Here's an excerpt from an interview with Carl Reiner. He's talking about the decision to end The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1966. Watch it and then I want to discuss something in it…
Okay. Mr. Reiner says, referring to Dick Van Dyke, "He did Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" while he was doing the Van Dyke Show, during the summer…"
No, he didn't. After the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show was shot on January 19, 1961, the series went into production in June of that year and filmed its last episode on June 1 of 1966. Nobody hired Dick for a film in the summer of '61 but he shot Bye Bye Birdie during the summer hiatus in 1962, Mary Poppins and his part in What a Way To Go in 1963, The Art of Love in 1964, Lt. Robinson Crusoe in 1965 and then after The Dick Van Dyke Show finished, he took a month off and started shooting Divorce American Style.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang began filming in June of 1967 at Pinewood Studios in the U.K. But that's an easy mistake for Mr. Reiner to make…the kind we all make, the kind you find in any interview. What it gets me to thinking about though it this: What should the interviewer do when that happens?
I do a lot of interviews, often in front of live audiences. I am helped, I'd like to think, by a good memory and the ability to throw in a name or a date when an interviewee can't remember and is grasping for it. But sometimes when they get something flat-out wrong, as Reiner did in the above video, I correct them as politely as I can…and no matter how politely I do it, it throws some people off. I can feel them tense up and they sometimes lose the thread of where they were heading.
Or sometimes, I don't correct them because I'm afraid of making them uncomfy…but then down the line, things get confusing. If there's a live audience, I can see people getting puzzled by the false information.
By the way, this is not about anyone lying. I don't even think Carl Reiner thought Dick did Chitty Chitty Bang Bang while on hiatus from the Van Dyke Show. I think he just meant to say Bye Bye Birdie and out came the wrong movie title. Happens all the time to all of us.
And I'm not asking anyone for advice on how to handle this kind of thing. Obviously, it's a matter of a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, I do correct people and sometimes, it makes the conversation flow better. And sometimes I skip it and sometimes, it makes the conversation worse. I once really pissed off an important comic book creator by correcting four or five of the kind of error Reiner made in the video. I don't have a foolproof answer for this and neither do you. I just thought I'd mention that it's something I think about.