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.
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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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
They did it by turning the most dangerous aspect of this drug, the fact that it potentially causes birth defects into an asset. They controlled distribution because the FDA, in approving the drug, mandated a safety program. They wanted to make sure that only the patients who needed it got the drug. They didn't want to see somebody accidentally take it and get pregnant and develop a birth defect.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
They were extremely concerned about that. So they controlled the distribution, and that meant that generic companies who wanted to develop a competing product had to acquire Revlimid from Celgene because you have to test your generic product against the brand name to prove to the FDA that they're essentially the same thing. and safe. They couldn't get the drug from Celgene.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Celgene simply refused to sell it to them, and they controlled the distribution. So that enabled them to really maintain a grip on the market for a number of years beyond the exclusivity period that the FDA granted them.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
They became aware of it. The FDA at one point ordered or directed Celgene to sell to a generic competitor. The FDA didn't have any enforcement ability, however. The Federal Trade Commission did do a lengthy investigation, and the staff proposed taking legal action against Celgene, but that didn't happen. The company promised that they would sell the drug
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
The commissioners that are needed to approve litigation thought that they were going to sell the drug and were not interested in pursuing litigation at that time. And that enabled them for several more years, again, to have this market all to themselves without any competition. So what did that mean for Celgene in the end?
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Celgene still had a monopoly on the marketplace, and they maintained that monopoly until 2022. In 2015, they settled with one of the generic companies who was involved in litigation with them. And that settlement required the generic maker to stay out of the marketplace until 2022. And even when it comes into the marketplace in a very limited way, less than 10% of the market.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
What we found is the company in certain situations used Revlimid to boost overall revenues. There was a situation in 2014 where Revlimid sales were not up to what the company expected. And a memo was sent out saying we need a price increase. Another situation in 2017 where they had a
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
a drug that was very promising for another condition called Crohn's disease, failed and they abandoned that project. And the day they abandoned that project, they raised the price of Revlimid 9%. You know, we've described it essentially as a piggy bank. They could tap Revlimid whenever they needed to. And there was really no regulator or governor on the price increases.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It was really up to the company.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
We did. In 2017, they raised the price 20% during the year. And one of the company officials filed a whistleblower complaint. And in her complaint, she said she was at a meeting and she objected to these price increases. She said it was just too much. And she said the CEO admonished her, said, what's the worst that's going to happen, a bad tweet?
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And that's how she said they viewed these price increases.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah. Might be a bad story here or there or a bad tweet. But, you know, why wouldn't we take the increases is what she quoted him as saying.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, I think the big reason is that here in the United States, we do not have a single payer of health care. We're one of the few countries where the government is not the provider or the sole provider of health care. And that makes it hard to negotiate. We have a very fractionalized system in terms of the number of payers.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, there's hundreds and hundreds of private payers, even among the government itself. There's Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, Department of Defense, who are all big payers. So it's very hard to negotiate a price when everybody's doing their own negotiating.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, you know, I think, first of all, the administration should be given some credit for bringing attention to this issue and pledging to do something about it. I think the executive order didn't have a lot of specific mechanisms for how this is going to be accomplished. A lot of it will be down the road.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
They talk about getting together with the drug companies and discussing prices of certain drugs. And if that doesn't work, they could turn to rulemaking. which would probably be Medicare and Medicaid programs instituting rules on what prices they will pay for drugs. But, you know, a lot of it is the devil's in the details here. And I think we'll have to see.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It's a complicated thing to get these prices down. You know, it doesn't even address the issue of what drug prices are launched at. You know, cancer drugs in particular are being launched at prices that are so expensive that, you know, you have nowhere to go when you start negotiating a decreased price because they started so high. So we'll have to see.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
I think you can make the argument it is. And the reality with, you know, things like this executive order is that whatever comes from it in terms of real concrete actions is likely to be challenged in court. You know, the Trump administration ran into this problem the first time around.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
They proposed a very modest, I think, idea where they would test out drug pricing for some of the Medicare drugs that are administered in a doctor's office. And that, you know, was held up by the courts. And then the first administration expired. So it's going to be a fight. You know, the pharma lobby is not to be underestimated.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, they spend billions of dollars on lobbying or millions, I should say. So this will be a tough fight trying to wrangle prices down.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Is that similar, different here? The Biden effort, frankly, was much more modest, at least in execution. The Trump administration is promising, you know, greater results we'll have to see. But, you know, essentially, the Inflation Reduction Act that was from the Biden administration allowed Medicare some limited ability to negotiate prices on the first year, 10 drugs, the next year, 15 drugs.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
But the Congressional Budget Office found that those impacts are going to be very modest. You know, it's not going to change the game, essentially.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Is he right? Well, you're not alone in understanding that. It's very opaque. It's very secretive. Lots of people have tried to crack the code there, and it's difficult. These are middlemen that set prices through sometimes secret rebates and discounts back to the drug maker. And on the other side, they have the health insurer. And a lot of people have called for transparency in pricing.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
What is the actual price, taking out all of these rebates and other things that the middlemen put in? So there's been a lot of calls to eliminate the middlemen. President Trump said something like, you know, they're taking money out of the system without actually making a product. And I think there's some truth to that.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
But again, this is a very entrenched interest in the drug pricing arena, and it'll be hard to do.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, you know, the fact of the matter is, and there's been some studies about this, you know, industry funding of research is certainly important. But government funding has been just as important. You know, 300 and something drugs approved by the FDA in the last decade, all but two of them had some element of government funding in them.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So there are some studies out there suggesting that the industry estimates of what it costs them to bring a drug to market, what they spend on research and development have been inflated. And perhaps most damning, the House Oversight Committee did a study that found drug makers spend more on stock buybacks and investor dividends than they do on research and development.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So the doctors in Arkansas didn't get anything, at least the ones I've spoken to. You know, there was no financial benefit to them from this discovery. And, you know, the ones I talked to said they really weren't looking for that. They were just incredibly gratified to find something that was going to help patients. You know, it was incredible.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It was a pretty grim period where, you know, they want to help patients. They want to get them better, give them an extension of life. And it was really hard to do before this discovery. The Boston doctors who were researching this drug, they didn't directly get something, but their institution did. They get royalties from Revlimid.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So there is a little bit of a benefit there to the research institution.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Sure. Well, I can describe to you what happened in my situation. And every case for every patient is a little bit different. But for me, it started with a pain in my side that wouldn't go away. It felt like, for many weeks, a bad runner's cramp. And I sought out care for it and went to a doctor who thought, you know, this is probably a muscle strain. But it ended up getting worse.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah, I think usually that's the case. And, you know, a lot of the most important developments have come out of academic labs, hospital labs. And, you know, these labs are willing to take chances that often pharmaceutical companies aren't. You know, they will study things that a drug company might look at and say, oh, there's not a big enough market or we're not sure that this will work.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So once they're found in the labs, they often strike deals with pharmaceutical companies that might be a royalty arrangement or something else. But that's not uncommon.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, you know, this was a situation where Christopher McNaughton had a very serious case of ulcerative colitis. He had to drop out of college. He was a basketball player in college. He was losing a tremendous amount of weight, so it was a really detrimental effect to his life. And he struggled to find a specialist who could help. give him some relief from this disease.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And that's when he got to the Mayo Clinic and found Dr. Edward Loftus, who prescribed a pretty aggressive regimen of drugs that were very expensive. And the interesting thing about Christopher McNaughton's case is he sued UnitedHealth and was able to access records about the company's decisions on his healthcare, including some audio recordings. And
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It was apparent from these records that cost was the issue. And what they did was they denied his care, saying it was not medically necessary because the regimen that his doctor prescribed was not an ordinary regimen. Chris had a very extreme case. And his doctor said that cutting him off in this regimen would be life-threatening.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
This is a very serious case that had a debilitating effect on a young man.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It was not true. And it was reflected in internal documents that he had said this when he had never said that. You know, they did admit later that he never said that. But there was such an effort to control the cost of Chris McNaughton's care that these kinds of things happened. In this case, you know, something that simply wasn't true.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And in other cases, sort of misrepresenting what his care was all about. And, you know, finally, Chris did what... win his case. You know, he won an agreement from the company to continue his care. A lot of details of that settlement are not public, but it took a tremendous effort. And most people are not so equipped to do something like that.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And one morning I woke up and I couldn't get out of bed. I mean, I had to grip the wall. I was in so much pain that and decided to go to the emergency room. And it was there they did some testing, some scans. And what happens with a lot of multiple myeloma patients is the disease really impacts the bones. It gets in there with these things called lytic lesions, creates holes in the bones.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
In fact, it's so rare to find somebody who's actually sued their health insurer over denied care. It's an expensive proposition. People are sick. They don't necessarily want to go through it. So his case was extraordinary, both in what it revealed and the outcome.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, they didn't answer my specific questions, but did say that they ultimately paid for his care. And they did point out that the dosages he was receiving, you know, exceeded what was in FDA guidelines, which, you know, his doctor said was necessary to get his disease under control.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
These companies essentially review claims from insurance companies' insureds and decide if they should be paid. So they're farming out the work of deciding what's appropriate care for their patients. And this is a growing business. You know, one of the things we found is that companies are engaging in a lot of prior authorization where you can't get a treatment or a drug until they say it's okay.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And for patients, this can be really disturbing. A lot of them have said that, you know, essentially the insurance company is playing doctor and deciding what I should get for care rather than my own doctor deciding it.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
That is certainly a real thing, and I've actually written about some of that in the past. I think what has happened is that it has been broadened to such a degree that it covers a wide swath of care. You know, cardiology, there's a lot of reviews. Oncology, there's reviews.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Certainly in the orthopedic world, you see a lot of insurance companies applying their own medical guidelines and analysis in determining whether someone should get that care. So I think it's true that there are cases where doctors over-prescribe or order tests that aren't necessarily needed, but this is broadened into a large practice of deciding what patients should get.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, you have a right to get that information. You can write to your insurance company to get it. We have on our website an aid for people to draft letters seeking your claim records. You know, one of the things we found when we were looking into insurance denials is that very few people ever challenge a denial. It's a small, small, small percentage. a single-digit percentage.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
But when people do challenge them, they're often successful, you know, as much as half the time. So if you have been denied prior authorization for something or if a claim came in and it was denied, it's worth the efforts, especially if it's a significant amount of money, to challenge it. It's well worth the effort if it's an amount of money that makes a difference to you.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And many people don't know they have multiple myeloma until they break a bone. I talked to another patient who was golfing and took a swing and his spine, part of his spine literally collapsed. And And he went to the hospital, and that's how he found out he had this disease. So it often lurks without people knowing it's there, and it takes something fairly dramatic for a patient to discover it.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
I think that's a fair question. And the way that we thought was best to deal with that was to be transparent. You know, I have this disease. I am a patient on this drug. I could at some point be financially impacted, you know, depending on... My insurance, which, as I mentioned, has changed several times. So we thought it was important to let people know.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And when I sought to interview people, I would tell them I'm a patient. I take the drug. And then people can make their own conclusions about what motivates me. I will say that being a patient changed my perspective. And before I even started on this story. I wondered, is it worth doing? Because for me, this is working. I don't have to pay much.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Why write about it if these high prices mean I get an effective drug? But ultimately, I came down on the side of this doesn't work for everybody. And that there's so much more research and discoveries that need to happen. And we need money for that. And a lot of money is going to things like stock buybacks and executive pay and just to the bottom line.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And I'm not saying that they shouldn't make a profit. They have a good drug. They should make a profit. But it was such an extraordinary amount that could have been directed to other resources that help patients in the long run.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
When Janice Ian was young, she was very precocious. She got her first song, both lyrics and music, printed in the same folk music magazine that first published a song by Bob Dylan. But at the time, she was only 13.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Not long after, she recorded another composition, Society's Child, which was about a young girl whose date arrived to pick her up and was met with disapproval from her mother, because her daughter was white, but her date was black. That was in the mid-60s, and the song became a hit after Leonard Bernstein featured it and her on a TV special he hosted for CBS in 1967.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So in my case, I found out that I had it and then began a course for drugs, including Revlimid.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
The next time Janice Ian had a hit record was almost a decade later. At age 24, she appeared as a musical guest on the very first episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, singing a song looking back on her own adolescence. It was called At Seventeen.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
In Janice Ian Breaking Silence, the new documentary by Varda Barkar, you get to see and hear Janice perform it, while people such as actress Jean Smart talk about what the song meant to them.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, so, you know, one of the amazing things about this particular cancer is that, you know, 20, 25 years ago, it was a very grim prognosis. You know, two, three, maybe five years is what many patients... lived with the cancer before passing away. That has changed dramatically thanks to drugs like Revlimid in the past 10, 15 years in particular.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Janis Ian won her first Grammy for At 17. When it was presented to her by Lily Tomlin, Janis noted the long gap between her first and second hit records in her acceptance speech, which I will now play in its entirety.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Janis Ian won her second Grammy not for singing, but for talking. In 2013, she won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for her reading of her just-published memoir, Society's Child. That memoir showed that Janice Ian was a gifted writer even when she wasn't writing lyrics. Her writing style is clear and honest, and the way she read her own words was both conversational and confessional.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
The same elements shine through in this new film documentary, which has Janice Ian talking candidly about her past. Whether she's talking in vintage or newly recorded interviews, she's a gifted storyteller. Even when she's talking about such personal memories as her then-husband who abused her.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
After that marriage, Janice Ian kept recording albums and writing songs, but approached her work and her life differently. She came out and wrote a regular column for The Advocate. She married again in 2003, this time to a woman, Patricia Snyder.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And after their marriage, she wrote a song about it, Married in London, which she performed gleefully in concerts until a medical problem with her throat forced her to quit touring.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Janice Ian Breaking Silence tells her story using several visual techniques, including animation and recreations. Not all of them work. But the best storyteller in this documentary is the artist herself. Whether she's singing or talking, Janice Ian is captivating. And in her 70s now, she's still quite precocious.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And for many patients, you know, you can almost live with it as sort of a chronic disease. If you fail one line of treatment, there's now second, third, fourth, fifth lines of treatment. So, you know, it's many more years than it was just 15, 20 years ago.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So for me, it's pretty good. You know, I do have some side effects from the drugs I take. You know, there's things like fatigue. But, you know, most days I feel good. I'm able to exercise fully and grateful that my cancer is in remission.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
That's right. So when I was diagnosed with this cancer, I was in the hospital and one of the doctors said, you'll get a regimen of drugs and one of them will be a thalidomide drug. And I've covered and written about medicine for a number of years and I said, Thalidomide? How is that possible? This is a drug that does so much harm. It's notorious. So that piqued my interest.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
I wanted to know how this drug that was so dangerous became a cancer fighter. And then once I started taking it and received my first claim summary... I was really taken aback by the price. And look, I'm not naive about drug pricing. You know, I've written about healthcare for the better part of two decades.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
I wrote extensively about Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family and how they manipulated the marketplace to make OxyContin appear safe and at low risk for addiction. So, you know, not naive to the ways of drug makers, drug pricing, and marketing. But even with that background... I couldn't believe that nearly $1,000 a pill is what my health plan was paying for this drug.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So I wanted to know how this was possible.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So thalidomide was developed by a German pharmaceutical company as a treatment for morning sickness for pregnant women, also to help them sleep. And it was sold in Europe, in Germany, for instance, over the counter. And there were advertisements in the UK telling women how safe this drug was. And it turned out not to be the case. Even a single dose of thalidomide was associated with birth defects.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It was incredibly potent that way. and tragic, as it turned out. And more than 10,000 babies, and some estimates are up to 20,000 babies, primarily in Europe, Canada, Australia, were born with some really horrific birth defects, and a large number of them died shortly after birth.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And this was just a horrific scandal that rocked the developed world in the 60s and led to a number of reforms for how drugs are tested for safety. including here in the United States.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah, the way I understand it is it deprived the fetus of new blood vessels that the fetus needed to develop.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So Ira Wollmer, Beth's husband, was an interventional cardiologist in the New York area who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in his 30s. Unfortunately for him, this was in the mid to late 1990s when there were really few options for myeloma patients.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So they went all over the country to different cancer centers looking for a doctor who could promise them something more than just, you know, a couple of years. And they ended up in Arkansas with a doctor named Bart Barlogi, who was gaining a reputation for trying just about anything to help multiple myeloma patients.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And people literally from all over the world were going to his clinic in Little Rock. So the Womers arrived there, and unfortunately for Ira Womer, he wasn't getting better. They did some stem cell transplants with him, but he relapsed after each one of them and was just getting sicker and sicker. But Beth Womer wouldn't quit. You know, she would read medical journals all day long.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
She'd call researchers all over the world. She was, you know, bound and determined to find anything that would help her husband. And it was in the course of doing that that a researcher told her about the work of Judah Folkman in Boston. who had a theory that if you could block blood vessel growth, you could starve tumors of what they needed to grow. And his lab was studying thalidomide.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
One of his researchers was deep into studying this and actually published some work about it. So when Beth finally connected with him, he said, try thalidomide.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah. I mean, you know, at the time, you know, nobody really thought that this would work. I mean, it was an idea that did not have a lot of people endorsing it. But, you know, Ira Wollmer was in a desperate strait. And, you know, Bart Bologi, you know, had a reputation for trying things.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So even though he might have been, you know, somewhat skeptical about it, he agreed to try it on both Ira Wollmer and two other patients. And unfortunately, it didn't work for Ira Ulmer. He didn't get better, and he died a few months later. But one of the patients, a guy named Jimmy, showed a miraculous recovery.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
I mean, he was at death's door, and all of a sudden, the cancer markers in his blood started going down. And the folks in Arkansas realized that for the first time in really forever, they had a potential drug that would help multiple myeloma patients.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, so after the response that Jimmy experienced with the drug, they immediately launched a larger trial with these 80-something patients, as you mentioned. And you have to keep in mind that it had been 30 years since any kind of treatment for multiple myeloma had been approved.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And even that was a chemotherapy drug that was just sort of blunt force, you know, killed the good cells, the bad cells. It's a very hard drug to tolerate. And the success rate for that drug, which was followed by a stem cell transplant, you know, was a mixed bag.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So there was tremendous excitement about the possibility of a drug, first of all, that you could just swallow and that might help multiple myeloma patients. So they did this study and they found these were patients who were high risk. and really running out of options.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And one-third of them showed declines in cancer in their blood work, which was something that doctors in the specialty had never seen before. It was an incredible response.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah, so Celgene was a small, struggling company in northern New Jersey who was studying thalidomide with the idea that it would be a treatment for AIDS patients who were getting it in the black market from places like Brazil and using it to treat a condition associated with AIDS where patients would lose a tremendous amount of weight, a dangerous amount of weight.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And they thought that there'd be a market for that. They, interestingly enough, to get FDA approval, the FDA approved it for a complication of leprosy. Doctors all over the world have been using it for leprosy patients to treat this condition that often causes painful skin lesions and other things.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
But, you know, there's only, you know, in the United States at the time, you know, hundreds of leprosy patients, a tiny, tiny market. But when the Arkansas results came in, the people at Celgene immediately realized that this was a cancer drug, and that was a game changer for the company.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah. So when the drug was initially approved, and again, technically for leprosy, but once it's approved, doctors are free to prescribe it off-label, they call it, for other indications. And the CEO at the time was speaking at an investor conference and said, you know, look, we kept the price low because that's what you do if you don't want protesters at your door.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
In other words, the AIDS community was very active. They would protest if there were developments that they thought ran contrary to the interests of the AIDS community. So they were concerned about that. And he said to the investors at the time, we have a lot of room for growth now.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, essentially, that's the implication. You know, one of the executives at Celgene said at the time, the company had the impression that cancer patients would pay whatever it takes.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So the problem that Celgene had with the thalidomide patent is they did not have a patent for the active ingredient. And that's because thalidomide was such an old drug. It was discovered and developed in the 1950s by a German pharmaceutical company. And for drug makers, the active ingredient is a really important patent. So Celgene started to explore alternatives to thalidomide.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And there was two reasons for that, at least two. One is they hoped to find a drug that didn't cause birth defects and a drug that they could patent in a more influential way. So they started studying analogs of thalidomide. And this is just a slightly tweaked version of the parent compound. You know, you move an atom here, do this here in the chemical structure.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And that's how they ended up developing Revlimid.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So in 2005, they released the drug with a price of $55,000 a year. And that really surprised a lot of people, including the analysts who follow the company. They thought that it would be half as much as that. But the company did its own due diligence, and that was a price they thought that they could justify. And it ended up being a price that people paid.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So the cost to manufacture Revlimid is approximately 25 cents a capsule. And that was true at the start, and it was true through most of the history of the drug. And that's according to a Celgene official who testified in a court case.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
No, I mean, there's certainly costs associated with developing the drug. And, you know, Celgene should be given credit for developing this drug. It's not easy to get FDA approval for a drug, and running clinical trials is hard business. You know, that being said, the company estimated about $800 million was spent to develop Revlimid.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
a few hundred million more to test it in clinical trials for other cancers. You know, when you consider the revenue in excess of $100 billion, you know, it's a fairly small amount in terms of the research and development costs for this particular drug.
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
But it was something that the Trump administration is has now started pursuing once again.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, it falls down to this idea of a unitary executive. They see things like civil servants who can't be fired by the president and they think it is abhorrent to the Constitution, because if the president is in charge of the executive branch, he should be able to do what he wants with the executive branch.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so when you see a civil servant who can't do that, they think that that that violates the Constitution. And it just makes it very hard for a president to do what he wants. We obviously saw Trump really struggling during his first term in office. to do a lot of the things he promised to do and to do a lot of things he was trying to do.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And for them, a lot of that blame came down to civil servants who tried to block it by, you know, following rules or regulations, maybe working specifically to the rule rather than trying to get things done.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah, they wanted to save money, and they point out that you can save money in an immediate term and actually cost money and cost yourself effectiveness in the long term, something maybe we're seeing with Elon Musk's stoge. They also just didn't have people trained.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
There were so many people who did not want to serve in the first Trump administration that they simply could not fill jobs with qualified people. And sometimes when they tried to appoint people who were not qualified, Congress would not confirm them. And that's another one of the motivations for the big training of people and vetting of people for these jobs that Project 2025 did.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
We don't. That database hasn't been made public. And we can look at a lot of the people who are contributors to Project 2025 and how they have come into top positions. But many of the people we're talking about are not names that I think would be household names and not in jobs that most people would think about or encounter.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They're in these low ranking positions where they can make a lot of difference to the way regulations are written and the way they're implemented. But they're not going to be in the public spotlight almost ever.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Trump is doing better in this term than he did in his first term. And he's doing better than Joe Biden did in getting people appointed into political jobs.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I think all of the things that they're interested in, including taking over so much power for the executive branch, are fundamentally in service of this social goal. So these are folks who have a very Christian and conservative view of the world, and they want to use all of the levers of government to do that.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so they're looking at how the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, The Department of Education or its functions can all be oriented around this. The Department of Justice. So, for example, they want to track student outcomes in schools based on family structure so they can encourage family structure.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They want to use the Labor Department to implement rules that will encourage people to stay home if they need to, to pay people to stay home. caring for children, presumably mothers or grandmothers, and to encourage people to be able to do work and support a family on a single income. A lot of this comes through the Department of Health and Human Services, which they'd like to use to ban abortion.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They'd also like to use things like temporary assistance for needy families, which is welfare in common parlance, to encourage marriage, to encourage abstinence, and to incentivize people to get married in order to get better benefits.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. The education department can mandate local school boards to report certain data. And so they want to orient so much of the data that the federal government is taking in around family structure. Again, that's not just education, but also the way the labor department approaches their things. So that they can gather this data and make a case.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They also want to do more research that encourages marriage, that encourages biblically-based family structure, they say. And they're interested in using all of these welfare programs then once you have the data to push people in that direction.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, some of it is making more generous benefits and also making it harder to acquire benefits. So, for example, you have Ben Carson, the former Republican presidential candidate and secretary of housing and urban development. saying that housing assistance has tended to push people towards multifamily living, and it's tended to encourage a culture of dependency.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so what they want to do is pull back on those benefits to encourage people to live in other situations that they think will lead to more stability and lead to better outcomes.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. And this is in some ways connected to the kind of faith-based push that we saw in the Bush administration. I think what sets it aside is both the scale, the way they want to use so many different departments of the government to do this, and the way they're willing to use a kind of coercive force of government in a way that conservatives in the past have found unacceptable.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Making benefits dependent on family structure and forcing people into these faith-based programs in order to receive their benefits are good examples of that.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah. You know, they're a little bit shy talking about same-sex couples, although they say incorrectly that same-sex couples have a higher divorce rate. It's certainly not trans and non-binary people. And as we've seen, they want to rewrite the language of government to write these people out of the way we talk about them. Trans people do not exist in their vision.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And they think that the left has been pushing what they call gender ideology. And that needs to be taken out of schools. It needs to be taken out of the language of government. It needs to be taken out of the way, for example, the Department of or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission works, for example.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I think they're willing to acknowledge that it's not a traditional conservative approach to government. And it's more of a question of means versus ends. They're willing to use the government and this more muscular government to achieve the end they want, which they see as being freer. I think there's a real conflict with the things that Musk and Doge are doing.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Because they've been cutting so aggressively and without consideration, what you're finding is they're cutting into the very things that they will need to implement these things. You can't have the education department gathering data if you have laid off all of the workers who know how to do that.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so there's a conflict there that I think we're going to see, but that hasn't yet become so public or become prominent.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, it's politically effective is a lot of it. There's a growing social consensus in favor of same-sex marriage, for example. There's opposition to discrimination in the workplace and a need for protection for those. But trans rights are much more conflicted. And Republican candidates have discovered in the last few years that it's a really good wedge issue.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah, they had a sense that the country was falling away from them as they had come to love it, that the America they knew was disappearing. And they also came out of a sense of frustration with the first Trump term in which many of them had served. And they felt like this was really their chance to save the country and save the vision of the country that they wanted to implement.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
It's not just something that motivates the right, but it motivates the center and even some parts of the left, too. We saw Trump's famous, you know, Trump is for you, Kamala is for they, them ad. And this is a place where I think the Project 2025 people find a place where they can bind themselves to Trump because Trump doesn't seem to care a great deal a lot about these things.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
He is obviously not a great avatar for traditional family structure, but he does care a lot about trans issues for political reasons. And it becomes kind of the tip of the spear to get into more traditional values on and much of other things, whether that's abortion, whether that's mothers staying home by first talking about something that is unpopular.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They don't want it to be in the hands of the state. their first choice would be to have a full federal ban on abortion. And they understand that probably isn't something that would happen immediately, but they see a series of steps for how to fight that in the meantime.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
That includes removing FDA approval for medical abortion drugs, using the 1873 Comstock Act to prevent them from being sent through the mail, And it means tracking much more aggressively what's going on at the state level.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
So they want as much data as they can on where abortions are taking place, where the mothers are coming from, to track things like interstate abortion, which has become a new focus for the Republican Party in the last couple of years.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They don't call for abolishing the Affordable Care Act, but they want to roll back some of the provisions of it. And they want to move things back closer towards the private insurance market that we've seen. It's interesting. They point out the private insurance market has real flaws that depending on employers is not a good system. And yet they don't really offer an alternative.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They'd like to reduce Medicaid by turning into block grants to states, which can then spend the money But only up to a certain amount. That's something we've heard from the right before. They don't really offer much else along those lines. They want to also push Medicare more towards privatization. So they're fond of the Medicare Advantage program, which is a kind of hybrid program for Medicare.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Medicare Advantage does not save taxpayers any money. In fact, it often costs more. And there's not a measurable difference in outcomes. But in general, it's part of an ideology of moving things towards privatization and away from government running them.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
That's right. And there are places where you can see how either they're trying to co-opt Trump or where Trump has co-opted the traditional GOP. But trade is one place where that conflict is still going on and where the sort of traditional free trade conservatives who have inhabited the right wing think tank sphere are not yet ready to give up.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
So rather than come to a single position on trade, the Mandate for Leadership document actually just publishes two chapters, one of which is by Peter Navarro. who is one of Trump's advisors on tariffs right now and is driving a lot of the train there.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And the other is by a guy named Kent Lastman, who is the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is more of an old school free trade think tank on the right. And you see them debating which one of these would be better. And Lastman saying, look, tariffs are a bad idea. They will not achieve greater prosperity for Americans. It's going to make people poorer. It's not going to help.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
While Navarro says the only way to take on the existential threat of China is to use tariffs.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Ukraine is another place where you can see a little bit of a difference with the White House. The authors here think that Ukraine is in the right and they think that America needs to stand up against Russia. That's obviously not the way we've seen Trump approach things. But generally, they seem less interested in most of the world and very focused on China.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They see China as this existential generational threat. And even though we've seen Trump in his first term and Biden as well, sort of pushing the U.S. towards a more confrontational stance with China, they still think that Americans and the government just don't really understand what a threat China is. economically, culturally, and potentially militarily.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so, so much of the thinking around national security is about how to confront China and how to prepare for major conflict with China, a little bit to the exclusion of anything else going on in the world.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
This is a piece in a kind of Trump-friendly but longstanding conservative opinion journal, the Claremont Review. And the writer used a Latin pseudonym and he said that this is the Flight 93 election and that conservatives needed to charge the cockpit or they would die. He said, you might die anyway, but this is the only option.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah, that's right. And Trump is fond of kind of saber rattling towards China and talking tough. But what we've seen from his policy is that he doesn't always do that. Although he did implement tariffs, he also could have, you know, he was, for example, on Uyghurs, he had no particular strong views about them. And John Bolton said he was fine with these Uyghur concentration camps.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They really do think that China is a threat and that the U.S. needs to be preparing to take it on.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah. This is another gap between what Project 2025 advocates and what Trump has actually done. They see USAID as something that liberals have used mostly to push their favorite ideology.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Exactly. Well, they see it as not – it hasn't been used sufficiently as a tool of foreign policy and they would like to see it used that way. So they think it can counter China's Belt and Road Initiative. Rather than simply doing humanitarian projects, they want it to be – they want it to be a weapon in the US arsenal.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And instead, Trump has mostly demolished it, sought to close it and it appears to be on the way out.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Matthew Feeney, Ph.D. : Instead, what you see is an argument that the U.S. is not doing enough to drill oil and gas. It needs to free up regulation to do those things, and it needs to stop tracking climate regulations. It needs to stop doing research on climate and let private industry take over all of those things.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Unlike Trump, it basically ignores it. Trump has said it's a hoax. They don't do that. They just argue in a kind of vague fashion that – You know, innovation will solve the problems of climate change insofar as they exist. And they try to paint this positive vision where, you know, in the 1970s, the air was dirty and the rivers were burning. But we've made a lot of progress since then.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And now we need to let business go. And environmentalists just refuse to acknowledge that we have made this progress. And so they kind of try to ignore it. But they also want to get rid of a lot of the federal agencies that track data on climate and do the research that shows the dangers of climate change and shows where it's having effects already.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And he says, to compound the metaphor, a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances. So you can see this kind of apocalyptic sense that they had. I think that sense continued throughout the first Trump term and it definitely imbues Project 2025 as well.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
It's skeptical of wind power. They try to blame, for example, the Texas blackouts a few years ago on wind power. So they're not as – Well, address that.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
The research on the Texas blackout shows that there were a bunch of causes, but one of the biggest ones was a failure of natural gas plants. It was not a problem of renewable energy like wind. And yet what we see in Project 2025 is an argument that we need to double or triple down on natural gas in order to make the U.S. energy system more resilient in their view.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I think that's right. I think it's very much a work in progress. Paul Danz, who led the effort, gave an interview to Politico recently, and he said that so far the implementation had been beyond his wildest dreams. But there is so much still to do. I think they are thinking on a much longer timescale than simply 100 days or four years.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They want to push the federal government as far to the right as they can, as quickly as they can, So they can kind of change the terms of engagement and change the shape of the playing field for the future. So for them, the Trump administration is very important, but they're thinking beyond the Trump administration to a much longer timescale.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, they're going to continue to work on these issues because they are the long-held issues. And I think you'll see them focusing on the things where there is the greatest unity. So on trade, I think a lot of conservatives are either going to put their heads down or else they're going to see where the winds blow.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
But when you see things like family structure or a ban on abortion, those are not going to go away. They're going to continue to be focuses of advocacy for years and decades to come.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review. The new PBS Independent Lens documentary about America's public library system arrives with a very clever two-edged title. It's called Free for All, the Public Library. And the free for all part refers, of course, to the beauty and generosity of the library system, which lends books for free to virtually anyone.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And the writer, Michael Anton, became one of the contributors to Project 2025. He's now a prominent figure in the Trump administration and in fact is leading technical talks with Iran on a new nuclear deal just coming up.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
But free-for-all also refers to the many fights surrounding that idealistic institution. Fights against segregated libraries, the banning and burning of books, tax cuts and local library closures, targeted reductions of federal funds, and, quite recently and famously, drag queen story hour. Free for All is co-directed by Don Logsdon, who also narrates, and Lucy Faulkner.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
At first, it sets out as a nostalgic memoir, with Logsdon explaining why and how, as a child, her parents took her on road trips traversing the entire country, always stopping at local libraries along the way. But then, like a road trip that keeps heading to new places, this documentary ends up covering all sorts of ground.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
The historical beginnings of American libraries, with nods to Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie. The growth and importance of tiny branches in rural communities. Fights involving segregation, book banning, and political and financial pressure. And, at each stop, a focus on individual libraries, librarians, and everyday patrons. And as we learn, some of them are everyday patrons.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
One librarian given a lot of airtime and due credit is Ernestine Rose, who arrived in New York City in 1904 as a newly trained librarian. The city and its inhabitants thrilled her, but also made her wonder how she could best serve such a diverse and largely illiterate immigrant population. Free For All quotes from her writings.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
She kept looking for that answer and for ways to serve her eventual Harlem community. By 1920, Ernestine Rose was serving as the branch librarian for Harlem's 135th Street Library.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Thanks to the generous contribution of a collector who donated his vast personal library of books written by black authors or about black and other minority cultures, this particular library fueled what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Sculptors and painters held art classes and honed their craft in basement spaces set aside for just that purpose.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Local theater productions and workshops were held in other spaces in that same basement, launching the careers of such talents as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. And upstairs, the Harlem residents reading the library books included other future talents, such as author James Baldwin.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Those are just a few of the stories. Free For All tells many, many more, painting a portrait that is personal, passionate, and in the end, unapologetically supportive. By examining the value of libraries in the distant and recent past, Free For All, the public library, also makes a compelling case about their value today.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
It's a very informative and ultimately very persuasive documentary about the legacy and importance of the American public library system. My recommendation is that you really should check it out.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Because the mix of things that you get in it. I mean at one time there are these very dry descriptions. of the way, for example, the White House operates, of the way Pentagon budgeting operates. And then right by that, there will be these outlandish policy ideas, really kind of radical stuff. Sometimes these are one paragraph after another.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so you see all these things right in one place and you see them putting these, I think, fairly radical schemes out in a document that they published online 18 months before the election. You know, it's not like some sort of secret cabal. It's a very public document.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
It still isn't public, although I think we have a pretty good sense of what it is by triangulating. It was a 100-day playbook with a series of drafted executive orders. And when we look at what Trump has done in his first roughly 100 days, there's a really strong connection between what is in mandate for leadership and the executive orders.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
So I think we can guess pretty effectively that what was in that plan are the executive orders that we have seen.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah, I guess we can start with Kevin Roberts, who is the head of the Heritage Foundation. And Heritage is, of course, a long running conservative institution. But Roberts was a relatively new leader. Heritage had gone through a sort of tumultuous period. They hired a new head. He left, formed a new organization. His replacement clashed with the Trump administration.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And so when Roberts came in, he was sort of trying to reboot the organization. And this was a big part of that. The person he brought in to lead Project 2025 is a man named Paul Danz. And Danz is a longtime lawyer, and he had been in the Federalist Society since he was in law school, but had not served in politics until the first Trump administration.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And he was a big fan of Trump from very early on. He wanted Trump to run for office in 2011 when he was pushing the birther lie. And he finally managed to kick his way into the White House late in the first Trump administration, working in the personnel office.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yes. And Vote is kind of the inside man if Dan's is the outsider. Vote came up through Capitol Hill circles working for very conservative, fiscally conservative members of Congress like Phil Graham and Jeb Hensarling. And then he served in the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term in office.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And he is the man who I think has thought most about how government works and how to achieve the things they want to do. He's really about the sort of operations and levers of power.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
That's right. You know, he gave a really interesting interview to Charlie Kirk a couple of years ago, the conservative podcaster. And he said, you know, the left is always saying using these pejorative names for us. But when they say Christian nationalist, you know, I think that's accurate. I'm a Christian and I'm a nationalist. That's not a pejorative for me.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And he thinks that America was founded as a Christian nation and it needs to return to those roots.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Well, obviously, we've heard a lot from Trump about the deep state and you get some of that kind of attack on the civil service. There's a frustration that civil servants are at worst liberals who are there to kind of implement their policy vision and are going to slow walk anything that the president wants to do. At best, they're kind of lazy. You know, they're there to clock in and clock out.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And they're just they're not trying. They're not on board. And that's a problem if you're trying to move the government in another direction, which they were trying to do. But they have almost as much frustration, maybe even more frustration with the political appointees with whom they worked in the first Trump administration. I mean, I think the anger is really striking.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They saw these people coming in and they were either out for themselves, they thought, or they were lazy or they were holdovers from the George W. Bush Republican Party who were there to stop Trump or to moderate some of his impulses. And, you know, I think for Dan, this is very personal. He thought he was going to get a great job in the Justice Department. You know, at the beginning of 2017.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And instead, he felt like his path was blocked by these Bush people.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. And so they wanted to, you know, come in on the first day of a new Republican administration with a team of political appointees who were vetted already, who had been trained, trained in what their departments do, trained in the way the federal government works and on board with Trump so that they would be working all in concert.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, this is all kinds of people. They wanted people who they said, you know, had run for local school board meetings. They wanted people who had been thrown out of organizations for being too loyal to Trump. They wanted the people who were kind of the rejects, but rejects who had skills and could sort of the raw talent that could be trained to work in the government.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, some of these things are just very basic. Like here is how you deal with public records in the government. Here's what you need to know about public records. Here's what you need to know about the structure of government. It's like schoolhouse rock on a very high level. And some of them are a little bit more specific. All of them are maybe, you know, 30, 60 minutes long, roughly.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
So to give people a basic grounding so they weren't coming in and learning how their offices worked only when they got their badge and got their HR training.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Correct. You had to sign up for them. You could register and sign up, and then you'd get a certificate at the end saying that you had completed the training.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I've seen some of them. A lot of them are available online and you can watch them. I mean, some of them are just much more boring than you would expect, which is kind of intriguing.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I think there is. And, you know, the diagnosis that they make, I think, is quite persuasive and shared by a lot of people across the political spectrum. Congress has over the last decades and years yielded more and more power to the president. They've delegated things to executive agencies. You know, they've allowed the White House basically to take over the war power. They can't pass a budget.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
All of these things are true. And I think we, you know, we don't need to mince words about that. But the question is what you're going to do about that. And I think they're Their answer is to give more power to the president.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
It doesn't make a great deal of sense and they don't really manage to reconcile how that's going to solve the problem other than making the president more able to implement his own will.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Impoundment is basically not spending all of the money that Congress has allocated. Everyone knows from their junior high school civics class that Congress has the power of the purse. And presidents have often wanted to not spend money for whatever reason.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And that was something that they did on and off for much of American history until the Nixon administration, when Nixon simply went overboard, as he did in many things. And Congress passed a law saying that a president could only impound money after a specific request and with Congress's permission. The people around Trump and particularly vote believe that that law is unconstitutional.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They think that the president should have power to do that. His job is to execute the budget and anything else is a limit on that. Trump tried this actually in his first administration infamously when he attempted to impound funds that had been allocated to Ukraine for defense. when he was trying to get an investigation of Hunter Biden out of the Ukrainian government.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And he was impeached for that, of course. And we think about that impeachment as about abuse of power and about, you know, use of the presidency for political purposes. But one of the major issues there was also the fact that he was trying to impound funds.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I mean they make the point that the Justice Department is kind of a weird creation because the attorney general – is appointed by the president and serves the president's will. But we've also had a division between the president and the Justice Department on some issues because of some egregious abuses in the past. They believe that's also unconstitutional and it's a danger to democracy if
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
There's somebody like the attorney general who's unelected sort of acting on their own will. Same goes for the FBI director. And so we've seen the Trump administration already acting on this. We see them, for example, firing line prosecutors, you know, career Justice Department officials.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
We see directing an investigation into ActBlue, the major Democratic donor platform that happened just last week. So they've started to move forward on making the Justice Department a wing of the executive branch or a wing of the presidency. that they can use to enforce their will and enforce the things that they talk about elsewhere in the plan.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah. So Schedule F is the idea that there are a lot of employees who are civil servants who should be converted to political appointees. A civil servant has a lot of protections. They can challenge any firing. They can be fired for cause. They can go through a long review process. And often if there's not cause, they will get their firing overturned or they'll get some sort of payout.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
But the president doesn't want people who are going to be slow to respond. He wants them to be doing exactly what he wants. So if you convert them to political appointees, political appointees can be fired at any time for any reason by the president who appointed them.
Fresh Air
How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
This is another Russell Vogt idea, who's the head of Office of Management and Budget and was in the first Trump administration on either end of his time at Project 2025. So they issued an executive order along these lines at the tail end of the first Trump administration. And then as soon as Joe Biden took office, he withdrew the order. And so it was kind of dead there.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yes. You just go, okay, that's done. I provided the entertainment.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yeah, this is to cheer everyone up. Prince is amazing. And I thought, wait a minute, didn't he do a Christmas song? But he gave it the twist of being an incredibly sad Christmas song, echoing LCD sound system and some of the others. It's kind of like, if you're alone for the holidays, it is deeply sad. Yeah.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yeah, yeah. He really gives it. It's a real vocal workout.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Well... Continuing on from our previous conversation, I sometimes have a tendency to take things a little bit literally. So I looked at the whole Santa phenomenon and said, well, what if I just describe this exactly as what's happening? Here's a stranger who's sneaking, breaking into your house basically and leaving packages and dressed in a rather strange outfit.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
The Staples are basically a gospel group. They have secular hits, but they come out of the gospel and the civil rights tradition. And so here they're talking about who took the Mary out of Christmas, but I think they're also talking about who forgot about the real meaning of Christmas.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Sometimes when I hear this song, I think instead of Mary, M-E-R-R-Y, they're singing M-A-R-Y. They're talking about the biblical story.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Oh, I probably did. My parents went to church when I was young. At one point, I remember they went to a Methodist church, which didn't have a lot of singing. And then they switched over to Unitarian. I asked my dad, why did you all switch? And he said, the music's better.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yes, there was that period. This was not that. This was going the other way. They had like full-on choirs and classical musicians playing. I mean, it was kind of incredible.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
A couple of reasons. I'm a Paul Simon fan, especially his more recent records. I don't know, the last five records or so, I think are some of the best things he's ever done. To my understanding, they're a little bit underappreciated. And this is... part of a long and continuing tradition of Jewish songwriters writing Christmas songs.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas, and Phil Spector did a Christmas record. There's a pretty long list, I think. And it's a song that starts off like, hey, we're all excited, we're getting ready for Christmas, and then he talks about somebody who got deployed to Iraq.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yeah, nephew got deployed to Iraq and all these other things. It's quite sobering thoughts, but those are the kind of things that people think about during the holidays.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yeah, that's kind of what he does, though. These perky, peppy songs sometimes, and then kind of the lyrics undercut it.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
And I thought, what if I just do that? The arrangement is by a guy named Jarek Bischoff that I'd worked with before. And his arrangement is fantastic. Pretty incredible. Really kind of catches the flavor of when I'm getting this sort of slightly ominous, despite my description of what Santa's up to, as being pretty accurate.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
I don't know Alexander 23. I'm familiar with Leve. She's Icelandic and does songs that sound like they were written before the rock and roll era. It's kind of like a throwback to the kind of older school of Christmas songs.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yes, I'm going to burn your present. But you can tell she really thought, why couldn't this have worked out, you know?
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
And I don't know if this is meant to be ironic, but it really is about, let's go shopping.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It's a sentiment that I might view with suspicion or assume was meant ironically, but it's a song about shopping, about the joy of shopping, by a man named Joseph Washington Jr., whom I'm completely unfamiliar with, but I thought... Oh, my goodness. Somebody's tackling this in a kind of unironic way.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yes. And kind of going downtown, mingling with all the other shoppers who everybody's engaged in the same kind of activity.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
I kind of signed off on it. But I often – I want to buy something for someone when I see the thing that so-and-so would love that. Then get it for them.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
And someone's looking at your facial expression and going, hmm.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yeah, yeah. I haven't heard this version, so I'm really looking forward to this. Usually the versions I hear are very kind of cleaned up and very pristine. And this sounds like it's going to have a little bit more passion in it.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
And then I noticed some little kind of musical songwriting things, like she sneaks in an extra measure when she holds out a note.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Thank you. Same to you. Happy holidays. Thank you. Hope you make it through the holidays. Yeah.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It's a great song. He's a great songwriter. It's a duet with Christy McCall, somebody that I've worked with on a couple of records. And it's incredibly moving. It kind of brings you to tears every time you hear it. He paints a picture of this... bickering couple that actually love one another very much. Immigrants who've come to New York and are finding a hard time of it getting their footing.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
But it's... The way he's telling this, the things she's accusing him of, he's sort of singing about himself, his unreliability and drunkenness and everything else. So it's, yeah, it's very moving.
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David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
No. No. It was during the 60s and 70s, I think, that I remember there being... songs that sort of criticized Christmas as far as talking about inequality and the emphasis on consumerism and things like that. You started to hear those kind of songs.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
I'm... On one hand, Christmas songs are perennial. If you do one that people like, as we all know, every year you hear it again. It starts getting played again and again and again for a few weeks, and then it's gone again. But it comes back. So you're set for your song royalties or whatever. But if it doesn't click, you've just got this embarrassing thing.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Yes, only viable for a month and then will be completely forgotten.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It's a classic. And this was during the period where James Brown was actually starting to make some social commentary in some of his songs. But even though he's making this kind of... pointed commentary about economics and inequality, and he can't help but put it to a funky beat. So there's a joy in the funky beat and how danceable it is that in a way is a response to the criticism in the lyrics.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
I wanted to not take it too seriously, not too seriously, the Christmas list, and have fun. So when I'm putting together these kind of playlists for friends or whatever, I'm thinking, I want them to just have fun. Let's give them something that will bring a little joy. And the holidays, because the holidays can be stressful for a lot of people.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
It wasn't like, oh, I don't want to see anyone. It was just like everybody was gone and I was left eating a turkey TV dinner. Sounds like I'm really pulling at the heartstrings there. But yeah, and that happens to quite a lot of people. But also, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's year end.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Maybe it's just this kind of enforced joy that we're supposed to feel, that people kind of feel like, wait a minute, you're not going to, you can't tell me to be happy. And we have James Murphy and LCD Sound System doing us all gold. Christmas Will Break Your Heart, which in some cases is very, very true.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
Not so much anymore, but I used to feel like that. I certainly felt that way. Look, they really are getting all the joy and they're going to parties and whatever they're doing. I thought, I'm not sure I'm totally down with all this.
Fresh Air
David Byrne's Christmas Playlist
I think I have. And then on New Year's Eve, I've done that. Those are especially New Year's Eve can be a very lucrative performance date.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Viewers of the first season of the rehearsal already know what a weird, unpredictable, often unsettling show Nathan Fielder's HBO series is. His concept is to prepare people for some upcoming life event – a marriage proposal, a financial confrontation with a relative, even the prospect of parenthood – by allowing them to rehearse it in advance and play out the various possibilities.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
He trains actors to observe and approximate the other people involved, then throws his subjects into an improvised conversation. And because he digs deeply into HBO's budget, like John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, Nathan stages and photographs these rehearsals on elaborately detailed replicas of actual locations, from bars to bedrooms.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Last season, some of these social experiments were extremely funny and astoundingly original. At the same time, though, sometimes they came with an occasional, unavoidable cringe factor, as when Nathan would insert himself into the narratives and his subjects' lives and get way too close for comfort.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Part of the delight of watching the rehearsal when it premiered in 2022 was having no idea what to expect from week to week, from the format or from Nathan. So I approached season two with a bit of wariness. How in the world could Nathan Fielder, with a new batch of episodes about rehearsals and recreations, recreate the show's original mystery and unpredictability? Well, he does.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And he does so right from the start. I'll discuss only the opening installment of this new season of the rehearsal, because the show's twists and turns are a crucial part of the plot, and also most of the fun. But because it's established right in the opening scene, it's fair to reveal what differentiates the new season of this quirky comedy series. This time, the rehearsal is no laughing matter.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
At least not at the outset. The first subject of this new season is deadly serious. It's about airline crashes and some of their possible contributing factors. Using transcripts from cockpit recorders and elaborately constructed flight simulators, Nathan and his team restaged the last moments of several commercial airline disasters.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
His thesis is that a lack of chemistry and personal communication in the cockpit between the pilot and the first officer may have played a significant role.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And when his research uncovers the findings of a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, who suggested that advanced role play between pilots may help that interaction and prevent crashes, Nathan goes to him and tries to be taken seriously, even though, by profession, he's a comedian.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Okay. Before long, Nathan is on the case. He enlists as his initial test subject a young first officer who lives with his mother and has a somewhat shaky relationship with his girlfriend. Nathan tries to shadow the junior pilot going through his everyday routine, but when Nathan and his camera crew track him through the Houston airport, they're denied access to the exclusive pilot's lounge.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
That's when Nathan places a phone call. And halfway through the call, walks into an adjacent office to deliver a message in person.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Think of how meta that is. Before Nathan places a call to United Airlines, he stages his own rehearsal, with a hired actor to ad-lib her responses to his request.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And then, when he calls the real United Airlines representative and she doesn't play ball, Nathan uses HBO's money to build on a vast soundstage a replica of a long stretch of the Houston airport terminal, including the pilot's lounge, as described by the first officer. An actor is hired to play the senior pilot, and we, along with Nathan, get to observe how they interact before a flight.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Or, more precisely, how they don't. I encourage you to take a ride with Season 2 of the rehearsal. It's like a magical mystery tour because you aren't given any clues about its final destination. But I can promise you this. The rehearsal doesn't crash at the end. It sticks the landings.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
The more I see of Black Mirror, the more episodes that arrive season after season, the more I think of creator Charlie Brooker's futuristic fantasy series as a TV miracle. I look forward to every new batch of episodes, but because of my pessimistic personality flaw, I always start watching with trepidation that this new season is the one that finally will let me down.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
Well, Season 7 just dropped on Netflix last week, and once again, Black Mirror didn't let me down. In fact, it lifted me up. Black Mirror is an anthology series, which means virtually anything can happen in any episode, because the main character doesn't have to come back for the next one.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
And when I say virtually anything, I mean that literally, because several episodes of Black Mirror involve virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other high-tech, borderline futuristic concerns. Black Mirror is our modern-day Twilight Zone, a much better and more consistent version of Rod Serling's classic series than the recent Jordan Peele reboot ever was.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
But it's also a modern callback to the 1960s series Outer Limits and to Kurt Vonnegut's stories adapted by Showtime Cable a generation ago. Charlie Brooker and his team love twist endings and nonconformist characters and new technology. But they also love old movies and television shows. And in this new season of Black Mirror, that's more apparent than ever.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
There's one episode, Eulogy, in which Paul Giamatti plays a man who searches for clues in a series of photographs, like the photographer in Antonioni's classic 60s movie Blow Up. Except new technology allows Giamatti's character to step inside the photographs and explore them from within.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
Similarly, in another episode, Hotel Reverie, Issa Rae plays a movie star who's cast in a remake of a vintage British film. Except, thanks to a sophisticated artificial intelligence program, she's inserted into the existing old movie to interact directly with those characters.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
It's a new tech twist on the step-into-the-screen premise explored previously by Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo 40 years ago, and by Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. more than 100 years ago.
Fresh Air
Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
And the first ever sequel to a Black Mirror episode arrives this season with a new chapter of USS Callister, a delightful yet chilling story about a computer programmer who creates his own artificial universe based on a TV series very, very much like the original Star Trek. But my favorite installment of this new season, Common People, doesn't draw from old movies or TV for inspiration.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
Instead, it draws from our shared experiences in real life with real technology. Black Mirror has been around since 2011, and by now it's built up its own familiar technology and look. So when it sets a show in the near-present just a few years away, it doesn't have to keep reinventing the futuristic wheel.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
Characters in many different episodes use the same immersive technology to play games or step into movies and photos. And there's even a streaming company like Netflix that pops up, under a different name, as it did last season. Common People stars Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones as Mike and Amanda, a happily married couple. Happily, that is, until a medical trauma leaves her brain dead.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
Tracy Ellis Ross, a sales representative for a new high-tech company, offers him a chance to revive his wife's brain functions by connecting her to a cloud-based service that can use its massive database to keep her functioning. Of course he signs up, especially since the life-saving service is offered at a low introductory rate.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
Things seem wonderful at first, but when the couple goes on a road trip, Amanda blacks out suddenly and almost dies because the company has revised its coverage patterns. As the company spokesperson politely explains, the couple will have to pay extra to rise to a higher tier of service. Sound familiar? Of course it does, to anyone who's subscribed to just about any streaming network.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
But in this new medical context, it also sounds both wryly comic and extremely chilling.
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Melinda French Gates On Giving Away Her 'Absurd' Wealth
TV this good is a joy to watch. And TV this thought-provoking that has you remembering and relishing it for days and weeks afterward, that's not just a joy. Black Mirror is a treasure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
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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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Bob Smigel was a writer for Late Night with Conan O'Brien in its early days, and was and still is the man providing the voice and barbed humor of the sarcastic hand puppet known as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Triumph opened the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Award presentation by subtly acknowledging the controversy caused by the recent restructuring of the Kennedy Center management, as Conan O'Brien, waiting in the wings to be introduced, laughed loudly.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
That tension and concern about partisan political interference towards the arts was unavoidable. But because this was a gathering of comics celebrating the brave and outspoken legacy of Mark Twain, it was not unmentionable. Here's how John Mulaney, the first of many comics to pay tribute to Conan, alluded to it.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
The Max Weinberg 7, led by Conan's old late-night and Tonight Show drummer, provided the music. Former sidekicks and opening acts, such as Andy Richter and Reggie Watts, were given time to pay their respects. So were three former recipients of the Mark Twain Prize, Will Ferrell, David Letterman, and Adam Sandler.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Other comics both toasting and roasting the evening's guest of honor included Sarah Silverman, Stephen Colbert, Will Forte, Nikki Glaser, Bill Burr, and Kamal Nanjani, whose appearance was staged like a version of a TED Talk, complete with projected graphics and lots of statistics. He pointed out how Conan was widely recognized for launching his career as a staff writer on The Simpsons.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Then, Nanjani took a deep dive into the numbers to hilarious effect. Even Conan, in the Guest of Honor box but mic'd up, could be heard laughing at the mathematically accurate comedy bit and its pie charts.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Just about everyone on stage scored big and provided an original approach. Stephen Colbert brought along Hot Ones host Sean Evans to replicate Conan's viral hot wing eating interview from that show. Sarah Silverman, well, you have to see what she did to believe it.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
And by the time David Letterman showed up at the end to hand the prize to Conan O'Brien, comics preceding him had combined to present the funniest Mark Twain prize show in its 26-year history, and one with lots of messages.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
The strongest points were saved for last when Conan took the stage to accept the award. More than any previous recipient, he articulated an understanding and appreciation of what the author Mark Twain wrote and represented. Conan, after all, had graduated from Harvard, majoring in history and literature.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
And without once evoking the name of Donald Trump, Conan cited Twain's works and put them into a context that reflected our times as much as Twain's.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Conan then brought it full circle by bringing things back to his perspective and his profession.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
It was as much a lecture as an acceptance speech. And it also may have provided a clue to a hidden motivation behind Conan's travel series, Conan O'Brien Must Go, which started its second season May 8th on Maxx.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
From triumph to letterman, every speaker on that Kennedy Center stage that night explained why Conan O'Brien was a worthy recipient of the Mark Twain Award. Yet no one explained it as well as Conan himself.
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Ramy Youssef Animates A Muslim Family's Post-9/11 Life
Afterward, when he closed the show by jamming on guitar, playing Neil Young's Livin' in the Free World with Adam Sandler and the Max Weinberg Seven, he looked like he was having the time of his life. And as this special proves, as a comic and even as a student of Twain's writings, Conan O'Brien has led quite a life.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
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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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Walton Goggins Was Raised By A Village
Conductor Robert Frahn says a good melody captures our attention.
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Walton Goggins Was Raised By A Village
Know that fizzy feeling you get when you read something really good, watch the movie everyone's been talking about, or catch the show that the internet can't get over? At the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, we chase that feeling four times a week. We'll serve you recommendations and commentary on the buzziest movies, TV, music, and more.
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Walton Goggins Was Raised By A Village
From lowbrow to highbrow to the stuff in between, catch the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.
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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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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The Secret History Of The Rape Kit
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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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
Kevin MacDonald and editor and co-director Sam Rice Edwards framed their movie about John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the early 70s by looking through the lens of television. In this case, it's a perfect framing device.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
As Lennon arrived in this country, being more politically outspoken than he was as a Beatle, he and his wife, Yoko Ono, eagerly went on TV talk shows to rally support for their causes, showing up everywhere from Dick Cavett to a week co-hosting the Mike Douglas show. And even more eagerly, John Lennon devoured television.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
In their small Greenwich Village apartment, which is recreated for the documentary, John and Yoko installed a TV at the foot of their bed so they could lounge around watching. And both the variety and sheer volume of what was available delighted them.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
They consumed it all, from the Waltons to Watergate coverage, and lots and lots of news about Richard Nixon and Vietnam and George Wallace and Attica. They also watched American football games and beauty pageants. And in one of Lennon's first local radio appearances after arriving, he responded to a phone-in caller by demonstrating his familiarity with televised beauty pageants.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
He fell in with activists like Jerry Rubin and appeared and performed at a rally protesting the 10-year sentence of another activist, John Sinclair, for a minor drug possession. But after agreeing to headline a series of national protest tour dates leading up to the 1972 national political conventions, Lenin backed off because he sensed the leaders of that movement were advocating violence.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
Even so, Lenin's activities got him singled out by the Nixon administration, which threatened to deport him and installed listening devices on his phone. And just as President Nixon ended up secretly taping his own White House conversations, John Lenin ended up taping his own phone calls, too.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
From heated talks with his then-manager to casual chats with friends, they provide some of the best moments in this documentary. In this call, which is loaded with suspicious static, a reporter asks about the wiretap rumors.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
Eventually, John and Yoko find yet another cause by watching TV. After seeing a news report by ABC correspondent Geraldo Rivera exposing the terrible treatment of young disabled patients at Willowbrook State Development Center, John and Yoko decide to hold a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, just as fellow Beatle George Harrison had done the year before with his concert for Bangladesh.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
They called theirs the One-to-One Concert, and this film plays many songs from that show full length. Imagine, Instant Karma, and Mother, a searingly emotional song about John feeling abandoned by his parents, a father who left and a mother who died. And even a Beatles song, to which Lennon adds an overt message of opposition to the Vietnam War, to the audience's obvious delight.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
Sean Ono Lennon is one of this documentary's executive producers, which may explain why some of the more unflattering details from the period are omitted or downplayed. But Yoko gets her due here, as she should, as an artist in her own right, and as the victim of some awful treatment by Beatles fans and the press.
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Best Of: Education & A.I. / Having A Child In The Digital Age
And by using TV to tell their story, One to One, John and Yoko retells the story of that time as well. Incendiary times. Inspirational artists. Amazing music.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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 regularly.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
And I found that personally quite challenging when it happened to me. So I'm always quite intrigued to know how others have 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 mix. Yes, it's always a mixture of impulses, I think.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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. I was finding this peculiar and odd.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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. And sort of he said, thank you very much and went on his way.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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 preacher. 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. But he was a good preacher, yeah.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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 go and meet a community project. He would do a little bit to camera where he gave a little message for the day. He'd do interviews with people.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
People who are doing interesting or important things in the world of 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.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
Which is the bit you find most implausible about that story? Because I have thoughts.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
This is the bit that now having had my own children, I kind of 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. So I know that I watched John Pertwee turn into Tom Baker on Doctor Who and I can date it. And it's 1974.
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Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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 learnt what the difference between a character in a television programme and an actor was.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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. Do you remember what was so captivating about the show to you? Something about that show and the combination of elements is certainly that central character always fascinated me. I just thought he was brilliant. I just thought he was cool.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
So all those things still felt possible in the world of the Doctor. There was something about that character that I could be, you know, 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 the TARDIS lands, where is it? What's the mystery? There's a whole new set of characters to get. And the monsters.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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? And what a thrill all that was. So it was, no, I was obsessional about it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
Well, you see 13 channels like you were starved. I mean, in Scotland, you had three channels. Right.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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. She's an adult character in the show.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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 the show that I grew up obsessed with.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
Thanks for having me. It's been an absolute delight.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
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. Tennant was Doctor Who for five years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jason Isbell / David Tennant
We've all been there, running around the city, looking for a bathroom, but unable to find one. Yeah, a restroom we could use. A very simple free market solution is that we could just pay to use a bathroom, but we can't. On the Planet Money podcast, the story of how we once had thousands of paid toilets and why they got banned. From Planet Money on NPR, wherever you get your podcasts.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
The two new Saturday Night Live documentaries come from filmmakers who bring their own interests and perspectives. NBC's Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of SNL Music comes from Amir Questlove-Thompson, who's both a musician and a music historian.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
And the four-part SNL 50 Beyond Saturday Night, now streaming on Peacock, comes from Morgan Neville, who's as interested in the creative process as he is in letting people tell their own stories. Questlove, in his movie-length study, mines the archive of a half-century of musical performances, as well as the emergence of hip-hop and other genres, into the show and the culture.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
Some classic performances are run full length. Others are sampled in cleverly compiled montages and mashups. It's such a solid, well-selected overview that I can think of only one SNL music performance I really wish had been included. Paul Simon, backed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, on their thrilling 1986 rendition of Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes. But Questlove covers a lot –
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
Not only infamous appearances by Elvis Costello, Sinead O'Connor, Ashley Simpson, and Kanye, but even comedy sketches and videos built around music. The infamous Dick in a Box Christmas song, with Justin Timberlake and SNL cast member Andy Samberg, is deconstructed. So is another classic SNL musical moment, featuring guest host Paul Rudd and musical guest Beyoncé.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
Timberlake tells how that got on the air, with Timberlake, Samberg, and cast member Bobby Moynihan as her music video backup dancers. Partway through Timberlake's account, we hear the start of the actual single lady's sketch.
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Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
Morgan Neville's SNL documentary series is broken into four episodes, each one looking at a different aspect of the show and its history. The first one looks at the original audition tapes by many of the people who tried out for SNL, with those same people watching and reacting to their younger selves. Some scream, some cringe, some cry, some, like Pete Davidson, laugh.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
Another episode spends a week observing how an installment of SNL is created by following the process from start to finish, mostly from the point of view of the writers. A third episode gets even more laser-focused, spending an hour on a single sketch. And it's a brilliant choice, coming from the midway point of the show's 50-year run.
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Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
It's the sketch Recording Session, featuring guest star Christopher Walken and cast members Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Parnell, and others. You may know it better by the name most associated with it, More Cowbell. It's a sketch Walken and Farrell elevated after the dress rehearsal by going all out in character.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
The sketch was set during the recording session for Blue Oyster Cult's 1970s hit Don't Fear the Reaper. Farrell plays a very loud cowbell, and Walken portrays the track's very enthusiastic music producer. Jimmy Fallon remembers.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
Once the sketch began on the live show, Farrell, who had written it, knew they had connected big time with the studio audience.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
They're in. Oh, goody, there's more coming. In this new recounting, we do not hear from Christopher Walken himself, which Dana Carvey says is writing character for him. Carvey even slips into character as Walken to make his point.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
The final episode of Neville's documentary series hones in on one seemingly random but ultimately seminal year. The 1985-86 season, when executive producer Lorne Michaels, who had left the show after its first successful five-year cycle with the original cast, was asked back by NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
SNL was in free fall, and the common wisdom was that Lorne never would return to a sinking ship. But he did.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
I kind of enjoyed being me. It's one of the few times in either documentary we hear from Michaels. Clearly, he prefers to let the cast and crew and the shows speak for themselves. And they do. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, among others, tell some really great stories.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 50 Years Of SNL Musical Guests / Black History Through Blues
There may not be enough screen time given to some SNL veterans in their stories, from Bill Murray to Kate McKinnon and Sarah Sherman, but there are an awful lot of laughs and memories and music and insights. And just the right amount of cowbell.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
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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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
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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.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
It's a lovely day by the sea Mr. Potato Head is strumming a guitar The beggar on the bench is acting lewd and crude
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Weekend fathers got his kid up for a stroll Winter bound offshore is shredding the seagulls once more So that's good And it is as it should be On a lovely day by the sea
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
a better voice thanks to dreamboat They got something they're gonna wanna say to you. Shut up.
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
Cause you're mine I put a spell on you I mean You will say you love me
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Sarah Snook Almost Didn't Audition For 'Succession'
And I will say It's all gonna go wrong It's not gonna turn out very well at all
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You're doing fight scenes, you're getting whiplash from doing reactions, and you're smashing through breakaway tables, or you're getting thrown out a window, and you just... Part of it is like the ability to be a little bit tough and have some pain tolerance and know that you're OK, that they're just bruises. But, you know, you get back up.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You hate it, but you're stoic about it and it is sort of the contract that you sign in the sense of the unwritten contract that you sign. If you can get up, you should be going again. And the stunt coordinator expects you to do that too because he's hired you and he doesn't want you to not make him look good in front of the director. I think for myself now being in the director chair,
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I have a lot more appreciation for the performers. It's really like if we get it on one take, why not check the gate? Why are we doing it again? There's a great story from Fight Club, and this is not to throw David Fincher under the bus, who's one of my mentors who I love, but we did that stair fall 12 times. 12, 12 takes. And I think the stunt double for Edward Norton was in boxer shorts.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And, you know, we had figured out a way to pad the stairs and, you know, the art department had faux painted. It looked like concrete. There were some safety things, but it's still launching yourself down a set of stairs. And it's like, I don't want to ask him to this day, like, David, which one did you use? And he's like, oh, take two.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Yeah. Like, what were you looking for? And again, like, I just know as a stunt performer, like, if it looks like a wreck and it was really compelling and painful and you got it on film, why are we going again? Like, you know, it's only going to get, you know, the stunt performer only gets more cautious and tries to protect themselves even more. I mean, it's just instinct at that point.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Can I just start by saying thank you for having me? Like, I'm a huge fan, and I'm very excited to be here. Well, back at you.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
But yeah, it is a little bit like magic. You know, I think we're always reinterpreting the classic gags and the classic tricks. And so, you know, that's what we did with Fall Guy. We sort of reimagined the big car jump. We reimagined the high fall from the helicopter. And there is a little secrecy.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's less about making them more grounded, in my opinion. I think it was more about figuring out a way to bring that martial arts feeling and integrate it into Hollywood cinema. I think for a long time... I was a fan of a lot of different Asian cinema, Korean and Chinese, Japanese cinema that had martial arts. And the lead characters, everyone just knew how to fight.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And they could fight with a martial arts style. And whether it was a police drama or a heightened sci-fi thing, every character knew how to fight. And it wasn't until... The Matrix movies where the Wachowskis had sort of like, hey, we want to have that same vibe in Western cinema.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And I think after that first Matrix film hit the ground where you saw Keanu and Laurence Fishburne fight in this dojo and there was the actors doing the fighting. I mean, that had not happened to that level in Western cinema before that, really.
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
So it was like a light went off for myself and, you know, a core group of us who were sort of training together at the time, Chad Stahelski, who co-directed John Wick with me. We decided, like, we want to take that model and apply it to all the films that we're working on. Like, we want to train the actors to do the fights, and we want... to bring martial arts to any sort of genre, it makes sense.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Like, these characters know how to fight. Instead of, like, it's just a messy, sloppy, dramatic thing, it's like there will be a level of skill with these characters. And so we started to... take that opportunity with a lot of different films. And we were sort of up-and-coming stunt coordinators. We were really specializing in fight choreography.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And we did something that we learned from that Hong Kong team on the Matrix films. We would shoot and edit our own fight scenes to present to the directors and the producers. And through that... We built a name for ourself and we also learned how to tell stories and we also learned how to direct, you know, technically direct.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
We were shooting and editing these sequences and presenting them as like sort of finished ideas, like moving storyboards. And now it's something that is like standard.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I think, you know, part of it for years, because it was such a business where it was passed down, it's apprenticeships, it's passed down from family, usually to kids, and it's hard to crack in and
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Well, you do, you know, it was part of, it was definitely part of the, the, um, old school mentality. It's like you, you learned how to, you know, hit a mini trampoline and jump in the air and like keep your head away from camera. And like you constantly, you know, it was a whole art form of like how to keep your head away from camera. Like I always try to give them the back of your head. Um,
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A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And you just got good at it and you thought about it and it was really sort of, you know, in the whole protocol of how you approached any physical stunt. It's like, how am I going to hide my face and make it feel natural? Like, my hand is up at this point just blocking my face. Now...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's kind of changed in the last decade or so because the ease of face replacement allows you to just let the stunt performer perform. And then if it's a few frames where we see a face, we can use a digital still and wrap it around their face. And with motion blur and simple visual effects, you can mask the stunt performer's profile or face or whatever.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And it allows the performers more freedom in doing the action and not trying to contort their body to hide their face.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Mm-hmm. I know that that's where the world is heading, and I think that that's okay. You know, for me, as someone who enjoys action films, I feel the difference in the stakes of what's happening on the screen with the characters when I feel that it's real. And so I think there'll always be... The want for that, I hope, especially for action film lovers, but actually just really good storytelling.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And find someone to teach you because they didn't want to share the knowledge so much, you know, because it didn't, again, like it can be a really fun and lucrative business and you want to share it with the people you want to share it with. I think in Fall Guy, we tried to pull the veil back just enough. and not give too much away. You know, you see those fire stunts.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
If the visual effects and the CGI can't deliver the reality of really feeling the stakes behind it all, then it's always going to fall flat.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Wow. I have torn my meniscus in both knees. I have broke my ankle. I have broken my wrist in four places, and it was pinned back together. That's a...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
crazy story it was actually my first day on the batman live show at magic mountain and i was just rehearsing i had not even gotten in the best batman costume and i was so excited and i got hired for the job and um you know sometimes that's when it happens we were rehearsing this simple stunt where the car is sliding under a catwalk and i had to jump off the car and grab the um the bar and
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
and the car drives away and then I would do a back flip and land down and I went to do my back flip and I under rotated and I put my hand down and I broke my wrist in four places. I had two concussions and I have knocked out my front tooth. So that's pretty much comprehensive list of my injuries.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I love it. I mean, I think when, you know, I look again, I'm always looking at those. movies, when I'm prepping for a new film, to find inspiration. Because it is sort of like, how do I reinvent the gag and make it my own? And, you know, it's a magic, it's how do I reinvent the magic trick? How do I reinvent this dance and make the choreography my own?
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You know, the swashbuckling pirate choreography would be a fun experiment. Like if I had a pirate movie, I would go back and watch, you know, Captain Blood and I would go back and watch Errol Flynn and watch all of that choreography and then, you know, take that. expand on it and make it my own. Um, you look at the old Westerns, like that's what Indiana Jones is, right?
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You know, the dragging under the, you know, dragging under the stage coach by, which, which was, um, Yakima Canuck, who did that first stage coach gag. And then it's, you know, Spielberg repurposed it in, uh, you know, um, Indiana Jones. And so, um, I love going back, seeing what was done, finding ways to reinterpret it. And Jackie was the master of doing that too, Jackie Chan.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
We didn't really give the science behind that away. And there is a, you know, that's, what's really amazing about stunts. I think people think it's a bunch of daredevils and, and there's a little bit of that sensibility in stunt performers, but really there's a lot of physics and math and legacy tricks that, you know, get you through the day.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
He really studied Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and he applied it for all his films from the mid-late 80s till today. He's doing reinterpretations of a lot of their physical gags and a lot of times besting them.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
So we had rented this house and it actually was a, I think a family was living in, um, Florida or the landlord was living in Florida. And I, I was, I actually moved into this house. There was a friend of mine, um, Tim Rigby, I think who actually had the lease. Um, my friend, um, was Brad Martin at the time. And another friend of mine, Brad Simonson, who's now a visual effects producer, uh, um,
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And what we did in the backyard, we had bought a trampoline, an Olympic-sized trampoline. And we were learning trampoline skills because it actually helps you for a couple of reasons. One, for high falls. When you're falling off of something, you want to be able to fall.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
understand air awareness and get your head under and fall to your back you know into the pads you always want to get to your back um so your trampoline allows you to train that you know that that skill and that instinct at constant repetition like you're doing you're jumping up you're doing a header we call it where you're just like landing on your back and bouncing landing on your back and bouncing and your body gets used to you fall off of something you get to your back that's why trampoline is so crucial to the stuntman's um
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Training. So we had this in the backyard and we just decided, you know, why don't we dig it into the background? It should be great if we had like a flush with the ground. So one afternoon we just got the shovels out. We didn't ask the landlord and we dug a hole and sunk the trampoline into the ground and
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And, um, and then later that month, I think we bought cinder block and we made it perfect and we sort of really dressed it out. And it was funny that we stayed in the house for four years, three, four years, and the landlord never said anything. And then we've always paid our rent on time and, and we would train at this house in Redondo beach. We'd fall off the roof. We would use the air ram.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
We would bounce on the trampoline. Um, It was just fun times. It was really, really fun times training ourselves to be stunt people.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's funny. That house stayed in sort of the stunt world for a long time. So we didn't want to... I remember when Chad came back from the Matrix movies, he just made some good money, and he's like, I'm going to buy the house. And we're like, what? You're going to buy the house? And so... He got someone in real estate. I think his brother was doing real estate at the time.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And they reached out to the landlord and they made an offer on the house. And then Chad ended up just to keep the trampoline. That's our mindset. Like we wanted the trampoline more than the house. He's like, I'm going to buy the house. I had already moved out. I was renting from Chris O'Hara and living in a different place, but he's like, I'm going to buy this.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
So then Chad bought that house and then he remodeled it over the years. And then he moved out and he sold it to another stunt performer from our generation, Hank Amos. And he kept the trampoline in the backyard. And I'm quite sure, I think it's still in the stunt community. I'm not sure who was bought in the house from Hank, but I think that house still exists.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And I think the trampoline is still in the backyard.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You can. You have to evolve. I mean, there's a lot of great stunt performers that are, you know, my age that still perform, but they have to move into the things that weren't my specialty. I think, like, I would have had to move into vehicles. There's some great drivers that are...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
In their 60s and 70s that can still maneuver a car, you know, they just the years behind the wheel of just the precision of all of the fine, you know, motor skill it takes to like, hit your marks in that world. And it's not so hard on your body, but being a fight double and being like the physical double that's
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
you know, getting ratcheted back from explosions or falling down the stairs or, you know, taking the big hits. Like, yeah, you can. I'm so grateful I was able to transition out of it because you don't want to be doing that at a certain age.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I feel like the first one that really connected with me was Lethal Weapon. And I don't know why that crazy character that Mel Gibson played, Riggs, like the classic trope, he's a live wire, he's a loose cannon character. You know, as a teenage boy in the 80s, like, that just was, like, so fun and exciting for me. And I remember seeing the action and watching it on HBO.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Another one that was really impactful for me, obviously, in my martial arts world is I watched Kung Fu Theater as a kid on Channel 18. And I remember there were a couple of my friends in high school. We would watch it on Saturday night. It would come on at midnight, and we would, like...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Someone would come over to walk over to somebody's house and we would all watch it together until like two in the morning and drive our parents nuts.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Yeah, they would show these classic like Shaw Brothers movies or like, you know. Dubbed movies from Hong Kong and it was on the local, the local sort of station, you know, it was called Kung Fu Theater and I'm sure they got the rights cheap so they could air these, you know, sort of Kung Fu movies from the 70s. Yeah. It was the best.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And I remember trying to like the next day, you know, play fight. You know, I put a heavy bag up in my garage and my parents are like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm going to teach myself Kung Fu. I love it.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You know, I had many conversations on the set of Fall Guy with Ryan about that because you're standing on the ledge and ultimately a lot of stunt work is trusting your team. Now, we had an incredible what we call rigging team on the Fall Guy. Keir Beck is an Australian stunt performer and I've known him since the Matrix years. He's now become one of the... legendary stunt riggers in the business.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And you're hooked up to this machine and you're trusting the physics of it and you've rehearsed it and you've seen the weight bags go down and up. But again, you're stepping off the ledge and you have to have this ability to calm your nerves. trust in the process, have the confidence that, you know, we've tested this over and over and it's going to go great.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And so you do find a little bit of a meditative state and really just focusing on performance. That's how I do it. It's not unlike an athlete, you know, at the starting line, you really have to focus on the first step and then your body takes over. And I think you wait, you hear that cue action and you go.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
See, Terry, I knew you were going to ask these hard questions. No, I think absolutely as a stunt performer, when you move into being a stunt coordinator, it's harder because you have your friends that are doing the stunts and you're designing them and you are responsible for their safety. And so... Yeah, it's harder to see how someone else do it than it is yourself, you know.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And especially with my experience of them doing them so long, it's easier for me to do it and feel comfortable than to watch somebody else sometimes. Your heart goes through your chest, so...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
To be fair, he didn't necessarily bring it up when we were working on the script together. He had a crippling fear of heights.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I didn't know it until we were now having this negotiation about the first stunt and we had been designing it and rehearsing it. You know, that Kier Beck, that stunt rigger, we had actually simulated the high fall in a parking lot. We had a construction crane. We had built the same rig that we were going to be flying inside of that building. And we were rehearsing it at different heights.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And we had the winches that lower you at sort of free fall speed.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
set up and I'm like oh we're going to bring Ryan out for rehearsal and it was that first day when we brought him out for rehearsal he sort of confides in me he's like you know I have a crippling fear of heights and I'm like now you're telling me yeah now okay and he's like I'm sure there's a green screen version of this right there's absolutely and I'm like there is but why don't we just take you up 10 feet and then 20 feet and then you can kind of feel how the rig works and and sort of
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
you know build the trust in the system and then ultimately after that first day of rehearsal he said you know i am playing a stunt performer and i know we want to celebrate the real stunt performers doing it in this movie but i also think i need to do this so i understand the character and it's like we're opening the movie i'm gonna do it i'm in
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Well, we had a hope for it. So early on in production, when we were working on the script, you know, I thought like if we're going to do this celebration of the stunt performer, it would be great if we sort of had aspirations to maybe set a record or do something that was like hadn't been done before.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And so I wrote in the script, you know, and Colt Seavers sets a world record for the number of cannon rolls. And I was kind of a little bit of like a tongue in cheek, like if we set the world record fine, if we don't. But the stunt team took it to heart and they were like, how do we do this? Let's do it. I'm like, OK, go for it.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And so I have a longtime collaborator and someone who I started in the business with as a stuntman way back in the day, Chris O'Hara. He was my stunt coordinator, second unit director on this film, and he took it upon himself, like, we're going to break the world record. So we got with special effects who were going to build the cannon inside the car and build the safety cage.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
We got with picture cars to find the right car that the physics would work, we felt, and And we went down the path of R&Ding how to beat seven roles, which was Casino Royale several years ago. And it took a couple takes. You know, take one was a really great...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
crash and in any other movie you would say that was epic you know the car flipped in a different way and like it kind of went end over end and it created the kind of carnage that you wanted for the film and it really would have worked narratively and I actually told the guys like we can walk away now but I They were really excited about setting the record and we'd had prepped for another car.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And so we waited to the next day when the conditions were a little bit better. Anyway, the next morning we had, closer to when the tide came in, we had firm sand and we flipped the car and it went eight and a half rolls. And every, you know, the crew went nuts because the stunt team had worked so hard on it.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You know, they had spent three months, I'm saying R&Ding that and, you know, figuring out the physics of it all.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Again, it's physics. So he's going, let's say, 80 miles an hour. He slides the car at a 90-degree angle, and the cannon is actually placed where the passenger seat is. And there's a pole that gets shoved into the ground. Explain what a cannon is. A cannon is a pneumatic press. So it's got a lot of compressed air that's sitting in the trunk of the car, and it shoves a metal pole down.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Into the ground. It's in a cylinder that's into the ground. And that basically stops the car in its tracks and flips it to where the car is. It's like a lot of catapults. Okay? Yeah. So as the car slides and he hits the button for that cannon and the pole gets shoved into the ground, the car flips. But it still has the speed, the directional speed of the 80 miles an hour.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
So now it's flipping and traveling 80 miles an hour. And, you know, they were hoping that obviously it would be barrel rolling. But yeah, it's like a catapult inside your car that you press the button and it stops you in your tracks and flips it.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
So inside the car, we build a cage. And the cage is built with steel pipe and welding. And it's designed to create just a box that protects the driver. And then the driver is in what we call a suspension harness. So they're saving their back. So they're really almost suspended above the seat. And there's a bungee system that's allowing them to take the shock off.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And then they're in a harness that's neck restraints. And there's a lot of things that's just built in to protect the driver. I'm not going to say it's foolproof, but that protection of the driver just gets better and better every year with more innovation and more stuff that's coming from the racing world.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And there's just a legacy of that stunt and information and how it's done that gets passed down generation to generation.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I was doubling Brad Pitt on The Mexican, and I'd just gotten the call. I was actually working in Vancouver doubling for Jean-Claude Van Damme. And I got the call to do this movie, The Mexican, and I actually told Jean-Claude I have to leave. I'm going to go double Brad Pitt.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
He wasn't necessarily excited or happy about that, but I didn't want to lose the opportunity because I had just done Fight Club, and I was excited to sort of build this relationship with that actor because as a stunt performer, you hope that you get to double an actor and you get to do multiple films with them, and you build a career that way. So I fly down to Mexico.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
We're shooting in this really small town, Rio de Catorce. It's like one road in, one road out, and I get there, And that morning, like I wake up and they're like, we got to get you to set right away. We have this car thing we want you to do. And really simple, actually, they had in the middle of the desert, they'd poured a blacktop intersection to make it look like an intersection.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And they were kind of doing a top shot over the street light. All I had to do was take the El Camino and drive it through the intersection fast. So I back up about 200 feet. And I remember the stunt coordinator giving me the thumbs up. And it's like, action, action. And I drive the car. And the speedometer doesn't work in the El Camino. I mean, we have these old cars.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You dress them up on the outside to film them. But sometimes they're not in the best condition otherwise. I'm getting close to the intersection, and I can hear the engine changing gears, but I'm not really thinking about it because I'm so excited. Like, I'm doubling Brad Pitt. This is amazing. Like, my career's on the rise. This is going to be awesome.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
And I hit the intersection, and where the blacktop, they had poured the blacktop, there was a bump. And...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
i launch and i launch up a couple feet and i hit the i hit the pavement and my suspension loosens up and i'm starting to drift and i'm like oh god and i can see the stunt coordinator on one side like you know what are you doing he's putting his hands up in the air and i'm kind of heading towards video village where everyone is filming it and i'm like drifting there and everything's now slowed down in time so uh i just crank the wheel the other way
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
and I start drifting towards the other El Camino, the backup El Camino. And I hit it, you know, I T-boned the other El Camino. But I saved Video Village, and I'm just sitting in the car, and I basically destroyed both cars in one morning. It was not my greatest day on set. Were you hurt? No, I wasn't. I'd scrubbed off enough speed where I was fine. And they let you keep working on the film?
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
For a couple of days until they decided, you know, maybe you should go home.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It was I think he he found it endearing. And, you know, I think everybody knows that when you're working on a set, there is a bandwidth for things to go wrong. But long and short, I think he just found it funny and endearing. And he knew that maybe cars weren't my specialty and that fights were. And so I got called for Troy pretty quickly after. And he's like, we got a great fight movie.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
You don't have to drive a car. Can you come to London and prep?
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
I have a lot of experience with that. You talked about specialties and the car stunts and cars and fire and things like that. They actually hurt less sometimes, I think, because you've built in all these protocols to protect the performer. And there's a lot of science involved. But the meat and potatoes of stunt performing is just physical performance. And sometimes it's like...
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
you know getting thrown down a set of stairs and you know multiple takes and you know how to protect yourself and you know you know you know you're not gonna break anything, but you're going to get a lot of bumps and bruises and twisted ankles and crooked necks. But that's just something that you accept. And so having been a fight guy, that was sort of my life.
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
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Outlaw country, ballads, the Bakersfield sound, western swing, jazz, and more, unquote. Haggard was inducted into the Country Hall of Fame in 1994 and was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. He died in 2016 on his 79th birthday. When Haggard was young, he hardly seemed destined for success. He spent time in and out of reform school and prison before he found his way back to music.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Haggard's best-known songs include Mama Tried, Okie from Muskogee, Today I Started Loving You Again, and The Bottle Let Me Down. Merle Haggard had a lifelong fascination with trains. After he became a star, he acquired his own railway observation car. And that railway car, on which you can book passage, is now part of the Virginia Scenic Railway.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. This week marks the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid, the country music concert founded by Willie Nelson as a fundraiser to benefit farmers. Held in Champaign, Illinois, this first gathering featured not only Willie Nelson, but such other supportive performers as Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty, B.B. King, Loretta Lynn, and Roy Orbison.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
When Terry spoke with Merle Haggard in 1995, he had reissued an album he recorded in 1969 featuring the songs of Jimmy Rogers. They began with Haggard's recording of the Jimmy Rogers classic, Waiting for a Train.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Merle Haggard speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. He died in 2016. Coming up, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two albums featuring Paul Robeson. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Bass baritone Paul Robeson was one of the most popular figures of the 20th century, and also one of the most controversial. He died in 1976 at the age of 77, leaving a huge imprint on music, politics, and race relations. Our classical music critic, Lloyd Schwartz, reviews two recent releases in which Robeson is the subject.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
One is a CD called Robeson by 38-year-old bass baritone Devon Tynes, who says he grew up being constantly compared to Robeson. The other release is an almost complete 14-CD set of Robeson's own recordings.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Lloyd Schwartz reviewed Paul Robeson, The Voice of Freedom, and the Devon Tynes album, Robeson. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews David Cronenberg's new movie, The Shrouds. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
In The Shrouds, the new thriller from the 82-year-old Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, Vincent Cassell plays a wealthy tech entrepreneur who's devised an unusual technology to help people still grieving their loved ones. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed The Shrouds, now playing in theaters. On Monday's show, a conversation with author and executive Daria Burke about her new memoir, Of My Own Making. It explores her growing up in 1980s Detroit amid addiction and instability and the years she spent trying to outrun that past by building a carefully curated, outwardly successful life.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
I hope you can join us. Thank you. 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 Adam Staniszewski.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Farmers still need aid, and Farm Aid has been staged annually ever since. Stealing the show at that very first Farm Aid concert in April 1985 was Merle Haggard singing his then-new song, Natural High.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Merle Haggard speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's 1995 interview with country star Merle Haggard. We'll dive back in with a taste of one of his biggest hits, Mama Tried.
Fresh Air
Merle Haggard On Hopping Trains And Doing Time
Today, we're going to listen to our 1995 interview with country music star Merle Haggard. John Karamanica, in the New York Times, once described him as, quote, the country music titan who most resists easy categorization. He was a wildly versatile singer, songwriter, and performer with an affinity for a variety of styles.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
And this person was revealed, you know, in many ways throughout the film. And no matter what he looked like, people fell in love with him. And that's the story. There are other people that look fantastic, and once you get to know them, what's shining forth from inside is not so pleasing.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
No, I knew nothing about... When I started making films, I knew nothing about films. And after Eraserhead was finished, after five years of working on it, I didn't know if anything would ever happen to the film. But Ben Barinholtz, who they call the grandfather of midnight films...
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
He got Eraserhead for his company, Libra Films, and he told me, he said, David, we're not going to spend one nickel on this picture. We're just going to open it in a theater and let it sit there. And this is a word-of-mouth picture, and he said if we hold on long enough... you know, one day the theater will be full. And that's exactly what happened.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
And those were the times when there were many theaters that had midnight shows. And it was beautiful because these were films that in today's world would, you know, come and go when something's allowed to only, you know, work or fail in one week's time. And so you'd see on the marquee Eraserhead year after year, and eventually you'd want to go see it.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
I didn't get any offers. I was brought into a couple of meetings at studios, and they were just disastrous. Nobody wanted me to work just from Eraserhead except Mel Brooks for The Elephant Man.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Yeah, I was sweating bullets when Mel was in the screening room looking at Eraserhead.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
No, Jonathan Sanger, who was the producer, produced The Elephant Man, told me that everybody, the writers were on, he was on, you know, the thing was going, but Mel wanted to see Eraserhead before he would let me direct the picture. And everything, you know, wrote or fell on... So I said, Jonathan, there's no way Mel's going to, you know, like this, go for Eraserhead.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
And Jonathan said, well, let's just wait and see. So it's a true story. After the screening, Mel literally ran out of the theater and embraced me and said, you're a madman. I love you. But Mel is an extremely complex, interesting fellow.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Right. You know, where you are now, Philadelphia is... I always say that Eraserhead is, you know, my Philadelphia story. And when you... I came from... smaller places in the Northwest. I didn't move to the East Coast until I was 15. And when you come from someplace like that and see a place like Philadelphia or Brooklyn, New York, it has an impact, and it completely fascinated me.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
And I used to go around in Philadelphia and feel this strangeness, and it was so powerful and fantastic. It really did something to me.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Well, it was... Because it was the Industrial Revolution going on at that time, and because the Elephant Man looked the way he looked, he was almost like a product of that. And since I'm fascinated with smoke, and fire and industry. That Mount St.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Helena's eruption, when you see close-ups of the eruption, the smoke, the curls of the smoke, or like the curls of the smoke in an atomic bomb, look very much like the growths on the Elephant Man's body. There's something, there's some connection of the way a growth grows. It's just a slow motion version of an explosion, sort of.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
These textures and the sounds and all these things seemed right for that world that the Elephant Man came from.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Not really. The first two or three ideas were a neighborhood, kind of a green lawns with shadows like lit at night from a light bulb and red lips and the color blue. And the song Blue Velvet, Bobby Vinton's version, influenced it a lot.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
No. You know, sometimes the timing has to be correct. You hear something for years and nothing happens, and then one day you hear it connected with some other thought that may be happening, and something magical happens.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Well, I don't know exactly how it came, but it... Jeffrey, the ear is like a canal. It's like an opening, a little egress into another place. And it seemed like a, finally seemed like a perfect, it's like a ticket to another world that he finds. And I mean, if he hadn't found it, you know, he would have kept on going home and that would have been the end of it. But
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
The fascination with this once found drew him into something that he needed to discover and work through.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us about your work.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Well, I was studying to be a painter and very keen on living the art life. And in the art life, the way I saw it then, it didn't have room for a family life.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Well, Eraserhead's about, you know, a couple of different things. And one of the things it's about is a family, but it could also be about other things. So I really love abstractions and things that maybe could be interpreted in different ways. So I don't really like to talk about the meaning so much. It's open for interpretation.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
I think, you know, when you make a film, inside you... I don't always know what I'm doing. And it's a process, you know, from when you start to when you finish. It's becoming something, and you have to always be questioning yourself and finding if it feels right. And it has, on some level, it has to feel correct and honest sometimes. to the person making the film.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
But as soon as it's over and people see it, it's, like I say, when it's a little bit abstract, everybody has their own interpretation. That's the way it should be. Now people are making films that are so one thing that most people have the same interpretation. And it's not very exciting to me.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Yes, I heard the name The Elephant Man and a physical pop went off in my brain and I knew I had to make that film. And luckily I was able to do it.
Fresh Air
Remembering David Lynch
Mm-hmm. That's very important. The whole idea was... that you could have someone that was so horrible on the outside, yet his spirit was so, so beautiful. And the more you get to know him, the more the outside disappears, the more the spirit shines through. And if you don't start from the reality, there's really nowhere to go.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
On The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
We're remembering composer Charles Strauss, who died last week at the age of 96. He wrote the music and won Tony Awards for the Broadway hits Bye Bye Birdie, Annie, and Applause. One of his lesser-known works is the 1964 musical Golden Boy. It was based on the 1937 play of the same name by Clifford Odets, who also wrote the musical adaptation. The 1964 musical starred Sammy Davis Jr.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
as a man who breaks out of Harlem by becoming a prizefighter. Terry Gross spoke to Charles Strauss again in 2002 when Golden Boy was being revived as part of the City Center Encore series, Great American Musicals in Concert. They began with one of the songs from the show called Night Song.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
The singer is Sammy Davis Jr., and the lyricist is Lee Adams, who previously had collaborated with Strauss on the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie. ¶¶
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Composer Charles Strauss speaking to Terry Gross in 2002. He died last week at the age of 96. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
some of the songs written by Charles Strauss. He started playing the piano at age 10 and graduated from Rochester's Eastman School of Music. He studied classical music with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, then met Lee Adams and started writing a more popular style of music. But before hitting it big in 1960 with Bye Bye Birdie, Strauss had a string of very odd jobs.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Charles Strauss speaking to Terry Gross in 2002. We couldn't end this tribute without considering the impact of perhaps his most enduring musical. In 2010, Terry spoke with the rapper Jay-Z about how one of the songs from Annie inspired his own distinctly different interpretation.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
He played piano for dance rehearsals and in strip clubs, and even wrote background music for Fox movie-tone newsreels. He wrote the music for the movies Bonnie and Clyde and The Night They Raided Minsky's.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Pianculli. Today, we're remembering Charles Strauss, the Broadway composer who died last week at age 96. Collaborating with lyricist Lee Adams, he won Tony Awards for Best Musical for Bye Bye Birdie and Applause. They also wrote the songs for Golden Boy, a musical starring Sammy Davis Jr. Teaming up with lyricist Martin Charnin, he wrote the songs for Annie.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Jay-Z speaking with Terry Gross in 2010 about his Hard Knock Life ghetto anthem. When Terry talked to Charles Strauss back in 2002, she asked him about that version.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
And on the opening credits of the hit 1970s TV series All in the Family, when Jean Stapleton's Edith was seen playing the piano as she and Carol O'Connor's Archie Bunker sang the Those Were the Days theme song, it actually was Charles Strauss who played the piano heard on the soundtrack. And he also wrote the music, while his Bye Bye Birdie partner, Lee Adams, wrote the nostalgic lyrics.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Charles Strauss speaking to Terry Gross in 2002. The composer of the music for Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie died last week. He was 96 years old. Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning is the eighth and reportedly final installment in the action-adventure series starring Tom Cruise, who plays the head of a secret government team that does what the CIA cannot do. In this latest installment, the crew must try to stop rogue AI from wiping out humanity.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Our critic at large, John Powers, has seen all seven of the preceding Mission Impossible pictures, plus the TV series that preceded it. He says this latest effort is a crazily entertaining monument to its star.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
John Powers reviewed Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. On Monday's show, we feature our interview about the life and legacy of Sly Stone. Questlove talks about his documentary, Sly Lives, a.k.a. The Burden of Black Genius, on Hulu. Questlove won the Oscar for another of his music documentaries, Summer of Soul. Hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
We're going to listen back to two different conversations Terry Gross had with Charles Strauss. She first spoke with him in 1994.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Dean Cooley.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
Even those who seldom see a Broadway show are familiar with some of the songs written by Strauss.
Fresh Air
Remembering Broadway Composer Charles Strouse
That's the telephone song from the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie, with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strauss.
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
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
The love story between Murley and Medgar Evers also is fraught with tension, with Murley objecting to how much he was away from home, leaving her wondering if he loved his work more than he loved his family. He often left her alone to deal with the constant phone calls, threatening the lives of her family.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
After her husband's death, Murley became an activist, an in-demand public speaker, and executive director of the NAACP. She gave the invocation at President Obama's second inauguration. Joy Reid spoke with Terry Gross last year.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Joy Reid spoke to Terry Gross last year. Her book about Medgar and Merle Evers, titled Medgar and Merle, is now out in paperback. We'll continue their conversation after a short break. And later, Justin Chang reviews the new supernatural thriller Sinner. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Joy Reid speaking with Terry Gross last year. Her book about Medgar and Murley Evers is called Medgar and Murley. More after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. How to Be a Civil Rights Widow is one chapter title in a book by Joy Reid, the former MSNBC Evening Show host. The widow is Merle Evers. Her husband was Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist who served as the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary and risked his life to push for voting rights, desegregation, and freedom.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
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Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
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 Seedy-Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Reid's book is called Medgar and Merle and is now out in paperback. Medgar and Murley were both from Mississippi. Murley constantly worried about the safety of her husband and their children, with good reason. Their house was firebombed. Later, in June 1963, Medgar was assassinated just outside the door of their home. Murley had heard the gunshot and found her husband bleeding out.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
His was the first in a series of high-profile assassinations in the 1960s. Next came President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy.
Fresh Air
A Love Story At The Center Of The Civil Rights Movement
Joy Reid describes her book, Medgar and Murley, as a love story between two black people in Mississippi, their love for their children, and the higher love it took for black Americans to love America and to fight for it, even in the state that butchered more black bodies via lynching than any other.
Fresh Air
Zombies Frontman Colin Blunstone
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day, and also those who listen. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli.
Fresh Air
Zombies Frontman Colin Blunstone
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Fresh Air
Zombies Frontman Colin Blunstone
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Fresh Air
Zombies Frontman Colin Blunstone
Support for NPR and the following message come from the estate of Joan B. Crott. whose bequest serves as an enduring investment in the future of public radio and seeks to help NPR be the model for high-quality journalism in the 21st century.
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Zombies Frontman Colin Blunstone
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day, and also those who listen.
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.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
But the jokes he read, written by original writer Alan Zweibel and others, helped too.
Fresh Air
'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...
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
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.
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.
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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
'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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
His work is like an id unleashed with no thought for propriety." R. Crumb's work has been controversial, considered racist and misogynistic. Now there's a new biography of Crumb by fellow cartoonist and founder of the Pictureboxx comics, Dan Nadel. Crumb is now 81 years old and lives in France, where he's resided for decades. We're going to listen back to Terry's 2005 interview with R. Crumb.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
R. Crum speaking with Terry Gross in 2005. We'll continue their conversation after a break, and we'll also listen to a later interview in which the cartoonist is joined by another cartoonist, his wife, Aileen Kaminsky Crum. And film critic Justin Chang reviews Thunderbolts, the newest superhero movie from Marvel. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I'm kind of an oddball character. R. Crumb speaking to Terry Gross in 2005. Let's listen to the 1929 song Singing in the Bathtub, covered by R. Crumb and his cheap-suit serenaders from the album of the same name.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
When we return, we'll listen to another of their conversations from 2007, in which the cartoonist is joined by his wife, Aileen Kaminsky-Krum, who was a cartoonist also. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. In 2007, Terry spoke with R. Crum and his wife Aileen Kaminsky Crum. She was one of the first women to create autobiographical comics back in the 1960s.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
They married in 1978 and moved to the south of France in the early 90s. R. Crum created Zap Comics in the 1960s. Aileen first became known for her contributions to women's comics and Twisted Sisters. She died in 2022. The Crumbs sometimes worked together on joint autobiographical cartoons for The New Yorker.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
When Terry spoke with them, she asked if their personas in those New Yorker cartoons were much different from who they really were.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Cartoonists R. Crum and his wife Aileen Kaminsky Crum speaking to Terry Gross in 2007. A new biography of R. Crum is out by Dan Nadel called Crum, A Cartoonist's Life. And many of Crum's original comics, drawings, and scrapbooks have been published by Tashin. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the latest Marvel superhero movie, Thunderbolts. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Our film critic Justin Chang says that Thunderbolts, which topped the box office last weekend, is the first Marvel superhero movie in some time that's actually worth seeing. Florence Pugh reprises her role from Black Widow as the CIA operative Yelena Belova, and there also are return appearances by some Marvel franchise veterans, including Sebastian Stan and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new Marvel movie, Thunderbolts. On Monday's show, actor Danny McBride talks about the final season of HBO's The Righteous Gemstones and his journey from Hollywood to South Carolina, where he co-founded Rough House Pictures. He'll tell us about how he's built a unique comic empire, blending sharp satire with Southern charm.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shura.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Charlie Kyer. 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. Nestor.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Kulik.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley. R. Crum is the most renowned of the underground cartoonists who emerged in the 1960s. He created Zap Comics, featuring an entire menagerie of his characters, such as Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, the Snoid, and Devil Girl. His comics were eccentric, and so was he, as a 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff makes clear.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Crum wrote a memoir in 2005 titled The R. Crum Handbook. Reviewing the book then in Newsweek, Malcolm Jones wrote, "...Crum has made strange and hilarious art out of his own neuroses. Insecure and paranoid, obsessed with sex in general and women with big behinds in particular, Crum has never been afraid to draw and write about his own foibles and fantasies.
Fresh Air
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,
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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?
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
You know, I mean, Birkenstocks are drag.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Everyone is like, everybody is saying something with their clothes, you know.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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?
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Because I'm just naturally crazy, lazy, bad, spoiled.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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?
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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...
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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.
Fresh Air
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
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
If you're a super fan of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, we have exciting news. WHYY has launched a Fresh Air Society, a leadership group dedicated to ensuring fresh air's legacy. For over 50 years, this program has brought you fascinating interviews with favorite authors, artists, actors, and more. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special benefits and recognition.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Learn more at whyy.org slash fresh air society.
Fresh Air
Remembering British Singer Marianne Faithfull
Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Sixty years later, what can a new film say or show about the Beatles' first trip to America that isn't already familiar or that is presented in a significantly different fashion? As it turns out, quite a lot. Beatles 64, the new documentary presented by Disney+, works really well at exploring and explaining an intense two-week period in musical and cultural history.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Director David Tedeschi starts his film with the group's first trip to New York, landing at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy Airport on February 7th, and ends with their return to Liverpool 15 days later. In between, they holed up at the Plaza Hotel, reached 73 million viewers on their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, played their first U.S.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
concert in Washington, D.C., did a second live Ed Sullivan Show from Miami, and flew back home triumphant, leaving America in the first giant wave of Beatlemania.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Beatles 64, the film, benefits greatly from behind-the-scenes and fans-eye-view footage shot at the time by the Maisels brothers, Albert and David, who also famously shot film of early Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones at Altamont, and Little Edie and Big Edie at Grey Gardens. The group's first press conference at JFK has the press trying to make fun of the Beatles or treat them as novelties.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
But the four lads from Liverpool instantly win them over. When one reporter repeats the accusation that the Beatles are nothing but four Elvis Presleys, Ringo Starr wiggles his pelvis in response, and John Lennon follows, to raucous laughter from the reporters. From the very start, they treat the press not as something to fear, but something to play.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Vintage interview and performance clips are collected and presented artfully. George Harrison, in an interview from the 90s, explains why the Beatles hit America and the press the way they did.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Another wonderful vintage interview from a decade ago has singer Ronnie Spector talking about how she and the Ronettes helped the Beatles escape from the Plaza Hotel, which was surrounded by a mob of adoring teenage fans.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
The film features new interviews as well. One of the film's producers, Martin Scorsese, conducts separate interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo. McCartney is filmed at his Brooklyn photographic exhibit from earlier this year, where he points out one of his favorite photos that he took during those two wild weeks.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
The Beatles are relaxing poolside in Miami, and George is being handed a drink by a young woman.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Instead of emphasizing the very familiar Ed Sullivan footage, Beatles 64 instead presents complete songs from the much rarer Washington, D.C. performance, which was filmed in the round in a boxing ring for a closed-circuit TV presentation. Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin, remixed the music, and it sounds great.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
One of the young people in the audience that day was film director David Lynch, who talks about it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
I was in high school. I lived in Alexandria, Virginia. I was into rock and roll music, mainly Elvis Presley, who brought rock and roll music to the world, to me anyway. I ended up going to this concert in I didn't really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn't, I don't know. And it was, I didn't have any idea how big this event was.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can't believe.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Other fresh stories come from such people as Jamie Bernstein, the daughter of Leonard Bernstein, record producer Jack Douglas, who tells a fabulous story about John Lennon, and Motown singer Smokey Robinson, who talks of the importance of the Beatles covering one of his songs. A year or so later, he'd return the favor on national television by singing Yesterday with the Miracles.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Folk Musician Jerron Paxton / Lyricist Ira Gershwin's Legacy
Not anyone of magnitude until the Beatles said that. By collecting the footage, gathering the stories, and presenting very generous samples of the songs, Beatles 64 makes it clear why the Beatles made such an impact. and why the group and its music continue to not only be remembered, but revered.
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.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And the other character is John Bulkeley, who was the gunner of the wager. And the gunner is in charge of the boat's munitions and was usually a very responsible and reliable person, which would describe Bulkeley. He was considered a natural leader among the sailors.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yes, he was in many ways the most skilled seaman on board the wager. He was, as you said, an instinctive leader. But because he did not come from the aristocracy or from the wealthier classes, he knew that it was unlikely that he would ever have a chance to become a commander of his own warship like David Sheep, the captain. Wow.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Okay, one of the biggest enemies the squadron has to face was disease. First, as the warships are crossing the Atlantic, there's a typhus breakout, and typhus is carried in the feces of lice, just for anyone who didn't know that. And then as the boats are beginning the most difficult part of their journey around Cape Horn, they are struck with the second disease, scurvy.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
We now know that scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, and it's actually easy to prevent and to cure by eating citrus. But at the time, people didn't know this. Ships didn't carry citrus on board or really any fruits and vegetables, and the sailors were defenseless against the disease. It sounds like scurvy was a ticking time bomb to any boat that traveled over a certain amount of time.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
That is true. Scurvy killed more seamen than, you know, all the other potential dangers that ship, you know, tempests and other diseases combined. And as the squadron and the wager were sailing around Cape Horn at a point when the ships are just being bandied about like these rowboats in these gigantic seas, and they need every person to persevere, they begin to suffer from scurvy.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
and they don't know what causes it, but their hair begins to fall out, their teeth fall out, and as some seamen say, the disease got into their brains and they went raving mad.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Okay, so the ships are making their attempt to round Cape Horn. How did it go?
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Oh, not so well. They lack men. At one point, I think at one of the more extraordinary moments, they can't even fly their sails because they keep blowing out. But if they take down all the sails, they can't control the ship. So they...
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
One of the commanders orders his men to climb the mast during this storm while the ships are rocking violently and to use their bodies as these threadbare sails so that the captain can help turn the ship. So imagine this. You have... These men and boys standing a hundred feet in the air, their bodies concave as a gale force wind blows against them.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Miraculously, the captain survived as well. The leaders of the mutineers and the captain were reunited in England at a court-martial hearing to decide whether they were guilty of the crimes of mutiny and murder. David Grand writes about this harrowing journey in his new book, The Wager, a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder. Well, David Grand, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And the captain was able to turn the ship around, but one of the men was lost and fell into the sea and the others could see him desperately swimming after the ship futilely.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, that's an amazing part of the story. So he doesn't want to use sails because the winds are so strong. But so he just needs a little bit of power and control. And so that's why he has these sailors go up there and act as sails.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
One of the reasons I find this book so compelling is that I just have absolutely no interest whatsoever in getting on a boat and trying to round Cape Horn. It just sounds like the worst possible scenario to me.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
It is, you know, very few people join that elite club of Cape Horners who, A, want to go around the horn and ever come back. There's, you know, if anyone reads Melville, he has amazing descriptions of Cape Horn. And he basically says, heaven help the, you know, the family members if one of their loved ones is going around the horn.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
What about you? Are you adventurous or do you like to find your adventure in pages of books and documents?
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Well, I am the least likely adventurer possible in so many ways. I'm half blind, I'm older, I'm bald, I get lost on a subway even on my way to work. Um, and I spend most of my time in archives researching these stories. Um, As I did for The Wager, I spent the first two years just combing archives, reading these journals and books with a magnifying glass.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
These places are very suited for my paltry physical attributes. But then there usually comes a time whenever I research these books or stories... where some doubt gnaws at me, some part of the story I don't fully feel like I understand, and I get propelled on some mad expedition to try to better understand what happened.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And so in the case of The Wager, I eventually organized my own little expedition to try to get to Wager Island.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
I do not round Cape Horn, and I hope I never do. It was rough enough as it was. Fair enough.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
All right, well, let's get back to the wager. First of all, just how long does it take to round Cape Horn?
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Well, they are struggling to get around it for months because every time they think they get around it, they don't. And the ships are breaking apart. Some of the ships end up turning back. So it takes weeks and weeks and weeks as they attempt to get around the horn.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Oh, it's so great to be back on the program. So your book takes place in the 1740s when the British Empire went to war against its rival, Imperial Spain. And the war was called the War of Jenkins' Ear, and we can leave that to readers to find out why it had that name. But there was a secret mission that a squadron of five British warships took. Tell us about that mission and where they were going.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
But they do succeed finally. But the boat is in terrible shape. They're no longer with the rest of the squadron. I think the squadron believes that the wager has sunk already. Most of the crew, including the captain, has scurvy, can't do their jobs at all or very well, and the ship wrecks.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Some of the crew believe, and this will be a factor in the mutiny, that it's the captain's fault, that Captain Cheap was so single-minded on his mission that he didn't really seem to pay attention, that the boat had drifted into shallow waters. So the boat starts getting ripped apart by rocks and bringing on water. Fortunately, it gets wedged between some rocks and so it doesn't completely sink.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And that gives the sailors an opportunity to get in their small transport boats and row to this desolate island. And this is not the most hospitable island for castaways, is it?
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
No, no. You know, the captain, you know, determinedly, you know, gets around the horn and is trying to sail the ship up the coast of Patagonia in Chile, hoping to eventually rendezvous with the rest of the squadron. But in those days, seamen... didn't really know exactly where they were on the map because they could not determine their longitude.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Longitude required a reliable clock, which had not yet been invented. And so Cheap and his navigators' estimation of their longitude turns out to be not only wrong, but wrong by hundreds of miles. And they suddenly smash into this rock, and an anchor falls through the floor of the ship. The rudder shatters, and then the ship is just careening through this minefield
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
It does become wedged between these rocks and begins to completely rip apart. Water surges under the bottom into the ship. Rats are scurrying upward. Those who were suffering from scurvy, who could not get out of their hammocks, drowned. But in the distance, some of the survivors see... this through the mist, this desolate island. And they think, okay, maybe this will be our salvation.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And they get there in one of these transport boats, about nearly 150 of them. And instead, the island turns out to be the beginning of their hell. It is cold and windy. It's constantly raining and sleeting. And worst of all, they can find virtually no water. One British officer compared the island to a place where the soul of man dies in him. Right.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
They were starving. They were cold. They had to scrape seaweed off of rocks to eat. They have a few supplies left from the boat, but the captain takes those and puts them in a tent and rations them out to make them last. Right. The castaways are on the road to starvation.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And one of the most remarkable moments during the castaways' time on the island is that they're visited by this group of indigenous people called the Kaweskar who come to their island by canoe. And the land that the British are on, it seems so barren and punishing to them. But the Kawaskar have perfectly adapted to their environment. Can you describe them to us?
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah. You know, like other Patagonians, they have been in the region, native Patagonians, they've been in the region for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so they had adapted to this very difficult environment. They traveled mostly in small familial groups. They lived almost exclusively off marine resources. And they traveled and spent much of their times in canoes.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, so they were given a secret mission to try to intercept and capture a Spanish galleon filled with so much treasure, it was known as the prize of all the oceans. And so they were going to sail across the Atlantic, around the violent seas of Cape Horn, into the Pacific, and then try to intercept the ship somewhere off the coast of the Philippines.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
They were known as the nomads of the sea. They had learned how to stay warm. They would keep a fire going at all times, even in their canoes. And most critically, they knew the landscape and the terrain, so they knew everything. We're to find hidden shoals filled with fish or other sea urchins that could be eaten or mussels or whatnot. So they knew how to survive.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And so when they arrive, they offer the castaways a potential lifeline.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Right, which unfortunately the castaways, they cut their own lifeline.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
The castaways cut their own life sign. Many of them are blinkered by, you know, racism. This idea that somehow their civilization is superior to others. And they are also spiraling into violence and chaos. At a certain point, the Kawaskar basically just say, you know, we're out of here. And they disappear.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And after that moment, the castaways descend only further into a Hobbesian state of depravity. And a few of the men even succumb to cannibalism.
Fresh Air
A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Okay. So Captain Cheap is trying to maintain naval law on the island. But the system starts to break down. Some men start stealing food. When they're caught, they are punished with 600 lashes. The captain shoots a man amid shipment in the cheek. This man, Henry Cousins, had been accused of dereliction of duty. He eventually dies from his wounds. And the crew believes –
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
that Cheap wasn't justified in his actions. And the men's loyalty to Cheap erodes, and the sailors start looking for leadership from the gunner, John Bulkley.
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Yes, they increasingly gravitate towards Bulkley, that instinctive leader who uses such populist expressions that still resonate with us today. He would use phrases to stir the semen, calling for them for life and liberty, while Cheap invokes such principles as duty and honor and patriotism to try to keep the men loyal to him and to the mission.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
We can't get into the details of the mutiny, but they finally decide to go that path. And it's so interesting to me how long it takes them to get there. There's all these deliberations. There's a lot of diplomacy back and forth between the factions. It seems that mutiny was a really hard line for these men to cross despite all that had happened to them.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yes, a full-blown mutiny they knew was risky and a real breach of naval order. And if it was a full-blown mutiny like the kind some were contemplating... The punishment could be, or likely would be, being hanged if they ever made it back to England. So even when they are planning it, they are holding these debates.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And what's amazing is that even on this desolate, remote island, the castaways are conscious of the Admiralty, you know, thousands of miles away, all the way in England, paring down on them. So they are thinking about the rules, what rules they can break.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
They are writing up documents and trying to create a written record contemporaneously that can justify their uprising, a written record that would withstand the attrition of a public trial.
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Yeah, it's amazing. They have these little scraps of paper and they're having all the mutineers sign them, especially the second in command. So it seems like that they were justified in their actions. And then Bulkley just takes all these pieces of paper with them on their journey. That is correct.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Okay, so once the boat is ready, the mutineers take control of it and leave Captain Cheap along with a few remaining men loyal to him on the island. He actually requests to be left there rather than to be taken prisoner on the boat. And Bokling and his men make this journey almost 3,000 miles successfully, but you could not call it an easy trip.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
No, it was not an easy trip. And one important caveat upon leaving the captain, they didn't really leave him with a working boat to get off. And so I think the assumption to some degree, or at least from Cheap's point of view, is he was being left to die so that he could never share his story. So if the others made it back to England, only one version of the tale would prevail.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Believe it or not, that was part of the mission and there was a real whiff of piracy to it all.
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So only 29 of the 81 men who take this trip survive. One actually dies, I think, as they made it to safety. And we won't get into the story, but miraculously, Captain Cheap and some of his men are rescued from the island by a group of native people. And we'll save that to the readers. But it's amazing, first of all, that...
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
that these men survived, they made it to safety, greatly diminished, but they all make it back to England. And there the survivors engage in this sort of war of words, like some of the men, including Bulkley, publish accounts of their experience, in part to make money, but also to sway public opinion to their side. And this is all happening at a time of increased journalism and publishing.
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Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a heist movie, but isn't this piracy? Isn't this almost illegal during that time?
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Yeah, there was greater literacy. Printing was cheaper. So there was a real explosion in newspaper writing, in travel literature. There were known as the Grub Street Hacks, you know, which is where a lot of the publishing had been located, who were these kind of books. For the first time, writing kind of done by professionals for individual profit rather than patronage by the aristocracy.
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And so you had the profusion of accounts. And these accounts that were being released by the various seamen and members of the expedition struck a chord. And what's so important to understand is why they did this. They get back to England. And after waging a war against all these elements, they are summoned to face a court martial where they could be hanged.
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So they begin to wage this war over the truth, releasing their accounts. And they each shape their account, probably the way we all do in some way, in order to emerge as the hero of their stories. There's a famous line from Joan Didion who says, we all tell ourselves stories in order to live. But in their case, it's quite literally true.
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It wasn't illegal. It was actually part – it was the end of a certain era of buccaneering. But in that period, seamen were offered a tantalizing prospect, which was a share of the prize money. So, yes, it – There really was a piratical element to this secret mission.
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They must try to tell a convincing tale in order to spare their lives. And during this battle over information, there is disinformation. It's just like today. There is misinformation, disinformation. There were even allegations of fake journals and a kind of fake news of the 18th century.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
So Bulkley and Cheap are called to a court-martial hearing by the Navy. And Bulkley is concerned he's going to have to defend himself against the charge of mutiny. And Cheap's main concern is that he's going to face a charge of murder, which is punishable by death for the shooting of the midshipman Henry Cousins. The court-martial actually takes a surprising turn. What happens there? Yeah.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, so many of them fear they're going to be hanged, and they have good reason to fear that, given the naval code, given that this had been a full-blown mutiny, given that Jeep had shot somebody without asking questions, without a proceeding. Some of them prayed before going in. But when they go into the court-martial, something astonishing happens, right?
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
They aren't asked about anything that happened on that island, none of the alleged crimes. Instead, they're only asked about what had caused the shipwreck. I would compare it to the authorities stopping a car and finding a dead body in the trunk and asking the driver only why he or she had a busted taillight.
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And it turned out that the Admiralty and those in power really didn't like any of these stories.
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Right. And Bulkley and Cheap, while they have a lot of concerns about each other's behavior on the ship and who is responsible for the wreckage of the ship, they decide to censor themselves because they see the way that the court-martial is going, that they're not going to have to face those more serious crimes.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yes. And after that single proceeding about what it calls the wreck, everybody is let go. And it became, as one naval historian called it, the mutiny that never was.
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And you say that the Navy behaved this way because the whole affair had just been a public relations disaster for them and the British Empire. What do you mean by that?
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Yeah, so this expedition that it set out with nearly 2,000 men, more than 1,300 of them had died. It was really kind of a folly of imperialism. It was a mission kind of bungled from the start in planning the public clamor for war, but as so often with wars, didn't actually really want to pay for it, so they sent off their various people in many ways simply to die.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Thousands and thousands of other seamen had died during other battles during this war period. And the war was kind of a bloody stalemate. And the wager disaster was a reminder of that. But even more profoundly, it undercut that central claim that the British Empire always asserted to justify its ruthless expansion.
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And can you set this conflict in the larger context? Like what were Britain and Spain fighting about?
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and conquering of other peoples, that its civilization was somehow superior to others. But here, when these castaways were on the island, these British officers and crew, these supposed apostles of Western civilization, they had descended into this Hobbesian state of depravity. They had behaved less like gentlemen and more like brutes. And so...
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
None of the stories that these seamen were telling, you know, the seamen were all battling over their stories, trying to prevail. But the British Navy and Empire was looking at these stories saying, I don't know if we like any of these stories.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
You know, one of my interests was always in mutinies. I was always fascinated by mutinies. I think like a lot of people, because what makes mutinies so interesting is they occur in a military organization that is by its very nature designed by the state as an instrument of order, to enforce order. And so what causes these men or women or members of this unit to suddenly rebel?
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, so Great Britain was seeking, this was the kind of terrible age of empires, and Great Britain was seeking to expand its empire into Latin America and break its rival Spain's hold over that region. And so this war was sparked by imperialists who were hoping to break that Spanish hold over this region.
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Are they these extreme outlaws? Or is there something justified there? In their actions, because there is something rotten within the system or what is taking place. And so I was doing research on mutinies when I came across the account of John Byron, the midshipman from the wager. And there was also, just like today, this great battle over who would get to tell the history.
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an effort by those in power to cover up the sinful chapters of a nation's past. And so I would come home from the archives and flip on the TV or read the newspaper, and I would be reading in our own society about these wars over the truth and disinformation and fake news and who would get to tell history and what books were being banned.
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And I thought, this crazy, weird story is like a parable for our own turbulent times.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Well, David Grand, thanks so much for coming back on Fresh Air. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much, Sam.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And as I said in the introduction, even today, rounding Cape Horn is considered very dangerous. What makes it so tricky?
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Oh, it is among the worst, if not the worst, seas in the world. And the reason is that the seas travel automatically. uninterrupted, unblocked by any land around the globe. And so they travel about 13,000 miles without having anything to slow them down. And then they funnel around Cape Horn. A 90-foot wave can dwarf a ship's mast. The currents are the strongest on Earth.
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And then there are the winds which can accelerate to as much as 200 miles per hour. Herman Melville, who later made the trek around the horn, compared it to a descent into hell in Dante's Inferno.
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One of the things I found fascinating was that this is before the Panama Canal, obviously, but the Spanish would prefer to just cross Panama rather than sail around the Cape.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
That is how terrifying Cape Horn was to seamen, that the Spanish decided that for their trade, they would take their cargo ship, sail to Panama, and then haul the goods across the jungle, suffering malaria. Yeah. and yellow fever and then load the goods on the other side of Panama onto ships into the Pacific. So that was just a testament to how terrifying these seas really were.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Let's talk a little bit about these ships. You call them buoyant wooden castles. The flagship of this mission was the Centurion. Can you describe it for us?
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Yeah, so these ships really were these kind of engineering marvels. They were more than 120 feet long. They had three masts. They were propelled by sails. They could fly as many as 12 to 18 sails, depending on the size of the warship at a time. But again, they were also very susceptible to the elements of sea and storm because they were made of wood.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
One of the facts that astonished me when researching this book was that about 4,000 trees could be used to build one of these warships. And I even found accounts of people complaining about a kind of deforestation at the time.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Now, the wager, the ship that you focus on, was not built as a man of war. It was actually a merchant ship that was purchased by the Navy and refurbished for battle. You say it was tubby and unwieldy.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, it was a little bit like the ugly duckling of the squadron because it had not been born for battle. It had been one of these merchant ships that had been remade into a warship to serve in the war. It was the lowest rated ship. In that period, they rated warships by the number of cannons and the wager at 28. So it was a six rate, which was the lowest rate.
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And it had been named after the head of the admiralty at the time, a man named Sir Charles Wager. And the name, in many ways, seemed fitting because they were all, in effect, gambling with their lives.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
So these boats also needed a lot of sailors to work properly. You say that the Centurion, the flagship of this mission, needed 400 sailors, and that's only one of the ships going on the mission. There are four other warships, there's a scouting boat, and two cargo ships. They all needed personnel, but the Navy was having a hard time recruiting enough men.
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What means did they resort to to find the manpower?
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Yeah, so the Great Britain at that time did not have conscription, and it had exhausted its supply of volunteers during this war for the Navy. And so for the squadron, which was desperately short of men, and men were the most essential element, you needed skilled seamen to operate these very complex vessels.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And so what they did was they dispatched the press gangs, and the press gangs would roam into cities everywhere. They would roam into ports and towns and they would look for anyone with the telltale signs of a mariner. You know, if you had even a little tar on the tips of your fingertips, tar was used on a ship a lot. They would say, oh, you're a mariner. They would round you up.
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They would put you on these basically like these floating jails and take you out to the ship. And you were forced to go unwillingly on a voyage that might last three years. Even then... The squadron was short of men, so the Admiralty took the extreme step of rounding up soldiers from a retirement home, many of whom were in their 60s and 70s. They were missing an assortment of limbs.
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Some were so sick, they needed to be lifted on stretchers onto these ships before the voyage. Everybody knew they were sailing to their deaths.
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At the bottom of the world, below the tip of South America, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans converge to form one of the most dangerous places to find yourself in a boat, the Drake Passage. In the mid-18th century, a squadron of British warships made the journey through the passage in the worst weather imaginable, suffering terrible damage to their ships.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Back to the press gangs for a second. You described how the press gangs would row out to returning merchant ships, and these are ships that may have been out in sea for years, and would snatch sailors off those boats so that the sailors wouldn't be able to see their families. They would be put...
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And then also you describe how there's this poignant scene where family and wives would go to the docks looking for their loved ones, trying to peer into the floating jails to see if they could get one last glimpse of the men before they were sent off again.
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Yeah, I mean, those scenes give you such a poignant sense of the human toll, these expeditions. You know, you could have been a loved one waiting for somebody to come home, and then you hear they've been snatched. You haven't seen a husband or a brother or a son for years and years. And then you just hope to catch one last glimpse before they sail off.
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And given how perilous this voyage is, not only may you not, this may be the last glimpse you have of your loved one.
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Let's talk a little bit about life on board these boats. Although they were huge vessels, there were so many sailors that unless you were, say, like the captain, you didn't have a lot of personal space, right?
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, like on land, real estate was a reflection of a class society and hierarchical society. So the captain had a great cabin, a large cabin with a balcony overlooking the sea. But the pitting officers were in very small quarters, and the Semen had to sleep on hammocks separated only by about a foot at most, the distance.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
So in jostling seas, their elbows and knees are bouncing against each other.
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And there could be dozens of boys on board, some as young as six years old. What jobs do they have?
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Yeah. So, I mean, what's so interesting about these ships is that they really are these floating civilizations that are almost like a test or experiment in human sociability because people from all walks of lives and all ages are thrown onto these ships. You know, they begin as strangers, most of them. There could be boys as young as six. You could have a... men in their 80s.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
You have aristocrats, you have dandies, you have city paupers, you have professional craftsmen, you have free black seamen. They're each given a different kind of mission on the ship. The boys tended to be, they were like powder monkeys. They would run about carrying the gunpowder in battle.
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Many of them were there to be trained, to learn how to live on a ship so that they could grow on to become seamen. And some might even be from well-to-do families who are in training to eventually become officers.
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Yeah. One of those is actually John Byron, who later is the grandfather of Lord Byron, the poet. The way you describe it, one of the more dangerous jobs on board was climbing the main mast. Can you describe how harrowing that is?
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, it's harrowing. So you mentioned Jahan Byram, for example, this midshipman who is 16 years old when the voyage sets sail. And he has to learn, you know... how to work and operate on a ship. And one of the tasks he has to do is to climb these masts that can rise as much as 100 feet. They would have to climb along these ropes that hold up the mast on the exterior and scurry up them.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
One man of war called the Wager went missing and wrecked upon the rocks of a desolate island off Patagonia. At first, the castaways maintained the naval laws and discipline of the British Empire under their captain, but that unraveled under the hardships they endured, including poor shelter, punishing weather, and starvation.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
It wasn't like ships today where you could kind of work the seals from down on the deck. You had to go up and then climb up and climb up. Sometimes when you were climbing, your back was nearly parallel to the deck and the sea. Right, because the ship is moving.
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This is not a static pole. The ship is rocking back and forth.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
No, and it's important to mention that there will come a time on this voyage where not only are they rocking back and forth, they have to do this in hurricanes and typhoons. So they are swinging as if they were spiders clinging on as the ship rocks close to 45 degrees to one side and then 45 degrees to the other. I have to ask you what the toilet situation was like.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Well, everything on a ship had its own name, and the toilet was known as the head. It was basically a hole in the water, and it would just kind of shoot through and down into the sea.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
But in storms, for the average seaman, when it became so rough, and it would when they were going around Cape Horn, the seas were coming over the entire bow of the ship, washing some of the heads away and making it impossible to use them.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
It would not be right to call it a privy because there was no privacy. Yes. You'd be a landlubber if you called it a privy. So there was a lot of documentation that happened on these boats. A lot of the officers would keep logbooks. Even some non-officers would keep logbooks. Why were these so important?
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
Yeah, so the Admiralty and the British Empire and the government required... the senior officers, all to keep a logbook, the captain and lieutenant, of almost a daily occurrence of the wind and the elements and unexpected accidents and remarkable incidents. And this was partly a way for the British Empire, which was during this age of ruthless expansion,
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
These documents provided a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of what the world was like, what these uncharted seas were like. All this was being fueled back to the empire for further trade and conquest. These documents were also very important documents.
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Because if anything happened on a ship, let's say there was a mutiny or a shipwreck or something went wrong, they would become entered into evidence at a court-martial, and officers were instructed not to alter them or to edit them because it raised suspicions.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
And some of the logbooks of the wager survived the wreck, and you actually got to read them. What was that like?
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Oh, yeah. I mean, it's hard to fathom how some of these documents survived typhoons and the tidal waves and the shipwreck and made it back. And you can hold these incredibly brittle documents from the 18th century. You know, you open them up in a box and you pull them out. You know, dust just blows out of them. The covers are almost disintegrating.
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But they are a wealth of information and let you to really meticulously reconstruct this expedition from day to day. There are muster books, there are log books, there are journals, and much more.
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There was murder and cannibalism, and the captain lost the respect of his crew, especially after killing one of the sailors by shooting him. Eventually, the majority of the men mutinied and sailed away on a makeshift craft, leaving behind their captain and a small band loyal to him. They sailed nearly 3,000 miles to rescue in Brazil, but only 29 of the 81 survived the journey.
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A Story Of Shipwreck, Mutiny And Murder
So, David, there's two important characters in your book that will become like the opposing poles in the mutiny. One is the captain, David Cheap, and he actually starts this journey to South America as a second in command of a different boat. But he's promoted to captain of the wager after its captain dies. Give us a little sense of him.
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Yeah, so Captain Cheap was somebody who on land was plagued by debts and chased by creditors, but he had always found refuge on the regimented, you know, wooden world of a ship. And on this voyage, he had finally obtained what he had always longed for. It was his deep ambition, which was to be captain of his own warship and to have a chance to possibly capture a lucrative prize. Wow.