Something Streaming This Way Comes: "The Please Watch The Jon Lovitz Special"
Tomorrow marks nine years since the debut of my Random Roles interview with Alex Rocco, a conversation that meant more to me than your average Random Roles because it led to a brief period where it looked like I might be helping Rocco put together a memoir. It never panned out, but it did result in about a dozen phone calls where he regaled me with stories about a variety of moments in his life and acting career. Most of them still have yet to be transcribed, but maybe I’ll finally do that for a few of them and post them here. We’ll see.
When discussing his career, one of the more throwaway moments - and this is not an insult, it’s just that we’re talking about maybe 10 seconds of screen time - was when he told me about how he made a brief appearance in a Jon Lovitz special where he reprised the role of Moe Greene from The Godfather. I had no idea what he was talking about, and at the time, I couldn’t find even so much as the clip he was talking about, let alone the special as a whole, but it was intriguing because he assured me that James Caan and Robert Duvall also appeared in this special.
Not too long after talking to Rocco, I ended up doing a Random Roles interview with Caan, and he also mentioned it. He said, “At the last minute, they called me and asked if I’d come by. But then Bobby Duvall happened to be in town at the time, so I called him up and I said, ‘Hey, Bobby, why don’t you come down and we’ll do this for Jon?’ So we put on our tuxedos, and we sat in the fourth or fifth row of the studio audience.”
Still, however, I could not find this special anywhere online.
Well, tonight, I decided on a whim to see if anyone had ever remedied that situation, and lo and behold, I found that someone had indeed uploaded The Please Watch The Jon Lovitz Special to YouTube. It’s absolutely terrible quality - I’m talking about the video quality, not the qualify of the comedy, which is a matter of personal opinion - but at least the special is out there.
Give a look. Or don’t. But if you’re a fan, you’ll…lovitz it.
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