Movie-Merv Griffen's 40 Most Interesting People

Ok ok...technically these three discs are not a movie, but interviews taken over the decades by Merv Griffin. The Merv Griffin Show was a standard in our house, mostly because my grandmother LOVED Merv. If we had to watch something else, moon walk, Nixon resignation, minor things like that instead of Merv, she would be noticeably upset. And anyone who came on that was Italian...Whoa! It was like pasta was reinvented! "She's Italian you know?" she would say.

Anyway, I digress. The three discs are organized by genre of the interviewee. Disc 1 mainly dramatic actors with a couple of comedic actors. Disc 2 comedians and disc 3 political figures. Now I would not say all of these are the most interesting people over several decades. But some of the interview were quite good. The disc that least impressed me was the first one. Some of these actors seemed to think that they were overly important, like Richard Burton. But it was worth it to see a young Tom Cruise (right after Risky Business) and a very young Tom Hanks.

Disc 2 was better and funny. Don Rickles is still one of the funniest comedians around, and this was when he was in his prime. Standup from young Jerry Seinfeld and
young George Carlin.

But the third disc was a prize. An interview with the newly retire Walter Cronkite was amazing. One thing Cronkite said that stuck with me. He thought all anchormen should start in the newspaper industry. His reasoning was that the TV side has to shrink down all that a full story would say into less than a minute. But he thought that the TV side should know what would have been in paragraph 30 of a story in the paper, to get that one paragraph right that TV would put out. Interviews with martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are all great. The interview with Reagan was very interesting. I disagree with so many of his political stances, but you could not help liking the guy. I mean, it was really hard to hate that man.

On another tangent, I just had heard a story about Reagan on NPR. After he was shot, he felt that god has saved his life for a reason. And he thought that reason was to start bringing peace to the world, and that was when he started reaching out to Gorbachev in the USSR. And Reagan touches very briefly on that in the Griffin interview.

All in all I felt like these were fun to watch, if for no other reason than to see how things have changed in the world---or stayed the same.