Episode 44
Episode 44 Jeremy Kagan - Movies Making Change, ACT 2
In our second episode featuring Jeremy Kagan, we discuss 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.
BIO
Jeremy Kagan is a director/writer/producer of feature films and television. His credits include the box-office hits Heroes (1977), The Big Fix (1978) and The Chosen (1981). His The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) was the first US film to win a Gold Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. Other directing credits include Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 (1987) (winning the ACE Award for Best Dramatic Special) and Roswell (1994), which he produced and directed and which was nominated for a Golden Globe. In 1996, his episode of Chicago Hope (1994) won him an Emmy for Outstanding Direction of a Dramatic Series. One of his segments of Picket Fences (1992) was listed by TV critics among the top 100 television episodes. His recent work includes en episode of Steven Spielberg's Emmy-winning anthology _"Taken" (2002/I) (mini)_ and numerous episodes of such hit series as The West Wing (1999) and The Guardian (2001).
His Bobbie's Girl (2002) was the highest rated film on Showtime 2003 and his movie Crown Heights (2004), which he produced and directed, won the Humanitas Award for "affirming the dignity" of every person and was nominated for a Directors Guild Award in 2004. Mr. Kagan is a graduate of Harvard University, where he wrote his thesis on Sergei M. Eisenstein, has a Masters from NYU and was in the first group of Fellows at the American Film Institute. He is a tenured full professor at USC, where he is in charge of the directing track, and has served as the Artistic Director of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. He is on the National Board of the Directors Guild and is Chairperson of its Special Projects Committee and author of the book "Directors Close Up" and was presented the 2004 Robert Aldrich Award for "extraordinary service to the guild.”
Notable Mentions:
Crown Heights, Movie: (Story) After the Crown Heights riots, an orthodox Rabbi and a community activist help two youths--one a Hasidic Jew, the other African-American--form a hip-hop group to heal their neighborhood.
Gavin Cato: Riots between Crown Heights’ Jewish and black communities erupted on Aug. 19, 1991 after two black children were hit by a station wagon that was part of a motorcade for a Jewish rabbi. Gavin Cato, 7, died instantly, and his 7-year-old cousin, Angela Cato, was severely injured.
Aaron Zigman: is an award-winning composer who has scored more than 60 major Hollywood films and influenced other musicians and songwriters. His deep classical roots combined with his background in writing and producing songs for many of music's greatest performers (Aretha Franklin, John Legend, Christina Aguilera, Phil Collins, Seal, Natalie Cole and more) Dr. Last, the Cure,
Charlie Chaplin: was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered one of the film industry's most important figures. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian Era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.
David Orr. is an environmental studies and politics professor. He is a well known environmentalist and is active in many areas of environmental studies, including environmental education and ecological design. He has been a trustee of many organizations and foundations including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.[1]
National Institutes of Health: A part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world.
USC Change-making Media Lab: The mission of The Change Making Media Lab (CMML) is to foster positive social and environmental change by producing strategic high-impact cinema, television, multi-media visual imagery to inspire individuals, organizations, and communities into action. CMML also promotes research on effective media techniques and helping engaged community members leverage the power of the cinematic arts to achieve health, sustainability, and social justice. The Change-Making Media Center, is a newly established addition to USC’s change making media program.
Story Center creates spaces for listening to and sharing stories, to help build a just and healthy world. Our public and custom workshops provide individuals and organizations with skills and tools that support self-expression, creative practice, and community building.
Playback Theater: is an original form of improvisational theatre in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot
Art in Other Places grew out of a 1986 meeting held at the University of California at Los Angeles among artists and community activists from around the United States. At that point, some of them had been working for twenty or more years as artists in social institutions — senior centers, hospitals, prisons, mental health facilities, youth centers — or in low-income communities. Author William Cleveland writes of that gathering's importance to him (then director of the ArtReach Program in Sacramento, California) in building a “...small network of like-minded artists, whose work has had a major impact on cultural policy and practice in this country.”
Geese Theater for Corrections, Geese Theater Company: A continually developing portfolio of performances and projects designed to explore key issues, including attitudes, thinking and behaviour, children and families, substance misuse, employability and resettlement
Rashomon is a 1950 Jidaigeki psychological thriller/crime film directed by Akira Kurosawa, working in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.[2] Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, and Takashi Shimura as various people who describe how a samurai was murdered in a forest. The film is known for a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, alternative and contradictory versions of the same incident.
Transcript
Jeremy Kagan Act 2
Crown Heights Sound Track
The accident was not handled properly.
Outside agitators came into the, to the community in Crown Heights and caused a lot of trouble.
It takes what a match, when you got that much gas for the blow up.
Part Three: The Matter of Trust
[:The film is based on the real life story of two young men, TJ Moses and Udi Simon, from opposite sides of the conflict who found common ground through their love of hip hop and worked together to use their mutual passion, to diffuse tensions on the street. The movie reminded me of how often art-making shows up as both a trust bridge, and a translator, not only on the battlefronts, but as a vehicle for telling the hardest, most unsettling stories. I wanted to hear more from Jeremy about how he uses his art to navigate issues like trust and believability in his films
BC: One of the things I wanted to ask has to do with that open ending, and, one of the biggest issues, at least in my work has always been trust. We probably think about trust as an interpersonal, condition in real life, but in fact anytime anybody sits through a movie, particularly if the movie is effecting, you have actually trusted the storyteller with your heart, your mind, your endocrine system. You're in a powerful, force field there.
So in your movie, Crown Heights, which, is set around the time that riots erupted in that New York neighborhood between blacks and Jews in the early nineties, you make really powerful use of some of those story tools you mentioned earlier, particularly at the end.
Number one is the open end, which is, there is no easy answer to what's happening in this film. In fact, if you went, the easy way you would have lost your audience, because everybody understands that story is still with us big time. The conflict between, one side and the other side of those subway tracks. But that last scene where the art of the dance, where you have, two young men actually transcending their cultural difference through a common culture, which is amazing, and then that extraordinary song that concludes the film. Could you just talk about that? Cause it seems like you tapped into something maybe serendipitously that, almost eclipsed the entire movie. It was so powerful.
[:[When] I met Aaron, and I said, can you write me a piece of music like that? He comes over to my house, and it was about a week before we're starting to shoot, and we put the CD on by the time it's done I’m weeping, and, I turned to him and said, “I think you've made something spectacular, and given me a challenge, because I don't think I can make a movie as good as your music. I don't think I can do it”.
Now what was interesting was for me, while we were shooting, we didn't have an end. We were still playing with the boys, they'll be together, and that, although some scene where the boys get together, because at first the boys are separate at the end, and then they'll come together. Maybe he'll arrive just in time for the performance that they, the group, Dr. Last, the Cure, which mixed African American. If I see the boys together, you'll, there'll be the two boys who were telling stories. They'll end up there too, and that'll be our end.
And it would have been a closed ending, it would've been a happy ending, but it just didn't feel right. And I remember sitting where I was living in Anika, my companion, was sitting on a bed and writing something, and she looked up at me and said, “what if they're separated in some way? Maybe you want us to leave town or something like that.” And I thought, “yeah, great idea. We'll use the subway”, which is all through the movie. And I'll use that as a metaphor and there, they will be on opposite side of the tracks.
They are no longer friends at this moment. They're no longer connected, and who knows whether they ever will be. And when they see each other at first, they don't acknowledge, then they do acknowledge, cross the tracks. And then they do this dance number that they done, and everybody’s looking around at these two guys and they're in sync because they remember the dance number. The train comes by, one of them’s gone and the music starts.
Crown Heights Sound Track
It won the Emmy for best music for a movie that particular year. And here's the thing. I often say to my students that all art aspires to the state of music, I’m quoting somebody. And when you really think about what that means is, it means that music transcends the limits of the mind's judgment, and goes right to, if you will, the beat of the blood and the beat of the heart. It just does that. Now there's smart music, and great hip hop lyrics, and, Bach is an intellectual if you think about, and there's no question about that. But great music, goes beyond the word. It goes deeper on some kind of almost physical, emotional level.
And so in a way, and then you think about this too, by the way, if you think about, silent movies. Now not someone movies that we now see that has music tracks, but if you turn down the music track, and I actually looked at the silent movie, you would realize in many ways it's got a rhythm to it in terms of the motion inside the frame, in terms of the way there cuts between, moments in a scene, it's got a whole feeling that is a kind of musical field.
Charlie Chaplin once said, when sound came in, he said it was too bad. And he made some really wonderful sound movies, but he said “because we were just getting it right”. And in many ways for reflective, and he was obviously a composer as well of the musical nature of cinema. Not the music that's in cinema, I’m not talking about that. I'm talking about the very kind of visual music that's ensued. And I feel that that’s something that we need to be aware of. One of my teachers, Frank Danielle, who actually got to meet to become a teacher, he made his writing students study symphonies. He made… you now have to listen to, a Mahler second or Beethoven's
[:[00:48:45] JK: It seems they get repeated and develop, and there's great tension and a high in the story, and then there's times when it comes down and then rises up and picks up.
[:[00:49:13] JK: I want to go with something back to something that you said about trust. Two things I do say to my students is, “you're not only directing your actors and your crew, but you're also directing the audience”. What you do show, or don't show is directed to the audience, and then the sensors trust. But, what I do say is that “you need with the people that you work with to build a trust”.
This is particularly between directors and actors, because an actor is essentially exposing themselves. They're naked, whether literally or not in front of a camera, they are exposing themselves, and they can get judged. The only one who actually is helping them is in fact, you the director. And the fact that one of the famous theater director used to say “director is and the audience of one”. The issue here being that if there's trust between the director with the actor, so I am giving you ‘permission’ to do whatever you're going to do, and the actor is trusting you in the sense that if I do something that is inappropriate, even though it just flows out of me, you'll know that's not what we want to both do together, and you'll say “saw it, but let's do something else”.
It’s the trust, and when that trust is going, it's thrilling because you're going into unknown territory, both of you, and yet you're going in there knowing that you, if you ‘got each other's backs”. So that issue of trust is really important in terms of establishing that, and that's very exciting.
Part Four: Harmony. Hyper-Local, and the Distance of the Machine
[:Fear is a really powerful strategy to get people to do just about anything. But the other is, that trust takes practice. I have no doubt in my mind that when all the king's horses, and all the king's men come on a movie set, and it's a new ensemble. New actors, new technicians. There’s a shakedown somewhere in there that will determine in many cases, the success or failure of your partnership, because if there's a sense of chaos, or that somebody doesn't know what they're doing, or that they're not to be trusted, then they’re not going to be able to deliver.
I guess what I'm asking is, and I, I ask this a lot of people involved in the creative process, “what can the creative processes that require trust, teach a society that needs to practice trust?”
[:That family there's a trust level. Can you do the job that you said you would do. You're here because you're the sound person. You committed to being able to get the sound in this particular situation, so you delivered on what you said you could do, but you delivered it in community.
I think one of the things that's happened is we've had a disillusion, and I’m not talking about COVID… We've had a disillusion of community, and we think we've established community through social media, or through whatever we do in the watching on television news. We think that's our community. But it's not, because there is literally the distance of the machines.
But when you're in a group where you're, I don't know outside, and you're all talking about moving the problem on the street, that these trees are falling and how are they going to be taken down or saved or whatever it is. And here, all your neighbors are together now as a neighborhood, and you're in a community, literally having that physical presence. And when you enter a movie set, the physical presence, that's the possibility where trust can be built. And I think the example of getting together to do something like a movie, solve a problem in your neighborhood, and getting together to do that on local small issues and small groups, you begin to establish a trust.
I want to emphasize this issue of local community, because I believe that's going to be our solutions to almost all of the issues we're facing, from political to the global, is going to be communities that really trust each other, and feel compassionate toward each other, and are open towards each other.
[:[00:54:27] JK: I talked to, um, David Orr. David Orr is one of the leaders in the issue of sustainability, and has been for thirty five years. We were just about to try to get USC, this giant institution with 50,000 people in Los Angeles and biggest employer in LA, which a very unsustainable institution. It doesn't have solar, there’s waste problems, facility problems, all the rest, and we wanted to really change it. And I said, “David you did this in Oberlin College.” Which is famous for, and the whole city of Oberlin, small little town, but started emulating what the university was doing, because the university builds number of buildings that are totally sustainable buildings. Water, everything, the whole thing, solar, electricity, sustainable. How'd you do it.?
David said two things. He said “one, get to know who’s the power, and somebody will always know somebody who's in power”, but to an equally important, get to know each other”. “What do you mean?” “Get to know each other, have a party.” “I can’t”. “What are you talking about?” “Those people who are interested in making change in your space, get together, hang out, and and get to know each other”. He said “do that, when you get to know each other and exchange, and find out while you're doing what you're doing, whatever it is, then you can go advance an agenda, because you will build the community, and you will build, as you just said the trust”. Wow.
[:[00:56:02] JK: And that's, exactly what we did. We got a bunch of 20 people together, and had wine, and cheese, and all the rest, and talked to them, bam. And now there's 500 people, and the university is all the way to becoming an incredible sustainable place. It's taken four or five years, but it started that way.
The other thing though I want to talk about is love and fear. I once met this guru, brilliant, brilliant guy, and I asked him, “what's the difference between love and fear?” And he went like this. He said, “fear is love upside down”. Now I didn't understand it at all what he meant. It took me days to even recycle it through. But I do understand that some way, if you do not feel you're in community. If you did not have that companionship. The loss of that, which is the loss of love, is the fear meaning they're connected.
And here's something I want to say. When we did this project for the National Institutes of Health, trying to get people to avoid potentially having cancer, to encourage these people to take the PAP tests, initially we were writing scenes that [would say] “of you are doing this, you're going to get cancer”.
The research was done, and this was totally fascinating and totally surprising to me. This was the pre formative research on making these particular short movies. The research was done, is that people are more motivated by love. Now, when I say that, you just don’t think it's true because particularly in the of time, you think, no, no fear is really what's motivating. These people are gonna come and kill us, and I got to get by machine gun. I mean, that's rather than the other side, which is we're all in this together. We're all interconnected. We're all sentient beings. Every one of us, from the elephant, to the back whale, to us, to the people who politically don't agree with us. They want to be happy too. They want to be healthy too. Bottom line, we're all have the same watch.
Dalai Lama makes it very simple. He says everybody wants to be happy. Okay. I don't know what happened. We all still have the same essential needs and wants, which makes us similar, which makes us also possibly have to appreciate each other, which makes us possible to realize that we're surrounded and included, which is where love is, and that possibly is going to motivate us.
So we shifted our storytelling where the idea was, if you didn't do this, and could get sick, you would lose the connections of the people that you love. You wouldn't be around for them.
[:And here's the scene from that film when the grandmother and her adult daughter finally arrive at the local clinic.
[:[00:59:00] Daughter: But you agreed. .
[:[00:59:04] Daughter: Come on, I'm not going in there without you. No, noon.
[:[00:59:21] Daughter: No Petra, you are my best comadre. If something were to happen to you.
[:[00:59:33] Daughter: Petra, you're only 55 years old. That's young, God made doctors so that we can live healthy lives. And remember, you're not here just for you. You're here for your Familia.
[:[01:02:22] BC: There's a brain science lesson, and that is that fear is the lizard brain, and love is the prefrontal cortex where the empathy lives. And, unfortunately the direct wiring to the lizard brain is much faster.
There's an amazing movie I have in my head, which is the first miracle was a group of humans, maybe Neanderthals, and they made a mistaken harmony, and in their voices and they listened to it and they repeated it. And so pre-language, they understood that they could capture the attention of the tribe in a powerful way by creating something beautiful that touched the heart and the head at the same time.
[:[01:01:32] BC: You know, A moment ago, you said you felt that our proximate communities, our neighborhoods, our barrios, our villages are key to us rediscovering common ground in this country. I’m completely on board with this idea that hyper-local is not on the periphery, it’s actually at the center of at least my theory of change, and that's largely because all those things we talked about. Trust, authenticity, harmony, real life experience, being accountable. Once you get beyond a certain scale, those things really become hard to practice, and humans need to practice these things if we're going to manifest them in the world, in our institutions, in our policies and our ideas, and particularly in our relationships with each other.
So the question is this. In the Change-making Media Lab, are there conversations about how do we create hyper-local, storytelling environments, whether it's using media or other ways, in which the stories we're generating, the relationships we're building, even the decisions we're making actually become part of the fabric of our neighborhood or, the small section of the city that we occupy.
[:So there is an effort…The difficulty is the nature of strangely enough, it really is the nature of cinema, specifically because barriers the distance. We can create the community to make something, and then once it's made it's out there, and the question becomes what kind of dialogue can you have, because that's what community is, with cinematic creations. And I think we're all still struggling with that is that. You can watch something on YouTube, and then the commentary on YouTube, until there is some kind of dialogue.
I must say that one of the things has been a gift of the isolation has been Zoom, because there is also the possibility of dialoguing that way as well. So that you've got 5,200 people altogether, also being able to participate in some way in the conversation.
So I think we're all experimenting with a way to have the direct communication that in-person is somehow communicated in the indirect way that any kind of cinematic form has. I don’t think any of us found an answer to this, but we're all- I think where that it is important, and in fact, one of the things that, for example, we're doing, as I said, another one of these pieces right now on encouraging parents to get their kids vaccinated. One of the parts of the work that's going to be done is the follow-up. Once this piece is done, it's going to be taken to various communities, and questions are going to be asked. The sociologists and communications experts are going to research what's working and what isn’t.
[:[01:05:11] JK: That's really important for us to continue to learn. For example, in the LatinX piece that we were just talking about, which was encouraging LatinX community to take an exam, all of the characters are women. It was shown to a group of LatinX men, who had a kind of, “oh yeah it's women's problem”. We were all shocked, because we didn't realize that's an issue we have to deal with. So the one we're doing right now, it’s mixed gender, so it's going to be a different kind of experience, because we were learning
[:[01:05:47] JK: …how to communicate.
[:[01:06:31] JK: I wanted to share with you, and I'm looking for, this, ‘cause it's a theater group that you may already know. It's called Playback Theater.
[:[01:06:42] JK: Yeah. Do you know it?
[:[01:06:47] JK: Yeah, yeah. The guy who founded it is, a relative of mine.
[:[01:06:54] JK: It's an international movement. It’s similar in a way to what you were saying, but it's theater, it's not cinema. But the concept is, you come as a member of the audience, and you tell a story, and there are actors who are trained to be able to become right away the characters in your story. Your mother, your brother, your uncle, whoever it is, the boss, and you in a sense, ‘direct it’ as they're doing whatever they're doing. You may say no, but now she goes over here, but the kind of cathartic experience for the ‘storyteller’, as well as for the people in the room is pretty magical.
[:Now the family visit is often the most critical and dramatic moment in a prisoner's life and more often than not, they go bad. They go poorly, for obvious reasons because of the issues at hand, and at the fact that nobody's in control of anything when it comes to that moment in their life. But often the prisoner, the incarcerated person loses it, and so there's two wounds. One of them is, I'm missing my loved ones. They came to visit me. I made the visit terrible because I lost it. And so in the playback part of it, you have an audience of, if you can imagine 150-200 prisoners, and they freeze the action, and they turn around and say, okay, what's about to happen here? And then they say, how can we avoid this? ‘Cause you know, what's at stake, and it is unbelievably powerful.
[:[01:08:59] BC: Oh my God. Yes.
[:[01:09:07] BC: Magical and powerful, especially for the incarcerated men and women and their families, who are caught up in that situation every day and prisons all across the country.
So Jeremy, I just like to say this conversation has sparked a bit of magic for me. I really appreciate your taking the time to share some of your stories.
[:[01:09:27] BC: I hope so.
And I'd also like to thank our listeners as well and remind you that we don't really exist in the world without your participation. Not only with your ears, but also as subscribers, which you can become by clicking on the subscribe button on your podcast app, and sharing us with your friends and colleagues.
I'd also like to remind those of you who are involved in some kind of training or advocacy, in supportive community arts or creative placemaking in your organization or community, our catalog of episodes is now available as a cross-reference collection. You can use this Change the Story Collection to share stories of how arts based tools and strategies can help communities move the crowd and change the story around such issues as education, public safety, health care, climate change, and others. Check the collection out at artandcommunity.com/podcast. We'll also include a link to the collection in our show notes.
Change the Story, Change the World is a production of The Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape are created by the incomparable Judy Munson, and our senior editor is Andre Nnebe. Our special effects are from freesound.com, and our inspiration rises up from the mysterious UKE 235. So for now, please stay well, do good and spread the good word.
Adios
