Alex Gibney
Appearances
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
But I kept asking people, kind of like David Chase kept asking himself, as a cinematographer told me, he's like, is anybody going to watch this shit? And that's what I kept wondering, like, is it going to get into Sundance? Like, is anybody going to watch this?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
It was like what I called a taxi driver film. Like you'd be riding in a taxi and the taxi driver would be saying, hey, man, have you seen that Enron movie? Enron was nominated for an Oscar.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So there was something terrifying at the heart of it that said something very deep and disturbing about human nature. And also it was told as a story about a poor innocent who got caught in a machine, you know, of cruelty.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Well, I think there was always this thinking, which was ironic in this case, like if you made something really well, you might win awards. Right. Now, awards are sometimes economically viable and sometimes they're good for business long term.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
They had a philosophy which was communities of interest. And so long as you could keep those people subscribing to your service, that was good. Right. And they would be super happy. Now, other people might come over to it, but if people weren't that interested, maybe they wouldn't come to it.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So it was just a way of getting some people hugely excited about a film as opposed to trying to get everybody excited. willing to buy that soggy croissant.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Right, and you're also not afraid... when it comes to certain subjects to offend people.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
I think, you know, I really do think it starts with the pandemic.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Yeah. I think there may have been warning signs about it before, but the pandemic really does it because the pandemic takes away theatrical. And theatrical, even in the small indie world, you know, people would go out to those films, they would pop up.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And the way you say it is exactly the way it worked in economic terms. In other words, theatrical distribution, particularly for independent films, was almost always a loss leader. It usually didn't pay for itself in theaters, but it was a signal that it was good. And also the film festival world, all of that, and then people would show up and bid for But then, you know, so the pandemic happened.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Suddenly, theaters flatline. Yeah. Nobody's going to theaters during a pandemic. And also, there starts to be a huge consolidation in the streaming industry or streaming cable industry because now streamers and cable casters are starting to be one.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Like when you're trying to make something that is... Well, then it becomes harder because, you know, you go to people and you say, I went to one streamer with a film I had called Citizen K, you know, which is kind of a look at Putin's Russia through this oligarch named Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who then, when things turned in 2003, spent 10 years in the Gulag.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And I went to one streamer and the streamer said, you know... This is a good film, but we don't want to offend Russia. Really? Yeah. We don't want to offend Russia. Okay. Wow. Okay. Note taken. You know, because you can see the commercial considerations, particularly in a global economy, begin to take over.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And I think, in a way, it's kind of obvious why that is. If you want... a big audience, you make a list of the top 20 celebrities, And you think if we do a Taylor Swift documentary, we're going to get a big audience because her audience is big. Right. So you're just borrowing Taylor Swift's audience.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
The difference is that for a network or a channel or even a streamer early on, that they would have editorial control. That would be a good thing. That showed a dedication to certain journalistic and editorial principles.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Right? You never give the subject control. Not anymore. Right. Gone. Poof. And I think that to some extent you think to yourself, well, okay, like I've made commercials before. Like when I make a commercial for a client, I don't expect to have editorial control. Because it's a commercial. Yeah. But that's the problem. It's like there's this netherworld at the moment where the celebrity –
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
and the channel, wants the viewer to believe that it's a documentary. Yeah. When it is, in fact, a commercial.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And look, HBO... has been pretty fearless over the years in terms of their willingness to do tough stuff. But it just felt to me like, I love the show, but do I want to do, like, a special on The Sopranos? It didn't feel that interesting to me. But then when I sat down with David and met him, he was a fascinating character. But also I realized, whoa.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
He went through back then what I and many others are going through right now. The battle. The battle. Meaning, how do you get something personal and important on when everything about the system is conspiring to keep it off?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Okay, so David was just getting tired of doing the TV thing. I mean, he had had a relatively successful career. He was a showrunner at Northern Exposure, which is a very successful show. And he had done some other ones in the past. But he had always wanted to make movies. That's really what he wanted to do. And this was like his last go-round. He had some money put away.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
He was just going to write spec scripts and see if he could get a movie made. So it was like the last roundup.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And so he writes this script, and he decides to make the protagonist a mobster, Tony Soprano, who's got a problem with his mother. And in fact, his mother wants to kill him. And he writes the script, and it's really good. And everybody agrees it's really good. And he starts to take it around. But at the time, TV was dominated by the three, possibly four networks.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And they were interested in kind of lowest common denominator programming and sort of routinized programming. So he would go from place to place and they all turned him down. And Les Moonves, who was at, you know, a famous executive at CBS said, you know, this mobster stuff is really good. But, you know, are you wedded to the therapy? Yeah.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And Dave was like, yeah, I'm wedded to the therapy, I guess you'd have to say, since it was the central engine of the entire show.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Right? So everybody wanted him to do something that was the cliché, and he wanted to do something that was completely different. And it wasn't until the script landed at HBO where they said, whoa, this is new and original and different. That was it. It was different. And HBO was looking to be different. It's not TV. It's HBO.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So with HBO, I mean, they were making money through subscriptions, and they were showing movies that they would license. They had dipped their toe into series, like with Larry Sanders and with Oz and others, and they were thinking, this is pretty good. Maybe we should try a bigger swing. And so they were looking for something.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So moment and different economic model because they don't need to have a big ratings winner. They just need some people who love a show. That's good for them. And then if you love different shows, that's okay because this group loves this show and they'll subscribe. And this other group loves this show and they'll subscribe. Good. Everybody doesn't have to love every show. So poise for that moment.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And then he walks into it with his script to HBO and they're asking the questions where everything's upside down instead of saying like, okay, so we'll shoot it in LA and we'll do second unit in Jersey, right? Because that'll save money. They were like, you're going to shoot everything in Jersey, right? That's what David said. He's like, whoa, I felt like I had landed in an alternate universe.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
They were going to let me do anything I wanted. And they pretty much did. Yeah. David felt he had landed in bizarro world. It was like where the execs were encouraging him to engage his own creativity and to lean in to all the things that were important to him as opposed to, you know, invest in the stereotypes that had become so successful. The Sopranos was not a confected corporate product.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
I mean, it wasn't at all in terms of its artistry and all of that, but it didn't come about because David thought, how can I make a lot of money? It came about because David was like, I'm obsessed with my mother.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
To work out their own personal shit about their mother. I totally agree. And that, to me, was the beauty of the moment. You came across a network that was like, fuck it, let's roll the dice.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
You know, what have we got to lose? But a lot. But a lot. I mean, it is true, and they were scared, too. I mean, because after they shot the pilot, they waited... six, seven, eight, nine months before they made the decision to go ahead and order the series. They were terrified.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Because, like, how can you have a mobster who's the... Yeah. Somebody who kills people for a living is going to be the protagonist of this family drama, right? And they were really nervous about it. And one argument that David had with the creative executives at HBO was over Tony killing somebody on camera. And they were worried that they would turn viewers off. But David convinced them.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
He said, look, we're making a show about a mobster. If he doesn't kill the guy who was the snitch, then what are we doing? We're just making bullshit. And so they move forward.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Very violent and grisly, yeah. He literally chokes him to death with a wire.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Yeah, I think that's right. And that's the best thing often about notes in general. You know, sometimes, particularly reaction, not so much the prescription, but the, you know, the reaction to like, this doesn't feel right. It's sometimes worth listening to.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
I think they were talking about political correctness. You know, there was a willingness to say things that were downright offensive. And also a willingness, even in the writer's room... to get ugly, to talk about stuff in a way that was brutally honest and would reveal about themselves stuff that wasn't particularly elevating or inspiring, maybe just the opposite.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
But that to me was actually one of the great lessons of doing the show. It's like when you start to pre-censor yourselves all the time, we've all got weird, dark, inappropriate feelings or thoughts. And to the extent that they're routinely repressed, they'll come out in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways, you know? What was that line about?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
If only Hitler's art teacher was a little bit... more attentive.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
The terrifying beauty of the show was that these people were so complex.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
They were both so charming and brutal. And one of the things that they made a point of during the making of the show, which I thought was so great, is whenever it seemed that the characters were becoming too likable, particularly the mobsters were becoming too likable, they would have them do something brutal. Yeah.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Just to remind you, because also in the back of his mind, you know, David is making this show, which is a character drama about a family, but it's also a commentary about America. And the brutality of America and the rapaciousness with which capitalism sort of, you know, chews people up and spits them out.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And The Sopranos is kind of the logical extension of that scene in The Godfather, you know, where they're all sitting around the table asking The Godfather to share all the bought stuff. politicians and police officers, and it's, we're willing to pay a fee. After all, we're not communists here. Right? But it's a brutal commentary on capitalism and America and the cruelty of the country.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So all those things are going through their heads, and they're willing to be ugly. And I think that's what people ended up loving the show for, is it didn't pull punches and suddenly the uncomfortable conversations that you shied away from because you might offend somebody, they were engaging in those conversations on screen.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And that's what great art does, is it allows you to get into areas that maybe you're not permitted to as part of your daily life.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
That's right. But at the same time, because they're all coming out of their personal experiences, I mean, it was supposed to be about David's mother, and then all the writers found out that they had major issues with their mothers. So it ends up being, you know, a lot of this experience ends up being universal.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
I think the other thing that makes this show so successful, too, is that, you know, there are a lot of conversations about that are extremely unironic, and they're very funny for it because these brutal mobsters are having very sensitive discussions about how their feelings are hurt, or should I buy flowers for my wife on her anniversary? Stuff like that.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
You know, normally, in most mob movies, you see the action. Yeah. You don't see the day-to-day interactions where you're trying to figure out whether or not you should show up for your son's soccer practice.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Well, it's not open under the current system. So something new is going to have to come along to blow it open again. Because HBO also, remember, was a different kind of a system. And it was coming up and they knew they had to do something different or they weren't going to I mean, what's the point of trying to become another network?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
If you're far behind in a sailing race, it doesn't make any sense to follow the same wind that's already got those boats that are way ahead of you. You tack on a different course and hope to catch a different kind of a wind. So at the moment, it's pretty bleak for trying to do personal art that's going to connect with viewers.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
But the hope is, the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box after a lot of bad shit has come out, is that there is a new distribution mechanism out there that will allow this relationship once again to find a way. You know, and it's kind of what you see happening in journalism.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Like the Substack model is interesting because suddenly you see some people are making bank on Substack by going directly to their readers. Yeah. Interesting. That was the hope in podcasts for a while, too. And actually, I think podcasts, you know, some over time still find a way to get audiences, but it's not as easy as it seemed like it was going to be at first.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And also, you know, some key players in the distribution universe are are tech players who have other businesses. Yes. You know, if I'm Apple, do I want to do anything that's going to offend somebody and so they might not buy an iPhone or an iPad? And if I'm Amazon, do I want to do something that might offend somebody who might buy their sneakers on Amazon? You know?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
No, I mean, I think they think, let's do stuff that's entertaining. And they hire executives who've been in the business before. But over time, tendencies emerge.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And the tendencies are, let's do the thing that worked the last time.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
The Japanese have a term for that, shinju. It's a mutual suicide, right. That sounds like a lovely, that's what we're going to teach listeners today is how to do shinju.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Yes, I think that's right. And you're looking over into the distance for... that swell that's going to be different. And I think it'll come, because it's always been like that. You know, you go back to the 20s and the 30s and the 40s. Think about what radio producers must have thought with the advent of television. It's over for us.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
There was something I heard the other night. I went to a benefit for this small little outfit up in Maine, which is a place called the Carpenter's Boat Shop, where people who have found themselves betwixt and between spend time at a place where they learn how to build boats. Okay. Cool.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
But this guy who's been doing that or who founded it and has been running that place for 45 years talked about his life. He said, I feel like My life is a rowboat. You know, I'm always looking backwards but moving forwards. And I was like, you know, it's not unlike this moment for creators. You know, you got to know what's happened behind.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Because, you know, there's always a place, you know, you can't stay still, right? Yeah.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
That's right, yeah. What is it? Art is born of constraint and dies of freedom. Because I can remember there was a period in docs where it was like, I'm not going to do a film for under, you know, $2 million or $3 million. That's just the way it is. And then I remembered, like, There was supposedly a conversation between Louis Bunuel and Nicolas Rey in Spain at some point.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And Bunuel, who had sort of learned how to save money by being a producer, was notorious for being very cheap and very efficient in his shooting. They used to call him Mr. Clapstick because, you know, to edit his movies, all you do is you cut out the clapsticks. And then you'd send it to the lab, right? But he was telling—
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Ray, who was very frustrated after he'd done King of Kings, he says, I just can't get my own movies made. He said, well, you know, maybe if you reduce your budgets by like 50%, you'd get them made. And Nicholas Ray said, nobody would ever respect me, you know, in the industry if I did that. It was kind of a deeply sad moment.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And they both walked away from the dinner like not understanding what the other person was thinking about or saying. And it's hard because, you know, for documentaries, at a certain moment, instead of being... the person who had to pretend that they weren't really interested in documentaries in order to get hired, me, right?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
You know, suddenly you could walk around and actually you could buy a house. You could think about sending your kids to college. You know, there was a business, there was an industry that could support people without you having to do some other job in order to do the job you wanted. On the other hand, you know, there comes a moment when if you really love what you're doing,
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Well, at the moment, I kind of feel the way Tony does. I think the golden age of documentary, which was proclaimed maybe even as recently as like four years ago, now feels like it's got a lot of rust on it.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Yes. America is in decline because the country's been ignoring all of the contradictions that have been gnawing at it. for years and years and just pretending that they don't exist. And now they're catching everybody. Where do you think it goes? Look backwards and row forwards.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So I made documentaries in film school, and one of the ones I made in film school, I actually got on TV, which was back then, you know, hugely successful. But then I went through a long period where... I was underemployed, even after I'd had kids. And if I was going in to look for a job, my wife would always say, honey, listen, if they ask you what you do, don't say you make documentaries.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Because then you'll never get hired for whatever it is you want to do because you couldn't get hired to make documentaries. Oh, they would see it as like, why would we hire you even for like a commercial or something like that? Right, because you're interested in documentaries and documentaries are spinach and nobody cares about them. Why did you like them?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
I liked them because, I mean, when I was going to college, you'd see them at film societies alongside the feature films. So to me, they were movies like, you know, Gimme Shelter, documentary, great documentary, really entertaining. And then Fred Wiseman, I always liked his films, and Barbara Koppel, Harlan County, USA, Woodstock. I mean, they're documentaries, right?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So, I thought they were great, but there came a period, and particularly the period of cable TV. was a period where channels were like, you were supposed to be able to recognize them as you went up and down the dial with your clicker, before there were too many channels to use a clicker.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So that if you went by A and E, it's like, oh, that's A and E, because you can automatically tell, like... in three seconds, what the channel is. And so documentaries just became either something that was dull, that was on PBS, even though they weren't always dull on PBS, or that was just a cable channel documentary, which meant it was just... more fodder.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
They were all stamped with a kind of corporate seal. There was no personality to them. Like the documentaries that I liked, like the ones I just talked about, even the cinema verite ones where you don't hear a narrator or anything, you know, the cinema verite filmmakers saw themselves as visual poets.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
So there was a mark of personality to them. That's what was intriguing and engaging. They were engaging with real life, but it wasn't some stentorian narrator telling you the way the world was.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
That's right. There was a lot of years in the wilderness I spent doing other stuff, whether it was doing some journalism or I cut exploitation trailers for a while, you know, all sorts of stuff. Did you feel like a person who had, like, fallen in love with the wrong thing? Yeah. I had. And my wife was particularly convinced I had fallen in love with the wrong thing. What about the post office?
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
The regular hours? You know, it was like, because I was always, I had a zillion projects, right? But the projects never went anywhere.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
That was the period when I was scuffling up in Canada trying to make something. I was trying to make it for the Disney Channel, and then... the Disney Channel had a change of heart about what it was gonna do because Michael Eisner, you know, was caught trying to make a slave ride. Wait, what happened? Okay, so the Disney Channel was gonna change to become an Americana channel. Okay.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And as part of that, the first show, this is gonna be my big break, was going to be a doc series that I invented called The 50s, based on a book by David Halberstam called The 50s. And it was cool. It was like toe-tapping music, but it was serious stuff, but told in a very entertaining way.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Somewhere along the line, Michael Eisner, as part of this Americana project, decided that he was going to build an Americana museum, sort of like Disney World.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
But he ran into two problems. One was he was going to build it by a Civil War battlefield. And two is discovered that one of the highlights of the park was going to be a slave ride. Like an amusement park ride. To show you what it would have been like to have been a slave, yeah. Yeah.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
All of this is a long way of saying that when it came time for the premiere, the 50s, my co-creator, Tracy Dolbin, I went down. And at some point during the big party, which was at the Hard Rock Cafe, they said, and now we'd like to introduce the people who are responsible for this series.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And I had, you know, bled this series for like three years, you know, moved to Canada in order to be able to do it. And so Tracy and I are puffing ourselves up. And then they proceeded to introduce the advertisers. The execs at A&E didn't really even understand why we were there. Like, why would you bother to show up? You're just... Widgets.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
The people who are really important are the advertisers. It's like the paper towel company. Yeah.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Well, I understood that TV isn't about the conversation between a creator and a viewer. You're about renting viewers to advertisers.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
And that the creators aren't really creators at all. You're just providing the catnip that is just tasty enough It's good enough to lure you in so that you'll stay for half an hour and please the advertisers. And the last thing they want is any kind of personality or originality.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
It felt awesome. And not only did they write bigger and better checks for it, but, you know, sometimes you could take a swing and make it for a little bit of money and sell it for a lot. And there was a tremendous amount of excitement because it was about how do you do something weird and original that was seen as a market benefit.
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A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
Kind of, because when I made it, even in the first five minutes of that film, there's a lot going on. There's a recreation of a suicide. There's a strange Tom Waits song called, What's He Building In There?, It was an odd and idiosyncratic film in many ways. Now, it was about something that was famous. Yeah. You know, the collapse of Enron.
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The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
So I've been coming here pretty frequently over the last year, probably a couple times a week. It's a workout for me. You're sweating. Yeah, I'm doing it to burn calories, so...
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The Dave and Buster's Anomaly
I'll take your word for it, it's okay. The person who's like, no, I'm good.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
It's hugely challenging. And I think in part because of what you outlined earlier. In other words, we're all cynical about, oh, sure, there's money in politics. We get it. But we don't really.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah, but I don't think we really get it in terms of where it's got to at this point and exactly how it works. And so that's why and I had done this, you know, I'd been on this beat for a while. Some years ago, I did a film called Casino Jack in the United States of Money. And it was about disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who I give a sort of tip of the hat to in Ohio.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But that one was not that did not break through because people are like lobbyists, money. Yeah. What people need to understand is that we've created a system of legalized bribery. And I think most people don't really understand. Most people get emotionally the idea of a bribe and they're deeply offended by it. So if we replace campaign finance with legalized bribery. Now we're talking.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Now we're talking about true crime and we're talking about the real problem, which is a few people getting advantage over the rest of us. And they're the ones who are insisting that the policies work for them, not us.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
That's right. And it starts with a death, a violent death by gunshot, originally possibly murdered, deemed by the police to be suicide. And indeed, I kind of envisioned that as sort of my... That was a nod to that movie Sunset Boulevard, where William Holden tells the story as he's floating in the pool after he's dead. And so Neil Clark, who's the crooked lobbyist who killed himself...
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Are you in the 80 percent, 90 percent? He killed himself. The telltale sign of, you know. Maybe the clue is. He's wearing a Mike DeWine T-shirt.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yes. That was his suicide note. That was his suicide note. It was like, don't forget, look at Mike DeWine's emolument in this case. And people have. Nobody's come to any legal conclusion about it. But I think that was the message he was sending. But it's, you know, suicide is tricky. I say tricky. Suicide is tragic. And it's mysterious.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But at the same time, I think he was also clearly trying to send a message. I will tell you what.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Well... The question is, why are parts of HB6, which was the bill that they essentially bribed to get, still in operation? Some of it has been dialed down. They haven't repealed it, right? It's not been 100% repealed. And this is, I mean, just for the viewers who haven't seen it, I mean, this is the most bald-faced kind of bribe where executives from First Energy
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
dumped $60 million into a slush fund for the use by an Ohio politician named Larry Householder. He uses it first to get to be Speaker of the House in the Ohio legislature. He basically hacked the – what I would say is he used MAGA.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
You did, but even more than that, in the few swing districts that there were, and Ohio is an extremely gerrymandered state, but in the few swing districts that there were, he used massive amounts of money to make sure that his GOP candidates got elected, and then they owed him. And they owed him big time, and he had a way that they could pay him back.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And that way was to pass this signature bill that was written by First Energy, okay? That was the quid pro quo. And the bill was... give us a one plus billion dollar subsidy for our failing energy company. So from the first energy executive standpoint, it's a good return on investment. You drop $60 million in Larry Householder's lap and you get back $1.3 billion.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But you get to keep your executive salaries. There was another scheme too, where they thought they could spin off part of the company that would earn them another $100 million. So it was just literally robbing the state. It was Sheriff of Nottingham stuff. It was like taking from the poor to give to the rich.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And at the heart of it was this quid pro quo deal and this dark money organization called Generation Now, which initially nobody really knew what it was because if you're a 501c4, you can't penetrate it using all sorts of public inquiries.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Most of it was stuff that they made public during the court cases. I mean, yeah. In a funny way, you know, the moral of the, you know, this was a funny story to look at in terms of dark money, because here's one case where they caught you know, the perps and they sent him up to prison.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
It doesn't happen very often, but this was like... It doesn't happen very often, but the intriguing thing is, and the reason we thought this was a good story to tell, as opposed to the cases where everybody gets away with it, is you can hear... how the perps talked about their fraud because what happened was the FBI was actually looking into another political corruption case involving gambling.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And the key character at the heart of this tale, a lobbyist named Neil Clark, was on those wires. Some were body wires, some were phone taps. And then he started talking about Larry Householder and House Bill 6. And they were like, what's this? So they literally stumbled into this case.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah, and so, but that's the thing. When you pull a subpoena and you have an order for a wiretap and you stumble on another crime, you're within your rights to then pursue it. And then if you wanna pursue it further, of course, you have to file other requests for wiretaps and body wires. They had a group of guys posing as businessmen
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
We're wearing body wires and going out a little ab scam ish to me.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And they were going out to dinner with Neil Clark and Larry Householder. And and it was amazing how candid they were about the scam that they were pulling off and what first energy.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
We've come to accept it, but the, you know, the, In some of the rulings, and then the biggest ruling of all by the Supreme Court was of course the Citizens United decision. But in some of these rulings, the intent was, okay, we're gonna allow unlimited amounts of money to enter the political process by corporations and to some extent unions.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But the deal is we are concerned about, we're concerned, that sounds like Susan Collins, we're concerned about corruption. So we're going to insist that you can't give money directly to a candidate. You have to give it to an independent organization, a super PAC, or sometimes a 501c4, even better, because a super PAC, you have to disclose where the money comes from.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And they are not supposed to have any contact with each other. Well, you know, ridiculous. Of course they have contact with each other. It reminds me, it's sort of like recently, you know, this hundred, this, sorry, million dollar a person candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago. you know, for a super PAC called MAGA Inc, right? And by law, MAGA Inc can't coordinate with Trump's campaign organization.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
So invitations say that Trump is a guest speaker.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
This goes on in every state of the union. And the beauty of Ohio Confidential is you actually get to hear and see how it works because these guys were chuckling to each other over four or five martinis that the Citizens United is so great because now bribery is legal.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And so that was the aspect of it I found intriguing because while they did get caught and most people don't, we can assume, if you find, if you find a rat in your house, you got to assume it's not the only one.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
We can assume these conversations, as you just said about Ron DeSantis are going on in every state in the union. And it's just bribery. It's quid pro quo. It's pay to play. And that's what we have to call out. Cause I think, you know, people I think are starting to get worked up about it. I, you know, in, in,
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
You know, in Wisconsin, the idea that the Supreme Court judge got through despite the amount of money that Musk spent because people are offended at the idea that you can just buy elections. But this idea of money in politics, we've become too cynical about it without really thinking that this is a system of bribery that we have to stop.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
If you study this as a- I'm not sure how early we are. I mean, we're full on crony capitalism now. When you have a meme coin that's introduced, you know, right after the presidential election, you know, and cryptocurrency is flowing to the president of the United States, I mean, I think we're there. And I do point out in the film, you know, most of it centers on this Ohio corruption case.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But I do point out in the film that in, for example, in the, you know, in the. I call out the example of Reid Hoffman, who linked in, who gave or or was inclined to give Kamala Harris seven million dollars, but he wanted something in return. He wanted her to fire Lena Kahn at the FTC. Right. So that's where you get to that weird place where, oh, is that a quid pro quo?
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Or is he just suggesting that it might be a good idea, you know, for her to fire Lena Kahn? And in exchange, well, let's not call it an exchange. And then surprise, surprise, I give you $7 million.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Larry Householder was reelected. I mean, but I think that goes to- A jury convicted him, right? And he gets reelected anyway. $60 million bribe. He's president of the United States, okay? And he was convicted. He's a felon. So- So, yeah, there's that.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And obviously, we've entered a world where we have such a tribal political system that it is very difficult to persuade people that they should do other than vote for their however they define the tribe to be.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But I also think in Ohio, the problem was compounded by this system of gerrymandering, which resulted in supermajority rule, so that Larry Householder came from a district that was so, so red that there was never going to be somebody who was going to, particularly on short notice, they just... They'd elect, you know, a dead cat before they'd elect a Democrat.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
I think they are. I think they are. I hope they do, because they should be. They should be ripper at what's going on in their state. And not just at the passage of this bill, just as astounding to me was how the householder team, team householder, or generation now, how they muscled the repeal effort. Because in Ohio, you can mount... you can repeal laws by popular vote effectively.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Because the voters finally took over. Well, in this case, they were mounting a campaign to repeal House Bill 6.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
secretly and we had a whistleblower who's amazing i mean like this is adds to the caper this is why yeah you get the crime play because you get the whistleblower who's talking about here's his best friend he realizes his best friend is trying to get him to do something super unethical he first turns him down then he gets uncomfortable he goes to the fbi they say go back
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And now he wants to betray his own friend for the good of the state, which he does. He wears a wire and and ultimately reveals that. And this guy, the whistleblower, his name's Tyler Furman, who's working for an organization that's trying to drum up signatures against House Bill six. But he learns from his old pal who was ultimately convicted that.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Matt Borges, that they're literally paying canvassers to leave the state so that or they buy up all the canvassing companies so that there's no ability to canvas. You know, there's one tape recording where the guy says, well, you've just given me I can't remember. It's like, you know, thirty five hundred dollars on a ticket home. What do you want me to do?
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
He said, that's the service you're providing. You're going home.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah. No, I agree with you. And that's why people's hair better be on fire, because this is what happens. This is what money in politics means. It's like it's like crime families paying off the cops. That's what it's like. It's not just, you know. money in politics. It's graft. It's corruption. No, you're describing it.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Right. And the fact that they're the ones who are, you know, money's being taken right out of their pocket. So it's right. I think there's a tendency for people to think those politicians or the government as if the government is not us. But these folks are I mean, in the case of Ohio, they literally took a billion dollars out of the pockets of Ohioans to give it to a.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
you know, a handful of executives or to give it to a company, but they wrote that message to each other. They put their heads on Mount Rushmore.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
I don't know what the standards and practices are on this show, but basically screw anybody that ain't us is what they said. They didn't use the word.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
They're afraid of it because they need to raise money. And and so what do you do? Like if you need to beat your opponent in a primary, you're going to need money and you don't get money by telling your big donors that you're trying to sideline them.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Everyone's figuring out how to cure polio. Right.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
All of us have got to get, I mean, you know, if you're a billionaire, you made a lot of money through your business, you know, God bless. But that doesn't mean that you get to define the world for the rest of us. You know, we... Who was it told me? I believe this is the correct statistic. The three richest richest Americans, which would be, I believe, Bezos, Musk and I think Zuckerberg.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah, they have a higher net worth in the bottom 50 percent of all Americans. Right. Really?
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah. And and and but you can see the rumble. People are getting angry. You know, I'm talking to you from Maine and Maine's got a pretty robust set of rules about, you know, against money and always has on state political level.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Right. And I think that, you know, your beginning, what happened in Wisconsin was a kind of emotional pushback. But I also think that it's interesting, this campaign that AOC and Bernie Sanders are running, sometimes in liberal districts, sometimes in red districts, they are turning out some pretty big crowds. And I think the anger that...
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
um that they're invoking or channeling is the anger toward a rigged system where whether you're democrat or republican it's the rich people who are calling the shots and we're getting policies that benefit them not the rest of us
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Right. I think that's right. I mean, but, you know, one of the things I tried to point out in Ohio Confidential, though, is that as you talk about money and politics, it's also true that for most people, nobody likes a bribe. Right. Right.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
feel it's unfair it's wrong you know you see it in crime films and and you know you you you wish them ill um i i we've done a lot on ohio confidential the second by the way how do you describe this series is this because it's not it's two films it started out as one film and then we just got too much material i mean we got into the ohio story it was so good
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Also, we discovered this guy, the Reverend Bob Schenk, who had kind of infiltrated the Supreme Court. So suddenly the film that was going to be one just split into two. But they're not, you know, they're not episodic in the way that one leads to another. So there are two films that are related. There are two independent films that are related by a common theme.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah, so that, I mean- You had evangelical Christians who were fiercely anti-abortion, but they weren't getting over. They needed money. You had people with money who wanted to deregulate the American political system because they didn't want things like laws that regulated the amount of pollution that they could dump into rivers and lakes and any regulations on cigarettes or anything like that.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But those causes weren't very popular. So the deal was basically, we'll put up the money, we the billionaires will put up the money and you'll give us the emotional fervor that we need for a political campaign. we'll help to fund the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and you'll help to turn the evangelical movement into a deregulatory movement so that we can destroy
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
all the laws that protect the citizens, you know, and enrich us.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
We should be free. Right. Yeah, that's right.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah, well, you can see how religion's being weaponized now as we see what's happening with anti-Semitism, you know, and how it's basically trying to be used to destroy something called habeas corpus, which is the very foundation of the rule of law. But I also think that the other, you know—
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
There's an interesting character in the film, this guy, Reverend Bob Schenk, who's an evangelical minister. And he was a very radical anti-abortion activist who was literally, you know, carrying fetuses to.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
He definitely was close to that. But anyway, they want to infiltrate the Supreme Court ultimately. And so he has that phrase, the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous. And he says, we'll baptize the billionaire's money. We can do that. You know, it sort of reminds you of the indulgences of the Catholic Church from way back in the day.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
So this weird corruption of religion, because, you know, evangelical Christians end up supporting somebody like Donald Trump, who, you know, would otherwise be anathema to everything that evangelical Christians do.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
but he is the sinner that's going to take them to the promised land but they become corrupt and and in the in the meantime the the billionaires become sanctified so it was a good deal and it ended up in you know what our contention the argument in the film is that it ends up effectively corrupting the supreme court have you thought about the fact that right now it feels like the
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Yeah, I think it's I mean, in a way, it's worse than that, though. I think we're we're seeing a reckoning now. You know, money is the one way you can avoid reckoning with ethical issues. You know, you can buy your way out of it. Love to clean up the river that we've been polluting for the last 20 years. But, you know, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders. Right. Yeah.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
But, OK, let's look what's happening recently as Donald Trump has been going after the big law firms. And some have been resisting for the very best ethical reasons relating fundamentally to the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Um, but of course, amendment right to counsel, you know, things like that, you know, the fundamental rights, uh, of the rule of law, you know, that in theory, every, everyone's equal under the law. That's what, that's what it says on the front, you know, at the front of the Supreme court. Um, but, uh, but they cave, uh, And they diminish themselves massively because of the money.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
It's like, well, we have a fiduciary responsibility to the firm. Well, screw.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
That's right. Well, that's what Columbia found out, to switch from law firms to universities. Columbia found that out right quick.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Sarah, just because they want to pursue a merger or other financial interests. But at some point, we all have to realize that we're citizens of a country that's supposed to stand for something. And unless we stand for it, it's not going to be here anymore. Because then it's just about the money. If it's just about the money, then we're a mob state. We're Al Capone's Chicago.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Well, I mean, I do think it's about the story. You know, I remember talking with Bethany McLean, who was the co-author of Smartest Guys in the Room when we were doing the Enron doc. We were going on the PR tour and the joke, which, I mean, it wasn't a joke, but the line that we would use every step of the way was, it wasn't about the numbers. It was about the people.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
What made that story interesting were the characters. And, you know, there are a lot of issues that may be good and very important as issues, but may not lend themselves to a story. So first thing is, is there a good story? And then how do you tell that story in a way that is compelling to somebody who doesn't care at all about the issue? Right.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
And I have no apologies about the idea that I think Ohio Confidential is a movie. You know, I do, too. It's patterned after Sunset Boulevard. You know, it's it's it's, you know, Michael Imperioli plays the character of Neil Clark. So, you know, I think it's because. Because you've got a lot of, you know, for people at home, they've got a lot of choices.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Like they can fire up, you know, whatever movie it is that they want to see or they can look at a doc. And in a way, that's your competition. But it's also a compelling reason to tell a story. I mean, the best nonfiction books read as compellingly as a novel because they pay attention to character and plot and narrative momentum.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
I agree. Yeah, it's the story that matters. And that's how we learn. We learn with stories. You know, that's how we retain information.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
Well, believe it or not, for the last two years prior to the election, I was working on a documentary on Elon Musk. And so now that is my brief has been expanded. It will get longer and I'm continuing to work on it.
The Chuck ToddCast
Dark Money Has Corrupted American Politics
No. It sounds like what you'd come up with.