Revisionist History - Chutzpah vs. Chutzpah

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

You thought that there was only one kind of chutzpah. Wrong. There’s two. Revisionist History tells the story of the Mafia’s showdown with a legendary Hollywood producer, in a battle of competing chutzpahs. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 an Israeli would say it. Milia Vital. And say, my name is Milia Vital in say it. Miliya Vital. And say, my name is Miliya Vital in Hebrew. Shmi Miliya Vital. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

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. 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 chutzpah. I decided I would like to examine the phenomenon of chutzpah.

Since Millie is my neighbor and an Israeli, she has agreed to help. Let's teach Goetia Malcolm how to say this word appropriately. First of all, are we doing that kind of thing in the throat that so many... The guttural... The ch. Do I have to master the ch? It's a little soft. Ch. 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. It's really deeper. So a softer, not a H, but a H. Huzpa. Huzpa. No. H.

Okay, so the sound is right. It is deep. But the vowel is not it's Yeah, in Hebrew, there's only There's no diphthongs and there's no There's no book and book, right? There's only

So you understand what i'm talking to myself for me it's very clear because sadly i worked on it so hard but um okay so it's not yeah yeah just like it's not millie it's millie so it's uh-huh the t who not who who yes that's better It's chuh. Uh-huh. T's. It's the T. Chuh. Not who. Chuh. Yes, that's better math.

Chuh. It strikes me that there is a lot of chutzpah 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 chutzpah. There's actually two. The American version and the Israeli version. Chutzpah, I knew, but not this other one.

Chutzpah. Not bad, but it's not a paw. Yeah. It's pa. Pa. Pa. It's a vowel that doesn't exist, actually, in English. Chutzpah.

Chutzpah. All right. Now you've got to have the chutzpah to say chutzpah. You've got to say chutzpah. It's a vowel that doesn't exist, actually, in English. Now you've got to have the chutzpah to say chutzpah. You've got to say chutzpah. With a certain oomph, kind of. Yeah, you hit the second syllable. Chutzpah. Chutzpah. There's a lot of air coming out of the mouth when you say that.

Why? But in America, the accent accents on the first syllable. Yeah. Chutzpah. Chutzpah. Right. Chutzpah and chutzpah. And they are worlds apart. And maybe our chutzpah 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 90. He lives up in the canyons of Beverly Hills, one of those 1960s 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. I was born in Canada also. Now that I know everything about you, I was born in Montreal. I know, I saw that. Yeah, I went to Montreal and then my mother snuck over the border. She divorced with three kids. We snuck over the border in New York. My mother said, when they ask you in junior high where you were born, say you don't know. I said, what do you look like a fucking boy? I don't know where the fuck I'm born, you crazy. Al Ruddy was the middle child. So I was the one that worked harder for everything I ever got.

Because I had an older sister who was beautiful and my brother who was the baby. I was the schmuck in the middle, right? So I was always working harder. But I decided, and I learned it early on, and 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 anyway. I've got to do it the Al Ruddy way. The Al Ruddy way 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. So I tell Bernie, why don't we write something? He said, I'm not a writer. I said, Bernie, what the fuck do you have to write a half-hour show? It's a one-liner. It's the simplest format. The one act, you break the high point and you resolve it in act two.

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-1960s 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. I'm sitting opposite William S. Paley, who fucking owns CBS. The whole room, CBS guys,

and me and Mike. Mike and, let's discuss a show called Hogan's Heroes. Bill Pelley was across the table, and Mike, he says, I find the idea of Nazis doing comedy shows totally reprehensible. Mike Levy, the agent, looks over at Ruddy. You tell him.

He's blown away. He doesn't know what to say. He says, oh, I'll have him tell you about it. he points to me I've never sold a fucking thing right I acted out the whole show idiotic

I'm jumping up and down I know nothing with machine guns and Bill Paley starts laughing he can't stop laughing I swear to Christ before I know it

the whole room is laughing on the other side so he got through and I thought as I got up and Bill Paley stands up, he says, I don't know if I could ever buy that show. But I said, I just want to commend you.

That's one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Hogan's Heroes runs for six seasons. From 1965 to 1971, the show wins two Emmys, has a huge following, and makes CBS a fortune. Oh, I see nothing. I was not here. I did not even get up this morning. Now, since

our topic is chutzpah, 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 has never 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 1935, and the prison guard Sergeant Schultz is played by John Banner, Jewish, who fled Europe in 1939. The word chutzpah 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 2004 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 chutzpah. But this is a very specific kind of chutzpah, right? Remember, this show is being made only 20 years after the Nazis stopped terrorizing Europe.

This camp, Klink, this camp is a black page in the glorious history of the Third Reich, which I shall report when I get back to Berlin. Paley admired Ruddy for the way he behaves. He rewarded him. If you and Bernie Fein were not Jewish, could you have gotten away with it? It didn't even enter my mind in those days. Yeah. No one asked us. No one knew that. There was never an issue. It was 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 chutzpah. But not in Israel. Chutzpah is a whole different matter. Chutzpah. Chutzpah. So you also don't say chutzpah, like with a sort of curl to it, like a cute kind of chutzpah. It's chutzpah. It's sort of a... You say, like, ez chutzpah. Like, what an insult.

It's edgy and bitter. It's not like, she's got so much chutzpah. That's a totally different word. It has the connotation, I would say, is like, ez chutzpah. 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, this is like as low as it gets. He actually once like teared up when I said that.

I could see his face going like shocked. Yeah, he knows what it means. Like no manners or no regard to someone else's feelings or condition. That would be the chutzpah. The chutzpah. 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 chutzpah case study involving an exact contemporary of Al Ruddy's. I'm not sure how to introduce my next guest. He's a businessman who leads a most colorful life. His name has been in the papers a great deal lately. And I just met him backstage, but I'm anxious to meet him further. Will you welcome, please, Mr. Joseph Colombo. Thank you. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,

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 Cavett Show in April of 1971. Explain what you do for a living, as if I had never met you. Well, I'm a real estate salesman, and I own a piece of a funeral home, and that wasn't meant to be, Sus. Funny, Dick. You may have noticed, by the way, there's a lot of Dick Cavett in this season of Revisionist History. I love Dick Cavett. Anything I can do to earn a living, honestly and sincerely,

I help sell cars and in a florist, and I own a piece of a cut room in New York that we cut material for dresses. Ah, yeah. It's a cut room. And with all these things put together, I earn a living. Yeah. And I work very hard at it, very honest and sincerely at it. Colombo's media tour was to promote an organization he had started called the Italian-American Civil Rights League.

Well, we believe that we are the scapegoats. We have been labeled and stigmatized. And I maintain and I'll keep saying that it's each and every Italian-American through the United States that there is a conspiracy against. I asked the writer Nick Pelleggi about him. Maybe you remember Pelleggi from our 4th of July episode earlier this season. And what was he like? From everything I hear,

and I've seen him speak on occasion, and I've been in rooms with him, he was as mild and calm and relaxed as you can imagine. He was like a dry goods salesman. Pelleggi grew up with Colombo in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He came up with this idea of the Italian American Civil Rights League. Their premise 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, all because the New York Times couldn't stop writing the word mafia. 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 Profaci dies in 1962.

Colombo takes over the organization. American Jews had the Anti-Defamation League, formed in 1913 to combat the long history of anti-Semitism around the world. African Americans start the NAACP in 1909 because black people were being openly and ruthlessly denied 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 1970, Columbo and a group of his associates started picketing the Manhattan headquarters of the FBI.

That protest eventually grows to 5,000 people. They come up with a logo invoking Christopher Columbus, the greatest Italian immigrant of them all. By the summer of 1970, they have 45,000 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. Sometimes you eat more than you should, and when it's spicy besides, mamma mia, do you need Alka-Seltzer. Italians eating meatballs, according to Joe Colombo, perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Italians. Mamma mia, that's a spicy meatball. Here's my favorite story involving Joe Colombo. In the late 1960s, 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, Henry 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. It was on, I think, 52nd and 8th. Right. A famous watering hole. And Johnny was in there one night with McMahon. Johnny being Johnny Carson. McMahon being his sidekick, Ed McMahon. And they try to pick up the wrong girls. Happened to be the wife and sister of a well-known mafioso type of character. Who was not sensitive about stuff like that. Not happy. 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. What happened was they went looking for Johnny. Johnny holed up in the apartment at UN Plaza. 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. The Columbus Day Parade was about to come up. It was like three weeks away. Right. And no network 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'll let Carson go. So that year, NBC is the only network that covered the parade. Carson gets off. Oh, and what happens the following year, 1971, when Joe Colombo 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. That's right. They had the first one at Columbus Circle and the second one they shot Joe Colombo. I mean, it's just insane. But you couldn't make this up. Oh. At the rally? No, it could have been grants, too. They could have done it at any location in the city

besides Columbus Circle. I mean, it's... But in the middle of a... A rally. Of a rally intended to whitewash the Italian-American community, somebody offs the guy trying to whitewash the... What I mean is, this is chutzpah all over the place. But it... What I mean is, this is chutzpah

all over the place. But it's not Al Ruddy's kind of chutzpah, 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 chutzpah on a whole other level. For goodness sake, at the time he was shot, Colombo was under federal indictment on charges of controlling a $10 million-a-year gambling syndicate. This is not audacity.

This is shamelessness. The other kind of chutzpah. Chutzpah! 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 50 righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah? Will you really sweep those cities away and not spare them for the sake of those 50 righteous people? So the Lord says, Okay, if you can find 50 righteous men, I will spare the cities. Abraham then says, what if there were only 45 righteous men? You wouldn't want to kill 45 perfectly innocent men for the sake of five at the margin. And God says, you're right, let's make it 45. To which Abraham responds, why not 30?

I mean, same logic. God says, okay. They keep going. In the end, Abraham gets him down to 10. 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 nu. N-U. Nu is what linguists call a reactive token, meaning a word used in conversation by the party that's doing the listening. Aha 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 nu is an unusual reactive token because it's not neutral. It's not I'm listening. It means hurry up. Get to the

point. No, no. 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 Yael Mashler has written extensively on Nu. She says, quote, by exhibiting their impatience with 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. 50 righteous men, to 45, to 40, to 30, to 20, and then 10, and surely right around the 40 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 this out. My friend Millie 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.

Like 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 chutzpah. 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 like, true, but I just want to know the, like, why can't I just ask the question? So that's, you know, yes. Let's say you were in Israel and the same scenario I mean I realize there's no snow days in Israel but suppose you're making the same request of 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 open more say excuse me you know my my kids are 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 20 people who agree with me do you want it this is would be like not chutzpah at all and what this would be very nice by the way and what i just and the principal in israel would would respond how excuse me i'm not working for you i'm running a school yeah 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 she wouldn't, like, here they don't even, like, answer my email. It's so embarrassing. So, we have two very different scenarios here. Chutzpah, that's Al Ruddy convincing Bill Pelley to greenlight Hogan's heroes. An Israeli would look at that and say, Al Ruddy'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 affront. It's not the, I do something and I'm, you know, a dog has no chutzpah. Right. That's good. That was not bad. Malcolm, you're getting very close. Very close. But the thing that's distinctive about this is the person who is completely unencumbered by shame. Exactly. 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 else's life. Without regard to anyone else's life. Remember that. Not long after I spoke with Millie Avital, 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. And that's any number of things might fall under those categories. That's Fabian. And this is one of the judges, Marsha Berzon. Yes, but sleep surely does, right? You can't be safe and sanitary or safe as a human being if you can't sleep. And you said in your briefs it doesn't say anything about sleeping, so therefore there's nothing in here about being able to sleep. The children, it turned out, didn't have beds or blankets, or in some cases, even room to lie down.

So Berzon wonders, how is that not a violation of the agreement to provide decent living conditions? 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 is one thing. But the ultimate conclusion is safe and sanitary is a singular category in the agreement. 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 are 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.

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 it being cold. We're forced to sleep crowded with the lights on all night long, and all you do put us on is the concrete floor with an aluminum blanket. I mean, no one would argue that this is secure and sanitary. Your Honor, I think what I'm arguing is that the way that the district court reached the conclusion was to say these specific items. And I think, I will acknowledge, I think sleep is the more difficult end of what I'm arguing. Sleep is the more difficult end of what I'm arguing.

You think? Cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleep on the concrete and you get an aluminum foil blanket. I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary. From sleep in blankets, the discussion moved on to toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap. It wasn't, you know, high-class milled soap. It was soap, and that sounds like that's part of safe and sanitary.

Are you disagreeing with that? What I'm disagreeing with is that the court ultimately concluded these things... 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 we come to this? There are a thousand answers, obviously.

But maybe one of them is that 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 chutzpah and chutzpah go head-to-head, when they meet each other in the field of battle? Well, it happened. Famously. In 1970, Al Ruddy 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. Al Ruddy, in typical Al Ruddy fashion, had just talked himself into a big job there as a producer. A reporter comes to do a piece on him. He asked Ruddy, after you did Hogan's Heroes, what did you do next? No, no, that's all I did.

That's it. He puts it back. Can I go off the record for a second with you? He said, how the fuck did you get in here? I know guys kicking in that gate

who've been here 20 years. Kicking. I said, listen, now that we're off the record, I had no idea what the fuck I'm doing. I've never developed a screenplay. I did one half-hour show, okay? I'm the dumbest guy on the

slot at the moment. I won't be for long. But just don't write any art of it. Still with the chutzpah. 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 under budget. Almost immediately, trouble began with The Godfather project. Trouble from Joe Colombo. Because Colombo was not at all happy about the movie. There 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. The league called Bob Evans out and threatened him. We don't want that movie made. If that movie made, someone's going to get hurt. So Bob called me and said, well, you're going to see this guy to your corner. I mean, These guys, people are crazy. Ruddy calls up the Godfather's author, Mario Puzo. Says, come with me to meet Joe Colombo. He said, are you crazy? You don't understand. I write about those people.

I never want to be involved with them. And you be very careful getting involved. Because these are not people you can toy with and bullshit. You're going to get in a lot of trouble. So to answer your question, I am not going to go tell them they don't even know me. So Ruddy says, OK, I'll do it myself. He goes to the offices of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, meets up with Columbo and his guys, Brooklyn to Brooklyn. Looks like half of them are on parole, you know, with a lump under their jacket. 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. Columbo shows up with three henchmen. Ruddy hands him the script. It's 155 pages long. He puts on his red Franklin classes.

Goes to page 26. Looks at it for about five minutes. What does this mean, fade in? I said, well, the screen's black in the front. No, I said, I realize there's no way the guy's going to the page, too. He said, oh, I can't read with these glasses. A mafia boss is not going to work his way through a 155-page script. The whole point of being a mafia boss is that you don't have to read things that are 155 pages.

Mafia bosses 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. Columbo 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. Here's why me. Give it to me. They threw my script right over my desk. Finally, Joe gets pissed off. He grabs the script, slams it on my desk. Wait a second. Do we like this guy? Yeah, I like him. What else?

I said, I'm reading the fucking script for him. So I said, well, what do you want? Where do you live? He said, would you take the word mafia out of the movie?

What Columbo doesn't realize, because he hasn't read the script, is that the word mafia is barely in the script. It only appears once. So I crossed the word mafia. I said, Joe, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take this out of the script. It only appears once. So I crossed the word mafia. I said, Joe, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take this out of the movie.

He didn't know how many times it was out. He said, you promise? Shook his hand. I made a deal that nobody could have made because no one read this which plan. From that moment on, all trouble with the movie ceased. It's why The Godfather got made.

Chutzpah is a bunch of violent mobsters threatening to shut down a movie because it depicts them as violent mobsters. Chutzpah is tricking them because they're too lazy to read the script. It's so difficult, Malcolm.

I bite my tongue all the time. There's no... It's not easy. It's not easy for you to be over here in this land of faux politeness. I'm basically living 10% of my personality because I have to be. I mean, it's tough. Millie wants to be direct.

She's not a bully. And I wonder, can we even tell the difference anymore? It's not good. It's not good. It's extreme. I'm a desert person having to deal with snow. Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith

with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor,

Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. so wait say it again mili mili mili it's a flat l okay and then the tongue is flat there's no curl It's L L L L Mili So that's Mili And it's not Avital Yeah It's Avital

Avital Avital There's the other difference Is also the T Yeah Which doesn't have a Sort of air to it So it's not

T T It's T T Ah So Do you hear the difference Or is it just me?