is saying. And I'm not a lawyer, so I'm going to have to guess. The government's argument goes like this sleep is one thing safe and sanitary or another. If the agreement had meant for sleep to fall under the requirement of safe and sanitary, it would have said so. Then Judge William Fletcher chimes in, maybe sleep wasn't explicitly part of the safe and sanitary definition because it's too obvious.

00:28:14
Speaker 10: I mean, it may be that they don't get super thread counts Egyptian linens. I get that, but the testimony that the district judge believed was it's really cold. In fact, it gets colder when we complain about is being cold. We're sports to sleep crowded with the lights on all night long, and all you to put us on is the concrete floor with an aluminum Lincoln. I mean, no one would argue that this is secure and sanitary.

00:28:44
Speaker 4: Yer, And I think what I'm arguing is that the way that the district cart reached the conclusion was to say these these specific items, and I think I will acknowledge. I think sleep is the more difficult end of what I'm arguing.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: Sleep is the more difficult end of what I'm arguing.

00:29:04
Speaker 10: You think cold all night long, lights on all night, now sleep on the concrete, and you got an aluminum foil blanket. I think I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: From sleeping blankets. The discussion moved on to toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap.

00:29:22
Speaker 10: It wasn't you know, a high class milled soap. It was soap, and that sounds all that's part of safe and sanitary?

00:29:30
Speaker 3: Are are you disagreeing with that?

00:29:33
Speaker 4: I'm What I'm disagreeing with is that the court ultimately concluded these things.

00:29:38
Speaker 1: Yes, she was disagreeing with that. All of this went on for some time. I would encourage you to listen to the full hearing for yourself, since if you are an American, it was your government, paid for by your tax dollars, that was doing the arguing, and ask yourself how did it come to this? There are a thousand answers, obviously, but maybe one of them is it. Over the years, our moral vocabulary has become impoverished, which is a problem because you cannot make sense of things that you cannot describe, and lumping together audacity and shamelessness creates a loophole large enough to drive a tank through. One last question, what happens when Hutsba and huts Bah go head to head when they meet each other in the field of battle? Well, it happened famously in nineteen seventy. Already at that point was working at Paramount Pictures. That was the era when Robert Evans was the head of production at Paramount, and the studio was on maybe the greatest run of any studio ever, Love Story, Three Days of the Condor, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, on and on. Already, in typical Alreaddy fashion, had just talked himself into a big job there as a producer a reporter to do a piece on him. He asked, Ruddy, after you did Hogan's Heroes, what did you do next?

00:31:16
Speaker 3: Oh? No, that's all I did. That's it. He puts the pedal. Can I go off the rekler for a second with you? He said, how the fuck did you get in here? I know guys can't get in that gate who been here twenty years? Kick in? I said, listen, neither were off the rugged. I had no idea what the fector. I've never developed a screenplay. I did one half hour show. Okay, I'm the dumbest guy on this lot at the moment. I won't be for long, but just don't write in the art of me.

00:31:45
Speaker 1: Still with the Hootspa. Around this time, Paramount, almost by accident, got the film rights to a novel by a writer named Mario Puzo. The novel was The Godfather. No One had high hopes for the movie since the mobster genre scene played out, so they gave it to the new guy ready to produce, in hopes he could bring it in on time and underby. Almost immediately, trouble began with the Godfather project, trouble from Joe Colombo because Colombo was not at all happy about the movie. They were death threats, union problems, shady guys followed Ruddy around the window of his car was smashed. The corporate headquarters of the company that owned Paramount had to be evacuated twice because of bomb threats, and then the Italian American Civil Rights League called up Ruddy's boss, Robert Evans.

00:32:42
Speaker 3: The Lee called Bob Evans up and threatened him, we didn't want that movie. He made if that movie made, someone's gonna get height. So Bob called me, will you go see the sky to your columb These people are crazy.

00:32:55
Speaker 1: Ruddy calls up the Godfather's author Mario Puzzo, says, come with me to meet Joe Colombo.

00:33:01
Speaker 3: He said, out, are you crazy? You don't understand I write about those people. I never want to be involved, and you'd be very careful, he evolved, because these are not people you can tour with. The bullshit you're gonna get in a lot of trouble. So to answer your question, I am not like I'm gonna go up tell him you don't even know me.

00:33:19
Speaker 1: So Ruddy says, okay, I'll do it myself. He goes to the offices of the Italian American Civil Rights League, meets up with Colombo and his guys Brooklyn.

00:33:28
Speaker 3: To Brooklyn, looks like half of them are on parole, you know, with the lump under of the jacket.

00:33:32
Speaker 1: They tell him they don't want the movie made. It's bad for the Italians. Ruddy responds, you know what, I'll let you read the script. Come to the Paramount office in New York. Colombo shows up with three henchmen. Ruddy hands in the script. It's one hundred and fifty five pages long.

00:33:50
Speaker 3: He puts on thervent flank. My classes goes the page. When his sister looks at for about five minutes, what does this mean? Fade in as well. The screen's black and event I said, I raise, there's no way the guy's going to page Oh, I can't read with these glasses.

00:34:08
Speaker 1: I'm mafia boss is not going to work his way through one hundred and fifty five page script. The whole point of being a mafia boss is that you don't have to read things that are one hundred and fifty five pages. Mafia bossays, do not have to do the fine print, the letter of the law, or chapter and verse. Those are for the people who have chosen not to live a life of crime. Colombo hands the script to one of his henchmen, a guy named Caesar. But Caesar's not going to read it either, is he. Caesar's not in the business of giving notes. Caesar's muscle.

00:34:41
Speaker 3: Here's why me, but my script or over my desk. Finally, Jill gets pissed Offiqus slester it on my desk? Do we like this guy? Yeah? I like her? That's just a really fuck, it's print for So, I said, well, what do you what do you want? Where do you live? He said, would you take the word mafia out of the movie.

00:35:04
Speaker 1: What Colombo doesn't realize because he hasn't read the script, is it the word mafia is barely in the script. It only appears once.

00:35:12
Speaker 3: So I crossed the word mafia. I said, Joe, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna take this out of the movie. He didn't know how many times it was ill is he to promise? Shook his hand. I made a deal that nobody could have made. No one read this way plan.

00:35:27
Speaker 1: From that moment on, all trouble with the movie ceased. It's why The Godfather got made. Hoots Ba is a bunch of violent mobsters threatening to shut down a movie because it depicts them as violent mobsters. HUTSBA is tricking them because they're too lazy to read the script.

00:35:45
Speaker 2: It's so difficult, Malcolm, I'd bite my tongue all the time.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: It's not easy. It's not easy for you to be over here in this politeness.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: I'm basically living ten percent of my personality because I have to be i'man.

00:36:01
Speaker 1: Mealy wants to be direct she's not a bully, and I wonder can we even tell the difference anymore?

00:36:09
Speaker 3: It's not good.

00:36:10
Speaker 2: It's not good. It's it's a very thick street. I'm a desert person having to deal with yah snow.

00:36:20
Speaker 1: Revisionous History is produced by Mela Bell and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Gara. Special thanks to Carl Migliori, heater Feine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Knigg and Jacob Weisberg. Revisious History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Godlaw, so wait say again me me Melli.

00:37:04
Speaker 2: It's a flat elka. If the tongue is flat, the snow all l.

00:37:12
Speaker 3: MILLI.

00:37:13
Speaker 2: So that's melli and it's not avial. It's a vital vital. There's the other difference is also the ta. It doesn't have a sort of air to it, so it's not it's.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: Ah.

00:37:28
Speaker 2: So do you hear the difference or is it just me