Documenting the History of Crime & Punishment in America with Lynn Novick

My guest today has an incredible new documentary coming out this November called Crime and Punishment in America. It's a four-part, 8 hour review of the history of crime and incarceration dating back hundreds of years all the way to today (I was fortunate enough to get a preview). 

Lynn Novick (The Vietnam War, College Behind Bars, The Us and the Holocaust) is the writer and director of this terrific new documentary and she sat down with me to talk about everything from where the idea to cover such an expansive subject came from to what it's like working with such tremendous talent to make history come to life. 

This conversation is a great look into documenting the complexities of the American criminal justice system. Give it a listen and be sure to catch the new film when it comes out in a few months!

Lynn Novick has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture, history, politics, sports, art, architecture, literature, and music for more than 30 years. As director and producer, she has created more than 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Ken Burns, including most recently their six-hour series, The U.S. and The Holocaust, (co-directed and produced by Sarah Botstein) which received the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Award and the Television Academy Honors award. Novick’s films  include The Vietnam War, Ernest Hemingway, Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, and The War --  these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. Novick herself has received DuPont, Emmy and Peabody Awards. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. My guest today walked into a prison classroom in 2012 to show a few scenes from a documentary about prohibition to the incarcerated students. She left with a different project entirely. Lynn Novick has been making documentary films since the mid-1980s, working alongside Ken Byrne since his Civil War series in 1989. She's worked on subjects ranging from baseball to Vietnam to World War II. Her newest film is called Crime and Punishment in America, and it's out this November. The documentary is a four-part, nearly eight-hour series tracing criminal justice in this country from the colonial era to today. And fun fact, yours truly was one of the subject matter experts consulted for the film. In this episode, Lynn and I talk about her years-long exploration into the U.S. prison system, the invention of the penitentiary, the gap between what the data says about crime and punishment and what people actually believe, and what it's like working with so many talented actors who bring history back to life on screen. This is a documentary that's well worth a watch and a story that's worth digging into. So let's get into it. My guest today is Lynn Novick. Lynn, thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Hey Chef, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

I'm so excited to be having this conversation. Um, this is probably the longest time between asking a guest and uh talking to a guest, and then still another few months until the guest's work actually comes out. So I'm I'm super excited to be having this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

It's been wonderful working with you on our project, and we're really excited for our series to see the light of day after many, many years. So I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Just launching in, what what is your background? How did you come to be a filmmaker?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Oh my goodness, wow. Well, I've been working in the world of documentary films since the mid-1980s. A few years after college, I decided I wanted to get involved in historical documentary work, and I didn't actually know what it was involved or what it would take. And so I started off as an intern and then worked my way up to production assistant and associate producer, learning about archival research and um production planning and coordinating and how to do an interview and how to bring all the materials together in post-production. And in 1989, I had the chance to work with Ken Burns when he was finishing up his series on the Civil War. So I started there as an associate producer and worked my way toward becoming a producer and director, and now a writer also on this project that we're about to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

So let's start it. What what is this new project? Do you have a new film coming out? Tell me about it.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Yeah, so our new series is called Crime and Punishment in America. It's a four-part series, almost eight hours long, that tells the story of criminal justice in this country from the colonial time until today.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

And how how did it start? This this has obviously, I think, been a baby of yours for quite a while.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

The stories we choose to tell come to us in different ways. Let's put it that way. And so back in 2012, I was invited to teach a class in a college and prison program in upstate New York. And we were there to present some scenes from a film we made about prohibition to a group of incarcerated students who were enrolled in the BARD Prison Initiative, which is a wonderful program that provides associates and bachelor's degrees to incarcerated men and women. And that was my first time going into a prison. It was my first time really thinking deeply about the carceral system that we have in this country. And I'm a student of history. I've explored many aspects of American life and culture for 30 years, and I really had never focused on the question of why do we have prisons? What are they for? How do they get here? What is criminal justice meant to do? What's it like to be in these places? And that sent me on a journey. First, to make a documentary about the Barred Prison Initiative, which was a four-year project. I made a film with my producing partner Sarah Botstein that came out in 2019, a four-part series about men and women who were earning degrees through this program. And while we were working on College Behind Bars, started thinking very deeply about the fact that I knew nothing about the history that was in front of our faces every day, but we really didn't understand how it got here. And so at that time, Ken Burns and Jeff Ward and I and Sarah Bottstein decided to make a series on the history of crime and punishment in America. And that was in 2014, 2015, a long time ago. We were busy with other projects, things happened, the project evolved. Um, Ken Burns ended up taking on the role of executive producer rather than co-director with me. So I've become the director of this film and also the writer, working with an amazing team of producers and editors to pull the story together. And it germinated for a very long time. And I'm glad of that because this is a very complex story and it took us a while to figure out what was the most important uh thread to pull through.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Can I ask, how do you figure that out? It is so expansive. It's like doing a documentary on math or something like that. Like, did you set out to tell a specific story or how did you learn this first and then figure out what stories to tell?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Well, sometimes it feels like we're flying the airplane while we're building it. And that can be a little terrifying, but also very exhilarating and exciting. The first thing that we do, honestly, is to figure out who the experts are. Because we never can become the experts the way that people have dedicated their lives to a particular topic or have lived experience of it. We can benefit from their knowledge and expertise and perspective. So we started to pull together a board of advisors, a wide mix of people with different kinds of expertise. And we convened meetings with them to talk about well, we want to make a film about the history of crime and punishment in America. What should it contain? What are the big questions we should be trying to answer? And we took a lot of guidance from them in terms of just focusing our attention on the big questions because there is an infinite amount of stories that we could tell. And then over time, put ideas on paper, make outlines and write scripts, and then send them out for comments. And it's very iterative. So the process means that we start out with one idea, and by the time the film is done, it's draft 17, and it has changed a lot. We learn a lot as we're making the film. Most of what's in this film I did not know when we started. So even when we've done a lot of research and are deep into it, we still are discovering new things and putting them in. And that's that's what makes, I think, the process really rewarding and hopefully will feel fresh and exciting, even to people who know this topic pretty well.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Yeah, absolutely. And I was fortunate enough to see a screener and it it absolutely accomplishes that goal. And I felt like the closer it got to the subject area that I feel like I know a lot about, the more engrossed I was in the subject. It like it definitely captured all of that. Um, did you have preconceived notions or this idea of the criminal justice system going into this, or was it more of a blank slate for you?

SPEAKER_00 6:58

I'm sure I did have preconceived notions. Probably the most fundamental one before we really started working on the film was that there's kind of a logic and consistency to a system that exists because it was planned that way. And that, you know, having faith in our forebearers, people who came before us, that they planned something out and, you know, put things in place for a reason. And in exploring the story, it was really interesting to really deeply understand that we have 50 states. Each one has its own system. There's 3,000 counties, each one of them has a system of prosecution. There's jails in every city and town, there's police forces all over the place, thousands of them. And that there is no one system, and there's no one single organizing principle. It's sort of, in a way, a bit of a mess. Whatever problems exist are challenging to fix because you can't do this from the top down. You have to really work state by state, county by county, city by city, jurisdiction by jurisdiction to address whatever issues there are. And I definitely did not fully understand that when we started the project.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

And are there other things, big takeaways, even small takeaways that you you take from this that maybe coming in you had no expectation of learning these things?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Probably the the big aha moment for many of us working on the project was to come to understand that prisons have not always been here in the way that we think of them today. Prisons and penitentiaries were an American invention of the early 19th century, late, late 18th, right after the revolution, basically, that Americans came up with this idea that we should build prisons and penitentiaries as a solution to the problem of crime and a more humane solution than what we were doing previously, which was public executions, whipping, branding, really torturing people in public to shame them and to teach them a lesson and to show everybody else this is what will happen to you if you break the law. And that that seemed to many people inconsistent with the American experiment that we were building, this new country with a new form of government. We needed a better form of punishment.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

So the the film traces like the start of the country through the revolution, the Civil War, the prohibition, and then all the way to today. Was there a a period or a section of American history where you were most sort of enthralled about learning about the criminal justice system?

SPEAKER_00 9:29

That's kind of like saying which is your favorite child.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

I guess I feel it was all I won't say it on here, but you know, we're all no, I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Exactly. We can't say which is our favorite. It was all equally interesting. The closer we got to the present, things seemed more familiar. So it felt like, oh, I I remember events that happened that we put in the film from living through them as a sentient adult. And so it was really interesting to explore events that were in my memory, but look deeper into them and understand the context for why they happened the way that they did and the impact that they had. And there's many examples of that in the in our last episode. For me, I think learning about the people whose stories I didn't know in the earlier periods was just absolutely revelatory. We get to know some really incredible characters who left behind memoirs or other kind of testimony that helps us open a door into a world that we otherwise wouldn't have access to. And that's really the magic of what we do. So bringing in an actor to read a voice of someone who wrote a memoir in the 19th century, for example, Samuel L. Jackson, reading the voice of a man named Austin Reed made that story come alive for all of us. Even though we had read the book and we knew the story from deep study of it, when a great actor reads those words, it comes alive. And even though this is a man for whom there are no photographs, we don't know what he looked like. But I feel I know him now because I've read his memoir and I've heard Sam Jackson speak his words. And what he leaves us with is an account of a young man who was caught up in what was then a very incipient system of juvenile justice. As a 10-year-old, he was punished for trying to set fire to the farm of a family that he was working on in their house as an indentured servant. He was sent to an institution in New York City called the House of Refuge, which was horrible. And as soon as he was released from there, he was convicted of another crime. And then he was sent to an adult prison. And the time when these adult prisons were just starting to become institutions and fixtures of American life. His memoir of that experience is just riveting and wrenching. And through his words, we're able to put ourselves there in a way that is truly profound. And seeing the resonances between the experiences he had and what people still experience to this day, well, that stays with you, I think.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

This is obviously, at least in a lot of parts, a very difficult story to watch and hear. And you know there's there's parts that are frankly quite depressing that this is the history of our country. But you also blend in that sort of hope. And how do you do that? You I mean, masterfully tell stories like the Florida Four and and Dr. Sweet in Michigan and um all of these like horrendous injustices in our American history. How do you how do you try to do that and not leave a viewer feeling just terrible about themselves?

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Yeah, well, we certainly are not attempting to make anyone feel this is their fault or bad about themselves or anything they did, or pointing fingers at people today for the failures of the past. I don't think that's terribly productive and doesn't get us too far in terms of just honestly confronting the failures of our society to live up to its values. Our feeling is that this is an important history that needs to be told, and that we can do better if we know that history. And if we choose to ignore it and pretend it didn't happen, we certainly cannot. And it has been sometimes a dark and deeply disturbing narrative. It also is inspiring to see the ways that people who have faced injustice maintain their humanity, have been resilient, have expressed hope, have survived it, have endured that we still tell their stories today, that they help us understand the best and worst of what people are capable of. These are sort of profound truths about the human condition. And the human condition, sadly, is not always a happy one. There are moments of uplift, there are moments of hope and inspiration, and there are moments of devastating tragedy. And I think it's important to hold both of those things. And finding the balance is always a challenge for a story like this. I have worked on many projects that are inherently tragic, especially the Vietnam War and our family on the Second World War, where catastrophic cataclysmic loss and suffering and degradation are at the core of those stories and sometimes just senseless waste of humanity. And still they're important to tell because we need to know what happened so we can honor the people who survived it and the people who didn't and do better next time and carry that with us. Maya Angelou says history with its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again. So I I think that's what we're really all about, not just in this film, but in really all the films I've made.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yeah. And I do love that the way that it ends is is very hopeful in pointing out that even that something is as difficult as our criminal justice system, there's evidence of like clear improvement, which I think is a strong, good message for people to take away from it.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

I completely agree. I've I had the privilege of interviewing Brian Stevenson for this project, and I asked him basically the same question you just asked me. Where do you find hope? You know, aren't I don't you think it's do you ever feel hopeless? And he said, I can't let myself be hopeless. Hopelessness is the enemy of progress. We we have to be hopeful. We don't have a choice. And I completely agree with that. And I am very inspired by the people both in the past and today, and I know in the future, who definitely have not given up and are working to make things better. We got ourselves into this, we can get ourselves out of it. It doesn't have to always be that way. And I don't think it will if we tell the story correctly.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

One of the parts that stuck out for me, um, and I I wrote it down because um I wanted to talk specifically about this line. And I I have no idea if this stuck out for you, but as like a data person, it stuck out for me was uh you had the the in 1961 when crime was still like at hit the historic lows that we talk about in America, um, at least for the reported FBI crime, Graucho Marks has the uh Los Angeles Police Department chief on his show. And Groucho says, Well, with the scientific approach, I assume you've wiped out crime in LA. Is that right? And I think he expects, like, uh, yes, we're doing great work. And the chief's response is actually it's getting worse. We have a very difficult and serious situation. It's not a question of the proficiency of the police service, so it's not our fault that everything's getting bad. It's a question of the indulgences of the American people. You see, crime in America is skyrocketing. And he's saying this at a time um when crime in America was not skyrocketing. And if he'd said it a decade later, he would have been like, oh, yes, that's true. But at this time it wasn't. And I was just thinking how so much of the documentary is about the people that are in charge sort of setting a story that doesn't inherently match the data. Is that a crazy interpretation from me? Or is it just because I'm a data person, or is that something that you set out to highlight?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

We've seen time and again that people in positions of authority are saying that we have a huge problem with crime. And also the media. So newspapers and pamphlets and then radio, and then later on television, the narrative that crime is going up, that people are scared that crime is a problem, is pervasive. And this is before they kept really good statistics. So we don't necessarily have a way of showing for sure if crime is going up or down, but the perception of crime is that it's always going up continually. And I've heard you speak about this in other conversations. It's the power of anecdote and fear. So one horrible crime that people hear about or see or read about tells them crime is going up. It doesn't matter if it only happened once. It's just so bad and so frightening, and they're so disturbed that it could happen to them or could happen again that the perception is crime is going up or the crime is a growing problem. And that goes back to the early 19th century. We see newspapers that are discussing the crime wave and that there's so much crime in our city streets and that these places are becoming ungovernable. There's also kind of a conflation of crime and disorder, crime and poverty, crime and kind of urban chaos. So crime as a word can mean a lot of different things. I think a lot of people would, on the one hand, say crime is an act of violence or you know, taking something that doesn't belong to you or harming somebody else, sort of one-on-one intrapersonal breaking of the social order by harming somebody else. That's the kind of crime that we're talking about when people say crime is going up. That's what I think they mean. Mugging, rape, murder, you know, child abuse, I don't know, car theft, the kind of things that people are afraid of happening to them and that do happen and that are sadly part of American life. But if you have, let's say, ethnic tensions that turn into riots in the 19th century, or you have urban America exploding in the 1960s, that's also considered crime. I'm not saying it's not deeply concerning, but it it gives the sense to many people that crime is a problem. And that kind of confusion or conflation, I think, is not new.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

So much of my work is about like you can sort of call a problem not solved, especially with crime, but also acknowledge that the data is correct and and the data's hey, the data's pointing down. That's good. Let's learn from that, let's keep doing that. Are there ways that you specifically tried to work data into the documentary and into all the conversations?

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Well, we tried to understand as best we could the data that was available. So in the 19th century, I don't think you have really much in the way of data at all. So that's our first episode, no data. Really? Our first episode goes up until 1880s or so. Our second episode goes until 1930s. What we talk about in those shows is a sense that people, either because of the reading in the paper or because they're living in urban areas where there's strangers that they don't know and there's kind of different kinds of tensions and things happening in the street, um, a fear of crime is always there. And also a fascination with crime and criminals and outlaws. So we have this really interesting tension between we're both scared of crime and fearful that something bad will happen, and fascinated by the people who seem to flout the law and get away with it. So Jesse James, for example.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Growing.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

So we were really interested to understand sort of just writ large, both Americans' perceptions of crime and fear and desire for a criminal justice system that will protect them, and fascination with the people who are the outlaws who seem to get away with it. And how both of these things are happening at the same time is, I think, really interesting tension or reality paradox of our history. Once we get to the 1930s and beyond, after the FBI is created in the Roosevelt administration, and there's a coordinated effort to collect data about crime across the country, the film will show charts and information about crime, violent crime in particular, as we know more, getting closer to the present. And we also have a moment where one of the historians that we interviewed talks about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were always collecting the crime data that they had and presenting it, that crime is going up and that they therefore need more money and more resources to fight it. So the use of crime statistics was deployed to secure more of what they needed to keep their jobs and keep their bureaucracy going.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

I'm gonna totally give away my my nerdiness here. But if you go through the old like the 1960 or the 1940s or the 1950s of the FBI PDFs, um they like they get really preachy in these things about like, hey, crime is going up and it's because of prosecutors or it's because of all of these other things. And in no way is it. The FBI's fault, it's just like, you know, we're gonna explain why it's everybody else's fault.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

One of the things we we were interested in kind of shining a light on is that first there's the problem of how much crime is there and how are we quantifying it and measuring it? That's one big, huge question. And another question is why is this happening and who's responsible? So even if we were to postulate or stipulate, yes, crime did go up, or if later on crime went down, why? What are the causes of crime and how much are we willing as a society to do anything about them? And that's a huge question throughout our history, which we haven't resolved. It's an ongoing debate.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

It's arguably the biggest debate we have right now. We've conquered the hey, we can measure this thing question, and we're going through this historic decline in crime, and nobody knows why, and nobody knows what to do about it.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

I find that really fascinating. I really find that fascinating. We basically will explain in the film that crime has been going down and that it's a mystery. There's many different theories. We went down many rabbit holes to try to understand, as much as you know, it's understandable what the different theories were and sort of different conjectures. But of course, you can't you can't prove this. You're observing after the fact, well, demographic shifts happened, or, you know, access to different social services happened, or street lights, parks, whatever the different things that have been shown to potentially affect crime in a neighborhood. But in the aggregate, it's not possible to really say. But depending on what you think the cause is, that will then dictate your approach. It's underlying that is a fundamental question about human nature, social responsibility, the role of government in our lives, the role of the police and the carceral system, individuals and families, what they're supposed to do. And I would say also the social structure, capitalism, labor, health insurance, access to benefits, all these mental health services, all these things also play a role. And everyone kind of agrees: well, there's not a ton of a crime in Palo Alto, Greenwich, Connecticut, very wealthy enclaves, and there's a lot more crime in really impoverished neighborhoods. So what more is there to say about that?

SPEAKER_01 24:17

If you could have an elected official, um, mayor or governor, watch one story or one scene to like really get the lesson and really understand the complexity of the issue. Is there a specific part of the film you'd point to, or is this me asking you to choose your children again?

SPEAKER_00 24:36

I think that's a hard one. I'm gonna have to punt on that. It's too soon for me to answer that. I think that our systems are so siloed, the people who make the laws, the elected officials, let's say, we'll say legislators, are one group, and the decisions they make affect how much time people spend in prison, for example. The people who run the prisons get their money from the state to do or not do whatever they're supposed to be doing for the people who are in custody. The police are given their instructions from, let's say, the local mayor. In other words, how many judges have ever spent any time inside a prison, the place they're sending people to, or in jails? How many prosecutors have been inside jails and prisons? How many police officers have been to these places to see, you know, once someone gets into the system, this is where they end up? And that therefore, who's responsible for what happens to them when they're there? Who takes responsibility or accountability for the failures of those systems? I think our film hopefully shines a light on all of this in a way. So it's hard for me to pick one thing because each group kind of needs to understand what the other groups are doing in a way. People are busy doing their jobs, they're very well-intentioned, they're working hard, they're doing what they think is right, and they're not responsible for what happens after they do their part.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Do you have any thoughts about what the future of the criminal justice system might look like based on the history and where we are now?

SPEAKER_00 25:59

We put our stock and trade in looking at the past through the lens of the present, you know, so where we are now and thinking about what questions to ask about the past. Projecting forward is much harder, I would say. So many things can happen that we can't predict. And I I recognize that over the course of the time we've been working on this project, or I've been interested in and focused on the criminal justice system, let's say from 2013 to now, the conversation has shifted multiple times in different ways, locally and nationally. And so it's kind of hard to predict where it will be in the future. But I am hopeful that we have somewhat of a shared consensus that our sentences are very long, that most people don't benefit from time in prison, that our system takes difficult problems and makes them worse. And so if we have some kind of shared acknowledgement of those truths, then perhaps we can start to make things better. I also recognize that there are just as many Americans probably who feel that when somebody commits a terrible crime, or maybe even not a terrible crime, a serious crime, they need to be punished and they need to be put away for as long as possible to keep them away from the rest of us. And it that's just all we can ever hope to do because human nature is what it is, and you people don't change. And therefore, someone who's committed serious harm can't be redeemed, can't be helped, just needs to be put somewhere else. And we have to reckon with the fact that many people feel that way and understand why they feel that way and think about what that means for our public policy.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

And I mean, that that's something that I I wrestle with all the time. I know lots of people who wrestle with that. Do you have any thoughts about how to weigh those two? That that concept of justice and revenge with also bettering society and and not being overly driven by punishment?

SPEAKER_00 27:58

I like the thought exercise for all of us to think about what I would want to happen if the person in question was someone I loved. Either a victim of a crime, if someone I loved was victimized, or if someone I loved committed an awful crime. And what would I want to have happen to that person? Because I think that's the only way we can really move forward is to think about these problems. They're all of our problems. And so we have to really find a balance. And I don't think we have that balance right now. We haven't had it maybe ever, but we certainly don't have it now. This is the hard problem of this whole topic. And I think it's really important to have a nuanced conversation about it and leave space to just think about it and not necessarily land on an answer. I don't think there are any easy answers here. And I think one of the problems is that we have made policies based on the worst cases and imposed the longest punishments and most severe, harshest punishments for everybody when there's a lot of room for subtlety and nuance and individualization. About what people can do and will do in the future. And I know many, many people who have committed serious crimes and have been incarcerated for long periods of time. And if you met them today, it would be hard to figure out how that happened. So people do change, people can change, most people want to change. And I think as a society, we have to welcome that. And we would if it was someone we loved.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

And I appreciate you addressing that and answering that. And I know that's such a difficult question because it's at the heart of everything. I wanna want to take a step back and talk about how does something like this, producing something like this, directing something like this, compare to doing something like baseball with a Vietnam War or something that's a lot more contained.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Baseball was a long time ago in my career. And so it felt more manageable than because I don't know, the characters and the stories that were important to tell had kind of stood the test of time. So if you were talking about the 1920s, it was going to be Babe Ruth. That's just obvious. You know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. How to make that come alive is still making challenges. But I think the path was a bit more clear than even for the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was hugely challenging because it's not settled history. Similar to what we've been discussing here with criminal justice, there's ongoing debates raging about whether the war was winnable, whether we lost, if we lost, whose fault it was, whether the soldiers who served were good, honorable, decent Americans or quote unquote baby killers, which is what they were called at the time, some of them. So this was an incredibly polarizing and devastating event for our country and also for the people of Vietnam. And we really wanted to bring into the conversation the perspectives of the Vietnamese who lived through it and understand from their points of view what they thought it was all about. It turns out they were as divided as we are about this topic, which is the war they call the American War. So that was hugely challenging because we didn't know much about the Vietnamese perspectives. I knew a fair amount about where Americans stood on the war across the spectrum. I had no concept of where Vietnamese of the North and the South would land when talking about the war today. So that was a a blank slate or a blank piece of paper to figure out what it was all about. It was very, very challenging. And yet the war had a beginning, middle, and end. So we knew April 30th, 1975. We're out, the war is over.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Story's done.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Yeah. This topic is infinitely challenging because it's an ongoing story, as we were just discussing. It's unfinished. It will be a story of America long after I'm no longer on this planet. This is age old and forever. And so putting your arms around it, putting guardrails around what stories are we telling, what's important, was really, really exciting and daunting and thrilling when we found the stories that just rose up to help us kind of shed light on the big questions we were asking. But it was hard. It's intensely collaborative. Our senior producer Lucas Frank and producers Vanessa Gonzalez Block and Priscilla Pondue were absolutely essential to figuring out the story and what we're what parts of it we were going to tell and how we were going to tell them. And finding the people who could bring it alive and the archival material that would make a movie out of it. So this is very much of a team effort. And all of those people contributed enormously to this project.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

So I I ask all of my guests this now, and I'm really curious for your answer. Is there a role for AI for your work? I don't talk to many documentarians. Well, and I imagine that that's a very loaded question.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm glad you're asking it. I am sure that there will be ways in which our colleagues use AI. And I feel pretty strongly that we should avoid it. And, you know, over time, I may be proven completely wrong. But at this moment, it feels very dangerous to me for the following reason. As documentary filmmakers, our core value is to find the truth, the facts, to tell what actually happened, even from different points of view, but to be grounded in fact and reality and truth. And AI makes things very slippery. In the world of AI, we could have this interview, and you could decide that you wish I had said something more eloquently, uh, use a different turn of phrase, and you can make me say it easily, and I would never know. And it might be what I would have wished I could have said. Maybe it would be what I meant to say. But it's way too easy to just play with the truth and make an alternative that's not true at all. You can make me say it and see my face, and it would no one would know. So from what what we do, it's a slippery slope. If we use a little bit, it undercuts pretty much the whole integrity of what we're doing, in my opinion. So I'm very, very nervous about it. I'm very concerned about not just the integrity of the work that we do, but all of our collective belief in reliable sources, let's just say. It can erode everything, and then there's no truth, and everything is a hall of mirrors, at which point I don't know. I can't, I'm getting sort of breath even talking about it. It makes me so nervous.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

There's no no AI in this interview, I promise.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

So But you know, people people are doing it. I mean, we know there was a documentary a number of years ago about Anthony Bourdeen, and they used AI with his voice to have him say something that he had written. And they didn't acknowledge, disclose that until after the film came out and they were asked. And you know, that doesn't sound that bad. I mean, he did write those words, but you're using a machine to make his voice say something he didn't say. So you could have made him say anything. And yeah, I just I think once you start down that path, you've stepped off the edge of the known world into someplace that I don't want to be.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

My last question is um, you know, it's so many great voice, not just in this documentary, but all in all of y'all's documentaries. What is it like working with so much talent? And I swear, even before your last uh response, I had this question written down. How can I get Keith David to record an outgoing voicemail message for me?

SPEAKER_00 35:30

He might. He might. Um, yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think. I feel like Keith did maybe it was an auction item or something, some benefit. But yeah, that would be pretty awesome. You could use AI, obviously. Yeah, I know. Yeah, right. It's been a really a thrill to over the many years that I've worked on these kind of historical films to work with such incredible actors. Some of them are bold-face names that everybody knows, and some of them are just working Broadway or off-Broadway actors in New York who love to come into the studio and work with us. And what's really fun is that they come in for an hour or two. We pay them the Screen Actors Guild scale rate. It's a very modest fee for their time. For them, it's probably almost like free, but we pay them. Everyone gets the same, and we just give them material to read right there. They don't prepare. And they just sit down and say, Oh, interesting, and just start reading. And we have worked with such brilliant actors who have such a wide range of expression, accent, feeling, and capacity to read words off a page. And we're always in awe, really. It's been one of the great joys of every project is when we we don't do it right away because we're not sure which voices are going to make it into the film. When we sit down to really do it, it's one of the best times we have, really. And they often have so much fun because I think, at least in my experience, you know, no matter who you are as an actor, a lot of times you don't get to work with material like this that's so rich and has so much depth and carries such weight. And so that's I think why they come back and love to do it. So yeah, it's it's been really amazing. And this project we got to work with Laura Linney, Samuel L. Jackson, Corey Stoll, Michael Stolbarg, B.D. Wong, Latanya Richardson, some just incredible actors, Harry Lemmox, that took words we've been reading on a page for years and made them three-dimensional.

SPEAKER_01 37:32

That's amazing. And of course, narrated by Keith David. And Keith David, yes. Incredible voice.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Keith has a beautiful voice. It's an instrument, and he really uses it in every wish way. So he can he can do anything with that credible voice he has. It was beautiful to work with him on this. I think he he really got deeply interested in the topic. It's always fun when you're working with someone and they're reading something, and then they say, Wow, I had no idea. And so he learned a lot as well. I think he would be the first to say.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

And so the movie is Crime and Punishment in America. It's out like November 16th, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:05

Yes. Airing on PBS starting November 16th for four nights. And we'll be releasing clips and some material on social media in the next coming months as sort of a lead-up. There'll be a teaser and there'll be some highlights coming out a little bit at a time to build up to the broadcast. And then we'll be streaming on PBS for a while.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

And what's next for you? Is there an 11th inning of baseball coming?

SPEAKER_00 38:28

Well, I don't know if there's an 11th inning. When we did baseball, it aired in 1994, which was during the strike. There was a baseball strike that year. And we had put in the film that the Red Sox had never won the World Series since 1918. And when they won, Ken felt like, well, we have to open it and we have to make another inning. That was the 10th inning because he's a huge Red Sox fan and just he couldn't leave that story untold. And then the Cubs won the World Series, and we had also basically said the Cubs would never win the World Series. So now we were faced with maybe we need to open it again and do 11th innings. So we'll see. I mean, that's the the baseball, the story of baseball is ongoing. There's going to be maybe a lockout this year or next year. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Perfect time for an 11th inning, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Exactly. Yeah. I think the game has changed a lot in the last 10 years. So it would be really interesting to look at whether it's still really the national pastime, what that means, given where our attention lies. I'm fascinated by the unbelievable phenomenon of sports betting and what is happening to professional sports and the public with the way that people relate to these games and athletes and events and the way that the betting has exploded. I find very concerning.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

And college sports, we're just seeing with the Texas Tech's quarterback allowed to play despite betting.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, I've heard multiple cases of people who have gotten into serious trouble with accumulating debt from sports betting and ended up embezzling to pay off their debts and going to jail for that. I wonder what's going to happen with that. I I'd like to hope it'll be reined in, but I don't I don't think it can sustain itself.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Excellent. Next next.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

It would be, I think sports betting, yeah, it would be fascinating. It would be fascinating. Um, I'm working on a documentary on the history of Central Park, which is a a beautiful, pretty much uplifting story, has some dark times in it as well. And then Ken Burns and myself and Sarah Botstein are doing a series on LBJ and the Great Society. So we're going to be kind of going back over in a way, from my perspective, the 60s and the war on crime that LBJ was involved in, setting up then, and all the riots and unrest and rebellions of that time and the sense that crime was out of control that started to take over and giving rise to the law and order policies of the 1970s. So that's gonna be looking at that through the perspective of LBJ and Zivil Rights will be really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

That's great. I I can't wait to watch it. Lynn, thank you so much. This has been awesome, fascinating. Um, movie's out November 16th. It's it's a terrific watch. So I highly recommend everybody to give it a look.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

Thank you so much, Jeff. It was great talking with you.

SPEAKER_01 41:11

Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Till next time, I'm Jeff Asher.