Carol Burnett Discusses The People She Won't Work With | The Dick Cavett Show

carol we we talked a lot about a lot of things down there what yes what what you just said carol i said yeah oh yeah just you'll self-peddle the fact that you know my real middle name i assume since you blurted that out to the public years ago alva yeah uh we talked about a lot of things uh late at night down in florida out there with the surf pretty quickly quiet my husband and my child and the wrestling of the diaphanous material and it sounds like one of those dreadful novels it sure does but we talked about some people we can't stand in the business and i had a longer list than you did but there are a couple really dreadful people in our business uh and um i wonder if is there anyone you won't work with you don't need to name no i'm i'm sorry here didn't hear that uh but uh i just wondered if there are without forcing you to give us any hints or anything is there a performer or sort of performer that you just feel so you ain't gonna get me into specifics about mentioning no i don't want to particular person but there are types i will not work with if i find out that someone is that way uh i won't work with them uh someone who is totally unprofessional by that i mean temperamental who runs in slamming the door screaming who is late who has no uh feeling for the other performers um i guess you would call it totally unprofessional who feels that what they're doing is the most important thing in the world and all it is is show business and it's it's a hoot to be in show business and too many people take it seriously i used to and it's it's not worth it it is fun and it is let's pretend and sometimes we lose the feeling of that and we don't make it as much fun as it is it is all just fake and phony we start pretending when we're kids playing dolls going out and pretending hey let's pretend i'm so-and-so and you're this and and acting out movies it's it's child's play yeah and i guess because all the big monkey mucks and the suits have all the money then it becomes very serious but as a performer i think we should just plunge in and have fun and experiment have you ever been in a situation where a huge star was so rotten to underlings around them yes that you wished you could do something you couldn't i was one of the underlings so i couldn't do anything at that time had i had more uh guts at the time i would have walked off and gone back on unemployment yeah can you tell us the nature of it just uh being very rude to the extras on the set and yelling at them and making them feel uh yay tall yeah and there's no excuse for that that truly baffles me i can understand somebody screaming at the costume man or the makeup man or the director out of uh nerves or and they often apologize afterwards and so on but there are one or two swingish louts in our business who are well known for being uh cruel to people who are helpless uh and saying you call that a take or well you see we booked the amateur come on yeah forget it forget it let somebody else do it who can do well why why are we talking about people like this because they see we're wasting positive energy well forget it don't try to understand it that's their problem the things that amaze me i want explanation for it i wonder if you knew whether you think it's their own doubts about their talent probably maybe they were born sadistic but they might have been forget that they were poor once and but they see it in some perverted sense they they despise people who are what they once were they probably would be that way in any job it's just that uh if if you're a celebrity that does feed the ego so they are in a very dangerous profession for someone with that kind of a temperament and they do take it could be insecure i mean they could be a plumber or a shoe salesman or anything and still be a stinker uh but unfortunately when you're a stinker and you're in show business and you're say a star that's that's awful because it is a total ego feeding business but it can sure be taken away as quickly as you got it and i mean it's an old it's the old cliche you meet them going up and you meet them coming down that one is true the bigger they are the nicer they are is not true no not necessarily yeah we've sort of slid off both friendly fire and that uh clip that we saw and uh do you feel you're in transition stage now or that you have made a transition because it seems to me that you have successfully uh passed second base or third base toward home uh in the in the sense that you were established now i think as a major film actress because of uh i would just like to keep on trucking uh i don't think um see what happens is people you get categorized it's certainly natural for me to be categorized for 11 years on our show and four years on the gary moore show and doing musical comedy and so forth you are pigeonholed i never pigeonholed myself i just was lucky and got jobs and the jobs happened to be in comedy and in music i always felt that i was i wanted to be a well-rounded performer and i like the whole british attitude of doing everything people well now i'm in film i wouldn't deem to do television that's silly you should go where the roles are you know whether i've said this before they're not it's in somebody's living room it's where you can grow and learn and stretch and stick your neck out the unfortunate thing i think in american show business is that people aren't allowed to make mistakes too much that's right and and in which case then they get their necks chopped off so much by the critics that they play it safe and that's why so much uh entertainment is dull everybody's playing it safe and not trying yeah it protects what you've got and don't step on yeah because somebody's going to say what are they trying to do you know it's almost as if you go up steps and then you're on a tightrope and you have to be what i love about bob boy he sticks his neck out and he experiments and he tries and he keeps going and he's very daring and i love him gets on to the next thing and if people say don't you're silly to try that he goes ahead and he does it anyway and you do that too i'm sure there were plenty of people who said carol i know i can understand you want to do a serious part but i mean really there's a scene in which you're gonna have to find out your son has been killed in in this thing and uh you know people are gonna expect a pie to come off that you've been hit with pies that often you know what i mean uh that was so moving the way you did that scene you didn't seem to do very much at all um is there any way you can tell us how you were guiding yourself from within while when the man came to you and gave the news that you the son hadn't been killed in the war uh actually in that you the scene does it because you don't have to do a whole lot the scene is there and um to overdo something like that would be i think a mistake uh could you tell in any detail what you disliked about yourself when you in one film you said you didn't care for was it too broad for you did you i just didn't know what i was doing i had no idea and i was flailing about and uh just you know i just stunk stung yeah stink stank stunk but there must have been specific mental notes you made like next time i won't each time you learn more next time i won't stink as much it's that general next time i ain't going to stink as much as that i moved like this instead of like it's see if if you kind of have an idea of the character then then it happens uh within if if you are flailing about that's when you notice that the moves aren't right um when you're not sure you do too much i guess yeah less is more so we have less than 10 seconds yes and then but let's uh get a good night's sleep come back tomorrow night okay and do the same thing and we'll get into the really risque stuff that we've been saving we'll see you tomorrow night you

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

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Rating: 4.9422917 out of 5

Keywords: The Dick Cavett Show, Talk Show, Celebrities, Dick Cavett, United States, Chat Show, Interview, Carol Burnett, Actress, Carol Burnett full interview, Carol Burnett Interview, Dick Cavett Show Carol Burnett, Dick Cavett Show 1970s, The Carol Burnett Show, Mama's Family, Annie 1982, Horton Hears a Who!, Carol Burnett 1970s, Carol Burnett tv shows, Carol Burnett And Dick Cavett show, Carol Burnett movies, Carol Burnett Discusses The People She Won't Work With, Carol Burnett actor

Id: V49ZuOb_Hr0

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021