YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Itzkoff

lines on the record: 63
first: 2018-05-19
most recent: 2018-05-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You have dreams about your kid, you have dreams that maybe one day your kid will be up there going, I'd like to thank the Nobel Academy. Then you have this other dream where your kid's going, do you want fries with it?”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why don't you see they're going to do everything for him? Work with him, raise him, nourish him, spend time with him. And 16 years from now, he's going to do to me what I did to my father. He's going to walk right up to me, look me right in the eye and go, God, Dad, you're fucked. My father will be standing right behind him going, yeah. Regardless is mine, the curse has been broken. Your mother and I are young again. No, Papa! Next thing you know, you're talking to your kid like, you know, your mother and I were so poor. We had to smoke weeds. We were that poor. We didn't have MTV in the old days, son. We used to get stoned and watch the radio. Yeah.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Good morning, Vietnam has not happened yet. But by now, he is not using cocaine anymore, so he's pretty happy about that. And his son Zach was born about three years prior to this. So he is still in the glow of being a parent of a young child and all the ways that that has changed his life for the better.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you can. I mean, that's the only way I could do it. I will say I highly recommend if you want to write a book also have a child in the midst of that process because it will really force you to organize your time.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm about to find out. I thought when I finished the book on Patty Chaevsky that, you know, I didn't want to necessarily undertake something of even that scale for a while. And I was working on this, I don't know, nine or ten months later.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm wondering if they think, well, this is the paper of record, this is the biggest deal, or this is one of many sources, or I used to think it was one of many sources, but now post Trump, I pay more attention than ever to it.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's an interesting question. I don't entirely know. I mean, I'm sure it's an important source of information for them because they're often riffing on or making material out of news stories that The Times is helping to break.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you think the relationship with the times and the people you're writing about most often, not the robins, but the Seth Myers and prominent comedic figures who often, if they're talking to Times or talking to you, what's your sense of the way they view the Times?”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because it's just not even the same. I mean, I appreciate it if people take pleasure in these things. And that's, you know, it certainly helped me get through, you know, the process of writing this book. As a kind of a reward system or a pure distraction, it was helpful. But it isn't, it certainly isn't my job. It's nice to now have a kind of a pool of people that, you know, when I want to make people aware of an event or development with this book, or, hey, it's out today. That's nice that I can share that with them. But I don't in any way consider, I mean, the people who get up on a stage perform what they're doing is, I mean, there's a lot of bravery in that and a lot of risk in that. I'm not doing any of that.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And drain it of all kinds. Hilarious What was the Super Bowl kid? Even as Justin Timberlake Excellent one You spend a lot of time talking to comedians. It's one of your specialties, writing about them, talking to them from the New York Times. How much are you sort of thinking this is my form of what they do? No.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, the next it's like a two part joke, and the second part is what is it that they're looking at on their phone? And so it's pretty easy to go from that to think of, okay, now he must be looking at a Google page where he's looked up what is law. And so it takes, you know, I don't know, five to ten seconds to create that screen grab. You put them together in a tweet and good night.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not much more. Okay. Literally, you know, I mean, I will, if we're going to unpack this and drain it of all comedy, which is the best way to analyze an art form. So, you know, Giuliani happened to be at that Yankees game the other night. And, you know, so even as I'm online looking at other things, I can see, okay, people are tweeting this photo of Giuliani. He is conspicuously looking at his own phone in the picture. That is a kind of time-tested setup for a kind of Twitter style. What was the Super Bowl kid? Yes, that was the kid who was looking at his own phone even as Justin Timberlake was like approaching him in mid-performance. Excellent one. Yeah, and that was the apotheosis of this joke construct. I certainly was thinking of things like that. When you see that, that is the setup for.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to go at it one more time. I'm going to retweet someone or I'm going to add one line of funny commentary that probably is less funny that I think of Twitter. That's me. That's a lot of people. You are often constructing multimedia stuff, right? It's May 9th. This is yesterday.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably too much, even as I try to limit it and rein it in. I mean, it was tremendously useful just during the creation and the writing of this book because writing is a pretty solitary process and at least having a tweet deck column open in the background makes you feel like you're not entirely by yourself. You can still kind of keep an eye on other people's conversations or chime in when you feel like it.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, just to clarify, those conversations that I had with him, you know, again, that was fairly late in his life. I don't want to pretend that somehow he confessed everything to me and only to me. I mean, if you look at, you know, I mean, very famously, he gave a great interview to Mark Maron about a year later where, you know, just very confessional. And vivid and honest. And I think that comes after going to rehab and getting clean. And it's something that I've seen in other recovering addicts, my own father, I think after he got clean, had this sudden just kind of catharsis, this burst of candor and honesty. People say that that happens after people have open heart surgery and they literally have to break open your chest to get to your heart. And that somehow has a metaphorical effect on people too.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to leave it there, but just that one idea you brought up, which is that he was both super open and candid and almost comically sort of like out there. And then you keep talking about this idea in the book that actually he closed off a portion of him. And this is his ongoing theme. No one got a full view of him. And by the way, it's probably true of everyone, right?”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to have valve replacement surgery so the whole Torah was put off. So those are pretty difficult things. And I bring them up only because when he and I would have our interviews or conversations, he was open about all of this. And often as an interviewer, and particularly, I think when you're talking to highly visible people, celebrities, and it's known that negative things have happened in their life. They don't want to talk about it. Or you really have to work up to it and you have to carefully construct your conversation so that they feel open enough to discuss some of those things with you. Everything with him was on the table, and especially the alcoholism and the recovery. And the real understanding of, I think some of the really awful things he had done while he was drinking and his feeling that it had kind of put a stain on.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I could live with that. But, you know, with Robin, and certainly the conversations that I had with him for some of the pieces that I wrote, I mean, he had just had a whole series of, you know, really difficult things before him. So, you know, by the time the period that I spent the most time with him was in 2009. And so just in the preceding years, he'd had a relapse into alcoholism and had gone into rehab for that. And when he came out and was clean, he got divorced from his second wife, Marcia, who was very integral, not only to his personal life, but also had a lot to do with his work and keeping him organized. So, you know, they had split up. And then he had started to prepare a new comedy tour and go out on the road. And just right at the start of that tour, started having heart problems.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, sure. I mean, my last book before this was about Patty Chaevsky, who is also fascinating about network. Yes. And he was brilliant. And I have a feeling that if we had ever met, he probably would not have liked me.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can be interested as a lead, but you clearly, I mean, you say so in the book, right? Like, he was a big deal to me. I looked up to him, he brought me a lot of joy, he was personally nice to me. You could have tackled someone who was complicated and fascinating and interesting, but was bad to you, or by the way, you'd never met.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I appreciate what you're saying. I can only kind of point my radar in the direction that it leads me. And I just try to do it in the best way that I can. I feel it was fortunate. I think that I did have some previous exposure to Robin and did get to spend time with him for a couple of stories nearer the end of his life and at least get a sense of what he was like as a person at those times.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned the Bob Woodward book about Belushi. That book came out and really criticized for not. I mean, the family is very protected, but in general, it's sort of like, oh, this is a square who doesn't really understand John Belushi and the culture he was in and his importance. And it's less to do with the criticism had less to do with the facts than just that he just didn't get what he was writing about. Did you think about that at all when, I mean, you specialize? One of your specialties at the times is writing about comedians and pop culture because we sort of looked at this earlier, like the idea of trying to correctly transmit sort of the ethos of a person, not just sort of the facts.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when he does get to Belushi, it's already a kind of, you know, this seedy, dissolute scene. And Belushi is with this woman, Kathy Evelyn Smith, who has a kind of checkered past. At least by Robin's own account, he's just kind of weirded out by it all and leaves and goes home to his wife and tells her what he's seen and then he was a little bothered by it. And then over the course of the night and into the early morning, yeah, Smith injected Belushi with a speedball and he died in his sleep. And yeah, Robin goes to work the next day, basically oblivious to this. And it's Pam Dauber who at one point.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they would hang out. Bob Woodward in Wired points out that they probably did share, not go at the same time, but they had drug dealers that they were in common. And Belushi did come to the Mork and Mindy set specifically to see Jonathan Winters, who was on the show at that time and to watch him improvise. And he and Robin kind of made loose plans to hang out later. One night, Robin had his own kind of post-work routine where even after a full day of taping Mork and Mindy, he would go out and hit all the comedy clubs and a big part of that kind of dynamic was that even after the shows, then he would just be partying everywhere. And either at clubs or bars or people's houses, there'd be a lot of drinking, there would be cocaine use. It wasn't widely known or it wasn't publicly known about him, but certainly in Hollywood, that was his reputation. And on this particular night,”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to be explicit, right? At the Chateau Marmont, while John Belouchi was doing speedballs, and you kind of allied whether or not Robin Woyne was doing drugs with him or not. If you're hanging out with him,”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find over and over. Oh, no, no. I think it's also, you know, I mean, I think when people say it was the 70s, I mean, I feel like that's kind of shorthand for, you know, if you think that everybody is engaging in that, then that maybe gives you permission to behave that way. It doesn't mean that it's acceptable or that that's the way that people should behave, but if you think that other people are doing this too, then maybe you think you're allowed to. clearly people shouldn't have been.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, exactly. And even if he didn't mean it in a kind of specifically as a kind of a come-on, I actually want to data, you know, be romantic with you, it's still a way of saying this is my place. I'm the one in charge here, even if it was done in a kind of a playful way, and even if she says that she's okay with it, I think. I can't speak to you to what extent that was going on at other shows. I surely doubt that Ron Howard is doing that to Aaron Moran over on the Happy Days set.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not necessarily. You know, again, I mean, I think the reasons for why he probably engaged in this kind of behavior are complex. And I think it does have to do, I mean, you know, he was not doing, as far as we know, I mean, he wasn't doing things like, you know, what Harvey Weinstein is alleged to have done. But as I was saying earlier, I think it does have to do with the fact that... This is my show. I'm the star of it. It's getting really popular. And that gives me, you know, the person thinks they have some license to behave in a certain way.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because one of the things you often hear as these stories come up is this, and you heard it from Harvey Weinstein, right? And obviously it doesn't make any sense coming from him. But a lot of people say, well, what you're talking about happened a long time ago and in the time and the context, it was not a big deal. Everyone did a version of it. And you've been reporting this book for three years. The Me Too stuff is less than a year old. Did the way you thought about that incident change sort of over the last year as these stories started, as a wave of these stories came out?”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of the same things. He doesn't strip off his clothes, but he grabs at him and he's, you know, hitting at his crotch. And so on some level, that was a playful way that Robin engaged with people. But of course, it's very different when it's with a woman. And even though on the one hand, as you say, Pam Dauber says she wasn't bothered by it. It was the 70s. That was how people behaved. There's no question that there is also a kind of power dynamic at play in terms of how and how Robin is, I think, behaving that way with her.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't think of it in either way. I mean, it was a story that she told me and volunteered, so I thought I'll include this and let people decide. But I think I understand why people are kind of looking to it and seizing upon it. And I think it's because it's complex. It is, on the one hand, the way that Pam describes it. She and Robin were very friendly on the show. I mean, they almost had a kind of sibling relationship in the sense that they were around the same age. They had both grown up at times of Michigan. And so they looked out for one another. And that was how they interacted. The last segment is him. He pulls John Ritter up on stage to improvise with him. And he does.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the run up to this book being published, there's a Me Too story in this book, and it's Robin Williams co-star, Pam Dauber from Morgan Mindy, saying it's something the effect of, yeah, he would grab me all the time. He'd grab my breast, grab my grab my bottom. I just said, boop. That's a weird thing to say out loud. But it's not something you spend a lot of time on in the book. You sort of contextualize. And by the way, she says, and I didn't really mind, as you were reporting that, did you think, oh, this is something that's going to attract attention? This anecdote will attract attention. Did you think, no, this is contextual. And at the time, it's like his drug use. It's not. It's something a lot of people did and not a very newsworthy thing.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think this is going to be a very cynical answer, but I do think it has more to do with the studios and the people running them than the talent. I mean, as Robin's story tells us, even though he was perceived as an overnight sensation at the time, he was by no means that. And it took development and it took people giving him opportunities at various stages before he became the big star that he was. Now I think the studios are basically just gamblers at the roulette table and they have put themselves in a position where they have to every time bet the entire house. There's nothing in between. And so they can only make their money if everything is a billion dollar franchise with the possibility of”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at the end of the book, you've got him up in Canada drinking and listing all his movies, writing them down paper and through the box office. This was a failure. This was a failure. Stuck with him. After Good Morning America, he becomes a giant movie star. He's someone who then can command giant salaries. And the idea that he's in a movie then makes the movie a hit. Not always, but often that air eventually ends for him. It seems like we're in an era where there aren't really those stars, period. There's maybe a handful, maybe Dwayne Johnson slash the rock, right? There's a couple people like that. And we're now in an era where it's the franchise, right? You go see a Marvel movie.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, it was something that I think he was worried about from the outset, even before making some of these films and seeing the response to them, that it always, I mean, he certainly knew what a phenomenon Morgan Mindy was, even the connection to Mork or being perceived as Mork or called Mork everywhere he went, that got at him. And it starts to create this feeling that maybe that's all I'm ever going to have. Maybe that was the best opportunity I had. It's not going to get better than that. And, you know, as you start to, you know, you try to step out in other ways and you see people reject that. It starts to reinforce that. And he was very acutely aware of those things and did really internalize them and take them to heart. And that, you know, the sensitivity to negative reviews, to feeling like he...”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and certainly the responses to those movies that came out, let's say, between Popeye and Good Morning Vietnam, I think there was decent receptions to something like World According to Garp or Moscow on the Hudson, but some of them were really dismissed to the point that people were like, Robin Williams is just not a leading man. It's not going to happen. People are not interested in him. And he certainly internalized”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back here with Dave Itzkoff, world's best Twitterer, and also the biographer of Robin Williams. I wanted to ask you a few more things about Robin Williams or just talk more, maybe a talk is better than ask. I was surprised to remember, because you reminded me, that he was a giant star in the 70s, early 80s as a stand-up and on TV, and then was not a movie star for a long time, was in movies for a long time, but was not Robin Williams, the giant movie star, took him almost a decade, right?”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit more on stage. I mean, I think just the relationship between his life and the stand up is very rich and it really does kind of illuminate the routines to the best that you can describe them in print.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, actually, that might be true. But I do take your point. And it is very difficult. And it really does not serve him, at least in a book, to try to just transcribe a portion of a routine at length and then in brackets. I mean, I had to do it in places to say, okay, now he adopts this voice or now he's doing this with his body. It's not equivalent. And you just, you know that as the writer, but I think that what you can do is provide, I think a lot of the context for what's happening either in his mind, in his world, in his preparation for these routines that kind of lets you understand really, I mean, some of the bits are just, you know, they're just funny bits. They're just things that, you know, he tossed off and they're funny for that reason. But I think the as he did it more, as he got better at it, and as he started to really incorporate things from his life and started to open up a little bit.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because comedy often does not hold it, it's specific to a time. The references are specific and even just the style. There's a lot of stuff that Just does not, you'll read about, I don't know, Charlie Chaplin or Lil and Hardy or Lenny Bruce all for different reasons, and they won't strike you as gutboat.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say, I mean, particularly if you go back to some of the earliest televised stand-up and especially, I think it's called Live at the Rock Seeds. This very first HBO special that he did where he was doing really more kind of character pieces than kind of straight stand up. I mean, I think it completely holds up.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you ever think, oh man, I wish this was just online because I just dropped a YouTube clip in here, and then you could watch it, or maybe, by the way, I haven't gone back and watched this stuff from the late 70s and early 80s in a long time. Maybe it isn't as exciting as it is in my mind because it's the right age.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really difficult. And I don't know if that answers your question, but it is something that I definitely wrestled with because you don't, there's nothing like the experience of just watching him perform. It says it all. It tells you everything you need to know, and there's so much energy and dynamism. Do you ever think, oh man.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a heavy conversation. Robin Williams was a giant star because he was this manic, joyful mile a minute funny person, right? And I mean, later became known for roles where he didn't do some of that. When you're writing someone's life story and they are an incredibly charismatic person and you're confined to typing words about them on a page and you can include a couple of photos, how do you spend time trying to think about conveying That person's magnetism and charisma and how unique they were.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, sure. And I also want to be clear. I mean, you know, some of the exact, you know, circumstances and what happened in terms of his death, maybe only a very few number of people know exactly what happened. Maybe only he knows would have known exactly what happened. And so we're not going to get some of those answers. And in some sense, it's some of those blanks are not going to be filled in. As I was saying, I think some people probably, you know, a lot of people sort of came to that immediate conclusion that he was depressed. He didn't like the way his career was going. And that's, for them, that was the answer. That's the story that they tell themselves. Then when the Parkinson's diagnosis was announced, people then say, well, okay, he was aware he had something.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think just in telling a story, you want to be as precise as possible. And I think because of, again, the nature of his death, the immediate outpouring that surrounded it, I don't know how attuned people were to some of the subsequent developments.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems important to his family and friends that people understand that's why he died. It seems somewhat important to you as a storyteller. Is that an important part of sort of understanding his life? Is understanding the real story of his death crucial to understanding his life?”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct to a point that he had been given diagnosis of Parkinson's. But in fact, and this did not come out until after his autopsy, which was several months after his death, that autopsy and specifically the analysis of brain tissue of his found the symptoms of what's called Lewy body dementia, which is the pathology is somewhat similar to Parkinson's, but the spectrum of symptoms is greater and the effect that it likely had on him is just pretty devastating.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a few iterations of what you're talking about, and I think it's kind of natural for people to do when there is a kind of vacuum of information. Understandably his family and his closest friends, they themselves were still just kind of learning what had happened to him, processing that, trying to figure out how, if at all, do we put this into the world. So in that absence, I think people just kind of made their own hypotheses. And yes, I mean, people sort of, I think, went to the kind of stereotype of the kind of, you know, the sad clown, the person who outwardly is happy, but inside is very broken. And he did have depression, and he did wrestle with anxiety. So, you know, people kind of made that assumption. Then within about a week of his death, it was disclosed that he had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And that was...”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I assume that it was drug or alcohol related. There had been a story about him being in a clinic, and Hazelton, Minnesota previously, that I just sad, but that makes sense. Then the narrative was he had depression and there was a whole discussion about depression. Subsequently, there's now a different diagnosis for his death.”
2018-05-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Media: Robin Williams biographer Dave Itzkoff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT