Q: What do you like to watch on TV?
A: To be honest, my two favorite shows are Mannix — which, alas, is no longer except in reruns — and the Johnny Carson Show. I just think he's terrific. It was such a common currency among those in the general category of intellectuals to like the Dick Cavett Show and not the Johnny Carson Show. And that is so much the party line that it takes awhile to dawn on you that Carson is really extremely funny. Dick Cavett, he has a lot of talent, but when it comes to wit, and even in handling the language, he's simply not in Carson's league.
There are a whole bunch of shows, I must say, in which I simply don't know who these people are. A lot of general-circulation magazines today are really television magazines. People magazine is a television magazine. Look at these people. Who are they? Who are Mindy and Mork? I mean, I've never seen the show. And yet, they're obviously extremely well-known.
These magazines now, in an era in which general circulation magazines are in trouble, have hit upon this idea: all these people that are watching television will have the thrill of recognition if we write about the people they've seen on television. So Sports Illustrated will tend to give you a kind of a rehash of the game of the week or the fight that everyone saw on television. It's kind of funny. At first, television was always cannibalizing the printed word for material, and now it's suddenly turning around.
Q: Do you have any other major projects coming up?
A: For years I've been telling myself that I was going to try a Vanity Fair type of novel about New York, and I think I should probably try to make myself tackle that next. I've debated whether to make it fiction or nonfiction. My fiction writing has been confined to one short story that I did for Esquire. And I was surprised that it was harder than I thought to write fiction. I thought that I could sit down on a Sunday afternoon and knock out a short story, because you could make things up.
Another thing I'd like to try is a movie script. I've done one — a series of vignettes about life in Los Angeles. … But many talented writers just go bananas in trying to write for the movies. Because they're not in charge of what they're doing. All that a good director can do is keep from ruining the script. He cannot turn a bad script into a good movie. He can turn a good script into a bad movie. And often, I think, it happens, because the director is given a power that he simply should not have.
Q: Do you feel a lot of pressure on yourself when you sit down at the typewriter, as being one of the trend-setters in American writing today?
A: It was terrible after my first book came out, and I suddenly got a lot of publicity I never dreamed I'd get. I was still working with the Herald Tribune as a general assignment reporter at the city desk. And I suddenly was made aware by publicity that there was something called the Tom Wolfe style. And this can really do terrible things to you. I wrote a whole series of just dreadful article because the first phase I went through was: "Well, I'll be damned. I have the Tom Wolfe style, I guess I'd better use it." And so I started writing these self-parodies. The second phase was: "I've got to stop this. It's self-destructive." And I would write something and a bell would go off and I'd say, "That's Tom Wolfe style. Now is that good the way I've used it there, or it is bad the way I've used it?" And this became very troublesome.
When I did this book, The Right Stuff, I decided I really was going to try to tailor my language to the mental atmosphere of pilots, and somehow make my tone what I have elsewhere called the downstage voice. You're writing in the third person about other people, but your own writing style takes on their tone. So I think the result is a book that seems different in style, and is sort of an experiment for me.