Episode 43: Jeremy Kagan: Movies Making Change

The code sets up highest standards of performance, far motion picture. It states the considerations, which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal farm of entertainment, respect for law, respect for every religion, respect for every race and respect for every nation.

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BC: That was William H. Hays, president of the motion picture, Producers and Distributers of America, describing the motion picture production code, also known as ‘The Hays Code’.

In: 1933

In: 2005

The result of their collaboration is a series of ten short films called The Freedom Files, that address such issues as the Patriot Act. free speech, voting rights, the drug wars, racial profiling, LGBTQ rights, and much, much more. Here's an audio excerpt from the Freedom Files trailer.

Here I am doing a peaceful protest, and I get deprived of my freedom.

The right of free speech is enshrined in the very first amendment.

The one officer said, sir, you’ll have to go inside into the free speech zone.

That's a contradiction in terms, the whole country is a free speech zone.

So we were let out in handcuffs, ironically, as America beautiful was playing on the left road.

That's just stupid.

I turned around to run, and that's when I got shot. My life is not going to be the same.

It's more important now that we continue to stand up for our rights. If we don't, we're going to lose them.

Since then, Jeremy has continued his work, not only as a director writer and producer, but also as a tenured professor of film at USC, where he founded the USC Change-making Media Lab. In our conversations over the next two episodes. We'll hear about how his continuing work in film, television, and teaching have melded together, in a role Jeremy describes as that of an archivist.

This is Change the Story, Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland

Part One: The Imagination Business.

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[00:03:40] JK: You know what, it's interesting as you said that, because a number of cultural theorists have said the one thing that distinguishes us is specifically stories. The ability to recreate the past, and recreate a future.

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[00:04:19] JK: I was just reading an article that was, by associated sociologists and communications theorists, making the point—and this is something I've been studying and running through my change banking media lab—is the idea that when you get involved in a story, and involved with characters… when that happens, the possibility of your resistance to the message becomes diminished, because you are on the journey of the character. Miguel Sabido, I don't know if you know who he is,

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[00:04:49] JK: You got it, and this is the work that I've been really committed to for the last 30 years. I even got to spend time with him in Mexico City, was that if you created three characters in the drama, one character that was, for the particular issue that you're advocating, one character that was opposed to it, and one character that was ‘undecided’. You have the possibility of not only shifting awareness, but since potentially changing behavior.

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[00:06:09] JK: Yep. And it's interesting about the issue of repetition because of both men you just talked about, and the repetition of a story. And Gerbels famous line, you keep repeating a lie people start to believe it, the story they start to believe it.

There's some great examples of how a story gets twisted into something that we now believe in. Years ago, I was asked by Shelly Duvall, to participate in a series that she was doing called fairytale theater. [It was] a very inventive series. She got some fabulous, obvious actors whom she knew, and good directors and writers to make these things, and I was asked to do a version of Sleeping Beauty that had Christopher Reeves, and Bernadette Peters, and I reflected it as a Russian tale. But when I did the research about it, the original Sleeping Beauty is nothing like the one that you’ll-

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[00:07:00] JK: Charles Perrault who was this a French, a mythologist storyteller. He took this story, which had among other things by the way, when the prince found her asleep in the original stories, much like the dark rim story, he raped her her asleep. She birth, and one of the children, because there are twins stuck that little needle that stuck, that put her to sleep, and that's how she woke up. Prince felt very guilty in return. This was part of the story, not the magical kiss of the prince and she revived. So, it's an interesting process of a story gets repeated, and repeated, and then you feel like, ‘oh that’s the story. And it's also fascinating about the issue of…I think just as I'm telling this part of the story needs to have you go into a dark place, to come out of that, which is all our lives. If the story is just positive and fanciful, I don't think it has much of effect.

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[00:08:54] JK: Oh, wow. Fabulous.

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So let me veer back onto the freeway here. What I'm most interested in, is given all of the different versions of the way in which your life journey have manifested is how do you, describe your work in the world?

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My father in particular was a reform rabbi, and a psychotherapist, and in the early sixties, he went down with any other clergymen to the south to deal with civil rights. That was what I grew up with, and I also grew up with an attitude about this particular culture and religion that I changed. And it was an attitude that you were, to be responsible, not just for yourself or for others around you. And in fact, even for the planet. You are a caretaker. That’s who you are as a human being, and there's a wonderful tale that is actually almost 3000 years old Torah. When your enemy’s donkey falls over because it's too late and over with, it is your responsibility to go help the animal and the enemy. Now you grow up with this kind of idea and you're suddenly saying, “We’re not all that different, we're all connected in one way. We're all related, and our responsibility is to provide for others as best we can”, and that's how I grew up. So it wasn't so much, I made that choice, as I continue.

That's one aspect, but the other aspect is it's a bit more metaphysical. I look at the work that I've done over the years and oftentimes I feel like the work, or the opportunities chose me.

Now, the fact is that when that door was open, I did step in. But I didn't open the door or even create the door. That was true with many of my films that were political. Although initially as my career was beginning, one of the early pieces I did was a piece called Catherine, which was essentially the biography of a revolutionary, loosely based on Diana Oughton, who was part of what was known as the weather underground, which was a radical movement that had finally gotten to the point saying “the only way we're gonna change American society, which is so oppressive, and is in wars that are so destructive, like the Vietnamese War was to actually have a revolution”.

So we've watched the evolution of this particular character. That movie got a lot of attention, and it established me to some degree, because I wrote it, as well as directed, and it was a television movie major ABC. But it established me within the world of entertainment as, ‘oh, this guy's concerned with these kinds of political issues.’ So opportunities then came. One of them was to make a movie, which I did for HBO when it first started called Conspiracy: The Trial: the Chicago Eight. Not seven, by the way. Eight

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[00:13:09] JK: And in fact, all of those people were alive when I made my movie, and they were all part of it because I made a movie that integrated the real people with actors playing them, with all the documentary footage.

Conspiracy Audio

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[00:15:11] BC: This clip from the film was the tumultuous moment in the trail, when Bobby Seale was jailed, and his case was severed by Judge Hoffman’s contempt citation. The last voice you heard there was the real Abbie Hoffman describing what went down.

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Now it's a fascinating issue. there's a word in,Yiddish Hebrew called “bashert” and it means like destiny, and the concept, there's somebody, who's your bashert here. There's some other person out there who's your soulmate. I'm finding it very much in terms of someone saying, what you were doing with this movie, The Big Fix, which is also a political movie. My second feature with Richard Dreyfuss. My first feature was all about an American soldier coming back from Vietnam, with Sally Field, Henry Winkler, Harrison Ford.

So these, […] I get call saying, “would you do a series of 10 half-hour movies for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) out of nowhere, and I said, sure, and then proceeded to make these 10 movies over a year that, and they dealt with things like voting rights, and women's rights, and the scent, and the Patriot Act at the time, which was a big deal. But one of the things I said to the ACLU people… I said “look, I don't want just to be some of the documentary with the stories of people, but I want to open up each of these ten with a dramatic scene, for two minutes, three minutes. So, for example, when we were dealing with racial issues, I had a scene in a little store, and an African-American guy comes in, and there's a guard, the story's very suspicious, and we see a girl, a white girl in this case, actually steal something. She gets out of the store, the African-American guy is leaving at the same time and is accused immediately, which he didn't do. And we saw it, the point of the story was this kind of racial discrimination that we do almost immediately, but It was more effective to see it as a dramatic scene, and then getting to the cases, the stories, what happened to people but always starting with this narrative.

Part Two: Facts Inform, Stories Transform

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[00:17:56] JK: Two things I learned from it. One is I learned that facts inform what stories transform. But the other thing I learned, which was interesting in its research, was the one thing that motivated both sides of the political space at the time, anyway, this is at least 12 years ago when we made these, was the issue of fairness

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[00:18:25] JK: And it was fascinating to hear this, because it shifted the way we worked. And a number of years later when I founded this change-making media center, and a media lab, it was a really interesting experiment. We've got a post by the National Institute of Health to compare a drama to informational documentary, about the exact same subject, with the exact same facts, aimed at motivating behavior change and seeing which would be more successful. This was specifically about motivating at-risk women to take PAP tests, to avoid cervical cancer.

So I hired I was a Josefina Lopez, Real Women Have Curves, to write the dramatic piece. I did photographic and informational documentary, a really good one. And then I directed what she did, which was very funny scenes with a family, three generations of women in a kitchen in the early part of the piece, they were only 12 minutes long, preparing for a quinceañera celebration of a 15 year old girl. Very funny, she wrote a really terrific theme and then the actors were wonderful.

Here's the point. Then the sociologists and communication experts took these two pieces; the documentary informational and the dramatic story, which was funny and dramatic, and they showed it to hundreds and hundreds of women to see if the women would be motivated to go then take the PAP test, and statistically, almost 10% more—which is incredible in terms of metrics—who saw the drama were motivated to take the test and actually did take the test. And then in all kinds of scientific journals, they began to write about this over the last number of years that often times if you want to influence people's awareness, or potentially change their behavior, a good story may very well do that. And literally, we just got hired to do, for what's called Vaccinate LA, two pieces, one for the Latin X community, one for the African-American community. I got my graduate students to do this, and to write it, to produce it, and direct it. I supervise, so they have somebody to lean against if they needed help, and they did a great job. and it was stories. it's not, go out there And take the thing. or you're going to get sick or document. It was literally stories.

One was about a grandma's birthday party. Another one was about two girls arguing about this in a church, and then going to visit actually also grandma, and one of them not being able to go inside and hunt the grandma because she's not been vaccinated.

We just got to asked, literally we're starting pre-production right now to do one, to encourage kids to get vaccinated, but it's also going to be through a narrative story because as I said, The facts do inform us, but stories transform us.

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[00:21:54] JK: First of all, I'm very impressed with these students. I supervise them, but they came up with a story and they came up with a delivery. I've been in education for long time, and I feel like this is also part of the artivism to inspire new filmmakers who want to tell socially relevant material that might make a difference. And it's interesting because we teach a class at the school of cinematic arts at USC, where I'm a professor, we teach a class called the Media for Social Change. And what's been fascinating is we would have, four, five, six graduate students take it to that on four or five years ago. And now we're getting 20 people, and to see the shift in terms of people who now say, “this is the way I want to use my skills”, that's really I think exciting, because we live in a time where we all are in this same boat, and we all need to use any skill we have to keep it afloat.

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[00:23:31] JK: I think there are a couple of things. One is have a passion for the issue, so that you really care deeply. It may be more personal because of your own experience, or because of your awareness of other people's experience, but have a passion to want to deal with it. That means, in a way that you can’t not do it, you have to do it, and I think that's really important because the challenges of making films are that they're really difficult, with five minute films or giant films. It's not easy, and it takes enormous focus and concentration.

So one of the issues that I want to make sure is that if you're going to do this, you have a passion for it. And then the other really has to do with learning the craft, because there are ways of storytelling, and methodologies and storytelling that are learnable. You can learn how to craft a tale, both in terms of the writing of it, as well as if your director of execution and the quote illustration of it.

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[00:24:50] JK: For example, one of the things that we emphasize, particularly in this kind of work where an artivism, is there are really two primary, emotional, psychological areas that you want to address in the storytelling and to get your audience excited to potentially be aware of something, and maybe even take some action. One is the issue of distress. Now what's interesting is that some psychologists have been doing some work, a guy named Zak it was a psychologist. There’s some real serious, brain study of how people respond to certain kinds of stories, and what he was learning where these two things. If there was distressed experience, the actual biochemistry of us, the cortisol, which is in our brains gets activated. In other words, we're really now feeling the distress of the story or the characters in it in particular.

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[00:25:48] JK: That's where, but again, I'm emphasizing this word distress where we're like, oh my goodness, this is dangerous. The other one though, is where we're feeling it has to do with our, oxytocin level, which is, also biochemistry what has to do with caring, and empathy, and compassion. That's also part of our brain.

So if you were able to, in your story, get us to be compassionately caring about a character or characters, and also feel the distress that they're under, you are going to motivate us to be not only concerned while we're watching this thing, but if it says we need to do something, then we're motivated to potentially do that. So knowing that these two aspects of our story, that you're going to tell this aspect of distress, and this aspect of care or empathy, can I get those in this story? Can I do that? Both in terms of what you've written as a story, and then of course, how you make it, which means who you cast, how you shoot it, how you put it together.

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[00:27:23] JK: The other thing I want to mention is also in these kinds of stories, which is fascinating because the research is still out there undecided, is how you end your story. Do you solve the problem? Oh my goodness, it's just terrible. There's this disease that has happened and taken over and somebody discovers the cure and it's all over, and we've got a happy ending.

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[00:27:38] JK: Well that’s the closed ending, and you feel really good. There's also what we call the open ending, where the crisis is up there, and you don't really know how it's going to resolve, so you've got something to do, potentially yourself if you identified with these characters in this issue and you realize it ain't solved.

I feel the distress of the issue. I identified and cared about these characters in it. For example, in those two pieces, by the way, and these two short ones in the one that's the Latinx piece, the girl has rejected the idea, “I don't need to take vaccines, and if I get the COVID I survive”, all the reasons we know, whether they're real of false the girl at the end is confronted, what do I do?

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So here's that scene from the English version of that episode. Uh, which was called reasons and rumors in it. Two granddaughters visit their tia and abuela. One has been vaccinated, the other has not. Earlier, they had been arguing about vaccination facts, and vaccination rumors, and what it means to get the jab. The moment of truth is when abuela reaches to hug her un-vaccinated granddaughter and she pulls back.

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[00:29:20] Granddaughter: Oh, I want to more than anything, but I haven't been vaccinated.

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[00:29:40] Other Granddaughter: Come on. The choice is yours. .

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So these are things that we're learning experiment, as you said, in the terms of teaching. And also because there's no ‘one way to do this’, but these things all are tools that you can use in the process of telling your story cinematically.

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Why don't we have a listen to what granny had to say in that scene?

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[00:31:42] Daughter: Look, it doesn't matter. Melanie, don't worry. I'm bringing her down to the clinic tomorrow.

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[00:31:54] Daughter: The only negative energy around here is you. And I'm going to say this one good time. Don't bring that mess around my mom.

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[00:32:21] Grannie: Oh, you all shut up. I already got the vaccine.

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[00:32:24] Grannie: Course I did. Do you really think I would have everyone at my house and not be vaccinated? Shoot, I was first in line. . Now, stop all this arguing. Come on, let’s eat some cake.

You getting your vaccine tomorrow? Yes.

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[00:32:52] BC: So one of the biggest issues that I deal with in my teaching is, we live in a culture that emphasizes the entertainment side of all this, and in doing so, actually what I would call is the trivialization of culture. Which is that if it's entertaining, it's actually not a core element of what we're up to here. It's a side deal, it's an orderve, it's an extra. And, because I really cut my teeth inside the California Department of Corrections, using art with incarcerated men and women, they taught me very early on that I was working with something powerful, and also had an immense level of responsibility attached to its practice, and that you could do as much harm as you could good by wielding this power. And of course, this is the same power that the pre-art artist was wielding around the ritual fire 30,000 years ago, in prehistory.

So my question to you is that as you are teaching the craft of your work, giving people access to tools and skills that actually exponentially increase the power, is there a place where you deal with the moral and ethical dimensions of the work, because guess what folks, this isn't a piece of candy, it’s a piece of uranium. It's very powerful. How do you, how do you deal with that

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I want to deal with the issue of the word entertainment, because the word itself like in a way, if you derive it from the Latin really means to ‘hold attention’.

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[00:34:55] JK: So if you think about that, if you have a message, then you really want people to understand that the global warming is absolutely real, I'm going to have to hold your attention in terms of however I communicate this. If I bore you by un-entertaining you, by railing you, or lecturing you, or over-facting you, or whatever it is, you're not going to be motivated, because I didn't hold your attention. I didn't entertain you. And if you think about some of the best comics of the last 30 years, who have been extremely political, because they're really good storytellers, and they do entertain us… They hold our attention and in the process potentially change our awareness.

Then the other thing that I have to add, I've been thinking about this a lot more recently is the issue of escapism. On the one side for me, I didn't become a filmmaker in order to purely provide entertaining escapism. Does that mean I don't like a good comedy that I'm laughing at, that doesn't seem to have any political nature? No, of course I do, and I really do get particularly under crisis times, which we're living in to actually, be ‘entertained’, is in terms of escaping the crisis is something that I understand, and I accept. Because I think some of those storytellers around the fire were getting the people who were afraid of the animals that might attack them at night, their minds were driven to another space, by the story that got told. Obviously you can tell a story that has a real motivation for social and progressive change, and tell it very entertainingly, and then get your audience to be involved.

You think about, I'm just thinking there's the one that comes to mind right away is Chernobyl from about a year or two year ago. This was an amazing piece of work that is about the dangers of nuclear energy, the dangers of corruption within a profit oriented [institutions], in this case even Russia in a profit oriented institutions, the bureaucracies of them, the lacking trust in science. This is all their messages, their full, and that famous line. If you want to say, “send a message, send a telegram”. Listen, every movie has a message. Even when you think it doesn't have a message.

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[00:37:33] JK: It has a point of view, which is one of the reasons why we want our students to understand, even if they're going to [say] “I want to make escapist, horror movies”, that’s what I want to do. Okay, be responsible for what you're doing now. It really is an issue, that we are, as teachers of the next generations of filmmakers, taking very seriously. That's why I say we teach an ethics class as you get in here, so you get conscious.

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This is where we close the first part of our conversation and our next episode. we segue from the question of ethics, to the matter of trust in social impact art-making, and in the community writ large, particularly these days. We also talk about these issues as they relate to Jeremy's film Crown Heights, which deals with the violence and hatred that erupted between the black and the Orthodox Jewish Hasidic communities in Brooklyn in 1991. So, thanks to all of you for tuning in, and to Jeremy and the USC Change-Making Media Lab for sharing some of those soundtracks

Changed the Story, Change the World is a production of The Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our soundscape and theme are the work of the incomparable Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, our effects. come from freesound.org, and our inspiration rises up from the mysterious UKE 235.

Finally, if you'd like what you're hearing, please join our community by subscribing and sharing what we're up to with your community. Until next episode, which is part two of Jeremy's story, please stay safe, stay well and spread the good word.