Sometimes having the person-- one thing to
do is it never get
discouraged if you don't get the person
who is the center of the story.
Sometimes that's the last person you want.
I mean "Frank Sinatra has a
cold," is a great example of that, something
we all study and teach in journalism.
But
if Frank Sinatra had actually shown up in
that story and actually had said, you
know, normal Frank Sinatra things, it wouldn't
be as great a story.
You know
the tension of not having him there and uh...
I have a friend named John Alter who wrote
a book is gonna second one coming out about
Barack Obama
and uh... he wrote about his first year in
office, and he said to me we were
talking about it, and he said he got interviews
with all the very high level White House
people and with the president,
and he said, "You know I did these interviews
with
Obama."
I knew I had to do them because I'd go on
these talk shows to promote the
book and they'd say, "How many interviews
did you have with the president," and he'd
have to say seven or four, and that's how
he would be judged.
It he said, "None,"
they'd think, "Now this is a second-rate book,"
when in fact
he's...I happen to personally a big obama
fan, so I don't say this is
in a negative way, but when you talk to the
subject
things that seem like conflicts in
and fiery meetings between people
he had a way of putting a spin on them in
explaining them and seeing them
and sort of making up, putting everything
into that middle zone in the middle
distance;;"That wasn't so bad, it wasn't so
dramatic, that wasn't so this or wasn't so
that" so he kind of
deflated the story
and took the air out of it.
Years ago I did a story about Rodney Dangerfield,
who
wouldn't talk to me.
It was kind of a mini "Frank Sinatra has a
cold" situation and
I wound up interviewing so many different
people around him out of fear
of not being able to pull off the story, that
I got a much better story than if
Rodney Dangerfield...The worst thing for me
would have been if he would have
finally changed his mind at the end it sort
of weighed in and agreed to be
talked to because then he would have just
made it
a more of an average, normal piece, and I
think it was a better pieces than that and
I often
think that
my personal opinion is that uh...
Gay Talese left Frank Sinatra out of the
piece
didn't, because he's obviously go so much
access to Frank Sinatra and his
people that he left him out of the piece on
purpose cause he saw it would
be a better piece, a more
tense and dramatic piece uh...
without Frank Sinatra.
