David Bianculli
Appearances
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The last time Independent Lens presented a film by director Jonathan Olszewski was in 2017. That documentary was called Quest, which showed the life of an African-American couple living in North Philadelphia. Everyday life, captured for over a decade and condensed into a film, about family, aspirations and setbacks, and sudden unexpected events.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
It managed to be simultaneously very specific and universally relatable. There was something about having the patience to spend that much time with your subject and to go wherever events took you that made Quest a very special movie and an equally special viewing experience.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
And now Olszewski is back with another documentary for Independent Lens, filmed in a similar fashion over a total of 13 years. Once again, he tells the story of a family and a culture not usually represented on TV or film with this amount of respect and care. This time, it's called Without Arrows, and it's the story of Delwin Fiddler Jr., a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
At the time we meet him, in 2011, Delwin is living in Philadelphia, running a company that teaches and performs Native ritual dances. After more than a decade away, he decides to return to the Sioux tribe reservation in South Dakota, where his parents and other relatives still live. Olszewski went along to record the family reunion, envisioning it as a short film.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But Delwyn decided to stay, and Without Arrows became a much larger project with a much deeper vision and message. As the film grew in scope, Olszewski teamed with a co-director, Elizabeth Day, a Native American from the Ojibwe Nation in Minnesota.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Her input and Olszewski's up-close-and-personal filming style combine to make Without Arrows feel less like filmmakers observing from the outside in and more like candid, honest snippets of family life from the inside out.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
We see moments of simple joy, a water balloon fight with the young nieces and nephews, or card games of gin rummy that give Delwyn's mother joy throughout the years we spend with her. We see beauty in the landscape and the horses, and in the eventual introduction of a new generation of the Fiddler family.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
But we also see hardship and tragedy, from violent thunderstorms to periodic additions to the family graveyard. And shortly after Delwyn Jr. returns home, his mother Shirley informs him of the duties she expects him to embrace.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
Even though Delwyn's father, Delwyn Sr., is still around, he's a quiet character who's great fun to watch, especially when tending horses or playing with his grandchildren. It's the mother who knows and recounts most of the family history. Their lineage can be traced back to the Battle of Little Bighorn and beyond, and they're now the custodians of the Lakota ceremonial pipe from that battle.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
In Lakota language, that pipe is called the chenupa, and Shirley displays it and old photographs of their ancestors with pride.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The personal history of The Fiddlers gets even more personal when Delwyn Jr., in a pensive moment alone with the filmmakers, talks about an event from his own adolescence. When you hear it, you suddenly understand why both Delwyn and his mother are so concerned about legacy and family.
Fresh Air
This Anti-Social American Life
The evidence that time heals runs throughout Without Arrows, but so do many other messages. Olszewski and Day present them beautifully and clearly, yet with subtlety. There's no narration and no talking head historians, just the images and the people on film to teach you about life, love, commitment, and perseverance. In Without Arrows, they do so in an emotionally powerful fashion.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
I watch more television than anyone I know, and even I can't pretend to have seen enough to compile a comprehensive end-of-year top ten list. What I can do is run through a list of the best things I've seen and why I like them so much, and also to note a trend or two that seem unique to the current year. If you're looking for great TV to binge over the holidays, consider this a quick guide.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
One show that may not make many 2024 top ten lists because of its last-second arrival is The Return of the Squid Game. Season one of this South Korean drama series premiered on Netflix three years ago and was a surprise but well-deserved hit. Season 2 doesn't drop until the day after Christmas, but I've previewed it and it's a worthy successor.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
It expands the focus, the perspectives, even the number of games, and is as brutal yet as beautifully photographed and intensely acted as the original. And speaking of beautifully photographed, let's give a nod to another Netflix series, Ripley, the most stunningly shot TV series I saw in 2024. The best non-fiction shows I saw all year? Beatles 64 on Disney Plus and Leonardo da Vinci on PBS.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
The best talk shows? HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Netflix's John Mulaney Presents Everybody's in L.A. The best scripted drama and comedy shows? Many were returning series with strong outings in 2024. The latest season of FX's Fargo, with Juno Temple and Jon Hamm, was stunning, surprising, and impossible to forget. My favorite series of the year.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
Season two of Netflix's The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell as our country's British ambassador, built to a point where it was almost too tense to watch and ended with a cliffhanger guaranteed to make season three even more of a thrill ride. The latest season of Hulu's The Bear, about workers in and around a newly launched high-end Chicago restaurant, disappointed some, but not me.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
I ate it all up, especially the final episode. And on the lighter side, the 2024 season of another Hulu series, Only Murders in the Building, was a comedy triumph, giving Meryl Streep an unexpectedly rich role to play and play with on TV. And the latest season of Max's Hacks gave Jean Smart the same thing. She's wonderful.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
And that show's cliffhanger ending promises another great season to come there, too. Two series ended in 2024 with noteworthy finales. HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, the long-running Larry David comedy, went out with much attention and fanfare. The Paramount Plus series, Evil, went out with very little.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
Both were very intelligent, entertaining shows that I watched and looked forward to every week until they ended. So farewell and thanks to Curb and Evil. And hello to a lot of new shows that really made strong first impressions. If you like dramas about intrigue involving politicians or spies, 2024 was a banner year.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
Black Doves, on Netflix, had Keira Knightley as a very clandestine spy, and she and it were really good. The Madness, starring Coleman Domingo as a TV pundit accused of murder, and On the Run, a sort of updated version of The Fugitive, also is on Netflix and is even better than Black Doves.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
And best of all is The Agency, a new spy series on Showtime and Paramount+, that stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, and Richard Gere. It's rolling out weekly at the moment and is another of the great shows I've seen this year. HBO's The Penguin surprised me very pleasantly with its plot and intensity, and with its impressive leading performances by Colin Farrell and Kristen Milioti.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
Netflix's Nobody Wants This, a sort of 21st century Bridget Loves Bernie, was surprising too. Funny and tender and romantic in all the right measures.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
Also deserving of mention and definitely worth watching, FX's remake of the miniseries Shogun, Netflix's A Man on the Inside starring Ted Danson in yet another excellent TV series, and Agatha All Along, the imaginative, very musical Disney Plus sequel to WandaVision. Watch enough of these great shows, as I did, and you'll notice some recurring patterns.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
Some of the same actors popped up in very different places. Jamie Lee Curtis returned as the unstable mother on The Bear, but she also played a ruthless hitwoman in Prime Video's The Sticky. Jodie Turner-Smith, whom I singled out for her great acting in Bad Monkey as the Dragon Queen, shows up as the female lead in the agency and is amazing again in a completely different type of role.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
And Tracy Ullman, who was so funny as Larry David's unwanted living girlfriend on Curb Your Enthusiasm, also showed up at the end of Black Doves, playing a very serious, potentially lethal adversary to Keira Knightley's undercover spy. and for Allman, a drastically impressively different type of role.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
Another trend I noticed was how many shows in 2024 featured actors of a certain age, not just in toss-away or clownish roles, but in meaty parts that these veteran performers elevate even higher. I've mentioned some already, from Richard Gere to Meryl Streep, but I saw more on TV in 2024 than in any year in decades. These include some of the best performances in some of the year's best shows.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
Martin Short and Steve Martin in Only Murders. Helen Hunt and Christopher Lloyd in Hacks. Sally Struthers in A Man on the Inside. Margot Martindale in The Sticky. I'm happy to see them all working and thriving, even in a year when the TV terrain has been tougher to navigate. Not only for those working in the medium, but those of us watching it.
Fresh Air
The Looming TikTok Ban
I'm also happy to have seen so many good and great shows in 2024, even if I know I've missed many more. To sum up, I'll present one final TV clip. It comes near the end of my favorite show of the year, Noah Hawley's Fargo. A mysterious and lethal killer visits a suburban home intending to kill the family within, but is greeted instead with disarming kindness.
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The Looming TikTok Ban
The father hands him a cold bottle of orange soda, then clicks it against his own. The killer replies with a short and simple phrase, but it's a phrase that captures perfectly my overall attitude towards television in the year 2024. A man is grateful.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
In the last couple of years, British writer-producer Stephen Knight has been responsible for some really thoughtful, very entertaining TV miniseries. The modern spy drama The Veil, starring Elizabeth Moss. The World War II drama All the Light We Cannot See, starring Mark Ruffalo.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And, set in the early 19th century, a vibrant adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, with the marvelous Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But before that, from 2013 to 2022, Stephen Knight created and wrote and directed many episodes of one of the best TV series so far in this 21st century, Peaky Blinders, showcasing the talent of Cillian Murphy long before he played the title role in the hit movie Oppenheimer.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Peaky Blinders was a brilliant character study of someone striving to outwit, outplay, and outlast all competing criminal elements, while simultaneously navigating potential roads to prominence and respectability. That's what Stephen Knight's new series, A Thousand Blows, is about as well.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But this new Hulu series, set on the tough east side of London in the Victorian era, focuses intently not just on one scrappy character, but on three. And Knight, as creator and lead writer of A Thousand Blows, has done what David Milch did on his HBO series Deadwood.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Knight, like Milch, bases his central characters on actual figures from history, then builds a totally believable, depressingly seedy environment, and populates that with fictional characters to interact with the real ones. The actual historical record is used more as inspiration than blueprint, but the seeds are there.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Basically, A Thousand Blows is set against the boxing world, which, at that time in London in the 1880s, was a tale of two cities. There's the east end of London, where vicious bare-knuckles fights were staged in back rooms of neighborhood pubs. And there's the West End, where boxing matches were more gentlemanly affairs in men's clubs, with boxing gloves and strongly enforced rules of engagement.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
Stephen Graham, who played Hayden Stagg in the final season of Peaky Blinders, portrays Sugar Goodson, an East End pub owner and furious fighter. Erin Doherty, who played Princess Anne in the middle seasons of The Crown, portrays Mary Carr, the leader of the Forty Elephants. That's a gang of opportunistic pickpockets, shoplifters, and thieves, all women.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
And interacting with both of those fact-based colorful characters is a third. Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Mosko, played with Killian Murphy-type intensity by Malachi Kirby, who starred as Kunta Kinte in the recent remake of Roots. Eventually, Hezekiah steps into the boxing ring on both sides of London.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
But when he arrives in England, fresh off the boat at the London docks and accompanied by his childhood friend Alex, he's pursuing a different dream entirely. One of the first people he meets on the bustling streets of London is Mary Carr, the gang leader thief, who, while talking to Hezekiah about his future, also is picking his pocket.
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The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
When their conversation is over and Hezekiah politely asks for his stolen two shillings to be returned, the two begin a friendship that takes them across London, from grimy streets to royal mansions. A Thousand Blows arrives on Hulu with all six episodes dropped at once. But it finishes with a to-be-continued ending and even includes some teaser scenes from future episodes.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
More of this story clearly is coming. But what's here is gripping on its own and full of surprises. The boxing sequences, like the royal dinners, are impressive in their detail and in their very different types of intensity. And while A Thousand Blows is not, so far, quite up to the level of Peaky Blinders, it does achieve one thing that TV series did so brilliantly.
Fresh Air
The Gutting Of The Department Of Education
It introduces us to characters and performances that linger long after the show is over.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Ukraine would be ready to go do it. So the issue is, could you establish a force of allies, the French, the British, the Germans, maybe backed up with the United States intelligence and others, who would basically put a peacekeeping force on the borders?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
To keep the Russians from coming over and having – they would then be attacking NATO forces and presumably that could invoke a NATO reaction under Article 5 of the treaty, you know, an attack on one, isn't it? attack on all. That's essentially the same as putting them into NATO. But we don't know if President Trump is willing to go do that. And certainly Vladimir Putin would oppose it.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
So as you're thinking about these negotiations, don't simply think about land. Think about how you would sustain a Ukrainian state. And we don't know how committed President Trump is to that concept.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Well, first of all, back in 2016 in the campaign, When Maggie Haberman and I were interviewing him in a series of foreign policy interviews, he went out of his way to say, hey, Ukraine's not our problem. It's the Europeans' problem. This is long before the current war started. But, of course, already some land and Crimea had been seized.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
So, yes, he believes or at least has voiced belief that Ukraine may not be a true country. He hasn't quite come out and uttered the same words that we've heard from Mr. Putin, but it's been pretty close. And same for Tulsi Gabbard, who is, of course, his nominee to be director of national intelligence. And it'll be interesting in her hearings to see how she navigates that wording.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But I think the critical fact of the matter is that Zelensky knows that in any negotiated agreement, this is essentially going to look like the Korea armistice, which is to say you're not going to get the Russians to back off Ukraine. to the borders of a traditional Ukraine from years ago. You might go back to some of the borders of February of 2022.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But at that point, the Russians were already into parts of Ukraine and, of course, had Crimea. So Zelensky understands the territorial reality. I think his brain is focused on the security question that I mentioned.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Dave, I once asked him why he said these things and he said, well, he always says very nice things about me.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
So the change was one that basically said Russia could imagine the use of nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack. So what we was trying to do was basically say we are reducing the threshold about when we could introduce nuclear weapons. Now, there have been elements of this in Putin's wording back and forth.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And the scariest moment of the war so far for the United States came in October of 2022 when U.S. intelligence picked up indications that the Russians were considering using a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine. And had they done it, they didn't, obviously, it would have been the first use of a nuclear weapon in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And it would have changed, I think, the world and it would have changed the nature of these new Cold Wars. And it would have, I think, also changed our understanding about when nuclear weapons would be used. I mean, after all, Ukraine is a non-nuclear state.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Now, President Trump in his first term had a national security strategy that also envisioned the possibility that in a case of a particularly crippling non-nuclear attack, say a cyber attack that took out all of the country's communications, the U.S. might use nuclear weapons in response. It didn't survive into the Biden administration.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But what worries me about this era and what makes these new Cold Wars so much more dangerous than the old Cold War is that we have seen general discussion about loosening the conditions under which nuclear weapons would be used.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a new treaty? Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold the vote? What is the strategy?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
February of 2026. So the president will have 13 months to go renegotiate a treaty that And, you know, have me back here to call me wrong, David, but there's no way this treaty is getting renegotiated. It can't be extended under its own terms. Now, you may remember the New START Treaty is what brought the Russian and U.S. forces, nuclear forces, deployed forces down to 1,550 weapons each.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And then, of course, we've got many thousands more in storage, as do the Russians. It is the last surviving nuclear accord, and the Russians have already violated many provisions of it, but they've held to the numerical limits. Those will go away in February of 2026. At the very moment that China... has radically changed its approach and is expanding its nuclear arsenal.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
The Pentagon recently said there are up to 500 nuclear weapons from maybe 100 to 200 back in the days of Mao's minimum deterrent. This is all fairly recent. They're heading to 1,000 by 2030, 1,500, roughly the number the U.S. and the Russians maintain, by 2035. And if you ask people in the defense community, they will tell you that the Chinese are actually ahead of schedule.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But here we are in a world in which we could have no restrictions on the size of the Russian arsenal and a growing arsenal from China, which, of course, was never a signatory to New START or any other nuclear limitation treaty that limited their number of nuclear weapons. So we could be back in a third nuclear age here pretty fast.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
It certainly is. And the result is, as I argue in the book, that the old Cold War, which had the stability, as you referred to it, is very unlike the new Cold War. In the old Cold War, we had one major adversary, the Soviet Union. And while it had its terrifying moments, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, we fundamentally got to a point where we understood if we did X, they would do Y.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We had these red phones. You had a pretty high confidence somebody would answer the other end. You knew everybody who had nuclear control there. That's what allowed the stability. In the three-way relationship between Russia, China, and the United States, that is really the newest and most important single feature of the geopolitical world today. You don't have that stability.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Introducing a new player makes a very big difference. The cyber attacks have given all of the players, but particularly China, a new way to have attacks that threaten to cripple the United States, its utility grid, and so forth, without ever actually launching an attack. And that's the core of an operation called Volt Typhoon, which is the Chinese code in our utility grid.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
There's been another one for surveillance that got in recent months into the telecom system. The fact that the Chinese can do this so effectively, even after we've raised these defenses, tells you that we are in a new and much more volatile kind of competition.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Referring to himself.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Well, we're about to go find out and we're conducting a big national experiment in that that buckle up for this one. Here's what we know from the first term. He does not respond well to being given big written reports. He will not read them. He will respond to oral presentations and visual presentations. And if you go back into the memoirs of people like John Bolton or H.R.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
McMaster, both of whom served as his national security advisor, you'll hear about briefings that are tailored to him, showing him what the investment in real estate, something he knows well, is like, what occupancy rates are like in hotels, things that would enabled him to sort of tap into the condition of, say, rebuilding Afghanistan, which is the examples that they were using at that time.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
He has embraced the sort of Nixon madman theory. But the fact of the matter is the rest of the world knows that, too. And we also discovered in the first term that he's very susceptible to the promise of a really great trade deal.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
There was one famous conversation with Xi Jinping in which he said to him, you know, I'm not going to beat up on you for how you're treating the people of Hong Kong if we just get our phase one and phase two trade deal. He got phase one. He never got phase two.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
So I think the Chinese are going to approach him by saying, let's work out our trade differences, knowing that if he could go do that, he would be susceptible to it. It's an important thing now, especially because China has a trade surplus now on a scale unlike any we saw when Trump was last in office, because they are wildly overproducing and they can't buy enough in their own economy.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
They now have some weaknesses. We are going to see whether or not President Trump can actually negotiate a new deal with Iran or whether he is going to use this moment of Iranian weakness and American and Israeli power after the defeat of Hezbollah to take out the Iranian nuclear program. So this is going to be probably one of the most consequential years in
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
in the use of American power that I can think of in the post-Cold War era.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
It certainly had weaknesses, but it had one big success, Dave, and that was that under the 2015 deal, The Iranians shipped out of the country about 97 percent of the material that they had from which you could make a nuclear weapon.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Not 100 percent, but enough that we would have had about a year's warning if they were going to build a weapon because they would have to build up their stockpiles again. And that material got taken by the Russians. They were well compensated for it, but they did cooperate in taking it out. When President Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, he said the Iranians would come begging for a new deal.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
They did not. And in fact, after a couple of years, that all fell apart and the Iranians began producing new nuclear material. lots of it, and at a much higher level of enrichment than they were doing prior to the 2015 deal. They are now enriching uranium at 60% purity. 90% is what you need to make a nuclear weapon. Prior to this, they hadn't been any place close to that.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
So they are now in a position where in a few weeks' time, they could produce enough 90% fuel to build four nuclear weapons. maybe a little bit more, and they are stepping up that production, we would have very little warning.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And while initially we thought it would be a year or a year and a half before they could actually produce a warhead, they look to be working on some programs that might speed that up as well. So we don't have a lot of time here. And I think we're at a point where the Iranians are feeling extremely vulnerable.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
They have lost their proxy forces, most importantly, Hezbollah, which the Israelis, against the advice of the United States and the Biden administration, attacked and they were wildly successful. Obviously, with the collapse of the Syrian government, they're exposed at that end. The result is that Iran no longer has a proxy force that could strike deep into Israel.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
It is not. The Panamanians are operating the Panama Canal. China does have ports at both ends for its ships, as does the United States, and others make use of these. They've had them there for years and years and had them there during – President Trump's first term. They have tried to exert some economic influence throughout Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe and other places.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
It would be effective if the rest of the world cooperated. But the fact of the matter is the Chinese have been buying a lot of Iranian oil and buying it at a discount. They've been buying Russian oil and buying it at a discount. Sanctions are a great thing. They make you feel wonderful because you've done something and you've done it without committing troops.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But they only really work if all the major buyers in the world go along with them.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Oh, it certainly does. Because what's happened now is the Russians need something from Iran. And what they need is the Shahid drones. Iran is now actually producing some of these in Russia. They built a plant in Russia. And there are other military goods they need. And same thing for North Korea, Dave. I mean, for the past 70 years, what has anyone in the world needed from North Korea?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Nothing, right? They've been a desperately poor country. Suddenly Russia comes along and says, I'll take millions of rounds of your artillery and we'd like some of your missiles as well. And so they've suddenly got a real customer.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And, of course, China has not been providing arms directly to Russia, but it has been providing the technology that Russia needs to rebuild what was a corrupt and technologically behind military force.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
So the question I'd really like to ask President-elect Trump is the same one I asked President Biden at his last press conference, what will almost certainly be the last full press conference of his presidency at the NATO summit, which is, do you have a strategy? for getting in the way of the Russia-China alliance and with that Iran and North Korea.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And President Biden, after winding around for a bit, said, yes, we do have such a policy, which was a big change. Now, he's since signed out what that policy is, but they classified the whole thing.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We don't have much. We heard a little bit more from this over the weekend from J.D. Vance, the vice president elect, who basically said that working through Israel, there would be a lifting of any restraint on attacking the last of Hamas. Now, of course, if you did big attacks on the Hamas leadership, you might wipe them out.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
The risk is, of course, also that the remaining hostages could be killed in the process. And that's what everybody's trying to avoid. So there has a lot of discussion of putting a deal together for 34 hostages, which would be probably a little less than half of what we believe is the current number of hostages who remain alive and in captivity, and a ceasefire.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But let's say that it was beyond a stretch of the facts to say that they are operating the Panama Canal.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
that would last for about 42 days, meaning that, of course, the renewal of it and turning it into something permanent would be up to the Trump team. If this has echoes to you of the Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan handoff, where, of course, the hostages in Iran were released just hours after inauguration, and Carter, as you saw in some of the
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
The memorials to him and the obituaries went to go greet the released hostages and so forth. You could see a scene taking place kind of like that. We would be lucky to see that because obviously these hostages have now been in place for nearly a year and a half. Since October 7th of 2023. And the hope is to get them out as quickly as can be.
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And if the inauguration is the moving moment for that, that would be terrific because the administration has been so close to agreements in the past that fell apart at the last minute. I'm told by the negotiators that the big obstacle here has been the Hamas leadership, which, as you can imagine, is in considerable disarray after the Israelis killed their longtime leader, Sinwar.
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Oh, I think there is. And, you know, I don't think that we should rule out the possibility that President Trump could make some significant agreements in areas where you might not suspect. So we were just discussing one, Iran. I think it's 50-50 he could strike an Iran deal. Now, whether or not it – does what we want to do with the nuclear weapons or is broader is a big question.
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Same thing for the Middle East. I would say that the biggest single diplomatic accomplishment of Trump's first term was the Abraham Accords. The Biden administration tried to expand them. And obviously, the biggest expansion would be an agreement with Saudi Arabia in which Saudi Arabia was negotiating to recognize Israel. But they had two conditions on that.
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And one of them was the creation of a Palestinian state, which Netanyahu was not about to go do. And the second is the ability to go enrich uranium themselves, obviously to counter the Iranians, which I think the U.S. was preparing to allow them to do. All of this fell apart on October 7th.
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In fact, Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, had been planning to be in the Mideast negotiating with the Saudis and others shortly after October 7th. Obviously, all of that collapsed right after the terror attacks. And the question now is, could Trump actually use his relationship with both the Israelis and the Saudis to put that back together?
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No, I don't think it was an accident. And you might argue, some have argued that it's to distract from some of the controversies around some of his cabinet appointees. Pete Hegseth is up for hearings this week. There are some issues, a lot of issues around Tulsi Gabbard, who's a nominee for director of national intelligence, and of course, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And he might be able to, but it's hard to imagine right now the Israelis or the Israeli public, given their current views after the attack, agreeing to a separate Palestinian state.
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This is one of the hardest problems in modern journalism. We come out of The New York Times and other major news organizations out of an old school theory that you go back and establish what the underlying facts are.
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So when the president says the Chinese are in control of the Panama Canal, you go back and with your fact checkers and with interviews and all that, you answer the reader question, do the Chinese control the Panama Canal? And you come back and you say no.
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The difficulty we're running into right now is that we are in an era of such partisanship where everybody believes they are entitled to their own set of facts, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say. You see it in the Israel-Hamas war. You see it at the White House podium.
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You see it as companies try to explain why they have changed their policies, as Microsoft has so publicly on DEI in recent times. And so the question is, even if you employ an army of fact-checkers, Do the real facts ever catch up with the assertion? And are readers open to the possibility that the facts of the world that they think surround their worldview may not be right?
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And this is like one of the biggest changes in the 43 years I've been working for The New York Times, which was you could establish a set of facts as a neutral observer. And by and large, most people, if they have confidence in your news organization, would adopt that and say, well, The New York Times says whatever the president said was wrong. Right.
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That's the hardest part of the environment to navigate now. Because people assume that even your fact checkers are coming to this with bias. And it's hard to persuade people otherwise. And I don't know how you do it other than establishing a long track record that the world can trust. But it's not an easy thing these days.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
But there's a reason, Dave, that I asked the question and the way that I asked it. In the first term, you may remember that President Trump brought up the possibility that the United States might be interested in acquiring Greenland. And at the time, it seemed like a real estate developer's dream with a slightly nationalistic turn. But it was at its essence an offer.
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Greenland said it wasn't interested. But more importantly, Denmark, which controls Greenland's security and foreign affairs, said they were interested and the issue was kind of dropped. It wasn't a crazy idea. Harry Truman wanted to buy Greenland.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And you can understand now at a moment that polar ice caps are melting away and the Chinese and the Russians are running more ships, nuclear submarines and so forth through the sort of creation of a new Northwest Passage, why we would have security interests there. And, of course, President Trump has always been interested in the –
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the minerals, rare earth minerals and others that might be mined there. But what's happened in the past couple of weeks is that his comments took a much more martial turn. They no longer became a, would you be interested in selling, to a, this is a central vital national security concern to the United States, so you must sell. And similar lines about taking control of the Panama Canal.
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And so the reason I asked it the way I did, which was, are you willing to use military or economic coercion, is basically to try to elicit from him, was he trying to say that he was going to make an offer you can't refuse? And his immediate answer was, yes, that's exactly what I'm doing.
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And it's unusual, particularly in the case of Denmark-Greenland, because we don't usually threaten to use our military against NATO allies. Right, right.
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So the foreign capitals were predictable, and I think they were getting a little taste of what negotiating with Donald Trump is like. And maybe this is just a negotiating position. You know, maybe in the end, all he wants to do is make an offer that they actually will take.
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The reaction in Congress, Democrats were saying exactly what you would expect, which is that the old America first may have sounded isolationist. The new America first, and I would argue the America first that Donald Trump always had in mind since I first started, Discussed it with him in an interview Maggie Abram and I did in 2016 has a really much more nationalistic turn.
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So, you know, Donald Trump's idea of America first is less 1930s isolationism. and more 1890s expansionism, when McKinley and then Teddy Roosevelt took the Philippines. It's when the United States got Guam. It's when the U.S. took control of some other territories, Puerto Rico included. So what we're facing here is a Donald Trump revolution.
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who is thinking in terms of going back to the era when the U.S. had expansionist ideals. And look, we had them in the Louisiana Purchase. We had them in the Purchase of Alaska, Seward's Folly, as you may remember from 11th grade, right? And we had them in the 1890s. We just haven't had them since.
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If in fact he means what he said to me, it would be. It would also be welcomed in many ways by President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. If you think about Putin's argument for taking Ukraine... What it came down to was we have a strong national security interest in reuniting Peter the Great's old empire. And he doesn't want to reconstitute the old Soviet Union.
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He thought the old Soviet leaders were… were idiots. What he wants to do is restore Peter the Great's Russia. And I've only been in his office once, Dave, but the one time I was, I noticed there were no pictures of Stalin and Lenin, but there was a bust of Peter the Great. So, If you are Putin, you're thinking, wow, this is terrific.
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We have a president of the United States coming in who has dropped the line about international legal order and all the things that Joe Biden was saying about why we could not take Ukraine. And we've got somebody who now believes that force can be used if you believe taking territory will improve your national security. And Xi, of course, would look at that and think about Taiwan.
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So this started as kind of a joke, right? And he called Prime Minister Trudeau, who, of course, is on his way out, Governor Trudeau. And he talked about how much easier it would be if Canada was just a state organization. I'm not sure he really believes that. I'm not quite sure how many votes for Donald Trump or people like him there would necessarily be in Canada.
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But, you know, we'll set that aside for a moment. But it began as a joke that then took a more serious turn. Now, Trudeau was in Washington last week for President Carter's funeral. And he went on television, I think with Jen Psaki's show. And she asked him, did President Trump bring this up during your meeting with him? when Trudeau came a number of weeks ago. And he said, yes, he did.
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Trudeau said that he tried to sort of make light of it by suggesting that maybe we could do land swaps and we could trade for California and Vermont, two reliably blue states. But I'm not sure that's really what President Trump has in mind.
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Absolutely. And that would be the way to get this done. And John Bolton, his former national security advisor or one of the four during the first term, has made that point repeatedly. If you're going to do this, the surest way to get people's back up is to do it in public and make threats. But there's a pattern here.
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You may remember that before he negotiated with North Korea, he declared that Kim Jong-un was Little Rocket Man and threatened, you know, said, I have a bigger red button on my desk than you do, basically threatened destruction, and then got into a negotiation. Now, What people forget is the negotiation failed and North Korea now has more nuclear weapons than it ever had before.
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But this would be a sort of Trumpian pattern to go out and do this. And you know what? It kind of thrilled his base. You didn't hear anybody in Congress on the Republican side really criticize him for it. A few rolled their eyes. And I think what...
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You have begun to hear from people close to President Trump, including his incoming national security advisor, Mike Waltz, that we are headed to a Monroe Doctrine 2.0. Now, you may remember the Monroe Doctrine was what established that the United States had a sphere of influence in our own hemisphere.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And that's sort of what he is saying about Greenland, Panama Canal for sure, maybe even adopting Canada as a 51st state. The difficulty with this is it plays right to the Chinese argument that they too have a sphere of influence and it's most of the Pacific.
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Well, this is going to be the fascinating sort of opening gambit in his – He takes office in a little less than a week. And, of course, he said during the campaign that he would solve the Ukraine problem in 24 hours. In fact, he said at one point during one of the debates that he would try to get it resolved even before he took office.
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He's now recognized that it's a lot more complicated than maybe it looked in the campaign trail. And his designated special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, who a former military official who was also in the first term National Security Council, has sort of set 100 days to get a negotiation going. So, first of all, nothing wrong with the idea that there needs to be a settlement here.
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We've been through as of next month, three years of horrific killing. And it's pretty clear that the Russians are not going to be able, at least this round, to take all of Ukraine. And it's pretty clear that the Ukrainians are not going to be able to expel the Russians. So we're kind of where we were
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in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, where you're at that static moment where maybe there is a moment for an armistice, not a peace treaty, but just a ceasefire where everybody is sort of locked into place. And then you try to come up with a mechanism where you are going to negotiate the borders later on. So the big question, Dave, would be what kind of security guarantee would
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could the United States and the West give the Ukrainians so they would have confidence that Putin would not simply use the time to reconstitute his forces, regroup, build up a stronger attack plan and the manpower and the equipment to do it, and then take Ukraine again sometime later in a Trump administration or beyond. I think you asked Donald Trump that question at Mar-a-Lago, didn't you?
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I did, and I didn't get an answer, as you may have seen. So he did say that he opposes letting Ukraine into NATO. And that wouldn't put them all that far from President Biden, who, along with the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, got in the way of specific commitments about when Ukraine would join NATO. They only passed these sort of vague commitments at some point.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Two things will happen. One is that smaller news outlets will simply cease to exist because they will be sued into oblivion or – or probably and sensible, economically rational individual journalists and institutions – will really rein in the aggressiveness with which they cover powerful and wealthy people and institutions in this society.
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And that is not, first of all, that's not in the public interest. And I think journalism plays an essential role at exposing wrongdoing and holding powerful people to account. And second of all, it just simply is not consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment as it was created hundreds of years ago by the framers of the Constitution. They wanted
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a vigorous, independent news media to serve as a really important check on the government's power. And there's no way to do that if every time you innocently make a mistake as a journalist, you risk kind of financially dying because you are exposed to endless litigation.
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Oh, well, the effort is huge. And Claire Locke is by no means alone at this point. I mean, their successes have led to a lot of copycat efforts all over the country. And that was one of the most startling things I saw in reporting this book was that, you know, Claire Locke has this national reputation. They if you were to Google them, you would see them popping up in a million different countries.
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cases and a million different situations where they end up sending threatening letters and those letters then get quoted from in an article about their client. But much more than that, this is never coming to public light. And there are
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It's simply impossible to calculate how many times they and other lawyers like them have threatened a news outlet and gotten that news outlet to either not write the story or water it down sufficiently that it does not irritate their client. And what I know from my own personal experience and the experience of my colleagues at the Times is that.
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You know, this is where we started this conversation. It's basically every time you're writing about a powerful or wealthy person in a critical way, you stand you run a great risk of getting one of these threatening letters. And again, for major news outlets like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or CNN or NPR. That's not that scary, right? We have a lot of experience getting these.
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We have really good in-house lawyers or external lawyers who know how to deal with this and know that this is kind of saber-rattling often on the parts of whoever is making these threats. It's much more detrimental for local news organizations or this whole group of independent journalists that have been proliferating in recent years and that to me is one of the really –
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kind of most optimistic, nice things that we're seeing from the journalism community right now, which is all of these new voices, whether they have a Substack newsletter or a podcast or a blog. And it's people like that that are at especially great risk because they generally don't have the money or the wherewithal to find lawyers to represent them and to defend themselves.
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And so it creates a situation where the simplest, safest way Most rational thing to do is to back down and stop digging into the affairs of this really litigious person or company or organization that you're writing about. And, you know, that is essentially a quiet form of censorship all over the country.
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Well, Thomas, in February 2019, took a case that was never going to be heard by the Supreme Court and decided as the Supreme Court rejected an appeal and said it would not hear the case. He took that opportunity to issue an opinion that said, in the future, we should take a better case and we should use this better case to overturn Sullivan.
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And his critique was from the perspective of someone who believes in constitutional originalism, which means basically that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be interpreted as the framers of the Constitution meant them to be interpreted. That's a tricky thing with the First Amendment, which is 45 words long.
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And there's not a whole lot of evidence, contemporary evidence from the time about what the framers actually meant. And but Thomas's argument was that if you look back at many, many years of English common law, there was no evidence that people in England or the framers of the Constitution wanted libelous speech to be protected by the First Amendment.
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Now, there are a bunch of problems with that argument. There are, for example, records that the framers did want that kind of speech to be protected and felt very strongly that people have the right and the ability to speak freely about their leaders without fear of being punished.
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But the biggest problem is that looking at the First Amendment through that narrow kind of historical lens means that you're not allowing for any change in the country or in the political or legal climate in the country over an intervening period of centuries, which I think most legal scholars would agree that that is not the right way to look at the Constitution.
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It's not the right way to look at the libel law.
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And Robert Bork, who is a very conservative judge and kind of one of the intellectual forefathers of originalism, himself was a huge fan of Sullivan and wrote about it a lot in ways that made clear that you can take an original meaning of the First Amendment and you should still believe in Sullivan because the framers, what they wanted was to have an environment where the public and reporters and everyone else believed.
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And this is according to Bork, not me. It was important to kind of update your understanding of how the First Amendment works and how it applies. And so he, for one, was a huge fan of Sullivan, wrote about it in kind of this adoring way. And so Thomas's critique of it that emerged in 2019 was, I think, a real surprise to a lot of people.
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Well, so Gorsuch has attacked this from a different angle. And Thomas, to be clear, so in this 2019 opinion that he issued, he was alone. He was just speaking for himself. That kind of set off a whole new round of activism and research and advocacy throughout the conservative legal movement all over the country to try and weaken the foundations of Sullivan.
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Gorsuch in 2021 came along and kind of jumped on this bandwagon, and he had a different argument than Thomas had originally articulated. His argument was that basically in an era when the Internet is awash in disinformation, in particular on social media. It's not right to preserve a constitutional standard that makes it harder for powerful people to sue people for getting things wrong.
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Now, if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, that's because I don't think Gorsuch's argument makes a whole lot of sense. He was kind of doing what seemed to me to be a bit of a sleight of hand where he's equating all the disinformation on social media, which undoubtedly exists. No one disputes that.
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And making it sound like the reason that that exists and the reason that no one can contain it is because the Sullivan decision makes it so hard for public figures to sue media companies. And there's just a real disconnect logically there.
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Yeah, that's right. So on the fifth day of his original confirmation hearings, there were two series of confirmation hearings, both one before Anita Hill made her allegations publicly and the other after. So... On the fifth and final day of his first round of confirmation hearings, Thomas was asked what he thought of the Sullivan decision.
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And up until that point in his hearings, he had been doing what I think most judicial nominees are trained to do, which is basically deflect senators' questions about – cases that they might have to deal with as justices. And Thomas had been doing that very artfully over the course of four prior days. And then on this fifth and final day, he's asked about Sullivan.
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And his answer to that question was it was probably the most direct answer he had given to any question about an existing precedent. That's my interpretation of it, having fairly recently listened to all of these hearings. And he said basically that, look, as a public official, it is unpleasant being in the spotlight. And, you know, he turned around. His wife, Jenny, was right behind him.
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And he kind of looked at her and said, Jenny just said to me the other day, this is so unpleasant being in the public spotlight like this. Reporters are, you know, digging into our personal story, our professional histories. This really is not fun. And Thomas told the senators that he had responded to Jenny by saying this is essentially the price of the First Amendment.
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And it's a price worth paying because we value in this country free speech and freedom of the press. And that's what the Supreme Court was looking to protect in the Sullivan decision. And so, therefore, it's a really important part of the First Amendment. And you could kind of see the wheels turning in Thomas's head at that point. And he had been thinking about it.
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And he gave a thoughtful and candid answer to the senator's questions. Now, this was completely lost to history. As far as I could tell, the only place that reported on his remarks at the time was I believe it was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote about it.
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No one else wrote about it at the time, and it was quickly overshadowed because Anita Hill, a few days later, came forward with her allegations of his sexual harassment and misconduct. And I think the experience that Thomas had over the remainder of his confirmation battle really changed the way he thought about the media.
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He's been vicious about the media and about how distrustful he is and everyone else should be of the media to such an extent that in his memoir in 2007, he recounts a bunch of instances in which the media purportedly mistreated him. And I went back and fact-checked his assertions, and they're just not true.
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There's no question that he went from, you know, on the Fifth Davis confirmation hearings, viewing the media as maybe an imperfect and certainly unpleasant but vital part of American democracy to thinking of it more like a cancer on democracy. And it's a really obviously that's a really stark change.
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And but it had not infiltrated his judicial opinions until this case came along in early 2019, where he, for the first time, publicly went after Sullivan.
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Well, I run a small team of investigative reporters at The New York Times. And back in 2022, I realized that it seemed like just about every time we were investigating or writing about a powerful person or powerful institution, We were getting bombarded with threatening letters from that person's lawyer. And, you know, the Times is pretty well equipped to handle those kinds of threats.
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Well, look, we do not know how individual justices will vote or rule on the case. We know Thomas and Gorsuch are presumably in favor of taking on a case to overturn Sullivan. And then we know that a few other justices have over the years said things that raise the prospect that perhaps they would be interested in it.
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Eleanor Kagan wrote a law review article many years ago that questioned aspects of Sullivan. John Roberts wrote something when he was in Bush's White House that raised questions about his view of Sullivan. Alito has been quite bullish on First Amendment cases in general, has also been very closely aligned with Thomas. We don't know where Amy Coney Barrett stands. It's very unclear. But I think...
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If I were to make a bet, and my bets almost always lose, so take it with a grain of salt, my bet would be that the court does not, in the short term, take up a case that would overturn Sullivan outright, but instead that they potentially take a case that gives them the opportunity to kind of chip away around the edges.
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And the way they might do that would be taking on a case filed by a public figure, not a public official, And it would look at whether there is too broad a group of people who has to meet the higher standards imposed by Sullivan.
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So maybe they kind of chip away around the edges at who qualifies as a public figure or under what circumstances or kind of what levels of evidence they need to present to prevail in a defamation case.
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Yeah, I would frame it a tiny bit differently, which is not that Thiel got involved because that makes it sound a little passive. But Thiel was angry at the way Gawker was covering him and Silicon Valley more broadly and so set out several years before Hulk Hogan came around.
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He set out to destroy Gawker, and he assembled an army of lawyers and consultants and researchers to dig into Gawker, to really every aspect of it, to look at all the articles they were publishing, to look into their finances, their employment practices, things like that, to try and find a legal strategy to destroy the website. And he came across his business.
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We have an excellent team of in-house lawyers and we have a lot of experience dealing with those kinds of threats. But it got me wondering what that would be like if you worked for a smaller news outlet. or if you were an independent journalist.
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The perfect weapon in Hulk Hogan, who, as you mentioned, had was the subject of a secretly recorded sex tape that Gawker published a little snippet of. But Teal saw in the Hulk Hogan case this perfect opportunity to kill Gawker by suing them for invading Hulk Hogan's privacy.
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And so he secretly no one knew this at the time, but he secretly financed this years long legal campaign against Gawker in a Florida courtroom. And it won it right around the time that Donald Trump was first talking about opening up the libel laws. A jury in Florida returned a verdict in favor of Hulk Hogan and against Gawker.
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And that very quickly led, pushed Gawker into a financial tailspin that resulted in the site being shut down.
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Well, in this case, the actual malice wasn't the standard. This was not a defamation case. It was an invasion of privacy case. Clearly, the jury was convinced that Gawker had acted irresponsibly and recklessly and maliciously in the publication of this sex tape. I actually disagree with you, though, that it's hard to find sympathy for Gawker. And look, Gawker existed before. to offend people.
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And usually it was trying to offend rich and powerful people. And it was really good at that. And it's not the kind of journalism that I practice or that I aspire to. But I think that they played a really pioneering role in challenging authority figures that the mainstream media later caught on to. And there's no better example to me
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And so I started calling around to reporters, editors, publishers, lawyers all over the country and just asking them about their experiences and whether they'd been threatened or if they'd been sued. And I just started hearing this litany of really kind of upsetting horror stories. Yeah.
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than its coverage of Peter Thiel and of Silicon Valley, which had been treated, you know, with some notable exceptions, was being treated by most of the media as, like, look at the novel things they're producing, all these cool gadgets and devices, and everyone was kind of oohing and aahing about the latest, greatest stuff coming out of Silicon Valley.
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And Gawker really existed to kind of pierce that narrative. And they were digging into Peter Thiel's finances, his hedge fund's finances, some of the kind of kooky stuff he was saying about not really believing in democracy and not believing women should have the right to vote, things like that. And they had become a real thorn in Peter Thiel's side. And
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
You know, I think there's an argument to be made that that is the role of journalists, or at least the role of some journalists, to try and make people like Peter Thiel uncomfortable by revealing what they're doing and revealing some of their secrets. And, you know, they certainly succeeded in that, but they made a very powerful enemy.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And Thiel's years-long campaign against Gawker, which, as I said, was very successful, it became this roadmap that other rich and powerful people could use. It showed that it was possible, if you put enough time and planning and money into a project, you could really kind of bring a fairly large news organization to its knees. And
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
That was a message that resonated with a lot of rich and powerful people. And I ended up talking to one of the guys who masterminded this campaign for Thiel behind the scenes.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And he said that following the outcome of this trial, even before Peter Thiel became publicly known as the guy who had done this, that he was fielding requests from other really rich people, kind of fantasizing about which media outlets they would like to go after next. And so when you look at the history of this type of litigation,
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
There is no way to avoid the conclusion that Gawker was this really seminal watershed moment where a lot of rich and powerful people realized that weaponized lawsuits were an ideal mechanism to punish and deter journalists and news organizations whose coverage made them uncomfortable.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Well, I think it just reflects the idea that right now it is a dangerous thing to be going up against the president in court. And Trump has shown over and over again a willingness to kind of push legal boundaries, to be vindictive. And to use his power, whether that's when he's a private person or now as president, to use his power to punish his enemies.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And so a couple months ago, we had ABC News, whom Trump had sued over an interview involving one of their anchors, George Stephanopoulos. He filed this lawsuit that most legal observers viewed as insidious. if not frivolous, then lacking much merit. And it was clearly the type of speech Stephanopoulos had gotten wrong.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
He had said that Trump had been found liable in the E. Jean Carroll case of rape, when in fact he'd been found liable for the lesser offense of sexual abuse. So this is a classic example of Stephanopoulos got it wrong
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And it probably shouldn't have gotten it wrong, but there is no evidence, at least that I'm aware of, or that had become public, that Stephanopoulos was lying or had acted with reckless disregard. It was also unclear the difference between sexual abuse and rape in the New York court system is kind of a technical matter. And there's some gray area there, which I won't get into.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
But this was a case that ABC— Almost every legal observer I speak to says that ABC had an extremely good chance of prevailing. But instead of going to trial, they agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle shortly after he had won the election. And I don't think there's any way to look at that and not see ABC and its parent company, Disney.
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thinking about how unpleasant it was going to be for them and potentially how bad it was going to be for their broader business to spend the next four years litigating against the sitting president of the United States.
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that was critical of people around Trump, including the Post's owner, Jeff Bezos. Bezos just fired recently the head of their editorial page, completely changing the direction of that editorial page into a direction that is much more palatable to the Trump White House.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
It occurred to me that that was a really pronounced trend I was seeing, that it has not gotten a lot of coverage. And it led me to start digging a bit deeper into the legal protections that journalists have and why it was that even with the strong protections that exist today, why these threats were already being effective.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Now, again, importantly, to my knowledge, that has not affected what The Washington Post's awesome cast of reporters are doing on the news side. And nor have I heard about other news outlets where the coverage has really changed because people are concerned about offending Trump.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
But I think there's no question that some of the steps that Trump and his allies in the government have been taking are designed to create that fear. And, you know, there's a whole range of things they've been doing. And it's not just lawsuits and legal threats. And they...
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
are trying to assert control over who gets to cover the president closely, whether that means not allowing the AP to cover events or handpicking favorable news outlets to be part of the press pool that closely covers and travels with the president. And I think there's a lot of concern among media lawyers and publishing executives and journalists
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
That this is just kind of a taste of what's to come. And again, we're only seven or eight weeks into this administration. And, you know, is the FBI under Kash Patel going to try to use subpoenas more frequently to identify journalists' confidential sources? Are they going to try and prosecute journalists who get secret information? I don't know.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
But I do know that that is definitely something that people are concerned about and watching really carefully and already looking at ways to challenge that in court were it to happen.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Yeah, that is true. I think the First Amendment is first for a reason. And look, I'm biased. I mean, those are literally the first words I wrote in this book, that I am biased. I've been a professional journalist my entire adult life. I think the media, we get things wrong. We're imperfect. We have biases. We're human.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
But I think, by and large, the media and journalism are just an incredible force for good and a force for democracy and a force for holding powerful people and institutions to account when no one else will. And that's not possible without the First Amendment. And so it's upsetting, frankly, to hear all these stories that I came across in this book where, despite the First Amendment—
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And despite these fairly strong legal protections that we currently have, even with those protections, journalists are getting threatened and bullied and in some cases driven out of business. And that situation could become a whole lot worse if the existing legal protections are weakened.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who want to weaken those legal standards and are pushing to do so are the ones that often have the most to hide and the greatest interest in journalists not having the spine or the willpower to go up against them.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Yeah, on a couple of occasions. You know, on a number of occasions, kind of small characters in the book basically told me that if I get anything wrong about them, they're going to sue me, which I found not that surprising based on my prior experience, but a little bit tone deaf on their part since I told them I was working on a book about threats against the media.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
But the biggest and kind of most extended series of threats I got was from a law firm that's a big character in the book and that exists for decades. primarily one reason, which is to threaten and file lawsuits against the media. The firm is Clare Locke, and they took great umbrage at some of the things I was reporting on them, both for this book and for The New York Times.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And over a series of letters, basically explained to my lawyers their great discussed with me, leveled some ad hominem attacks against me. And the thing lingering in the background was that, you know, they're a law firm that makes its money from selling people. And it was very clear that that was a prospect they were raising with me.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Yeah. So Sullivan was a decision that the Supreme Court issued in 1964. And without going into the very kind of colorful, interesting backstory of that, the outcome of the case was that the Supreme Court ruled that if you are a public figure or a public official to win a defamation case, you need to prove not only that someone got their facts wrong.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
and that you were defamed, you also need to prove that whoever wrote those words or spoke those words did so knowing that what they were saying was false, in other words, lying, or that they acted with reckless disregard for the accuracy of what they were writing. And that set a high bar for public figures and public officials to clear, and that was by design.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
The Supreme Court wrote in Sullivan and then in some subsequent decisions that there is a great public interest that dates back to the founding of the United States and having unfettered speech and debate and argument about matters of public importance in this country. And their argument was that if you have
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
potentially ruinous litigation hanging over your head every time you speak critically about a powerful person, you're going to self-censor or you're going to be sued into oblivion. And both of those outcomes ran counter to what the First Amendment guaranteed about free speech and freedom for the press.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Well, it's complicated and it depends on the circumstances. So in the Sullivan decision, it didn't deal with public figures at all. It was simply public officials. So in other words, someone who held elected office or had a real role in government. Over a couple of subsequent decisions, that group of people was expanded to include all sorts of public figures.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
So that could be someone who is, say, a billionaire. or a celebrity, or a university president. It could be someone, if you're a community newspaper writing about your town's affairs, it could be, say, a big real estate development company. It could be someone who is an outspoken advocate for or against abortion rights, for example.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
It could be someone who has kind of injected themselves into a public controversy that wouldn't necessarily be considered a public figure, but maybe is circulating a petition in your town or your city that's trying to do something controversial. And even in occasional circumstances, it can be someone who did absolutely nothing to seek out the spotlight. And the example that jumps to mind here is
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
is, for example, an air traffic controller who was on duty when there was a plane crash. And that's someone who is a private person, had never sought out fame or notoriety, but yet because of their role in a public – disaster could end up getting scrutinized and could even end up getting defamed.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And the courts have ruled over and over again that even though that subjects private people to potential reputational damage, it's really important that the public and the media be able to speak freely and investigate freely and criticize freely. when matters are in the public domain.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
So the air traffic controller, for example, might be a private person, but it's important that people be able to investigate the causes of a plane crash. And if that means that in the course of describing the air traffic controller's role in a crash, they get a couple of facts wrong by mistake, that is okay under the Supreme Court rules.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
So the actual malice standard, which the court established in the Sullivan decision, it's a little bit of a misnomer because it sounds like, you know, you're mean to someone or you don't like someone. And that constitutes malice. That's not the meaning in the legal sense.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
In the legal sense, it means that you were either lying or knew that had very good reason to know that what you were writing or publishing was false and did so anyway.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Yeah, this is a pattern that had been going on for years. It hadn't been weaponized in quite so sophisticated and successful a manner. But there are famous examples of the richest of the rich. And I think Ford was one of those who famously sued the Chicago Tribune and dragged it through years of very costly litigation. And so there's been a pattern and a history in the U.S.,
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
of using lawsuits to shut up your critics, or at least to deter your critics and make them think twice before saying anything negative about you. But it really had not become a phenomenon that threatened to shut down an entire line of really important press coverage.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
So Tom, Claire, and Libby Locke had been lawyers at a major corporate law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, for several years. Tom was Libby's mentor. And in 2014, they decided that they would set out on their own to start their own law firm called Claire Locke that would be entirely focused on defamation cases.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
So basically either threatening the news media and journalists with lawsuits or actually filing those lawsuits. And At the time, this was kind of a – it seemed like a strange decision for two successful lawyers who were making a ton of money at a big corporate law firm. And ultimately, because libel law at that point was not this booming business that it has now become.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
It was kind of this niche backwater area, in fact.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Yeah, this is 2014. So it's a year before Trump declares his candidacy and probably a year and a half or two years before his candidacy really starts to be taken seriously by a lot of people. And so their business model was that they were going to take on corporate clients or really rich individuals.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
who were concerned about stories that were being written about them or angry about things that had already been published. And they were going to try to either get news outlets to stop writing about their clients or to retract what they'd written or to just soften the focus, or they were going to file lawsuits. And They got off to kind of a rocky start.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And there were a couple of cases that they brought that where they just completely fell flat on their face because they ran into the First Amendment and they ran into the Sullivan protections when they were trying to kind of bully local journalists and independent journalists into retracting things that they had written.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
They really started to achieve success in 2016, though, and their big breakthrough case was one where they represented a dean at the University of Virginia who had been one of the focuses of a deeply flawed article that Rolling Stone had written about an alleged rape on UVA's campus. The article ended up being—it was filled with errors. The dean had not been treated fairly.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And this went to trial. And just before the election in 2016, Clare Locke won the case on behalf of their client against Rolling Stone. And it made huge national headlines because this case – because the Rolling Stone article was just – it had become such a public debacle that this outcome in court was – it attracted a lot of headlines.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And it vaulted Libby Locke into kind of the national headlines. She became, going forward – a regular guest on Fox News, in particular on Tucker Carlson's show, where she started not just bashing the media and claiming that the media was reckless, but also arguing that the only antidote to that was for the Supreme Court to overturn or narrow New York Times versus Sullivan.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
And that was kind of the moment where... where this issue that had been kind of lingering in the background, Trump had talked about it on the campaign trail, but he wasn't talking in very specific language, and he seemed to kind of lack a nuanced understanding of the issue.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
This was the moment when Libby Locke started talking about this much more in public, that this really started to enter the public consciousness, I think.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
Well, it's not nearly enough because as human beings, journalists are flawed. You know, we make mistakes. I make mistakes. The New York Times makes mistakes. I would hazard to guess that Fresh Air has made mistakes over the years. And sometimes those mistakes are minor and sometimes they're less minor.
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The Campaign To Silence Journalists & Undermine Free Speech
In my experience with journalists and certainly based on my reporting for this book, they are overwhelmingly errors that are done in good faith. In other words, we're not lying. We're not trying to get things wrong. We do so by mistake for any number of reasons. And if we are held – if we can be dragged into court and sued for millions of dollars every time we accidentally make a mistake –
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Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
This message comes from David Tennant Does a Podcast With, back for Season 3. David Tennant returns to sit down with superstar guests like Russell T. Davies, Jamila Jamil, and Stanley Tucci. New season streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
If you saw the 2015 movie The Revenant, co-written by Mark L. Smith, you have some strong hints about what he's up to in his new Netflix miniseries, American Primeval. Both stories are set in the 19th century, in isolated and rugged lands full of promise and danger. Both stories are about characters who face formidable obstacles and either fight back from the edge of death or just die.
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Sometimes both. Smith wrote all six episodes of American Primeval, and Peter Berg directed them all. This gives the drama an even, cohesive feel and flow. Smith uses a few actual events and characters from the 1850s, including Brigham Young of the Mormons, as the launching point for his largely fictional narrative.
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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Berg, of both the movie and TV versions of Friday Night Lights, has a gift for making characters both credible and relatable, whether he's acting or directing, and he does it again here. American Primeval begins by following two sets of travelers making their way west.
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There's Sarah Roll, played by Betty Gilpin from Glow, who's trying to arrange safe passage for her and her young son, Devin, to meet her husband in a town even farther west. And there's a newlywed couple, Jacob and Abish, part of a wagon train of pioneers hoping to settle in a nearby territory. Along the way, there's hostile weather and even more hostile people.
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From the various native tribes fighting to maintain their land, to the pioneers, the American army, and even the armed Mormon militia, all claiming their rights to the same land. And in the middle of both the land and its conflicts is Jim Bridger, an early settler who built his own trading post and now finds himself surrounded by warring factions.
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And occasionally visited by such travelers as Betty Gilp and Sarah, who barges into Bridger's office horrified by the violence she's just witnessed inside his fort. Bridger is played by Shea Wiggum from Boardwalk Empire and the Joker, who's a scene-stealing charmer here. With a full beard, twinkly eyes, and a playful way with words, Bridger is fun to spend time with.
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As in this early scene, when he's not thrown at all by Sarah's attitude and demands.
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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
Sarah and her son end up hitching a ride in a wagon with the newlywed couple heading west. But it's not long before the pioneers are stopped in transit by James Walsey, a leader of Brigham Young's Mormon militia. He's played by Joe Tippett. And in this scene, flanked by his men, Walsey questions the man in charge of the travelers, who happens to be played by Peter Berg himself.
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After this point, the wagon train is targeted in what was a real-life event called the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which killed 120 westbound pioneers. There were few survivors, but those survivors in this TV miniseries are crucial to the rest of the story American Primeval has to tell.
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It's at this point when some of them team up with a frontiersman named Isaac Reed, played by Taylor Kitsch, who played the star football player in Friday Night Lights on Berg's TV version. Kitsch and Betty Gilpin, as Sarah, have the most chemistry and screen time here. But I also keep going back to savor scenes with Shea Wiggum as Jim Bridger.
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He keeps resisting all offers to sell his fort, even when Governor Brigham Young, leader of the Mormons, eventually pays a personal visit. Kim Coates, from another excellent Netflix western, Godless, plays Brigham Young.
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American Primeval is as gritty as HBO's Deadwood and as full of heart and of endearing characters as CBS's classic Lonesome Dove. Be forewarned, some of the violence in American Primeval is as sudden, chaotic, and disturbing as the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. This new Netflix western is not an easy watch. But the road west back then was not an easy path.
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You'll be rewarded for your efforts if you make it through with some sights and performances you'll not soon forget.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Clean Slate won't be the last we'll hear from Norman Lear. The man behind All in the Family and The Jeffersons and Maude and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, had several other TV projects in development at the time of his death. His death, by the way, came when he was 101 years old.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Among those projects still in development is a remake of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Lear's somewhat twisted parody of a soap opera. And in a way, Clean Slate, the new comedy series on Prime Video, is a remake too. Or at least, a variation on a familiar theme. but it's very well cast and has a lot more laughs and tenderness than I expected.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
To picture the basic framework of Clean Slate, start with All in the Family, Lear's most famous creation, and imagine that Archie Bunker was still living in the same house in which his wife had died decades earlier. Then, imagine that Archie's longtime former household nemesis, the son-in-law he called Meathead, was not his son-in-law, but his son.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
And finally, imagine that after a very long estranged absence, the son was returning home. As a daughter. This premise allows for a lot of intergenerational arguing under one roof, just as all in the family did. But with some significant changes. The father, Harry Slate, is black, played by the veteran comic George Wallace.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
The trans woman who moves back in with him is played by Laverne Cox from Orange is the New Black. And while Norman Lear began developing Clean Slate back when he was 96 years old, the credit for creating the series and writing the pilot goes to three people. Dan Ewan, who wrote Dear Santa, George Wallace, and Laverne Cox. The show isn't shot in front of an audience and there's no laugh track.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
But there are laughs, mostly because Clean Slate is so well cast from top to bottom. Wallace as Harry Slate, just like Carol O'Connor as Archie Bunker, manages to be likable, even lovable, even when he's being gruff and loud and way too opinionated.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
And Cox brings a lot of heart, as well as a lot of combative playfulness, to her role as well, which you can tell from their very first scene together. He's at home, watching TV, awaiting the first visit from his son Desmond, whom he hasn't seen or talked to in 23 years, when the doorbell rings.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
In lesser hands, Clean Slate could be a one-joke show, or at best, a one-act play. After all, if Harry doesn't accept Desiree into his home, the show's over. And if Harry does share his household, where does the show go from there? Well, Clean Slate does have places to go, in part because the small Alabama town in which Harry runs his car wash is well-populated.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
There's the formerly incarcerated man with a young daughter, both of whom work at the car wash. the local pastor who was a childhood friend of Desmond's, the next-door neighbor who's not exactly neighborly, and even a town busybody played by another veteran performer, Thelma Hopkins.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
But the spine of Clean Slate, and what makes it work, is the relationship and the comic timing between Wallace's Harry and Cox's Desiree. Instead of a swear jar, they have a pronoun jar. And every time he slips, he has to pay a dollar. And just like Archie and Meathead, Harry and Desiree have clashing opinions about just about everything.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Including, from episode two, a vintage velvet painting on Harry's wall called The Last Supper of Soul.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
The feel of the show is a little old-fashioned, like comfort food. But the very point of Clean Slate, which is to be open to other viewpoints and embrace diversity, couldn't be more timely or more potentially controversial. Even from beyond the grave, Norman Lear is stirring up some good trouble. And a pretty good TV sitcom.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
In the U.S., murder mystery series built around eccentric but intrepid investigators have been around forever. And the best of them, from Columbo to Sherlock, have made an indelible mark on TV history. Currently, we have such shows as Elsbeth, Matlock, and Only Murders in the Building, all of which playfully present crimes solved by people with unusual but ultimately lovable personalities.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
A new BritBox import, a mystery series called Ludwig, is even lighter and flat-out fun to watch. Created and written by Mark Brotherhood, it arrives with one of the most original and captivating variations on the entire TV mystery genre. Here are the basics. Two very intelligent children, identical twins John and James, grow up sharing their youth with a best friend, Lucy.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
After the twins are traumatized by the sudden abandonment by their father, their lives take different paths. James becomes a police inspector and marries Lucy. John, who's got just as keen a mind but has become isolated and reclusive, ends up designing and publishing all sorts of puzzles.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
And then, after John goes missing while working on a case, Lucy contacts his twin brother, her old friend, and begs him to visit her. When he does, she hits him with a very bizarre request. John is played by David Mitchell from Peep Show. Lucy is played by Anna Maxwell Martin from Good Omens.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Reluctantly, John goes to the police station, pretending to be his brother. But before he can look for clues there, he's taken to a nearby office building, the scene of a freshly committed murder. The only possible suspects, the ones still on site, are isolated in a conference room. And John, whom his colleagues think is James, is expected to crack the case. At first, he freaks.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
But then, he imagines it as a type of puzzle, his specialty. And starts writing things enthusiastically on a whiteboard, running down the variables.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
The first season of Ludwig contains six episodes, which show John continuing to impersonate his brother while trying to solve his disappearance. He's also faced with a different murder case or different puzzle each week, which he tackles while working with and fooling his colleagues.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
It's a strong ensemble, led by Deepo Ola as his new partner and Garen Howell, who plays Dennis Whitaker on The Pit, as a young member of his team. And the guest stars are valuable too, especially the great Derek Jacoby in a later episode. For Ludwig to work, the mysteries have to be clever, the clues have to be credible but not obvious, and the performances have to be enjoyable.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Check, check, check. As John and Lucy, David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin are loads of fun, especially when they're together. And the style of the show is infectious and almost musical. The series is called Ludwig for a reason, which it reveals in time. And that connection allows for plenty of music from the Beethoven canon, which is heard often and winningly.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
From start to finish, Ludwig is a winner. And I'm happy to report it's not really finished yet. The producers already have committed to a season two, which makes me smile almost as much as watching Ludwig.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The normal way to tell a dramatic story on TV is to follow the characters and plots wherever they go in a straightforward fashion, focusing only on the most important parts. Sometimes, as on Law & Order, there are time stamps and music cues to move things along, but mostly the narratives move in a straight line in concise little scenes.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
On occasion, a TV show can play with time as well as space, offering plenty of flashbacks and flash-forwards. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul did that. And the most recent season of Fargo threw viewers for a loop by a mid-series change of setting title card that read 500 years ago.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But when it comes to TV telling a dramatic story by reflecting time in a different way, the biggest innovation until now came almost 25 years ago, when the Fox network premiered 24. Each season was a self-contained story spread across 24 episodes, telling of a single day in the life of government agent Jack Bauer.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Each episode dramatized an hour of his day in real time, and the unrelenting intensity and momentum made 24 an instant hit. So now, in 2025, we have two new series inspired by that radical, real-time approach. The Pit, a Max series streaming new episodes weekly, takes the 24 approach, using each hour of TV to present an hour in a long single shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The show's creator is R. Scott Gemmel, who was a producer on ER with John Wells. Wells is involved here too, as is ER veteran Noah Wiley, who, as Dr. Michael Rabinovich, is in charge of the emergency room, which is part of an overworked, understaffed, underfunded teaching hospital. The pit never leaves the ER, what its nurses and doctors call the pit. And the clock, like the action, never stops.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Here's Wiley addressing his staff after the death of a young patient. It's a rare, quiet moment, but it doesn't last.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Binge a few hours of the pit back-to-back, and you'll feel as exhausted as the doctors, nurses, and interns look. But stick around, and you'll come to know and love these characters just as viewers of the original ER did, embracing such similarly talented and endearing young actors as George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, and Noah Wiley.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Adolescence, now on Netflix, is much shorter, only four episodes, but is even more intense. Each episode looks at a different point in time and point of view regarding the case of a murdered teen girl. There's the apprehension of the prime suspect, an investigation at the victim's high school days later, and then other jumps in the narrative to seven and 13 months later.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Each of these episodes plays out in real time, as on The Pit, but here it's filmed in one continuous take in one seemingly uninterrupted, unedited camera move. It's like a live stage play, and even if part of your brain is aware of and impressed by the technical gimmick, your heart is pulled in by the gripping story and the astoundingly believable acting.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Most of the third episode, for example, is a psychological interview between 14-year-old Jamie Miller, awaiting trial for killing a female classmate, and a court-assigned therapist played by Aaron Doherty. Jamie is played by Owen Cooper, and their extended scenes together are amazing. This is Owen's first acting role on television, and there's no doubt, he's going to be a big star.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Other prominent actors and characters in Adolescence include Ashley Walters as the lead detective on the case and Stephen Graham as Jamie's father. Their acting in this, like everyone's acting in this, is superb, and the real-time narrative only enhances their effectiveness. And Graham, who co-starred in A Thousand Blows and appeared in Peaky Blinders, gets extra credit here.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
He's co-creator and writer of the series, along with Jack Thorne. Adolescence is brilliant, the best TV series so far this year. I can recommend both It and The Pit as excellent TV shows that are exciting, enthralling, and constantly surprising. Be aware, though, one thing they aren't is relaxing.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
It's hard to know because, you know, when you prepare a production like that, you kind of know what your version of it needs to be. I've never heard that back. So it's hard. I don't know. All I'm hearing is what I would have done differently. What would you have done differently? Oh, I don't know. You know, I think that speech in particular actually was probably out of the whole play.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
That was sort of never quite the same twice. So you've got a version of it.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Yes, I think that speech more than any, because it comes near the end. It's probably the most emotional moment. It's the moment where Lady Macbeth's gone. He knows it's all over. It's really just a case of how he's going to go down rather than if he will. And it was, particularly in our staging, it was right up the back. I was sort of sitting very much my own.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
The lighting was such that I was in a pool of darkness. And I sort of tried to dare myself every night to kind of find it, that particular moment, sort of afresh each time. Obviously, that's what you're always trying to do. It's easier with something like Shakespeare because the words are pretty bottomless and they have lots of different...
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
available meanings and that's why actors love doing it so much because on performance 150 you can suddenly hear a line that you thought you knew inside out you can sort of hear it in a brand new way and that's obviously that's a thrill um and also a bit frustrating because you're gonna go oh that's how i should have done that can i go back and do the first 100 performances again please
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Oh, he could get quite fiery. Yes, he was quite a performer, my dad. There was definitely a bit of an old ham about him. And he... Yes, I wasn't firing brimstone so much, but although he could get there, he could get a little bit... He would thump the pulpit now and again. But no, he was definitely a performer and he was a very good preacher, actually.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
People would ask him to come and guest preach in various places. I think he was very well thought of and he was very loved. He was a very good minister. His congregation liked him and he was kind and he was patient and all the things that... I guess you have to be in that job.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
The highest position, but on a revolving yearly basis because the Church of Scotland is built on the idea that there should be no hierarchy. So you take a turn and you step back again.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I did, actually, yes. It was on Scottish television. But yes, he did. On a Sunday afternoon in Scotland, you could see my dad in That's the Spirit. It was a sort of religious magazine program. So he would, you know, he would go and meet a community project. He would do a little bit to camera where he gave a little message for the day.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
He'd do interviews with people who were doing interesting or important things in the world of, I suppose, divinity or outreach or whatever it was. But yeah, he did that for quite a few years. And I remember sitting off camera and watching it happen a couple of times. Yeah.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Which is the bit you find most implausible about that story? Because I have thought.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
This is the bit that now having had my own children, I can think three. Really? Could I have been three? Because it does feel like quite a complicated thought process, doesn't it? But I can date it because I, you know, this was in the times before. home video recorders.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
So I know that I watched John Pertwee turn into Tom Baker on Doctor Who and I can date it and it's 1974 so I was three years old. Maybe they repeated it like a year later because sometimes they did that. So maybe I was four but I know that it was then and I know that that led to a conversation with my parents and you're absolutely right that it was a conversation where I
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
learnt what the difference between a character in a television programme and an actor was. But in that moment, I understood what that concept was and decided that's what I wanted to do. So despite how implausible it seems, I know that it's true.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Something about that show and the combination of elements certainly that central character always fascinated me. I just thought he was brilliant. I just thought he was cool. He was clever. He wasn't... He sort of... He was dressed in sort of brilliant, cool, mad clothes, but he looked like a normal human. And I think that was quite important to me as a fairly geeky young child.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I didn't imagine I could ever aspire to be Superman or... The Incredible Hulk or, you know, I was sort of quite weedy and I wore glasses and I had a terrible haircut. So all those things still felt possible in the world of The Doctor. There was something about that character that I could be.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I also loved that it's a brilliantly constructed show in that you don't know where they're going to land each time. Every time that the TARDIS lands, where is it? What's the mystery? There's a whole new set of characters to get. There's a whole and the monsters. What's the monster going to be this week? What's going to come around that corner and how scary is it going to be?
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And what a thrill all that was. So it was, no, it was, I was obsessional about it.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Well, you see 13 channels like you were starved. I mean in Scotland you had three channels.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
There was a certain sense of there were a few people I had either meant to interview or had sort of got to know in the interim. And I thought I would have naturally interviewed them when I'd done this podcast before. So maybe now is an opportunity to to kind of scoop them up. It really has always been the case with the podcast. It's something I've done.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Listen, all of those memories are very accurate, I think. I don't think there's anything wrong with any of those observations you make. And I think I was aware of all that too, but I still either forgave it or revelled in it, its shortcomings, because actually the writing, they were incredibly well written.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And those central performances, I remember Tom Baker, who played the Doctor through most of my early childhood, it was a really magnificent performance. He was a properly... charismatic, mercurial, funny, funny, heroic. It was a brilliant performance as a piece of sort of mad acting. It was a wonder to behold. And that just scooped me up.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
How thrilling that you tuned in, you tuned your TV set to get so slightly illicit channels. It must have felt like you discovered wonderful secrets.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Good different or bad different?
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
That's a very good question. I don't know. I mean, it's one of those parts that has a lot of cultural baggage about it. But it also, the whole, the idea of regeneration where one actor takes over from the next, you're given a bit of a blank sheet. The Doctor has certain immovable truths about them, but you're not expected to do what the last one did.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I don't mean to minimise it, but it's almost been a hobby, like a sideline, like a sort of thing I've done for pleasure when I've had a moment. It's never been my principal job. So it was just a sort of moment of opportunity.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
You're expected to bring your own version of it. You just have to find yourself in it, I suppose. You just have to kind of chuck yourself at it and see what you get. And, of course, it was written by Russell T Davies, who's one of the great television writers of our time, and wrote it with sort of a bit like himself. I mean, Russell has a wonderful...
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
gift of the gab about him he can he can talk and he's funny and he's quick and he's probably the cleverest person in most rooms and that's kind of how he writes the doctor so you if you you just kind of look to plug into that energy filter it through yourself and hope that that produces something that's kind of endearing and not smug and annoying
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Probably some people did find it smug and annoying, but hopefully most people found it charming and funny. I think it's important that the Doctor is funny because he uses wit to undermine some of the worst creatures that the universe can throw at him. That's part of what's glorious about that character, is that he can be funny in times of crisis. And that's his cool.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
He's very uncool in many ways, but he's got that... That ability to undermine everything with a gag or with a twinkle. So I didn't ponder all that. It's quite interesting listening back to that through headphones now. It feels quite green and quite squeaky to me.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Yes, but listen, time is very relative when you're a time lord. And she's a little bit younger than me. She's not that much younger than me.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
That's right, yeah. He was number five. I mean, I watched him as a kid. He became the Doctor when I was about 11. So he was absolutely someone that I drew pictures of in sketchbooks, yeah. That has just added to how odd the whole thing is that I've ended up being part of this show that I grew up obsessed with.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
You have to just go back to what's written. And I think why Jessica Jones as a series worked so well is because Melissa Rosenberg, who was the showrunner and her team of writers, did something really quite remarkable, I think. It was a superhero show. Jessica Jones, part of the Marvel Universe.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
The Kilgrave was known in the comic books as the purple man, and he's a character in his first appearance wears a purple jumpsuit and is entirely purple, but has this ability that whatever he says, people have to obey him. So if he tells them to lie down in the street, they lie down in the street.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
You know, and what could be quite a sort of simplistic, rather rather sort of schlocky comic book idea in the hands of the writers that we had became, as you have hinted, it became a story about consent and it became a story about emotional abuse and psychological abuse. But it was also looking into what had caused Kilgrave to be this way.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And if you had that ability, what would that do to your own psychology? So, yes, he's a monster and he does awful things and there's nothing, there's very little redeemable about him. But I think we were also led into understand that with that ability all his life, how could he not be damaged by that? When he doesn't know if somebody does something because they want to or because he's told them to.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Yeah, there's certainly there's definitely a bit of that a bit of there are some slightly odd things about being in this profession and what it sort of does to your life outside the work. That is the sort of bit you don't get trained for at a drama school. You know, one of the sort of side effects of being successful as an actor, I suppose, is that you lose an element of anonymity.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Fresh Air
At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And I found that personally quite challenging when it happened to me. So I'm always quite intrigued to know how others have survived. dealt with that or are dealing with that or kind of characterise what that does to them and the people around them. But it's a mixture of things.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
You're also just, again, if it's someone you know, you're often interested in sort of celebrating them and wanting the world to know them and understand what's likeable about them, because there's a sort of delight in celebrating that to the public somehow. Yes, it's always a mixture of impulses, I think.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, and moments like that are quite peculiar. Yes, perhaps that's stating the obvious. But I'm always quite intrigued to know if other people have had similar experiences or how they would have dealt with experiences like that.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Because I think it's quite... It's a bit of a sort of club that you can't really expect any sort of sympathy for because it's a very privileged position to be in. But it's, you know, it's a complicated one. It's one I struggle with because you're also very aware if someone...
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
wants to have a moment's interaction with you that they're sort of that moment for them is representing all the work you might have done that has meant something to them so that's a hugely it's quite a precious moment for someone else whereas you might be just thinking I'm going to be late for this appointment that you're having a bad day or something Oh, you're having a bad day. Yeah.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And of course, you're not really going to make the situation better by explaining to someone why this is an inappropriate moment. If they're not seeing that for themselves, I draw you back to the moment in the shower. That man obviously didn't understand why.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
i was finding this peculiar and odd so it became simpler to sort of carve a signature into what was the mulch of the piece of paper that he was now holding under a shower uh and sort of he said thank you very much and went on his way well i wanted to talk about another version of david tennant that you've played um
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
It was an absolutely opportunistic pitch by a friend of, well, actually someone that my wife was at school with, who's a film producer called Finn Glynn, who both George and I have worked with on various projects over the years.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
a few days into that first lockdown must have been March 2020 Finn phoned us up and went I might have an idea of something we could we could make while we're all locked in our houses it was entirely his his baby he went off got a script written we went off and enlisted Michael Sheen and Anna Lundberg who were locked in their house in Wales and between us we we just made one on spec Simon Evans was
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
who plays the director in the show, is also the director and also wrote the script very quickly and very cleverly. Neither Michael nor Georgia nor myself or Anna had met Simon, but we got to know him very well over Zoom.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And also, it was reflecting what we were all living.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I think we quite enjoyed playing awful versions of ourselves. So we were pretty happy to lean into that. Interestingly, Simon said that one of the things he did as he was writing it was listen to the episode of my podcast with Michael Sheen. I don't know what that says about... I mean, Michael's this sort of rather... Rather pompous, rather grand character, rather arrogant actor.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I'm a sort of whining miserablest. Well, you're described as Weasley at one point. Yes, I am described as Weasley. And I don't know where that came from, but it certainly seemed to fit well enough for us to lean pretty hard into it and rather enjoy it. leaning into. I mean, even listening to that, when I hear bits of it back, it does make me smile.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
I suppose because it reminds me of a moment in time where there wasn't an awful lot going on other than homeschooling our children, which was a real fresh hell that we were all trying to catch up with and being locked in our house.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And although, you know, I didn't, in many ways, I didn't dislike lockdown at all because I was very happy to be locked in my house and kept away from other human beings, being on my own family. It was certainly lovely to have that release and that creative release particularly.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
Yes. Lots of bits of that were sort of inspired by what was happening around us. We do happen to have a couple of mugs in my house that may or may not have my face on them. And I can't remember quite the origin of that particular gag, but it was either we were on a Zoom discussing what we were going to do and I had the mug there or I brought it and maybe I suggested it one day.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And anyway, it became a sort of long running gag that runs throughout three seasons, I think. Yeah.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
We're fortunate that we have a fair amount of space and we've got a bit of outdoor space, which I think it would have killed us without that. But yes, of course it was challenging. Our youngest was brand new. She was born towards the end of 2019. So we had a very small baby with all the pleasures and difficulties that that brings. Three who were in school.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
That was the real hell, the homeschooling. Just trying to be the sort of manager-cum-teacher that keeps them on track was very, very hard. And then our eldest... His 18th birthday came three, four days after lockdown was called. So his big 18th birthday celebration was spent staring at us over the kitchen table. I still feel like he got slightly shortchanged there. Yeah, yeah.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
It was one of the... Max Webster, our director, it was one of his very earliest ideas. He was fascinated with the idea of Macbeth as a soldier. He'd done a production of Henry V where they'd looked a lot into the actuality of being a soldier who goes to war, what that might do to you, ideas around PTSD and shell shock. And he talked to people who'd experienced that.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And the idea that one would hear voices... that one would imagine things were happening that weren't. And he sort of took the idea of PTSD and put it onto Macbeth and it kind of fits remarkably well. I mean, who knows what Shakespeare's experience was with veterans from whatever wars were around at the time.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
But it feels like it all tracks with how modern day veterans describe some of the things they struggle with after tours of duty. And he started working with a sound designer called Gareth Fry, who'd done other shows where the audiences all wore headphones.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
And you can do extraordinary things then to the audience's experience, because for a start, you can whisper very quietly and you can move where that whisper is. So if you can do that for the audience, they get an understanding of perhaps what's happening inside Macbeth's very troubled brain.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
So you could particularly when so much of what Macbeth says is in soliloquy, which is an address to the audience. I think it was just using a tool that was available and adding to that, you have a sort of soundscape, which is happening the whole time.
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At 3 Years Old, David Tennant Knew He Wanted To Be Doctor Who
You're mixing in the music, you're mixing in sound effects that may or may not be live on stage in front of you, which again is adding to that sense of. disconcertion and what's real what isn't real and so it was a sort of conceptual way of telling this very well told story perhaps in a slightly new quite modern way while still being entirely faithful to the text that Shakespeare wrote
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Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
Where do the writers and producers of TV shows get their ideas these days? Increasingly, it seems, from other countries. More than ever before, if they're not importing and presenting the programs outright, like Netflix is doing with Squid Game 2, they're buying the rights to international productions and making their own American versions.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
The Agency, a great new Showtime and Paramount Plus spy series, is based on a hit show from France. Doc, a new series from Fox starring Molly Parker, is based on an Italian medical drama series. And there's another recent entry, this one coming from Australia. The U.S.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
version began streaming a few weeks ago on Peacock, and it's really worth seeking out as one of the more original comedy ideas to pop up in years. It stars Stephanie Hsu, and I've been waiting for her to be given a standout starring role ever since she matched Michelle Yeoh, scene for scene, playing her daughter in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once.
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Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
In this new Peacock series, she gets that standout role, and she's hilarious. The show is called Laid, and the premise is outrageously high concept. Shu plays a single 30-something woman named Ruby, who slowly learns that for reasons she doesn't understand, her previous boyfriends are starting to die off, some from natural causes, others from violent accidents.
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Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
But the body count continues to rise. Ruby and her best friend AJ, played by Zasha Mamet from HBO's Girls, attend the funeral of one of Ruby's ex-boyfriends, where another death involving another ex follows the same day. Ruby and AJ react by going home, drinking a lot, and eventually, Ruby decides to drunk-dial her first boyfriend, David, to whom she hasn't spoken in years.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
Stephanie Hsu carries most of the comedy, and her Ruby is both exasperated and exasperating in equal measure. Sally Bredford McKenna and Nanachka Khan developed Laid for American TV and wrote the teleplay for the pilot, which Khan directed. Their sensibility is witty, wild, and supremely confident.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
They give their star the latitude to roam freely, whether in loudly comic scenes or in uncomfortably quiet ones. In my favorite scene from the opening episode, after one boyfriend's funeral, Shu as Ruby is offered a ride to the wake by the bereaved parents of the deceased. Also in the car, the young man's resentful most recent girlfriend and his dog, a massive panting St. Bernard.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
Ruby tries to cut the quiet tension by asking the father to turn on the radio. He does. And as Ruby begins singing along to Paul Simon's Graceland, director Kahn frames the action and the other passengers' silent reactions in a long, unbroken five-shot. Two parents, two young women, and a dog.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
There is one new TV series, though, that's neither based on an international show nor presented by a streaming network. From Fox, the same broadcast network presenting Doc is another new show for 2025. Going Dutch, a comedy starring Dennis Leary from Rescue Me.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
He plays Patrick Quinn, a decorated military colonel punished for his vocal outbursts by being reassigned to run a service base in the Netherlands, a non-military operation where they pride themselves on serving Michelin star food in the commissary and making cheese for the locals.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
That irritates him a lot, but not as much as the fact that he's taking command of the base from his estranged daughter Maggie, played by Taylor Mishak, who's the captain in charge. Danny Pudi, from Community, plays the officer who tries to get them to work together amicably.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
Fox provided only two episodes of Going Dutch for preview, so unlike Peacock's Laid, where I've seen the entire first season and loved it, I'm not sure where I stand yet on Going Dutch. I like the chemistry between Leary and Mishak as father and daughter, and I like the setting, but I'm not sure how strongly the series will develop.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
My greatest hopes lie with one of the supporting players, Catherine Tate, a British comedy legend who's appeared in several episodes of Doctor Who. But in the two episodes I've seen of Going Dutch, she's in it for less than a minute total, as an honored guest at the aforementioned Tula Parade, who introduces herself to Leary's colonel.
Fresh Air
Getting In Sync With Your Inner Clock
With Going Dutch on Fox, we'll have to wait and see. But with Laid on Peacock, there's no need to wait. Just see.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
We're listening to the interview Fresh Air's Ann Marie Baldonado recorded with Adam Scott in 2022. He stars in the Apple TV Plus series Severance, which just began season two after a long hiatus. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. Also, Justin Chang reviews the new film No Other Land, which has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
And Maureen Corrigan reviews Mothers and Sons, the new novel by Adam Hazlett. I'm David Bean Cooley, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Ben Stiller co-created Severance and directs a lot of the episodes. The series also stars Patricia Arquette, John Turturro and Christopher Walken. We're going to listen to the interview from 2022 that Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado did with Adam Scott.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Thank you, Anne-Marie. It was a real pleasure. Adam Scott spoke to Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado in 2022. Season 2 of Severance is streaming weekly on Apple TV+. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews No Other Land, which has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It's a collaboration between a team of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
One of this year's most talked-about Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature is No Other Land. The film was directed by a collective of two Palestinian filmmakers and two Israeli filmmakers, and it chronicles the Israeli military's demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. No Other Land begins playing in New York today. Here is Justin's review.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Mothers and Sons, the new novel by Adam Hazlett. His books have twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This is Fresh Air. Adam Hazlett has written two novels and one short story collection, all of them bestsellers. Hazlett has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, says Hazlett's new novel, Mothers and Sons, will likely be another contender for all the glittering prizes. Here is her review.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The hit drama series Severance, a sci-fi take on work-life balance, is now into its second season on Apple TV+, after a long hiatus. Today, we feature our interview with Adam Scott, who stars in it.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Maureen Corrigan is a professor at Georgetown University. She reviewed Mothers and Sons by Adam Hazlett. On Monday's show, the difficulty of confronting death when it's your adolescent child who's dying. Even some in the medical field don't talk about death realistically with child patients or their families. When is hope helpful and when is it just denial?
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
We talk with Sarah Wildman of the New York Times. Her daughter died of cancer at age 14. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Chirac. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfer. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
You may know him previously from his role in Parks and Recreation, playing Ben Wyatt, government worker and love interest for Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler. He also was in the series Big Little Lies and in the cult favorite Party Down. In Severance, as Mark S., he's a guy still grieving for his wife who died in a car accident years ago.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Unable to return to work as a professor because of his grief, he decides to work for the company Lumen, a mysterious conglomerate that performs a controversial surgery on some of its employees. Workers can choose to get a chip implanted in their brain that makes them forget about their personal lives when they're at work and their work lives when they're at home.
Fresh Air
For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
In the current season, there's some evidence that Mark's wife may not be dead after all, which only reinforces his desire to quit the company that severed his consciousness. But his sister Devin, played by Jen Tulloch, urges him to stay put and investigate further.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The new film The Friend, starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, is based on the novel of the same name by Sigrid Nunez. Her book won a 2018 National Book Award for fiction. It begins with the narrator, a woman, at the memorial of a dear friend who killed himself. He was more than a friend. Years before, he was her writing professor and mentor.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
Please note, there is a discussion of suicide at the beginning of this interview. If you or someone you know has thoughts of suicide and needs help, call or text the suicide lifeline at 988. That's 988.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
Sigrid Nunez speaking with Terry Gross in 2019. Her novel The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award for fiction. It's been adapted into a new film of the same name and opens today in New York City and nationwide April 4th. Also, Justin Chang reviews the new French thriller Misericordia. I'm David Bianculli and this is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's 2019 interview with author Sigrid Nunez.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
Her novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and has been adapted into a new film. One of the co-stars of the film is a very large dog, a Great Dane named Bing. Here's a clip in which Naomi Watts, playing a writer named Iris, learns that her best friend wanted her to take ownership of his dog after his death.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
Sigrid Nunez speaking to Terry Gross in 2019. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
When she was his student, they slept together once, at his suggestion. She wasn't the only student he seduced, but her friendship with him outlasted his three marriages and many affairs. After his death, she reluctantly inherits his dog, a 180-pound Great Dane, who, like her, is grieving. Here's a clip from the film. Bill Murray as Walter and Naomi Watts as Iris are the two old friends.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
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Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
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Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
He's trying to persuade her to get his daughter to help put together a book of his work.
Fresh Air
After A Friend's Suicide, A Writer Inherits His Grieving Dog
The novel The Friend is filled with reflections about the line between appropriate and inappropriate relations between students and teachers, what it's like to mourn a friend who left no note to explain his suicide, the bond that can develop between a dog and a person, and how being a writer has changed in the era of social media. We're going to listen to Terry's 2019 interview with Sigrid Nunez.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
When Cohn notices Trump, whom he's never seen before, he asks his friend to bring Trump to the table. Cohn is interested in finding out who Trump is. Trump is played by Sebastian Stan. Jeremy Strong, as Cohn, speaks first.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Sebastian Stan speaking to Terry Gross. He's nominated for an Academy Award for his starring role as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. After a break, we'll hear from another of this year's Best Actor Oscar nominees, Adrian Brody, nominated for his starring role in The Brutalist.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
And John Powers reviews Flow, an animated film from Latvia that has earned Oscar nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. The Academy Awards are being televised on Sunday, and among the Best Actor nominees is Adrian Brody, up for his starring role in The Brutalist.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
He plays a Hungarian refugee who escapes post-war Europe and arrives in the U.S. with dreams of rebuilding his life. The film is up for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Directing, Cinematography, Supporting Actor and Actress, and Screenplay. Directed by Brady Corbet, The Brutalist explores the harsh realities of the American dream.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Brody portrays a fictional character named Laszlo Toth, who settles in Pennsylvania in 1947. He soon meets a wealthy industrialist, played by Guy Pearce, who's also nominated for an Academy Award, who recognizes Laszlo's talent and hires him to create a community center in honor of his mother. However, the relationship between the two comes at a cost.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
The sweeping nature of The Brutalist is reminiscent of Brody's work in The Pianist, in which he won an Oscar for his stirring performance as a Jewish pianist from Warsaw who survived the Holocaust by hiding from the Nazis. Adrienne Brody spoke with Tanya Mosley last month.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The Academy Awards are Sunday. Today, we feature interviews with three nominees. First, actor Jeremy Strong. He's probably best known for his role in the HBO series Succession, playing the troubled character of Kendall Roy.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Adrian Brody speaking to Tanya Mosley last month. This Sunday, he'll be competing for a Best Actor Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards, televised live by ABC. Coming up, another Oscar contender. It's a film from Latvia called Flow, nominated for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Critic-at-Large John Powers has a review. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Flow is an animated movie from Latvia that follows an unlikely collection of animals brought together by a massive flood that overwhelms the countryside. The film, which is now streaming on Max, already won animation prizes from, among others, the Golden Globes, the New York Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film Critics.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
And it's received Oscar nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Our critic at large, John Powers, says that flow is, quite simply, wonderful.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
John Powers reviewed the animated film Flow, which is up for two Oscars and is now streaming on Max. On Monday's show, how life can change in a second. The first film by Hanif Qureshi, 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette, starred Daniel Day-Lewis, was directed by Stephen Frears, and won Qureshi an Oscar for Best Screenplay. In 2022, he fell, and when he regained consciousness, his limbs were paralyzed.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
He'll talk about life before and after the fall. I hope you can join us. Music Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Sharrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
In the film The Apprentice, Strong is nominated for his role as the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn, who mentored a young Donald Trump as he was establishing himself in his father's real estate business. In the 1950s, Cohn was infamous for being the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigation into suspected communists.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Cohn and McCarthy also were leaders in the anti-gay movement that led to an executive order banning gay people from serving in government. But Cohn was a closeted gay man who died of AIDS. He never came out and insisted that his disease wasn't AIDS but was liver cancer. Strong's performance personifies what was written about Cohn on his patch on the AIDS memorial quilt, bully, coward, victim.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Jeremy Strong, speaking with Terry Gross last October. He's nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as Roy Cohn in the film The Apprentice. We'll hear from his co-star in the film, Sebastian Stan, after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Today, we're featuring our interviews with Oscar contenders. Sebastian Stan, whose credits include playing Tommy Lee in the TV series Pam and Tommy and Bucky Barnes in Marvel's Captain America and Avengers movies, is nominated for an Academy Award for his starring role as Donald Trump in the film The Apprentice.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
The movie begins in 1973 when Trump is 27, still working for his father's real estate development company and trying to make a name for himself. The company is being sued for discriminating against black people in its rental units. Trump convinces his father to hire Roy Cohn as their attorney.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Cohn becomes Trump's mentor, teaching him how to admit nothing and deny everything, go on the attack, and intimidate through the threat of lawsuits. Terry Gross recently spoke with Sebastian Stan. Let's start with a scene from The Apprentice.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Trump is planning to build Trump Tower and is trying to persuade the mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, that the building will be so extraordinary, Koch should give him tax breaks. Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, also is in the room. You'll hear him jump into the conversation.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody
Terry spoke with Jeremy Strong last October. Let's begin with a scene from early in the film, when Trump and Cohn first meet. Trump has just gotten accepted to a private dining club in Manhattan. Cohn is seated at a table with several mobsters, including Fat Tony Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
John Feinstein, one of the nation's leading sports journalists, a commentator for NPR, ESPN, and the Golf Channel, and the author of more than 40 books, died last week at the age of 69. He was an ex-jock who understood the world of athletes.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
He was known for his insights and inside portraits of some of the most talented and temperamental characters in sports, though he was more often drawn to the obscure, struggling athlete. Feinstein began at the Washington Post as an intern in 1977 and covered the police and the courts before turning to sports reporting. He later became a columnist.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
In 1985, he took a leave of absence from the Post to research and write his first book, Season on the Brink, about his year shadowing the volatile Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight. It became a bestseller, as did his book A Good Walk Spoiled, a behind-the-scenes look at the pro golf tour. His book, A Civil War, was about the fierce rivalry between the Army and Navy college football teams.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
He also wrote books about tennis, minor league baseball, and a series of sports-based mysteries for young readers. John Feinstein spoke with Dave Davies in 2011 upon the publication of his book, One on One, Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game. Well, John Feinstein, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
During a violent rainstorm, Brad and Janet seek shelter at a remote castle. It's run by Dr. Frank N. Furter, a cross-dressing mad scientist from outer space who is self-described as a sweet transvestite from Transylvania.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
John Feinstein speaking to Dave Davies in 2011. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Over the course of the movie, Frank, played by Tim Curry, builds the perfect sexual partner, seduces both Brad and Janet, and ends the movie pleading in song for people to follow their own dreams, embrace and explore their own identities, and tolerate other lifestyles. Fifty years later, it's a message that still seems timely, even daring.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
John Feinstein speaking to Dave Davies in 2011. The author, sports writer, and NPR commentator died last week. He was 69 years old. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
In The Alto Knights, a new biographical crime drama directed by Barry Levinson, Robert De Niro plays two leading roles. He stars as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two Italian-American mob bosses who were longtime friends but became rivals in the 1950s. The movie opens in theaters this week, and our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
At that point, Tim Curry's post-Rocky horror career had included roles in the movies Clue and The Shout, the TV miniseries It, he played Pennywise, and Rock Follies of 77, the TV series Wiseguy, and tons of voice work for animated movies and TV shows. He suffered a stroke in 2012, but at age 78 continues to provide voices for cartoons.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed The Alto Nights, starring Robert De Niro. On Monday's show, legal scholar Elie Mestal joins us to talk about the ten laws he says are ruining America.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
In his new book, Bad Law, he argues that our country's laws on immigration, abortion, and voting rights don't reflect the will of most Americans, and we'd be better off abolishing them and starting over. I hope you can join us. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And in 2016, he appeared as the criminologist in a Fox TV movie version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which starred Laverne Cox as Frankenfurter. Let's begin with a scene from the original 1975 movie version. Brad and Janet have entered the castle soaking wet, and Frank and Furter's assistants have stripped them down to their underclothes as Frank looks them over wickedly.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Both the stage and screen versions of The Rocky Horror Show, starring Tim Curry as an extraterrestrial visitor who believed in sexual freedom and fluid sexual identities, had beginnings that might best be described as rocky. Richard O'Brien's stage musical, The Rocky Horror Show, began in London in 1973, ran for a while in a Los Angeles nightclub, then moved to Broadway in 1975.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
It opened there in March, starring Tim Curry, Richard O'Brien, and Meatloaf, and closed a month later. The movie version had been filmed before the brief Broadway run and was released later that year, but it too vanished quickly.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Vanished, that is, until a year later when a New York movie theater began hosting midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, launching a phenomenon that's still going strong. And next spring, the Rocky Horror Show is returning to Broadway, courtesy of a new production by the Roundabout Theater Company.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie starred two then relatively unknown actors, Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon. They played young sweethearts Brad Majors and Janet Weiss. Brad and Janet are very much in love, though as the movie begins, they haven't yet given in to their passionate impulses.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Today's guest, actor Andrew Scott, got noticed by many American TV viewers because of his role in the second season of the British comedy series Fleabag. He played the so-called hot priest who was torn between his vow of celibacy and his attraction to a woman who loves him.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
The man believes that Ripley was a close college friend of the man's son, Dickie, and he offers to pay Ripley to go to Italy, visit Dickie at the villa where he's living a layabout life with his girlfriend, and persuade him to return home to the States. Even though Ripley's friendship with Dickey was much more distant than the father presumed, Dickey accepts the assignment.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Andrew Scott speaking to Terry Gross last year. He's nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his starring role in the 2024 Netflix series Ripley. The SAG Awards are Sunday evening and will be presented live on Netflix. After a break, we'll hear more of their interview. And I'll review Zero Day, a new Netflix series starring Robert De Niro. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
But when he gets to Italy and the villa, he wants it all for himself. The home on the beach, the fine art on the walls, Dickey's expensive watches and finely tailored clothes. He begins plotting a way to assume Dickie's identity and step into his life. In this scene, Andrew Scott, as Ripley, is alone in Dickie's villa, admiring the clothes in Dickie's closet. He tries them on. They fit nicely.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Andrew Scott speaking to Terry Gross last year. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
And he also tries on Dickie's voice and mannerisms. He's sitting on the side of Dickie's bed, pretending he's Dickie, and also pretending that he's breaking up with Dickie's girlfriend.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Before that, Scott got rave reviews in another British series that made it to the U.S., Sherlock, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes. Andrew Scott played the famed detective's nemesis, Moriarty. In the U.K., he starred in several acclaimed stage productions, including plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Thank you so much for having me. Andrew Scott speaking with Terry Gross last year. He's nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his starring role in the Netflix series Ripley, based on the best-selling Patricia Highsmith novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. The SAG Awards take place Sunday night and will be streamed live on Netflix.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Coming up, I review the new Netflix series Zero Day, a political thriller starring Robert De Niro. This is Fresh Air. Robert De Niro has been a movie star for more than 50 years, and still is. But occasionally, very occasionally, he also pops up as an actor on television. For NBC, he was a guest star on one episode of 30 Rock and appeared close to 10 times on Saturday Night Live.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
For HBO, he starred in The Wizard of Lies, Barry Levinson's made-for-TV movie about Bernie Madoff. And two years ago, he appeared in and narrated a little-known five-episode Argentinian TV miniseries called Nada, playing the American friend of a caustic Buenos Aires food critic. Except for De Niro's contributions, Nada is subtitled.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
It's also very funny, delightful in its playful approach to both food and language, and available to stream on Hulu. Thanks to Netflix, another entry has just been added to Robert De Niro's TV resume. He's starring in Zero Day, a new six-part political thriller about a chilling cyber-terrorist attack on the United States.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
With no warning and no explanation, all the electronic and computerized systems in the country stop working for precisely one minute, resulting in widespread havoc, unchecked panic, and, during those 60 seconds, thousands of deaths. When systems are restored, everyone with a cell phone receives the same frightening text message. This will happen again.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
That makes part of Zero Day a mystery, a thriller, and a race against time, with the President of the United States forced to act quickly against an unknown, unseen enemy. But it's also a political drama, with various factions inside Congress and in the media stoking panic or using the crisis to advance their own personal agendas.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
It deals with abuse of power, political overreach, and questionable decisions. Subjects that make Zero Day almost mind-blowingly topical. In this TV drama, after the cyberattack, there's a lot of anger and paranoia and finger-pointing and division. And that's where De Niro comes in. He plays former president George Mullen, one of the last leaders popular on both sides of the political spectrum.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
His former chief of staff, played by the always-impressive Jesse Plemons, visits Mullen right after the cyberattack. He urges him to make a public appearance at a New York City disaster site where survivors may be trapped under the rubble to help calm things down.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
An angry crowd, fed by conspiracy theories and blaming the current administration, is pushing against police barricades when the former president arrives and spontaneously addresses the crowd. TV cameras already are there, and Mullen's impromptu remarks are shown relayed on live TV throughout the nation as a rare and welcome voice of reason.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Because of that performance, Mullen is summoned immediately to the Oval Office by the current president, played by Angela Bassett. He doesn't know it, but she's about to appoint him to head a very powerful, potentially unconstitutional task force.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
The supporting players in Zero Day, in addition to Plemons and Bassett, include other top-tier actors. Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Lizzie Kaplan, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, Bill Camp. All of them are actors I've raved about in the past, and they all contribute strongly to this miniseries.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
And while Zero Day is a work of fiction, it's structured to make it easy to draw parallels to real-life events and figures. There's a right-wing media figure stirring up trouble, an elderly politician whose mental faculties may be slipping, Russian operatives and Silicon Valley billionaires in the shadows, and so on.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
And on Zero Day, the scripted events of this TV miniseries are relayed by actual news people portraying themselves, including Wolf Blitzer, Savannah Guthrie, and Nicole Wallace. Behind the scenes, the creators and co-writers of Zero Day include Wallace's husband, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, and Noah Oppenheim, former president of NBC News.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Their narrative, also written with Eric Newman of the TV series Narcos, builds nicely and with very little predictability. One element missing is humor. There's hardly a drop of it in the entire show. But the story escalates dramatically, like such recent TV political thrillers as The Agency and The Diplomat.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
And all six episodes of Zero Day are directed by Leslie Linka Glatter, who worked on both Homeland and Mad Men. She uses images in a way that conjures their own sense of mystery and adds to the intensity of Zero Day. As do all the actors from De Niro on down. So add Netflix's Zero Day to your streaming list. And while you're at it, add Hulu's Nada.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
© BF-WATCH TV 2021 It was the right story, but the wrong comedian. Lorne Michaels actually had made that offer to another comic who appeared on that first show, Albert Brooks. It was Brooks who suggested the rotating hosts, and it was I who misremembered it and made the mistake. I apologize for the error.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
On Monday's show, the Catholic Church has been described as the world's last true monarchy, with enormous power concentrated in the Vatican. Philip Sheenan talks about the last seven popes and how efforts to reform the church with the Second Vatican Council led to decades-long doctrinal debates and power struggles. Sheenan's book is Jesus Wept. Join us. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancullo.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Terry spoke with Andrew Scott last year, and the reason we're returning to the interview is because he's been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for his starring performance in the 2024 Netflix series Ripley. The SAG Awards ceremony is Sunday night.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
Ripley is based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first of several books about Tom Ripley, a con man with no conscience. He's a cold-blooded opportunist who most probably is a sociopath. Matt Damon played Ripley in a 1999 movie version, but the Netflix version, written and directed by Steve Zalian, is an even bigger and better adaptation.
Fresh Air
Andrew Scott Doesn't See Ripley As A Monster
It was beautifully photographed in various scenic cities, and Andrew Scott as Ripley carried almost every scene with a sense of mystery, magnetism, and maybe even a touch of madness. As the Netflix version begins, Ripley is scraping by on small-time hustles when a wealthy man tracks Ripley down and offers him an unusual proposition.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Bonnie Raitt speaking to Terry Gross in 1996. After a break, we'll continue their conversation and also hear from another of this year's Kennedy Center honorees, Francis Ford Coppola. Also, Justin Chang reviews two new films, The Brutalist and Nickel Boys. Meanwhile, from Bonnie Raitt's latest CD, here's the track Livin' for the Ones. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Let's get back to Terry's 1996 interview with Bonnie Raitt, who is one of this year's Kennedy Center honorees. She grew up listening to Broadway songs. Her father, John Raitt, was a star in the Broadway musicals Carousel, Oklahoma, and The Pajama Game.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Raitt sang with her father on his self-titled album, which was nominated for a Grammy in 1996.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Bonnie Raitt. Coming up, another of this year's Kennedy Center honorees, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. One of this year's Kennedy Center honorees is singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt. She's a ten-time Grammy Award winner, best known for her soulful voice and her hit singles from the late 1980s, Something to Talk About and I Can't Make You Love Me. She's also known for her depth of knowledge of classic blues.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
This is Fresh Air. Francis Ford Coppola also is a Kennedy Center honoree for 2024. We're going to listen to the story he told Terry Gross in 2016 about how Marlon Brando came to be cast in Coppola's masterpiece, The Godfather. At the time she spoke with him, he had published the notes he had written while he made that film.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
The notebook contained his thoughts about each scene, including the pitfalls he wanted to avoid. It also included pages from the novel on which the movie was based, Mario Puzo's The Godfather, with Coppola's notes in the margin. Let's begin with the opening scene, in which the character Bona Sera has come to the godfather, Don Vito Corleone, seeking justice.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Bona Sera's daughter was brutally beaten after she resisted two boys who had tried to take advantage of her. Bona Sera says he went to the police like a good American. The boys were tried in court, but the judge gave them a suspended sentence, and they went free that very day. Bonasera wants revenge against those boys. The Godfather, played by Marlon Brando, offers this response.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
That's a scene from The Godfather, featuring Marlon Brando. Terry asked Francis Ford Coppola if Mario Puzo had first suggested casting Brando.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola speaking to Terry Gross in 2016. He and Bonnie Raitt are two of this year's Kennedy Center honorees. The ceremony, held earlier this month, is scheduled to be televised Sunday on CBS. Other nominees for 2024 include The Grateful Dead, jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, and the iconic Harlem theater The Apollo.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
After a break, Justin Chang reviews two new films that have made many critics' end-of-year top ten lists, Nickel Boys and The Brutalist. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
This is Fresh Air. Our film critic, Justin Chang, recommends two new movies that have been hailed by critics groups as among the year's best. In The Brutalist, Adrian Brody stars as a Hungarian-Jewish architect who ends up in Pennsylvania after World War II. Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel set in a juvenile detention facility in the Jim Crow South.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed The Brutalist and Nickel Boys. On Monday's show, some great Christmas music. John Batiste will be at the piano to play, sing, and talk about some of his favorite Christmas songs. It's part two of the session we recorded with him.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
And we'll listen back to Amir Questlove-Thompson playing recordings from the Christmas playlist he put together for us. Hope you can join us. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
We're going to listen to Terry's 1996 interview with Raitt. At the time, she had released a live double CD called Road Tested. That collection featured duets with some of the singer-songwriters and rhythm and blues performers who had shaped her musical style. Raitt was a 20-year-old college student when she got to know and learn from them.
Fresh Air
Bonnie Raitt / Francis Ford Coppola
Terry invited Bonnie Raitt to bring and play some of the blues recordings that most influenced her. Before we hear them, let's listen to a song from her first album, which was released in 1971. This is the Robert Johnson song, Walking Blues.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. NBC's Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend with a triple header of special events. Tonight, Peacock streams a live music concert featuring scheduled performances by everyone from Bad Bunny and David Byrne to Lady Gaga and The Roots.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Alan Zweibel spoke to Terry Gross in 2004. After a break, we'll hear from SNL writer turned U.S. Senator Al Franken and cast member John Lovitz. And Justin Chang reviews a newly released movie that's actually more than 25 years old. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
One other noteworthy element from that first show, still part of the format 50 years later, was a TV news parody called Weekend Update. Chevy Chase was the first update anchor, and thanks to that showcase, the first star to emerge from SNL. It helped that he started most updates with the opening line, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
We're celebrating 50 years of Saturday Night Live, featuring interviews with early cast members and writers. Al Franken was one of the show's original writers, along with his partner Tom Davis. He worked as a writer and occasional performer during the show's first five years, then returned in 1985 as both writer and performer for another 10 years.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Terry spoke with Al Franken in 1988, and she asked him about how he dealt with the network censors.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
But the jokes he read, written by original writer Alan Zweibel and others, helped too.
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Okay, well, thank you. Al Franken speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. And by the way, his Jew Not a Jew sketch did eventually get on the air later that year with Tom Hanks playing the game show host.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
You'll hear another one of their conversations after a break. This is Fresh Air. When Al Franken spoke to Terry again in 1992, he was a more prominent performer on Saturday Night Live. He satirized the recovery movement through his character Stuart Smalley. Stuart was a caring nurturer who was addicted to 12-step programs and dispensed advice on how to keep a positive attitude.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
On today's show, we'll hear from Alan Zweibel and cast member John Lovitz, and also from Al Franken, a writer and performer who went from the halls of Saturday Night Live to the corridors of the U.S. Senate.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Franken even wrote a book of Stuart's daily affirmations and released an audio tape of his guided visualizations. Both of those works were titled I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
But let's start with an interview Terry Gross conducted in 2004 with Dan Aykroyd, who broke out on the show impersonating Julia Child and Tom Snyder, co-anchoring Weekend Update after Chevy Chase left...
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'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
and introducing a range of unforgettable characters, including the outer space alien Beldar Conehead, one of the wild and crazy guys opposite Steve Martin, and most famously, Elwood Blues, one of the musical energetic Blues Brothers alongside John Belushi. Terry asked Dan Aykroyd about his love of music and more.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
On Saturday, in its regular late-night slot on NBC, SNL repeats the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by George Carlin and introducing the original not-for-prime-time players. John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Lorraine Newman, and Garrett Morris.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Al Franken speaking to Terry Gross in 1992. He left Saturday Night Live in 1995 and 14 years later was elected as the Democratic Senator for Minnesota, where he served until 2018.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
We'll end our Saturday Night Live tribute with a brief visit with one of the cast members who became a star during Franken's second stint with the show, John Lovitz, who was part of the repertory company from 1984 to 1990. The characters he created included Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar, and Master Thespian, the pretentious actor.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
In 1992, he told Terry the story behind the creation of Master Thespian.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
He would do stuff like that. John Lovitz speaking to Terry Gross in 1992. The 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live is being celebrated all weekend with a live concert streaming on Peacock Tonight, a repeat of the very first episode of SNL in the show's regular late-night Saturday time slot on NBC, and a three-hour live special on NBC's Sunday Night.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Coming up, Justin Chang reviews a new movie that's also an old movie. He'll explain after a break. This is Fresh Air. This week sees the belated release of The Annihilation of Fish, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1999, but is only now opening in theatres for the first time.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
It's a romantic comedy starring the late trio of James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder, and was directed by Charles Burnett, best known for his 1978 classic, Killer of Sheep. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review of The Annihilation of Fish.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Charles Burnett's The Annihilation of Fish, now playing in selected theaters. On Monday's show, we devote President's Day to understanding the scope of President Donald Trump's power as he continues to potentially break laws, use billionaire Elon Musk to dismantle the government, and circumvent Congress. I hope you can join us.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Ngouli.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And on Sunday, NBC presents a three-hour live anniversary special, preceded by an additional hour on the red carpet. Today on Fresh Air, we're noting that anniversary by replaying interviews with some of the performers and writers who were there at or near the start, when producer Lorne Michaels created and shaped the show's first five seasons.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
After a five-year hiatus, Michaels returned and has been there ever since, presiding over many decades of cast changes, musical trends, and political shifts. Even though Michaels and NBC are celebrating the 50th anniversary of SNL this weekend, the very first episode, then called NBC's Saturday Night, actually premiered on October 11, 1975.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Michaels had selected a cutting-edge counterculture comic as the show's host, but the comedian, George Carlin, suggested he do only the first one, making room for guest hosts from then on. Michaels agreed, establishing a template that still works, while Carlin established another one, taking the stage at Studio 8H to deliver an opening monologue.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Dan Aykroyd spoke to Terry Gross in 2004. One of the original writers on Saturday Night Live was Alan Zweibel. In 1989, he told Terry about how he collaborated with Gilda Radner on several of her characters. Together, they wrote such still-memorable comic creations as Emily Letella and Roseanne Rosanna Dana.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Erivo played Aretha Franklin in the TV miniseries Genius Aretha. She also co-starred in the HBO series The Outsider. And she released an album of songs she co-wrote titled Chapter One, Verse One, and wrote a children's book called Remember to Dream, Ebere. Erivo grew up in South London, where her parents emigrated from Nigeria.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Erivo played Aretha Franklin in the TV miniseries Genius Aretha. She also co-starred in the HBO series The Outsider. And she released an album of songs she co-wrote titled Chapter One, Verse One, and wrote a children's book called Remember to Dream, Ebere. Erivo grew up in South London, where her parents emigrated from Nigeria.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Cynthia Erivo speaking with Terry Gross in 2021. She is currently starring in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. We'll hear more of their interview after a break. Also, Ken Tucker plays us some great new Christmas music. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Cynthia Erivo speaking with Terry Gross in 2021. She is currently starring in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. We'll hear more of their interview after a break. Also, Ken Tucker plays us some great new Christmas music. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Terry Gross spoke with Cynthia Erivo in 2021 and asked her about playing Aretha Franklin. They began with this scene from the miniseries Genius Aretha. This is set during Aretha's first recording session for Atlantic Records in 1967. Erivo, as Aretha, is at the piano, singing I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Terry Gross spoke with Cynthia Erivo in 2021 and asked her about playing Aretha Franklin. They began with this scene from the miniseries Genius Aretha. This is set during Aretha's first recording session for Atlantic Records in 1967. Erivo, as Aretha, is at the piano, singing I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Singer and actress Cynthia Erivo has just been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. Here she is singing one of that musical's most iconic songs.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Singer and actress Cynthia Erivo has just been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. Here she is singing one of that musical's most iconic songs.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Cynthia Erivo, recorded in 2021. She's currently starring in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. The first half of the two-part adaptation opened November 22nd and already has earned more than $300 million in American ticket sales. Coming up, I'll review the new Prime video series The Sticky, which brings the sensibility of the TV series Fargo to Canada's syrup industry.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Cynthia Erivo, recorded in 2021. She's currently starring in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked. The first half of the two-part adaptation opened November 22nd and already has earned more than $300 million in American ticket sales. Coming up, I'll review the new Prime video series, The Sticky, which brings the sensibility of the TV series Fargo to Canada's syrup industry.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
I'm TV critic David Bianculli. The Sticky is a new TV series starring Margo Martindale inspired by the biggest crime in Canadian history, the theft of a massive amount of government-stored maple syrup. This new six-part Prime Video miniseries, all of which is streaming now, tells that story, but more whimsically than faithfully. Don't think of The Sticky as a fact-based Canadian crime story.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. The Sticky is a new TV series starring Margot Martindale inspired by the biggest crime in Canadian history, the theft of a massive amount of government-stored maple syrup. This new six-part Prime Video miniseries, all of which is streaming now, tells that story, but more whimsically than faithfully.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Think of it more like the movie Fargo, where half the fun is enjoying the snow-covered scenery and the somewhat cartoonish characters. And though the series creators of The Sticky, Brian Donovan and Ed Harrow, don't mind the French-Canadian accents for laughs the way Fargo played with those Minnesota draws, the loose connection with the truth is exactly the same.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Don't think of The Sticky as a fact-based Canadian crime story. Think of it more like the movie Fargo, where half the fun is enjoying the snow-covered scenery and the somewhat cartoonish characters.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
And though the series creators of The Sticky, Brian Donovan and Ed Harrow, don't mind the French-Canadian accents for laughs the way Fargo played with those Minnesota draws, the loose connection with the truth is exactly the same. The Fargo movie and TV series stated at the start that they were based on a true story, but they were lying, because why not?
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
The Fargo movie and TV series stated at the start that they were based on a true story, but they were lying, because why not? The opening disclaimer in the sticky is just as playful, but much more honest. It says, this is absolutely not the true story of the great Canadian maple syrup heist.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
The opening disclaimer in the sticky is just as playful, but much more honest. It says, this is absolutely not the true story of the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. In that real-life robbery, $18 million worth of maple syrup reserves were stolen with the theft discovered in 2012. In this six-part version for TV, the heist is planned by a trio of unlikely co-conspirators.
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Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
In that real-life robbery, $18 million worth of maple syrup reserves were stolen with the theft discovered in 2012. In this six-part version for TV, the heist is planned by a trio of unlikely co-conspirators. There's Remy, a local security guard, the only security guard, at the place where local syrup is stockpiled. Mike is a low-level mobster visiting from Chicago.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
There's Remy, a local security guard, the only security guard, at the place where local syrup is stockpiled. Mike is a low-level mobster visiting from Chicago. And Ruth is a local farmer who taps her trees for sap each year, but whose land is about to be sold out from under her. All three of these people have grudges to settle.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
And Ruth is a local farmer who taps her trees for sap each year, but whose land is about to be sold out from under her. All three of these people have grudges to settle.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
The security guard against the Syrup Federation that treats him poorly, the gangster against the mob family that takes him for granted, and the farmer whose property is being targeted by the head of the Syrup Association, even though her husband is in the hospital in a coma. Remy, the security guard, hatches a plan to steal some syrup.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
The security guard against the Syrup Federation that treats him poorly, the gangster against the mob family that takes him for granted, and the farmer whose property is being targeted by the head of the Syrup Association, even though her husband is in the hospital in a coma. Remy, the security guard, hatches a plan to steal some syrup.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
He tells the mobster, who tries to enlist Ruth because of her knowledge of the trade. Mike is played by Chris Diamantopoulos. Guillaume Sear plays Remy, and Margo Martindale plays Ruth. You need this. So hear him out. Remy.
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Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
He tells the mobster, who tries to enlist Ruth because of her knowledge of the trade. Mike is played by Chris Diamantopoulos. Guillaume Sear plays Remy, and Margo Martindale plays Ruth. You need this. So hear him out. Remy.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Once the three agree to work together, the real fun begins. Outside factors and unexpected antagonists keep gumming up the works. And these three very different characters react differently to almost everything, including one another. Ruth is the brains of the outfit. Remy knows almost nothing.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
They're going to notice 500 barrels missing. Once the three agree to work together, the real fun begins. Outside factors and unexpected antagonists keep gumming up the works. And these three very different characters react differently to almost everything, including one another.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Ruth is the brains of the outfit, Remy knows almost nothing, and Mike certainly knows nothing about the production methods of maple syrup, which he demonstrates in a conversation with them during a cramped truck ride.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
And Mike certainly knows nothing about the production methods of maple syrup, which he demonstrates in a conversation with them during a cramped truck ride.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Margot Martindale, who was so enjoyable to watch on both Justified and The Americans, has a blast with this leading role. Her major co-stars, including Gita Miller and Suzanne Clément as a pair of investigators on their trail, are all Canadian actors, and all add to the mix here.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Margot Martindale, who was so enjoyable to watch on both Justified and The Americans, has a blast with this leading role. Her major co-stars, including Gita Miller and Suzanne Clément as a pair of investigators on their trail, are all Canadian actors, and all add to the mix here.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
But the secret ingredient, and the reason to make this a must-watch TV series, is an eventual, substantial guest star appearance by an American, Jamie Lee Curtis. She arrives late, but makes as big an impact as she did in her Emmy-winning guest stint on The Bear, or as the tax auditor in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
But the secret ingredient, and the reason to make this a must-watch TV series, is an eventual, substantial guest star appearance by an American, Jamie Lee Curtis. She arrives late, but makes as big an impact as she did in her Emmy-winning guest stint on The Bear, or as the tax auditor in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
It's such a blast to see Curtis and Martindale swing for the fences with their portrayals, and both of them hit it out of the park. The entire company of actors is strong, and the French versions of American pop songs on the soundtrack are a delight.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
It's such a blast to see Curtis and Martindale swing for the fences with their portrayals, and both of them hit it out of the park. The entire company of actors is strong, and the French versions of American pop songs on the soundtrack are a delight.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
The best part of all is that while the sticky is loaded with wonderful characters, performances, music, and surprises, it's not at all overly sentimental, which is good. The last thing you'd want from a TV show about a maple syrup heist is for it to be too sappy.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
The best part of all is that while the sticky is loaded with wonderful characters, performances, music, and surprises, it's not at all overly sentimental, which is good. The last thing you'd want from a TV show about a maple syrup heist is for it to be too sappy.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Each year, the holiday season brings new Christmas music, and rock critic Ken Tucker has been listening to it all to select the songs he's enjoyed the most. This year's picks include new holiday albums by Ben Folds and the country group Little Big Town, as well as a duet from a very famous pop star and a very famous football player.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Each year, the holiday season brings new Christmas music, and rock critic Ken Tucker has been listening to it all to select the songs he's enjoyed the most. This year's picks include new holiday albums by Ben Folds and the country group Little Big Town, as well as a duet from a very famous pop star and a very famous football player.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Here's Ben Folds with his new song, The Bell That Couldn't Jingle.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Here's Ben Folds with his new song, The Bell That Couldn't Jingle.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Rock critic Ken Tucker reviewed new Christmas music from Ben Folds, Little Big Town, and Jason Kelsey and Stevie Nicks singing a duet on A Philly Special Christmas Party. On Monday's show, actor and comic Ronnie Chang. He was brought to The Daily Show by Trevor Noah and became a field correspondent. Now he's one of the rotating correspondents who anchor the show.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Rock critic Ken Tucker reviewed new Christmas music from Ben Folds, Little Big Town, and Jason Kelsey and Stevie Nicks singing a duet on A Philly Special Christmas Party. On Monday's show, actor and comic Ronnie Chang. He was brought to The Daily Show by Trevor Noah and became a field correspondent. Now he's one of the rotating correspondents who anchor the show.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
He co-stars in the new series Interior Chinatown and was in the film Crazy Rich Asians. He has a new Netflix comedy special. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Chirac.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
He co-stars in the new series Interior Chinatown and was in the film Crazy Rich Asians. He has a new Netflix comedy special. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Chirac.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
That's Cynthia Erivo. In 2016, after coming to the U.S. from England, Erivo starred in the Broadway revival of the musical The Color Purple, winning a Tony and Drama Desk Award. For her starring role as Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet, she was nominated for an Oscar and also was nominated for the movie's closing credits song, Stand Up, which she co-wrote and sang.
Fresh Air
Cynthia Erivo Sings With 'A Bit Of A Smile'
That's Cynthia Erivo. In 2016, after coming to the U.S. from England, Erivo starred in the Broadway revival of the musical The Color Purple, winning a Tony and Drama Desk Award. For her starring role as Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet, she was nominated for an Oscar and also was nominated for the movie's closing credits song, Stand Up, which she co-wrote and sang.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
More recently, she's played some pretty tough women in the TV series Fargo and Legion and in the HBO crime drama Mayor of Easttown. When Hacks begins, the career of Deborah Vance is in decline. In an attempt to save her career, Jimmy pairs her with a young woman comedy writer, Ava, whom he also manages.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Gene Smart, speaking with Terry Gross in 2021. Season four of Hacks has begun streaming this week on HBO Max. After a break, we'll hear from two other stars of Hacks, Hannah Einbinder and series co-creator Paul W. Downs. And Justin Chang reviews Warfare, a new film based on actual exploits of U.S. Navy SEALs. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Neither wants to meet with the other, but they do, and Ava reluctantly flies to Vegas to meet with Deborah. At one of their first meetings, Deborah tells Ava the jokes she's written for her aren't funny. Then Deborah asks if Ava is a lesbian. Ava responds that Debra is her employer, which makes it inappropriate for her to ask.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Let's continue our show about Hacks, the award-winning HBO Max comedy series, which began its fourth season this week. Hannah Einbinder plays Ava, the young writer teamed reluctantly with veteran female comic Deborah, played by Jean Smart. In real life, Einbinder is a stand-up comic who had her own comedy special on HBO Max last year.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
She's the daughter of Lorraine Newman, an original cast member of Saturday Night Live. Terry Gross spoke with Hannah Einbinder last year. Let's listen to a clip from Season 3 of Hacks. With Ava's help, Jean Smart's character of Deborah is making a comeback and is in line to be offered the job she always wanted, hosting a popular late-night TV show.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
She's about to be given an honorary degree and is at a party on the college campus when she finds out a video has gone viral stringing together some of her jokes from years ago, jokes that now are considered insensitive and problematic. Ava, played by Hannah Einbinder, is by her side. Jean Smart's character, Deborah, speaks first.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
And then Ava goes on to describe, in graphic detail, her sexual experiences with women and men, and concludes by telling Debra this.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Hannah Einbinder co-stars in the HBO Max series Hacks. She spoke with Terry Gross last year. Here's Einbinder on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He asked her about the possibility of a romantic relationship between her character and Gene Smarts on Hacks, apparently something a lot of fans want.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bean Cooley. Hacks, the very funny TV series about an older Vegas-style stand-up comic and the generational differences between her and her younger comedy writer, returned to HBO Max last night for its fourth season.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Coming up, Paul W. Downs, who plays Jimmy. Downs also co-created and co-writes the show. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Paul W. Downs co-created, co-writes, and co-stars in Hacks, playing the talent manager, Jimmy. He created Hacks with his comedy partners, his wife, Lucia Uniello, and their friend and collaborator, Jen Statsky. Downs and Uniello also direct many of the episodes. Before creating Hacks, the trio worked on the Comedy Central show Broad City, in which Downs also co-starred.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Paul W. Downs spoke with Anne-Marie Baldonado last year. Let's hear another clip from the very first episode of Hacks. Jimmy is fielding a call from his big client, Deborah, played by Jean Smart. She's in danger of losing part of her Las Vegas residency. By the way, Downs won an Emmy for writing this episode.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Today, we feature our interviews with Jean Smart, who stars as Deborah Vance, the older comic, with Hannah Einbinder, who plays her young comedy writer, Ava, and with Paul W. Downs, who co-created, co-writes, and co-stars as their talent manager, Jimmy. As the new season begins, Debra and Ava are embarking on new jobs.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
Debra as the first female host of a big three network late night show, and Ava as her head writer. It's a job she got by defying Debra, which changes their dynamic dramatically. Debra makes that clear on day one when she walks unannounced into Ava's new office.
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'Hacks' Returns! With Jean Smart, Hannah Einbinder, Paul W. Downs
We'll see. That's what's happening now on Hacks. But let's go back to the beginning and start with Jean Smart, who spoke with Terry Gross when the show premiered on Max in 2021. Smart's comedic timing was obvious in the 1980s sitcom Designing Women and again in the early 2000s when she won two Emmys for her guest starring role on Frasier.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. A Complete Unknown, the new film about Bob Dylan's early career, starring Timothee Chalamet, is out in theaters. Today, we hear from three of the people who were depicted in the film. First, Suze Rodolo, who was Dylan's girlfriend and his muse. She met him when she was 17 and he was 20, and they soon moved in together in Greenwich Village.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Suze Rodolo spoke to Terry Gross in 2008. More of her interview after a break, and we'll also hear from two other people who are portrayed in the new film A Complete Unknown about a young Bob Dylan. Musicians Joan Baez and Al Cooper. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
We're featuring interviews with three people depicted in the new film A Complete Unknown about Bob Dylan's early years in New York City. Suze Rodolo was Dylan's girlfriend in the early 1960s. They lived together in Greenwich Village. Terry spoke to her in 2008. When we left off, Rodolo was talking about leaving Dylan for a short trip to Italy. The character in the film was partly based on Rodolo.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Suze Rodolo spoke to Terry Gross in 2008. Rodolo died in 2011. Coming up, Joan Baez, in an interview with Terry Gross from 1987, talks about meeting Bob Dylan. This is Fresh Air. Another character from Bob Dylan's early career, portrayed in the new movie A Complete Unknown, is Joan Baez.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
She already was an established folk music star when Dylan was trying to break into the New York folk scene in the early 1960s. She sang traditional ballads and early on was labeled the Madonna. in part for her sense of purity performing the songs she sang, but also for her behavior offstage. She didn't do drugs, she engaged in social activism, and she shunned major record companies.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
After Bob Dylan met her, she began recording a number of his songs and invited him on tour when he was just starting out. They also had a temporary, sometimes tempestuous, romantic relationship. Here's the song Diamonds and Rust, which she wrote years later about that relationship.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Terry Gross spoke with Joan Baez in 1987 upon the publication of her autobiography, A Voice to Sing With.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Joan Baez speaking with Terry Gross in 1987. Coming up, Terry's interview from 1998 with one more person portrayed in the new Bob Dylan biopic, Al Cooper, who played the famous organ opening on Like a Rolling Stone. This is Fresh Air.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Al Cooper, a session musician in his early career, played in the band Blues Project and founded the band Blood, Sweat & Tears, famous for its use of horns and its mix of jazz, blues, and rock. In the new Dylan biographical film A Complete Unknown, Al Cooper figures in two pivotal musical scenes.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
One is during the recording of Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, and the other is at the climax, when Dylan and his band, including Cooper, go electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Cooper talked with Terry Gross in 1998 when his revised and expanded memoir, Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, had just been released.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
they shared a love of poetry and an abundant curiosity. At the time, the village was the center of the urban folk scene. Rodolo was the young woman arm-in-arm with Dylan in the now-famous cover photo from his album The Freewheeling Bob Dylan. Here's a scene from the film. The girlfriend, named Sylvie, based partly on Rodolo, is played by Elle Fanning.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Al Cooper speaking with Terry Gross in 1998. The new film in which he's portrayed, a complete unknown about a young Bob Dylan, is now in theaters. On Monday's show, comedian Roy Wood Jr. His new comedy special, Lonely Flowers, looks at how isolation has sent society spiraling into a culture full of guns, rude employees, self-checkout lanes, and sex parties. I hope you can join us.
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Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Suze Rodolo became an artist and taught at the Parsons School of Design. She married and had a son. In 2011, she died from lung cancer at the age of 67. Three years before that, she spoke to Terry Gross on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, A Freewheel in Time, a memoir of Greenwich Village in the 60s.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
So instead of like male and female, gender is really masculine and feminine, right? I think the trick for us at the time was to decide which characteristics were sex and which were gender, you know? Because there's certain things males do and there's certain things females do. I mean, the universe didn't make two sexes for nothing,
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it was obviously we weren't gay. I mean, you know, but maybe to some people it was. You know how some people, I mean, to some people everybody's gay, you know? You could say, like, you could be talking to somebody and go, oh, that Hitler, and they go, gay. So, I mean, some...
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
some people just think everybody's gay but i don't know we were like these kind of street kids from uh you know from saint mark's place you know and um we just had this idea that you know at the time masculine meant strong and assertive feminine meant weak and demure and this was a time of like redefinition of the roles you know it was overdue and uh
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
It was just part of evolution, I think, you know, and everything kind of transcends and goes beyond what went before. And otherwise, what's the use of doing anything, you know?
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I woke up early one day And turned on my TV They said they'd take it over When I was asleep Well, they were breaking down doors. They were purging and burning people just like me. Well, I fixed the drink. I switched around the channel. But that was all I could say. Well, it's such a boring feeling when you find that you've fallen to a totalitarian state. There are no ones left.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
It don't seem right. You just don't feel so great. Well, the trees were all camping and the Mexicans were laughing down at the detention center. They didn't seem to care that they were there. I couldn't find one dissenter. I didn't feel too muted, I was insubmuted kind of. I couldn't see it getting any better. I couldn't call no one. I wish I had a gun. I couldn't even send a letter.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Oh, it's such a boring feeling when you find that you're falling. You were choked out. You don't know what's left and what's right. You just don't feel so great. When they came to get me, I hoped they would forgive me. I tried playing dead. I finished my drink, assessed the situation, put the covers up over my head.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
When I say I'm in love, you best believe I'm in love, M.U.V. I always saw you just before the dawn All the other kids you're just draggin' along I couldn't believe the way you seemed to be Timber in the place they used to say to be I could go off every waste of time cause I gotta have my fun I gotta get some fun I gotta keep on movin' Can't stop till it's all done I've been looking for a kiss
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Yes and no. I mean... It's very interesting. Like, you know, there were, like, Rust Belt places, you know, like Detroit and Cleveland and places like that. People would go crazy for us, and they would come to the shows all dressed up, you know, and Chicago. And, you know, we were really well-received in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We used to play a lot in Florida, you know, Miami.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And we used to play in Atlanta and be very well accepted. And then we used to also, you know, we were friends with Leonard Skinner at the time. We were kind of kindred spirits. And we would go on tours of, like, state fairs and, like, tertiary markets in Missouri together. And... we would have a great time, you know?
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I know in Memphis, I got arrested on stage one night for allegedly... You know, it was like the Alice Tully Hall of Memphis. I mean, it was this nice, clean room, and there had been articles in the newspaper that we were coming to, uh... Pied Piper all the children to, uh... the end of the world or whatever, and, uh...
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
We thought it was funny when we read it, but I actually got arrested on stage and went to the Huskow in Memphis, which is... I was dressed like Liza Minnelli at the time, so it wasn't the most relaxing night I ever had.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I just, like, hid under these, like, Lysol-smelling, like, army blankets, and then this guy woke up and he went like, Oh, damn, you're David Johansson. And I was like, quiet, quiet, quiet. And then he woke up this bear and the bear was growling. And I was like, oh, my God, my knees were like, you know, rattling under these covers. But I got bailed out at like dawn.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
inciting a riot. The cops, you know, the cops wanted to mess the thing up and they started beating on kids because they got up and danced and I stopped the music and I started explaining to this officer that this child he was abusing may be, you know, the mayor's kid or nephew or something and his job would
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
be in jeopardy and then they just threw me in cuffs and dragged me away for inciting a riot i may not have used the exact same language i understand um why did the new york dolls break up uh inertia i don't know you know i think we got to a point where
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I like to think, you know, it was a project that we finished, but there was like factions in the group that were, you know, more interested in drugs than in playing music. And it just kind of became, for me, I mean, I can only speak for myself, you know, for me it became untenable.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I thought every new idea begins as heresy and winds up as superstition. I never saw the Sex Pistols, but I saw the Ramones because they used to rehearse down the hall from me. I forget if I was in the Dolls or in my next band, but I remember Joey Ramone came to the room I was rehearsing in. You know, they have these buildings in New York with a hundred bands playing at once.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
It's like... It would drive a monk insane. And he came by and said that he wanted me to come down the hall and hear his band. And I went down the hall to hear his band. And I probably said, you know, you're a nice guy. Why don't you just give up? You know? I told the talking heads they should give up. I mean, I would be the worst...
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
A&R man in the history of show business because I tell all these bands who, when they're beginning, that, you're a good kid, why don't you get a real job and a house, you know? So, what do I know? I didn't think anything about it being influenced by me or anything like that. It was just probably I had a headache and the music was really loud.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
You know, I mean, Birkenstocks are drag.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Everyone is like, everybody is saying something with their clothes, you know.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the thing with Poindex is there was a little club, like a saloon, an Irish bar around the corner from my house. I was living in Gramercy Park. It was two blocks from my house, and it was kind of like my watering hole. And they would have bands there like Joe Turner or Charles Brown or Big Maybell, and they would do residencies there.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
So they would play like three or four nights a week for a month, say, you know, and there was a room upstairs where they would live. Monday night, the back room was dark. So I had decided I was going to do this little like road barrel house kind of roadhouse show where I could just sing whatever songs I wanted to sing. And I was going to do it for four Mondays.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And I went in there and I figured I'd use a pseudonym so people wouldn't be coming in screaming for, you know, funky butt cheek. So I went in to do that and I just picked whatever songs. I had been listening to a lot of jump blues at the time, but I also did, you know, like the Seven Deadly Virtues from Camelot, and just whatever songs I wanted to sing.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And by the end of four weeks, I started doing weekends, and it just kind of organically built into this. It started out as a three-piece band and wound up as like a 15-piece band. So I think by the time it got to the... national awareness, it did have this kind of Vegas-y kind of idea to it, but it started off more kind of like the Louis Prima days in the 50s of Vegas, you know what I'm saying?
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
See, I was walking to work. I was making a nice living. And then we had a hit and, you know, we all went to hell because we had to go back on the road.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Well, I don't know. It's just a good song. It was written by Lil Armstrong. I always liked it ever since I was a kid.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I'm taking the trouble to turn my night into day. You know that old hot blazing sun, it ain't gonna hurt my head. Cause you ain't gonna find me right there in the shade. I can see all the folks, I can see them laughing at me.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Because I'm just naturally crazy, lazy, bad, spoiled.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Yeah, I guess there's a lot of... a kind of acting involved. You know, I have this friend, Elliot Murphy, who's a singer. He lives in Paris now. I remember when I started doing Buster Poindexter, he used to say to me, David, you know, Buster Poindexter is so much more like you than David Johansson is, you know, if you get what I'm saying. In other words...
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
With Buster, I really kind of went on stage and really didn't edit myself and just kind of said whatever came to my mind and didn't have many filters. Whereas prior to that, in the period of my, I guess you would call it solo career, although, you know, you're always in a band, so it's never really a solo career. But I had the David Johansson group or band or whatever it was called.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And we used to open for a lot of bands and hockey rinks, you know, and you kind of go out there. At that point, I was going out there and kind of... presenting this, what I thought, like, ideal picture of myself, you know what I mean? This pleasant fellow, you know? Whereas Buster was really kind of more warts and all, you know? And I think by doing that, it...
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
helped me to be myself more you know whereas so now now when i go on stage i'm not like biting my nails i go what am i gonna do what are you how am i gonna be blah blah i just don't even think about it because i'm just gonna go out there and essentially be whoever i am at that moment you know what i'm saying
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Well, I have memories, but God, they're vague. I mean, I remember the first time We made a record with Todd Rundgren, and the only thing I remember is the lights on the control board. I thought they were really pretty. And that's really the only memory I have.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Exactly. You know, it's funny because my mother, when Buster came out, she said, you know, this is the most genius idea you've ever come up with. This is great. And I think that was her idea that, you know, Buster can take the rap and politicians should do it.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Are you just yourself or do you have a... I have a show called The Mansion of Fun. And I'm kind of like Sri Rama Poindexter Johansson. And I'm very taken with Sri Ramakrishna lately because I read a biography of his and thought, man, that guy knew how to live. He called the planet the mansion of fun. So I named my show after that. And I play a really diverse bunch of music.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I play salsa, opera, blues, rock and roll, you name it. I play a lot of Nino Rota music. I play whatever tickles my fancy. So it's really completely free form. And I speak a lot of kind of Ken Wilber type forward thinking philosophy.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Tonight I'm going to do songs that I wrote or co-wrote, I guess from when I was a teenager all the way up to now.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And the one thing I could say, the unifying thing of my existence is that there's always been plenty of music.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Feeling a great sadness today. I don't want to shush it or shoo it away. It belongs to the whole world, the boys and girls. It ain't just mine. Like joy and love, it's always there I don't know how I tune in or why that I care But I can't pretend it don't feel like the end And everything is fine I feel exiled from the divine.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Me and these sad friends of mine, we're just waiting down here, drinking beer and losing time. Well, I hear plenty of music. I see superfluous beauty everywhere. Why should I care? What does it matter to me?
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Of making that first record. You know, people think I'm kidding when they ask, well, what was it like making that first record? Because it kind of became this benchmark kind of record. But that's really the only memory I have of it. But... You know, the thing that struck me was I had to kind of sit down and listen to the music and write the words down and learn them.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews Mickey 17, the new film by Bong Joon-ho. This is Fresh Air.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Yeah, because, you know, I hadn't sung them in God knows how long, you know. I mean, it wasn't like I had to relearn them from scratch because they kind of come back to you. But I had to have some kind of thing to look at. And, you know, I find that when I write something, it goes into my head better than if I just try to memorize it. So I was writing, for example, like human being.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And I was thinking, God, how did I write that song? This is great. I mean, it really holds up, you know. It's kind of like a declaration that I think is timeless. So there's a lot of stuff like that in the songs, which... Let me explain something to you. There was a time, you know, when we started at Dolls and we were really...
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
such a gang and it was like us against the world and we were really trying to evolve music into something new and it was you know very kind of almost militant to us and then over the years you know in the history books you know like the
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
the Rolling Stone complete encyclopedia of rock and roll or something, you know, you look in the appendix and see where your name is and see what they say about you. It's not like you buy the book. And I would always say, you know, they were trashy, they were flashy, they were drug addicts, they were drag queens, you know.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And that whole kind of trashy blah, blah, blah thing, I think over the years kind of... settled in my mind as, oh yeah, that's what it was.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And then by going back to it and deconstructing it and then putting it back together again, I realized that it really is art and that some critic at one time had come up with this catch-all phrase that, as you know, once somebody says it, then everybody just looks it up and they say it because nobody has an original idea.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Well, you know, I don't remember exactly sitting down and writing the words, but I remember where I got the name because I was... I was kind of like an acolyte in Charles Ludlam's ridiculous theater when I was a kid. This is when I was 17, 18, 19.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Yeah, but it was so much more than that. It was really very intelligent stuff that he used to do, and he used to combine a lot of genres of...
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
you know classical playwriting and you know like moliere he would put in with uh something kitschy that was present you know present day stuff and he would put he would make this melange of ideas that were just so they would come out so original and brilliant that you know people throw the word genius around but he was actually a genius he was one of the most intelligent uh people i think i've ever met
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
But I think one day we were at a rehearsal or something, and he just said, Oh, God, I'm having a personality crisis. And I just thought, Oh, that's really good. And I wrote it down, you know, personality crisis. And that's really all I remember about writing a song, and the song came from that.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
No, and neither did he. You know, he had had this incredible life, Arthur, and he was just this really brilliant guy who had this incredible insight into reality that was just... one step to the left of probably the most radical people I had ever met at that point. And I don't even mean, you know, politics. I just mean the way he saw things. And they were always spot on.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And he was just so brilliant to me. And then he kind of He had come from this family that was just like hell on earth. And he got a taste for the booze and went through like a lot of years of just being drunk all the time. And I remember he got to this point where you would just say, hi, Arthur, and he would just say, woof. His only word became woof. Anyway, he went through all this stuff.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I mean, I can't begin to tell you. In his life, he fell out a window. He did this. He got hit by a car. He did this. He did that. And then he came out the other side, and he got involved with, like, you know, the Mormons and became the librarian at the family history office at the Mormon tabernacle and So he was like this Mormon, but with this really kind of demented outlook on life.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
So he wasn't, you know, like a proselytizer. But he just was so wonderful. And he had this very high voice. And he was six foot five or something.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Well, there was a guy who lived in my building who I used to jam with and strum guitars. And he was this Colombian guy who played bongos. And we used to just sit around and play music. And he knew Billy Mercier, who was the original drummer in the Dolls, and told these guys who were looking for a singer that I was a singer. And he thought I was a pretty good singer.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And so one day, Arthur was just at my door with Billy, and Arthur was about three feet taller than Billy, and he just said, I hear you're a singer. And I said, yeah, and I invited them in, and we started talking, and they said they had a band, and they were looking for a singer.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I was looking for a band, and we just really that day, actually, we left my apartment and went like four blocks up the street to Johnny Thunder's apartment where there was some drums and guitars and stuff and started to play, and we were a band, essentially.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Oh... You know, at that time there was like these interminable drum solos. You know what happens when the drum solo stops. It's the worst. Then the bass takes a solo. And stuff like that, you know. And we just wanted to kind of have some really wham-bam songs. I mean, for me the whole thing was like... If you have to compare it to something like a Little Richard kind of presentation.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
I can remember when I was really young and I would go to the Murray D. Kaye shows and I saw Mitch Ryder. These shows had 30 acts and everybody would come out and do two or three minutes. Mitch Ryder would come out and do a medley of his three big hits. He would come out in kind of like a tuxedo, and within 45 seconds, he was half naked and sweating like a pig.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
We just wanted to make an explosion of excitement. So that's what was missing, you know, rock and roll had become very kind of pedantic and meandering and it was looking for something, but it was like an actor in search of a play or something, you know.
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Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Well, that was probably, you know, I mean... I think, you know, to the average civilian, it probably didn't look any different. But to us, we were like dressing up a little bit more, make it a little special for the audience. For the record cover, you know. You know, Sylvain was in the rag trade with Billy.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
They had this little sweater company called Truth and... Well, they sold it to this company called Truth and Soul. They used to make these poor boy sweaters. They had a loom. And through that, they knew a lot of people who actually are very kind of famous designers now, but who were just getting started. And I think it was like...
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Betsy Johnson and these women that she used to work with, they had a store in St. Mark's Place and they knew a photographer and they knew a makeup guy and they knew this and that. We didn't know anything about that. So I think they helped to facilitate that photo session.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Well, you know, we were, you know, the hotbed of revolution at that time was, you know, St. Mark's Place and 2nd Avenue. And through that, you know, there were so many artists there and, you know, actors and people who were doing these plays, like the Ridiculous People. And there was, you know, filmmakers and poets and painters. And we were the band...
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
that crowd I mean it wasn't like we were the band of even New York City you know we were the band basically of the East Village you know and it wasn't so much like a sexual thing cuz you know like sexuality refers to like biological aspects it was more like a gender thing you know and gender is like You know, like the cultural differences that grow up around the biological differences.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
It's from 20 years ago, but couldn't be more topical. Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell, offended some of his employees by reenacting part of a Chris Rock comedy routine. They complained to HR, which ordered that a diversity sensitivity training session be held. Larry Wilmore played the person brought in to run the session.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
But Michael, instead of sitting with the rest of the staff, decides to stand and deliver.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Ricky Gervais, starring co-creator of the original British series The Office, speaking to Terry Gross in 2004. The American version of The Office is 20 years old, and today we're featuring interviews with the Dunder Mifflin staff. Next, we'll listen back to a 2008 interview Terry conducted with Jenna Fisher, who played Pam Beasley.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
She was an original cast member, and when she auditioned for the role of the receptionist, she hadn't memorized any lines. She couldn't.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. He relocated the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and renamed and recast all the roles of the office employees. Steve Carell, then a correspondent for The Daily Show, got the lead role as office manager Michael Scott.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Jenna Fisher speaking to Terry Gross in 2008. Coming up, John Krasinski, who played Jim. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
John Krasinski played Jim Halpert, who had two important relationships on The Office. He was the friend and later the love interest of the receptionist Pam, and he was the rival and chief tormentor of his office co-worker Dwight. Dave Davies spoke with John Krasinski in 2016.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Let's hear from Steve Carell, star of the NBC version of The Office. Terry Gross spoke with him in 2007, and they started with a clip from the show from Season 2, which, once again, had Carell as Michael Scott disrupting a workplace sensitivity session. This time, it's a seminar for women only, led by corporate officer Jan, played by Melora Hardin.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
After we hear her begin the session, Jenna Fisher, as Pam, puts it in context for the documentary camera crew that's following all the action. And then, Michael intrudes.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Steve Carell, star of NBC's The Office, speaking with Terry Gross in 2007. Now we'll hear from two of the writers who worked on the series. Greg Daniels, who wrote and directed episodes of NBC's The Office and developed it for American audiences, and Mindy Kaling, who both wrote for the series and co-starred as Kelly Kapoor, whom Michael Scott described as his most ethnic employee.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
The rest of the office was populated by actors and writers who have become much more famous since the NBC version premiered in March 2005. That's partly because The Office, which retained the documentary format and no-laugh-track approach of the original, quickly matured into its own funny, popular version, and kept maturing much longer than its British counterpart.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Greg Daniels and Mindy Kaling speaking to Terry Gross in 2006. After a break, we'll hear from the star and co-creator of the original Office, Ricky Gervais.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
NBC's The Office ran for nine seasons and broadcast 201 episodes, and it's still popular on streaming sites. Today, in our Fresh Air Anniversary show about the American version of The Office, we'll hear from cast members and from Greg Daniels and Ricky Gervais. Let's start with a taste from one of the earliest episodes of the NBC version of The Office.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of the popular NBC sitcom The Office. The original British version of The Office, co-starring co-creator Ricky Gervais as office manager David Brent, was the model for the long-running NBC sitcom starring Steve Carell. Terry Gross spoke with Ricky Gervais in 2004, and they began with a scene from his version of The Office.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Gervais, as Michael Brent, is conducting a performance evaluation with his receptionist Dawn, played by Lucy Davis.