Judge Judy: 'Are my feelings PC and kumbaya? No. They are realistic'
Order, order. Court is in session, Judge Judith Sheindlin presiding, and while you are here you will follow her rules.
Don’t throw paper on the floor. Hang on to your gum wrapper until you get to a bin. Don’t befoul your community. Try not to scratch other people’s cars and, if you do, leave your details on the windscreen. Don’t tell lies. Confront your problems and try to solve them.
“Those are the right things to do,” concludes Judge Judy. And, she believes, most of us know it. It is our innate love of order – and seeing consequences for those who defy it – that has driven the astonishing success of her courtroom TV show. Where other daytime personalities have come and gone, Judge Judy has reigned supreme for 25 years. One in three Americans watch her programme every year, with the most recent season averaging 9 million daily viewers.
Sheindlin, 78, is not just a household name but an authority figure. In 2013 a Reader’s Digest survey found that she was considered more trustworthy than any sitting US supreme court justice. The Drag Race host RuPaul Charles has described her courtroom as a “sanctuary for rational critical thinking”. Barack Obama, the rapper Nicki Minaj and the comedians
Larry David, Amy Poehler and Amy Schumer are also fans.
“I wish Judge Judy was in charge” (of my life, the courts, my country) is a recurring refrain on social media. But Sheindlin is hanging up her gavel. Judge Judy’s final episode will air this year.
“I always said, if you’re smart, you’re supposed to go out of any profession when you’re on top,” Sheindlin says by phone. “If you decide to stay too long at the party, your makeup begins to fade.”
It is true that Judge Judy seems increasingly at odds with the times. Her black-and-white worldview and her refusal to spare others’ feelings doesn’t sit easily with a society that has become more sensitive to unkindness.
Sheindlin has always been brutally blunt – some may say cruel – in her unrelenting drive for personal responsibility. But what sets her apart today is her lack of apology for it. “Everybody knows the message,” she says, with an implied shrug. “Do the right thing”.
Show business was an unexpected career change for Sheindlin, coming after 25 years as a litigator and a judge in New York’s family court. Growing up in Brooklyn, she settled on the law “by a process of elimination” before she was even 10, she says. “I was a great bullshitter … and I could argue my way out of any situation.” Her father, Murray, a dentist, told her she should be a senator. “I figured out you’ve really got to be a lawyer first.”
But it was not purely pragmatism. “I just felt as if it was my natural place.” Both Murray and her mother, Ethel, an office manager, were “very moral people”, while her grandfather was deeply religious. She remembers him explaining to her, on Yom Kippur, that he fasted and took the stairs to his apartment as atonement for his sins. “It translated to an eight-year-old’s mind as, if I do everything right all year, I can eat and take the elevator on Yom Kippur!”
Sheindlin shares it as “a cute story”, but it is also telling of a worldview in which the right thing is always unambiguous and attainable. In Sheindlin’s book, good and bad, moral and immoral, order and disorder are a straightforward calculation. If you can’t make it add up, well – that’s on you. Factors such as systemic injustice, for example, don’t apply.
Her time at the family court “toughened” her, Sheindlin says. She saw tens of thousands of cases of child neglect and abuse that underscored her absolutist views on personal responsibility. Many parents brought before her were young and unemployed, she says, with more children than they could take care of, financially or emotionally.
“Are my feelings necessarily PC and kumbaya? No. They are realistic.” Being blind to the reality for the sake of political correctness is not only ignorant, Sheindlin says, but “hurtful – mostly to children”.
Her voice lowers to a furious undertone. “How do you put together in your brain a mother punishing a child by putting out a cigarette on his arm? A parent punishing a child for wetting their pants by making them sit in scalding water? Howdoyoudothat!
“Do you say: ‘Well, I’m going to look at the childhood of the parent – maybe that’s all the parent knew?’ Not in my world. In my world, if that’s the way you know how to parent, you shouldn’t have any more children.”
And in her court, she would say so – not as an order, Sheindlin clarifies. “I mean, I can’t do that.” (Though you get the feeling that if she could, she would.) But she would tell deadbeat dads: “Find something to do with that organ other than make babies.”
In her outspokenness, Sheindlin says, she was unique even among judges. “Nobody else says that – it’s
not PC! ‘How dare you say that?’ Well, I dare say that because a) I’m supporting them all, and so is everybody else who pays taxes and b) the reason the case is before me is because the children were neglected, or abused – or worse.”
She was raising a family of her own at the time, having had two children in her first marriage, to the lawyer Ronald Levy. They divorced in 1976 after 12 years of marriage. The following year she married Jerry Sheindlin, another lawyer, with three children of his own. They divorced in 1990, but remarried a year later; today they live in Florida with their three shih tzu dogs.
It meant, after long days at court, taking care of meals, “appointments, clothes, socks – and not everybody is as neat as you would want them!” splutters Sheindlin with fond exasperation. (Asked if his mother treated her family the same way she did her court, her son Adam once joked: “There are similarities.”)
In 1986 Sheindlin was appointed supervising judge in Manhattan, going on to rule on more than 20,000 cases. She drew immense satisfaction from those where she felt she had intervened to stop a family on a downward spiral. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes, but my motivating factor was always to try to do the right thing.”
At the same time, Sheindlin gained a reputation for intolerance, sarcasm and even bullying among complainants and lawyers alike. In 1993 a Los Angeles Times profile described her as having a comedian’s timing and an “impatience that borders on rage”.
As Sheindlin puts it now, she was “not stifled” in her courtroom. “Some people didn’t like my style – I told them to bug off.” Was she ever too hard on those who appeared before her? She considers the question. “Probably. Probably it all balances out, because most of them will have been treated too softly.” Few people ever emerge from family court pleased with the outcome, she points out. But it is also hard to avoid an element of grandstanding, of personal affront at lapsed responsibility.
In a 60 Minutes interview in 1993 (embraced by Sheindlin and her team as Judge Judy lore), the host Morley Safer called her out for “trying to scare the hell” out of a 13-year-old boy in her court. “I try,” agreed Sheindlin.
That segment drew the attention of the makers of the reality TV show The People’s Court, who approached Sheindlin about a show of her own. With her term at the family court nearly up, when opportunity knocked, “I pulled the door open,” she declares.
And so in September 1996, just shy of her 54th birthday, Sheindlin began a new chapter in show business, without an agent or any previous experience. (Her husband, a former New York supreme court justice, went on to appear on The People’s Court from 1999 to 2001 – though, she says, “he was always a support for me”.)
Sheindlin quickly made herself indispensable to CBS. Her approach to remuneration is famous: every three years, she went to a steakhouse with the network president and handed him an envelope with her desired figure inside. When a newcomer once tried to give her an envelope of his own, Sheindlin told him: “This isn’t a negotiation.”
That envelope was last reported to say $47m (£33m), on top of the $200m CBS paid her in 2017 for rights to the show’s library. As a later-in-life celebrity, Sheindlin says, she was never at risk of being swept away. “I still remember the lean years.”
But the fact that Sheindlin is one of the highest-paid personalities in television adds bite to criticisms of her show as “poverty porn”. Those who appear on Judge Judy apply to do so and are paid a fee. But critics, such as the lawyer Sarah Jaffe, writing in Slate last year, have said its success lies in watching “vulnerable people be subjected to humiliation”.
“This is sport for me,” shouts Sheindlin at a complainant in her courtroom, in one of the many YouTube compilations of her “best savage moments”.
Sheindlin rejects the idea that she is ever “gratuitously nasty or mean, without trying to make a point”. But, she adds, “for those idiot critics in the legal field who say ‘she gives judges a bad reputation’ … It’s TV, folks. You want to sit in a regular courtroom, go to a courtroom.”
It certainly seems true that Sheindlin’s pop-cultural status distracts liberals from politics they might otherwise find unpalatable. For instance, she applauds as “courageous” Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms on the grounds that “he disincentivised young girls from having children just because it was like getting a new pair of sneakers”, when recent analysis suggests that, in fact, the policy’s success was in reducing the number of beneficiaries – not poverty itself.
But criticism of Judge Judy has eased in recent years, Sheindlin observes – perhaps because of the very social sensitivities she decries. “The attacks would be brutal when I was younger – now, well, it’s not PC to say nasty things about old people.” She chuckles. “But the truth is, and I say this without ego, you cannot belie success.”
Indeed, the figures are inarguable: Judge Judy has been the No 1 daytime programme since 1998, licensed in more than 100 territories. Sheindlin has no doubt as to the reason for its popularity: “In a society where there are no rules, and boundaries are designed to be broken without consequence, people flail.” We are witnessing that in action now, Sheindlin maintains – from the rise of “ridiculous” lawsuits, such as for the right to emotional support animals, to chaos in global politics.
Does she wish she could tackle that in an official capacity – as a supreme court justice, say? Sheindlin’s response is immediate: “Oh, no.
She has been asked before, she says, but “I am too accustomed to being a monarch in my courtroom. The supreme court rules by committee, and I would be unhappy to write a lengthy, scholarly, dissenting opinion. Listen …” Sheindlin snickers. “Either you’re a team player, you play lacrosse or football – or you play golf.” Instead, she is starting anew in streaming, with a forthcoming project for Amazon Studios’ new IMDb TV. Despite the name – Judy Justice – it’s not expected to be another typical courtroom show.
Many people seek out Judge Judy’s verdict directly. “I can’t tell you how much mail I receive from the UK complaining about your judges, saying they’re soft,” says Sheindlin. Softer than US judges? “I don’t know,” she says, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “But softer than I am.”
Many of the defining images of classic Italian cinema can be attributed to Giuseppe Rotunno, who has died aged 97. The cinematographer, known as “Peppino”, shot Luchino Visconti’s masterpieces Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963). Though both films are operatic in emotion and scale, they are strikingly different visually, the former a gritty black-and-white portrait of a poor family who decamp to Milan in the late 1950s, the latter plush and elegiac in depicting another clan, far wealthier but experiencing its own death throes during Italian unification in 19th-century Sicily.
The most impressive part of The Leopard is its final ballroom sequence, which runs at around 45 minutes and incorporates complex intersecting dramas unfolding in different parts of one palazzo, and even in separate areas of the same shot, all filmed with three cameras. It demanded from Rotunno a mind-boggling control of light, space and movement, not to mention the placement of a thousand candles (“As we moved from one camera to the next,” he said, “I got many drops of wax on my neck”).
Martin Scorsese, whose film foundation later oversaw the restoration of both movies, placed The Leopard among his 10 favourite films of all time. He called Rocco and His Brothers “one of the most sumptuous black-andwhite pictures I’ve ever seen”, describing the cinematography as “pearly, elegant and lustrous”.
Rotunno also worked with Federico
Fellini on nine projects including Amarcord (1973), about a boy growing up in 1930s Italy, and Fellini’s Casanova (1976), which he called the director’s “best and most beautiful film”. When he was finally nominated for an Oscar, it was for an American picture, albeit one with a Fellini-esque flavour: All That Jazz (1979), Bob Fosse’s autobiographical musical, which mixed realism, dance and dream sequences. Rotunno called it “the dream of my life. It was like working with five directors at once but without the problems of having to work with so many.”
Born into a large Roman family, Rotunno was 17 when his father died. Desperate for any work, he found a job in the photography lab at Cinecittà, where he was encouraged to experiment with a Leica camera. Within 18 months, he was the studio’s stills photographer. At 19, he was shooting documentary shorts and working as camera operator on Roberto Rossellini’s first world war drama The Man With a Cross (1943).
Rotunno was drafted into the Italian army, where he became a combat photographer in the film unit. Sent to a prison camp by the Germans, he was liberated by US forces in 1945 and later resumed his career as camera operator and assistant. He was operator on Visconti’s Senso (1954); when the original cinematographer GR Aldo died near the end of shooting, and things did not go smoothly with his replacement Robert Krasker, he was asked by Visconti to complete the picture.
His first cinematography credit was on Scandal in Sorrento (1955), shot in CinemaScope with Sophia Loren. But his first full feature for Visconti was White Nights (1957), a Dostoevsky adaptation in which his luminous black-and-white cinematography was instrumental in maintaining the unusual, off-kilter mood. “Sometimes the city had to look real, and sometimes it had to look fake,” he said of the Tuscan street sets, which were built on a Cinecittà sound stage. “But we got it, I think.”
Rotunno’s collaboration with Fellini began on Toby Dammit, the director’s haunting contribution to Spirits of the Dead (1968), a portmanteau film comprised of shorts based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; it continued on Fellini Satyricon (1969), I Clowns (1970), for which Rotunno did uncredited work on the flashback scenes, the more realistic Roma (1972) and Orchestra Rehearsal (1978), as well as the flamboyant City of Women (1980), which Philip French described as “seductively photographed.” They worked together for the last time on the shimmering artifice of And the Ship Sails On (1983).
He was respected among US directors, too, having shot the solemn antinuclear drama On the Beach (1959) and John Huston’s epic The Bible (1966). He was a surprising choice for Carnal Knowledge (1971), where his use of close-ups justified Mike Nichols’s instinct that the material, intended originally for the stage by its writer Jules Feiffer, would only work if the audience could see into the eyes of its frequently lacerating characters. Director and cinematographer were reunited on Regarding Henry (1991) and Wolf (1994) with unremarkable results.
Rotunno brought visual coherence to two chaotic, idiosyncratic comedies: Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) and Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Collaborating with Fellini’s cinematographer was, Gilliam said, “like working on Olympus”. As the production quickly exceeded its budget and schedule, however, Gilliam found that his pleas for more camera set-ups were falling on deaf ears. “Peppino wouldn’t budge,” he complained. “He felt we were doing something for posterity, and he wasn’t going to sell out his art … The whole thing was about to collapse.”
Scorsese asked Rotunno to shoot The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) but he declined. Among his final credits were Sydney Pollack’s tepid remake of Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1995) and Dario Argento’s horror The Stendhal Syndrome (1996).
He was sometimes at a loss to describe his particular art. “It’s difficult to ask a painter, ‘How did you paint the picture?’” he said in 1999. “I go with my eyes and intuition.” He was proud, he said, of his ability to “create a wonderful harmony with my directors, and to release their fantasies.”
He is survived by his wife, Graziolina (nee Campori), and their daughters, Tiziana, Paola and Carmen, and seven grandchildren.
• Giuseppe Rotunno, cinematographer, born 19 March 1923; died 7 February 2021