Corruption Kills: The Warnings of Orwell and Mr. Jones
This week, Gaslit Nation brings you a special episode on the making of Mr. Jones, the journalistic thriller exploring Stalin’s crimes in Ukraine that Andrea wrote and produced! This movie about a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, whose attempts to bring the truth about Russian terror to light made him not only a threat to the Soviets but a target of sneering reporters at The New York Times is all too relevant to our era.
[begin film trailer for Mr. Jones]
Paul:
Hello.
Mr. Jones:
Paul, I need your help arranging an interview with Stalin.
Paul:
Go to Walter Duranty at the New York Times.
Speaker 4:
Listen, I really need to talk to you, I've found something big. You can crack the story wide open.
Walter Duranty:
Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones:
Mr. Duranty.
Walter Duranty:
Why are you really here?
Mr. Jones:
I need your help.
Walter Duranty:
This is Ada Brooks, she’s my star.
Ada Brooks:
What do you want?
Mr. Jones:
The story no one is talking about.
Ada Brooks:
Ukraine.
Paul:
Stalin’s called.
Speaker 7:
You will retract your statements to the press immediately.
Paul:
Or they will shoot our engineers?
Walter Duranty:
You actually thought you could interview Stalin and make some kind of difference, didn’t you?
Ada Brooks:
I guess the agenda now–
Mr. Jones:
I don’t have an agenda, unless you call truth an agenda.
[end film trailer for Mr Jones]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, which is available right now for your viewing pleasure wherever you stream your films. iTunes, other places. Just Google it, look it up, you'll find it, and watch it. It's a very important film made by a lot of people. Not just me. So thank you for supporting it by watching the film.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world. Today, we are doing a special episode where I am going to interview our special guest, Andrea Chalupa, my co-host here, and we are going to talk about her movie, Mr. Jones, which is not only an excellent film in its own right, but incredibly relevant to things happening today, to the issues that we cover on our show about authoritarianism, media control, the search for the truth, so on and so forth. We're going to just dive right in here. My first question for Andrea is what inspired you to write Mr. Jones, when did you start working on it, and how has the world changed since you came up with the idea and now, when the film is finally being released?
Andrea Chalupa:
First of all, Sarah, thank you so much for having me on the show.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh, yes. My pleasure.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to say I am tremendously grateful for this conversation. Let's just get right down to it. Yeah, so when was I first inspired? Well, when I was a little girl growing up... Yes, we're going to go far back. When I was growing up in northern California–me, my Ukrainian family, and a few of their friends, we were the loud Ukrainians in our northern California farm town. It was a very small, tight-knit group of us. Growing up, to stay connected with my heritage, I was extremely close with my grandfather. My parents were out doing God knows what–they're going to listen to this interview and hate it–so my grandfather was the world to me. He was born in Donbass, a part of eastern Ukraine that's currently being invaded by Russia today as we speak. Western press today as we speak, including most recently, the Washington Post–a reporter at the Washington Post–are calling it a civil war in Ukraine today. It's not. It's Russia invading Ukraine. There's tons of documentation on this, but yet, western press today is falling for it and following Putin's propaganda and saying it's a civil war, and it's not.
Andrea Chalupa:
So my grandfather was born in that part of eastern Ukraine and I grew up with his stories, including how he suffered under Stalin. First, with Stalin's famine, which is the Holodomor, “death by hunger”. And then, later, as a young father arrested and tortured during Stalin's purges. When my grandfather passed away, that left a huge hole in my heart. To fill it, all these years later in college, I started researching Ukraine and I focused on history... I majored in history in college. My senior year in college, I started digging into this famine that my grandfather and his family survived when countless millions didn't. I was most drawn to the story of the New York Times. This real-life, Pulitzer prize-winning, New York Times reporter by the name of Walter Duranty. He was the Moscow bureau chief at the time who deliberately covered it up–who covered up this famine. I was so confused by that in college, when you're starting out your life and deciding, and just thinking, “I'd love to be a journalist”, so why would somebody do something so perverted as a journalist and cover up a famine with the Soviets? I couldn't understand that.
Andrea Chalupa:
The more I started digging into this guy to get answers, the more I was thinking, my God, he would make an incredible film. Walter Duranty. He was lovers and friends with this great Satanist, Aleister Crowley, who inspired the Rolling Stones' song, Sympathy for the Devil. They were involved in these Satanic sex orgies in 1920s Paris. Duranty even wrote spells or hymns or whatever for these orgies. They shared a lover. They smoked a lot of opium and did a lot of other crazy stuff. So Duranty very much had this wild, bohemian temperament that made him perfect to be this eccentric social ringleader in this far-flung post of Moscow–to be the bureau chief there for the New York Times.
Andrea Chalupa:
All these literati that flocked from the West that would come to Moscow, many of these characters of their day would meet with Duranty and go to avant garde parties in Moscow with Duranty, while meanwhile, out in the countryside, largely in Ukraine, millions were being systematically starved to death. The borders of Ukraine were sealed. The starving refugees were not allowed to leave. Journalists were not allowed to come in. This was all systematically done as mass murder. This was before there's an atomic bomb and so the most efficient, effective way you could kill millions of people at that time was through starvation. And so that was the story. It was essentially Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death. There was this big ball in Moscow and then the red death, the plague, knocking on everyone's door. They knew what was happening over there, but they refused to report it.
Andrea Chalupa:
I was struck by this and, in college, I was committed to doing this, but it was a very, very long journey. But the pieces of the story that were ultimately produced in the film, they were there very, very early on in the start of the research. That's why it's so ironic to me now, today, when I read reviews of the film–critics are saying, “oh, it's so about today. It's so prescient. Or it's pulled from the headlines of today”. Obviously, when I started working on this 2004-2005, I would have never in my wildest dreams imagined that the Kremlin would invade our democracy through Donald Trump as president and so forth. So, obviously, this was just a film about history that just happened to become relevant today because we have a failure to learn from history. Part of that, of course, comes from this myth of American exceptionalism–that it could never happen here when, of course, authoritarianism can happen anywhere. The seeds of this, the most dangerous seeds of this, are sown by Fox News and other propaganda outlets. That's where it begins. So I think the most important takeaway of this film–and I know I'm hammering in this whole interview in my first answer–I think the most important takeaway of this is that genocides begin with propaganda.
Andrea Chalupa:
In this clip of Mr. Jones, Gareth Jones has just arrived in Moscow. The source he was supposed to meet has been murdered in what's being called a robbery. Gareth is trying to figure out what happened and, in putting pieces together, he's interviewing other journalists who carefully tip him off to the truth, like real-life reporter Eugene Lyons of United Press International, who we hear in this scene. Lyons initially helped Jones, but goes on to join Walter Duranty and others in the media in writing hit pieces discrediting him just to protect his access to the Kremlin.
Jones:
He told me that he was persona non grata with the regime. Do you know why? Do you know what he was working on?
Lyons:
There's not much else to do here, is there? When you're not allowed to leave Moscow. What kind of reporting can you do confined here?
Jones:
Wait. Journalists are confined to Moscow? For protection?
Lyons:
Yeah, that's right.
Jones:
What? Are they paranoid about spies?
Lyons:
Have you ever read Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death? The Masque of the Red Death. Have you read it?
Jones:
No.
Lyons:
Get a copy before they ban it.
Sarah Kendzior:
You said you started out with interest in Duranty and in his cover-up of the Ukraine famine, but the film is very much a character study of Gareth Jones. It's somewhat unusual in that you have a genuinely likable, genuinely heroic individual that's based on a real-life story. How did your script move to making him the primary focus and what challenges did you have in capturing his story?
Andrea Chalupa:
That is a great question. So, obviously, Duranty was the gateway drug in so many ways. Because, being in college, you're like, oh, Satanic orgies. What was also really interesting is that that was–we're talking about 1933; that's the year Hitler comes to power. 1933. That's the year that Stalin gets away with mass murdering millions in Ukraine. 1933 is also a time when Aleister Crowley is a great celebrity, that great Satanist. I'll get to Gareth Jones in a moment, but I want to just emphasize this was a time of the interwar period following the Great War, following the Spanish flu pandemic, and the Great Depression was starting. So people were turning to black magic and all these weird, new age ideas to try to explain the horrendous reality in front of them and escape into drugs and other things.
Andrea Chalupa:
That all underscores how unusual Gareth Jones was, being a very straight-laced young man, because, coming out of this world, he didn't drink. And thank God for history that Gareth Jones did not drink. He was very dry. He was a young man that came from essentially nowhere, Wales. Barry, at the time, was an industrial port city, but to go from Barry, Wales to Cambridge University, to the halls of Parliament, where he was a foreign advisor, a secretary to David Lloyd George, the former World War I prime minister, and all the events that he would sit in on and the meetings and all the incredible people that he wrote about being around and all the gossip of global affairs that he was hearing firsthand from notable people and so forth... I mean, he led an incredible life. I guess Gareth's drug was really being on the front seat of history.
Andrea Chalupa:
He really came alive for me when his wonderful nephew, Nigel Colley, took me to Wales to visit his archives and read the letters and diary entries and the letters that he was writing home to his parents. There was some language that he was using essentially telling his mom and dad, get off my back, stop telling me to settle down and get a stable job, a teaching job, and marry Jane Evans. His parents, you can tell, were quite nervous about how he was globetrotting and going on adventures and reporting trips and so forth. They wanted him to settle down. That reminded me so much of telling my own parents, “leave me alone. I'm going to produce this film. I know you think it's crazy, but I'm going to do it”. And so Gareth was really an independent spirit, a nonconformist. He just had such a passion for life.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously, he was straight-laced. He was a good soul. He was somebody that you'd want your child to marry. But I think that can be very boring. That could be very boring for the audience. Especially as Agnieszka Holland, the director–the great Agnieszka Holland, who directed Europa Europa, The Secret Garden, In Darkness, House of Cards, The Wire, tons of amazing television–one thing that Agnieszka pointed out to me when she said yes to the script was “there's so many antiheroes”. We have Walter White on Breaking Bad. We have Frank Underwood on House of Cards. America has been fed all these... The Sopranos and all these gangster type personalities for so long. So she was really drawn to a refreshing, classical hero because she felt like the world was falling apart again and that we desperately needed to hold up good, moral heroes for us to look up to again. I know that sounds very tired, but it's actually not. It's actually refreshing in this cultural moment.
Andrea Chalupa:
The way I found that edge to Gareth Jones so he wasn't just a boy scout was just, he was unusual because he was nonconformist. We know from our industry, media, and we know from being in this work for so long how many conformists they are and how boring they are and what imagination they lack and how they're totally unreliable morally. I think that's what gave him his dangerous edge was just his commitment, his conviction, to be nonconformist.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, definitely. To the point that both you and Agnieszka Holland made about the series of antihero TV shows–The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, all of those–accompanied by that were these simplistic superhero movies that we've just been bombarded with since about 2000 when X-Men came out. There's almost nothing in between–not nothing, but fewer and fewer films that show that nuanced perspective or have a hero who's human, but flawed. I think that's interesting, too, especially because it is based on an actual person.
Sarah Kendzior:
The other main character who people will have heard of with this movie is George Orwell, who serves as a narrative device and a recorder of history in the movie. You're someone who wrote a book about Orwell and inserted him into this movie as well. Can you talk some about that, where your interest in him came from and what his relevance is to Mr. Jones?
Andrea Chalupa:
I think to answer the Orwell question, I have to talk about Orwell as an example of the importance of art and why we're always saying on the show, "Make art." Make art. It's not indulgent. It's not self-serving. Everybody, for some higher power reasons... You have to engage with art. You have to make art. Whether you consider yourself an artist or not. I think the way Orwell found himself into the script–and Orwell's own story very much exemplifies the importance of art and why art matters.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously, throughout the years I was working on this screenplay, coming from a family with zero Hollywood connections, and just shocking my very proper Ukrainian immigrant family that I was going to go off and do this big, unstable thing. I have to note that the years I was working on this, researching it–2004 onwards–that was a time of Bush invading Iraq, Afghanistan, and those were wars that were furthered by lies in the press like the New York Times. We had economic collapse. We had Wall Street getting away with crashing the global economy. Regular people suffering from that. It was a time of great instability and lies and a state-manufactured chaos and destruction.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then I was working in the media, striking out to build a career in the media, and it was mainstream media. I saw firsthand the line between the editorial side and the business side in media disintegrate, where it all became one. Clickbait factories and so forth. And journalists, really smart journalists, being under pressure to churn out articles because they needed the page views and the clicks. I saw how it was hurting our democracy in real time to have this sweatshop, clickbait factories, and journalism largely disappearing. For me, almost like a coping mechanism, I hung out in this project. I hid in my screenplay. That was my safe place. I would research this world and get into the minds of these real-life people and I would read the primary sources and I would go on research trips and I’d interview whoever I could. That's what sustained me through this whole dark period that all of us were going through.
Andrea Chalupa:
Through that, I discovered George Orwell struggled to publish his work of art, which was Animal Farm. That was a book that was very much using the power of art to undo the gaslighting, the prevailing gaslighting at the time that Stalin was our great World War II hero and he was Uncle Joe and could be trusted. So, Orwell wrote a simple children's book to open up people's eyes to the true horror of Stalin's mass murder regime. That book was rejected by many publishers. There was even a Soviet spy that had a British publisher turn down the book. Finally, a relatively small press put out Animal Farm. A copy of Animal Farm ended up in the hands of a young Ukrainian refugee that immediately understood what the book was trying to say and got the message and started translating it into Ukrainian and wrote letters to George Orwell in London. What ended up happening was Animal Farm was translated into Ukrainian and given out in the refugee camps of Europe. That was such a happy story in all this darkness that I was researching and that's how Orwell entered the story. I saw him as... Gareth Jones was murdered, ultimately. That's what happens. For telling the truth. But his truth lives on thanks to artists like George Orwell that pick up where Gareth Jones left off.
Sarah Kendzior:
Speaking of journalists who do not tell the truth, I have lots of questions about that. To get back to the Satanic orgies for a second, your description of that, of Walter Duranty who existed in this very luxurious layer of lies–the antithesis of Orwell, the antithesis of Gareth Jones–he was doing this as an American in Moscow. It reminded me so much of the kind of American journalism that emerged in post-Soviet Russia during the 1990s and the early period of the 2000s. What the hell is up with all these American men going to Russia to do this kind of work?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, I think it was a wild west. It was before camera phones. You had, of course, a lot of neocon Republicans dancing on the ashes of the Soviet Union, waving the American flag, screaming that they won the Cold War, the war was over. It was, to them, their Disney movie ending of the 20th century. Along with that came all these young bucks from the West that were there with all their money and all their flashy western products and they were taking advantage of all these extraordinarily poor, gorgeous women. Russian women are very beautiful, like Ukrainian women and eastern European women generally, in my opinion. They just took full advantage. They just took full advantage. It was just sex tourism. It was sex safari tourism. They essentially made an industry out of it. They should be ashamed of themselves and that should rightfully follow them around for the rest of their lives.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. No, it's gross. It's gross to see this kind of continuum. Like a continuum with them, a continuum, of course, with the New York Times–which did the kind of cover-ups nowadays in terms of Trump and his relationship to the Kremlin and to various oligarchs in the Russian mafia and the cover-ups by the FBI– They've enabled that and they've enabled fascism, much as they covered up Stalin's genocide and they wrote puff pieces about Hitler's Bavarian home up into the 1940s. There's such continuity in these approaches. At the same time, though–we are, today, as people did during the fascist era of the 30s and 40s–journalists today are not just complicit, but are under real attack by the government. They're under attack by the Trump administration and its allies. They're under attack by the corporations that support them. As of today, recently, they are under attack by state entities like Voice of America, which has now been taken over by one of Bannon's acolytes, resulting in a few reporters quitting. There's all sorts of different issues associated with attacks on freedom of the press that people are experiencing now. What lessons does Gareth Jones or, for that matter, Walter Duranty provide for journalists working on authoritarianism or Russia or the United States today?
Andrea Chalupa:
The lesson is that media is power. Media is power. And because media is power, media is a weapon. In January, I believe, of 2017, the head of Russia's military gave a speech saying that they're going to make their propaganda even more effective. That was the head of Russia's military talking about propaganda. Because propaganda is a weapon. Propaganda kills. Propaganda has real-world effects. You see so many examples of this with Ukraine. With how Putin's propaganda machine, which Russian friends have described to me, Russian state TV being like Fox News on acid and how it's turned Russians against Ukrainians and justified Putin's annexation of Crimea, which has created a human rights crisis there, especially for indigenous Tatars, and also Putin's ongoing invasion of east Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
We see it here in the US. There's a reason why white supremacist Steve Bannon is so drawn to this Kremlin-driven, far-right movement, this global white supremacist brotherhood. There was just reporting that Dugin–who's like a Steve Bannon of Russia, a white supremacist–Dugin and Steve Bannon hung out for several hours and connected. And of course they would. They're all part of this larger, global movement of white terror and their weapon of choice is propaganda. When Bannon was building his fascist academy or trying to get his fascist academy in Italy off the ground, Italy being a state in Europe that's very sympathetic to Putin's mass murdering regime and there's even been finance scandals between Italian politicians and the Kremlin–there's a reason why Bannon chose Italy for that. One of the classes that Bannon was going to teach was like The Media Dark Arts and things.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I think it's extremely dangerous to have a propaganda president like Donald Trump, and bringing in Fox News like his own Pravda. Now they're going to take over Voice of America, which, yes, it is US-funded, but unlike Russian state media, which is like a xenophobic fever dream, Voice of America does objective, good reporting. They have quality journalists that can work there with pride and then they can go to other outlets like the Texas Tribune or ProPublica or elsewhere with their heads held up, knowing that they did their work with integrity at Voice of America. It's a trusted, objective source even if it is US-funded. They have standards for that in the US that they simply do not have in a propaganda empire like Putin's Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think the big takeaway is that propaganda is a weapon and propaganda kills and we have to be so careful of it in terms of holding our own objective media to higher standards. The New York Times, being one of the most influential newspapers in the world, cannot afford to slip up by having some really shady pieces appear, really shady articles and op-eds appear, like most notably recently, of course, the James Bennet debacle with Tom Cotton saying, "Yeah, a military crackdown on American citizens using their free speech. Yeah, that's fine." We have to be so vigilant because propaganda isn't as always blatant as Fox News in your face telling you to hate Black and Brown people and women. It's also these little seediness or these useful idiots at some more credible outlets like Rolling Stone and New York Times and Washington Post and other places, that bring down the credibility of the other. Objective, trusted news sources always have to hold themselves to a higher standard and to try to be as inclusive of the larger context and giving a voice to the most vulnerable and powerless and hold themselves to a moral consciousness because propaganda is that invasive and it's that dangerous. The way to combat that is the good people have to insist on holding themselves to a higher standard.
Sarah Kendzior:
Did you have any issues as you were making this? As you noted, the political climate changed a great deal. It changed in ways that reflect the themes of your film. At the same time, these authoritarian regimes or just regimes that rely on propaganda, that brag about their desire to create reality, whether Putin's Russia, who I'm sure is not thrilled about this movie, or somebody like Karl Rove saying that they create reality... Did you get any kind of blowback? Especially from the countries in question. How did the UK react to it? How is Russia reacting to it? How is Ukraine reacting to it? What's the response been so far?
Andrea Chalupa:
That's a really interesting question. I was really taken aback by how supportive they were for the film in Great Britain, especially with how many people were allowed to be killed on British soil by the Kremlin. London being awash with dirty oligarch money, I was really taken aback by how widely supportive British audiences and reviewers and institutes were for this film. Obviously, Gareth Jones is an unsung Welsh hero. They embraced the film and I was very heartened by that.
Andrea Chalupa:
In Ukraine, I was overwhelmed by the response to the film. They had a huge premiere there. James Norton, who plays Gareth Jones perfectly, he flew out to Kyiv for the premiere. Agnieszka Holland, the director, of course was there. I was not there because Devin Nunes was attacking my sister openly at the time–I think this was during the impeachment hearings around that time–and so I didn't feel safe going to Ukraine at that time. Because it is, obviously, a dangerous place to be, as we saw with Marie Yovanovitch's testimony how they can get to you if they want to get to you there. I did not get to the premiere of my own film in Ukraine after having worked on this for 14 years because of the unsafe political situation in Ukraine and how... I'm sorry, in the US. Sorry. Freudian slip, I guess. Yeah, I was just worried about Trump's thugs and network being like, “oh, a Chalupa sister is in Ukraine. Let's get her.”
Andrea Chalupa:
So I didn't end up going, but I was watching all the social media posts come in out of Ukraine and seeing mothers with their daughters taking photos of the movie poster and going out to eat afterwards and all the hashtags of the film and just seeing all these people across Ukraine making a huge event out of seeing this film. Because it was their history. It was their Schindler's List. Finally, they were getting their story told. Not through Ukrainians, but through these amazing, internationally known actors. Vanessa Kirby, who was in Fast and Furious, is starring in a movie about their little-known genocide that most of the world has no idea of. It was deeply gratifying to see what a huge family event it was for Ukrainians across Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
That must have been a great feeling, I think. Especially knowing how much emotion goes into this movie. Because it's your grandfather's heritage and story, too. That's a wonderful thing. It's a shame that it had to come out during coronavirus, but at least Ukraine got to see it before we did. One thing that I was thinking about is you write about these events that took place 75 years ago, whether Gareth Jones or Stalin's genocide or Walter Duranty. I was thinking, if there's a version of you 75 years in the future that's going to make a movie about a buried event of today–an event that wasn't covered properly or that was buried with propaganda–what kind of topics do you think that they would be looking at?
Andrea Chalupa:
Okay, so if a young Andrea Chalupa in college in the future is nosing around for a procrastination project to throw herself into?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. In 2090 or something.
Andrea Chalupa:
I plan to still be around. Cackling around a whiskey bottle.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're going to assume the planet survives and that filmmaking survives and that coronavirus has actually ended. What would the Andrea of the future be covering?
Andrea Chalupa:
Gosh, that's such a great question. I think she should dig up these two little known podcasters [laughing] that met on election eve 2016 and no one took them seriously and everyone laughed at them. No, I think that that has to be a personal question. I think the whole story of the making of Mr. Jones, it's my grandfather's story. The deeply personal becomes the universal. So I think all of us have to dig into ourselves and focus on who we love in our life and our own personal history and look for gold there. Look for a story to give voice to there. Look for a need for healing there. I think all of us can do that right now, and anybody 100 years from now, looking back.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to tell audiences today: the history we get in school is sanitized. Real history is just a momentum of chaos, firing off in all directions. I really benefited from being grounded and feeling grounded in the chaos of the recent years, of Putin's invasion of Ukraine to Trump and Putin stealing the 2016 election. I felt very grounded in that chaos because I had history to anchor me. I didn't rely just on what I studied in school. I dug into the primary sources. I read the books of the day. I read the journalists, the nonsense, the filth, that they published, thinking that they could get away with it. I read all those primary sources and it slowed down history for me. And that deep dive allowed me to look around the modern age and see the resurrected characters of my film all around me. That's where a lot of the knowledge that drives what I say in the show and all the work I've done since. It comes from that very strong, deep appreciation and time I spent with this history.
Andrea Chalupa:
Human nature is human nature. It's very difficult to change. People are either cowards or they're not. Or they get past being cowards and they push through and they force themselves to find a deeper meaning in a tough situation or they don't. Unfortunately, there are just too many conformists out there and I just saw history repeating in recent years, as you and I have been covering everything and just seeing conformists all around us. Everybody, really, just lacking imagination and lacking morals and being too afraid to say what needed to be said and being too afraid to point out what needed to be pointed out. Yet, privately, some of these journalists would tell me, "Oh my God. What's happening? Tell me what's going to happen next." I'd be like, “you coward. You know what's going to happen next or else you wouldn't be begging me to tell you. You know how bad this is.”
Andrea Chalupa:
I think we just all have to remember that these horrific events we've been living since Trump was announced the winner of the 2016 election–all these horrific events, they're going to get boiled down into the most simplistic explanation of how this all happened. And that's going to infuriate all of us who survived these years. Because we knew what these terror moments were and how many there were and you cannot boil this period down to just a few simplistic moments to explain it all. But that's what we do all the time in how we teach history. Think about high school. It's “Hitler comes to power and then the Americans come in and save the day and then Churchill said a bunch of fancy words”. That's how we think of World War II, when it's so much more complicated than that, clearly. That's what I want to ground people in with this film, is that my film takes place in 1933 right when this crazy little politician, Adolf Hitler, comes to power as Chancellor of Germany and Stalin is right getting away with starving millions of his own citizens and no one cares. That's where we are. We're right at the start of the mouth of hell opening up across Europe.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking about what you just said about that complexity of history not being taught to us in school and not delivered to us through the media. There have been a number of films in recent years that really captured that. The Chernobyl series that ran last summer, Ava DuVernay's work, especially When They See Us about the Central Park Five, which really changed, I think, how people remember that story, how they see that story. All of those projects were hard-fought projects, Especially Ava DuVernay's work as a female filmmaker. I was just curious if you have advice for young screenwriters, young writers in general, particularly women in a male-dominated industry. Do you have advice on how to get projects made and how to handle it emotionally over the long run? Because this was like a 14 year project for you and it's finally made it to fruition now, but I know that that's not easy.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think you have to first and foremost know who you're committed to telling the story for. Because you're going to have a lot of people laugh at you in your face. You're going to have a lot of people ignore you. You're going to have a lot of people reject you. You're going to have a lot of people actively work to undermine you. You're going to have a lot of people take credit for your hard work. You're going to have a lot of people act worried about you, that you're still working on it after all these years. What is going to ground you throughout that entire time and help you peel yourself off the floor again and again and again, even when the last thing you want to do is get out of bed, is you have to be so sure of who you're telling the story for.
Andrea Chalupa:
For me, it was that I refused to let them get away with what they did to Gareth Jones. I refused that. There was a time when I wanted to get up and I was staring at his photo after Walter Duranty and all the fancy journalists in the western press turned against him and published articles in their big newspapers essentially calling him a liar and discrediting him. He had to move back home to his small town in Wales. There was a photo I was looking at of him where he just looked so beaten up by life. He was staring at me from the photograph and I was staring at him and I just thought to myself... I'm like, “I'm not going to let them get away with what they thought they could do to you. I'm not going to let them do that.”” And so I continued fighting for him.
Andrea Chalupa:
Also, of course, my grandfather. Because that was gaslighting. Growing up in America and most people around me, when I said I was from Ukraine, their minds immediately said, oh, you're from Russia? Americans had a tendency to think Russia was Ukraine. And then also of course they had never heard of Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine before. The Holodomor. That's considered by historians as Stalin's worst genocide. That, to me, was like gaslighting, growing up with my grandfather's eyewitness account of it and all the horrific stories that carried on through my family and people around me in my neighborhood, my school, my friends had never heard of it before. Going through life, people had no idea what I was talking about. That just felt like such a sense of injustice. And so, for me, I was very grounded in why I was telling that story. That's your survival. That's your longevity, is being grounded in that.
Andrea Chalupa:
More specifically, more practically, as a woman, I have to share this story. One of my mentors is Nelson George, who's a writer of the hip hop movement. He came up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn with so many other brilliant Black artists before they made it big. He invested in Spike Lee's first film. He was a writer with Chris Rock. He and Chris Rock are dear friends to this day. Nelson was a producer on Chris Rock's film, Top Five. So Nelson had this incredible bohemian, New York City, renaissance man life as a writer, a director, a filmmaker, a producer, and he took me seriously before most anyone else did. I met him when I worked in New York for a summer. I met him at a concert randomly. We stayed in touch all this time and nerded out together over culture. He saw me working on this from the beginning and tried opening up so many doors for me that I just wasn't ready to enter through because I didn't really know what I was doing. I was such a nerd lost in the history that I couldn't take an industry meeting without being very awkward. But having that mentor helped me establish accountability, that there was someone in the industry that was taking me seriously and that taught me how to take myself seriously.
Andrea Chalupa:
More specifically to being a woman in this industry, it's a white male dominated industry. I went to Nelson and I said, "Nelson, I'm not getting anywhere with this. What do I do?" Nelson printed out a study from a university in LA... it was like UCLA... saying how Hollywood is dominated by white men. Nelson handed me the study and he said, "Get yourself a white man." And I did. I full on did. I got myself some white men and I hacked the system by going through women and men that love strong women. That's how I pulled it together.
Andrea Chalupa:
There were times when a Hollywood agent would not talk to me and he would talk to the white male, even though the white male was the junior and I was the senior, this Hollywood agent would only talk to the white male. He refused to speak with me directly even though I was the boss in this situation. My white male colleague thought the whole thing was so silly and dumb, but I said, "If that's what it takes for us to get where we need to go, then go ahead and do it." I had no choice. That's the kind of misogyny that I was dealing with. There was even a point where I had a huge make it or break it meeting and I full on raised some donation money in my community and I used some of it to buy a plane ticket to fly a white male from Europe to come join me in a meeting and just sit in the room while I did all the pitching and talking. And it sealed the deal. That's a true story.
Andrea Chalupa:
I recognized the misogyny and I brought in the calvary to basically address other people's biases, but I was the one that was delivering the pitch. I was the one making the case and pulling the team together. Obviously, Agnieszka Holland signing on to direct my screenplay, that moved mountains. Obviously, our wonderful producers in Europe, that moved mountains. But more along this larger theme of misogyny and how to hack the system, you have got to find your own kind, the people who see you as human. Even though you're outnumbered by this larger, colossal misogyny and racism in the industry, if you group together with your own kind and the allies and advocates of women and people of color, if you come together, you can pull together your resources and that's what we did. I made that decision. I chose safety over prestige at every turn because I was a woman and I knew what was working against me.
Andrea Chalupa:
For instance, there was a screenplay that I read for years, an Oscar-award winning film, one of my favorite films, and the producer, a white male, wanted to produce my script, but the way he treated me was like patting me on the head. Like he was the boss and my script was not ready until he said it was ready and he was going to choose the director and... I was like, wait a minute. I ended up going with the no name, relatively unknown for Europe, young woman producer in Poland, who did not have an Oscar, but she was a woman and she saw me as a human being. She was around my age. We're young starting off in this industry. She was ahead of me, but she was still nervous. She was really doubting herself that she could pull this off, but I chose her over the Oscar winner. I said to her, "Of course you can. Of course we're going to do this." Now, she's one of the most in demand producers in Europe. [laughs] I can't even get her to do my next film because she's like, "I'm busy. I have all these people on the phone."
Andrea Chalupa:
But it just goes to show that women and people of color, you can hack the system, the system that's working against you with all these biases whether they're racist, misogynist, or conscious of it or not. They're always there, but you can hack it by gathering with your own and your allies and advocates and come together and pull your resources together that way. That's how Mr. Jones came together.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well said. That is a great story about a great film. You want to just remind our audience of where it's available to watch or buy or steam?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. So Mr. Jones is available in the US. A simple way to find it is if you go to the distributor website in the US, Samuelgoldwynfilms.com. Samuelgoldwynfilms.com. They'll list all the ways under Mr. Jones, under their film listed there on where to watch it. For Canada, you can watch it on iTunes. Also, in the UK, you can watch it on iTunes. The film sold to most of the world, so wherever you're currently based, just look it up on iTunes and you can probably find it that way.
Sarah Kendzior:
Awesome. Highly recommended. Five stars. My unbiased review. Well, thank you, Andrea, for coming on Gaslit Nation tonight and I will talk to you soon.
Andrea Chalupa:
[laughs] Thanks for having me.
Andrea Chalupa:
Back in February 2018, as I was leaving for Poland to begin filming Mr. Jones, I wrote a piece for Dame Magazine highlighting some of the latest horror coming out of the Trump White House. That piece, which we'll link to in our show notes for this episode, was called ‘Why RussiaGate Matters to Our Democracy’. It's a chilling reminder, especially in light of the latest confirmed reports that Putin put a bounty on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Several of them were killed as a result, and Trump knew about this urgent intelligence for months. His response was to essentially defend Putin by advocating that Russia return to the world leading alliance known as the G8. None of this is surprising, especially if you've been listening to Gaslit Nation. I'm going to read excerpts of this essay–again, I wrote it back in 2018–since it reminds us how we got here and sets up a clip we're going to play from Mr. Jones quoting some of the most famous lines of Orwell's Animal Farm.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In a normal election year, one political catchphrase is often used to sum up the key issue of the electorate. ‘It's the economy, stupid’. This is not a normal election year. Since the scandal-ridden campaign of Donald Trump, who increasingly looks like an illegitimate president, one with well-documented authoritarian instincts, we're fighting to preserve basic norms. RussiaGate, the stunning scope of which was partially defined in FBI indictments of 13 Russians who helped orchestrate the far-reaching, well-funded infiltration of our democracy, reminds us what's at stake this November. It's the corruption, stupid.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Some critics like to dismiss RussiaGate as the hysterical political games of a desperate opposition or as an excuse for the Democratic Party not to own its many mistakes. There's a determined, deep-pocketed, and pernicious enemy at the heart of the scandal–an international corruption ring that has an obvious ally holding the most powerful office in the world. America's far from perfect when it comes to fighting its own corruption. The heartbreaking Flint water crisis is only one of many examples, as is the government indifference and corporate fascism that attacked Standing Rock. One of the most urgent crises we face as a nation is the grotesque impunity of the gun lobby–the NRA–which prioritizes profits over human life when an average of two dozen children are shot every day in America. The examples like this are many. That's why the last thing our fragile democracy needs is a president in the Oval Office allied with one of the most corrupt regimes in the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
“By their own admission, the Trump family relies on Russian money. It helps keep their businesses afloat and is reportedly laundered through Trump properties. Russian dark money is also making its way through the GOP. For the countless times the question has been raised, “Why won't Trump ever say anything critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin–an architect of a mafia state, a champion of mass murderer Joseph Stalin, and a war criminal?”, the answer is simple: he can't. Trump has reportedly enriched himself with Russian money, looking to hide abroad, keeping it safe from the uncertainty of doing business inside Russia, where fortunes can be seized to benefit Putin. Trump's presidency has also turned out to be a financial boon for Putin's oligarchs. Trump and Russia's ruling elite seem to have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Andrea Chalupa:
Why should any of this matter to a candidate, organizer, and voter in America in one of the most important election years in the history of our country? An anti-corruption crusader for Global Witness named Ava Lee has this to say about the destruction behind the glamor of the oligarch jetset: ‘Every corrupt politician, shady oil boss, and dodgy business is backed up and protected by a willing team of unscrupulous lawyers, bankers, and accountants. These people don't just enable corruption. They profit from it, and they have blood on their hands. These people and the companies they work for must be held to account if we want to fight the corruption that keeps poor countries poor, destabilizes democracies, and enables human rights abuses.’
Andrea Chalupa:
“A Ukrainian investigative journalist who regularly covers corruption in Ukraine and Russia told me that she wonders if Americans fully grasp what they're up against. When there's a reality TV producer in the Oval Office adept at inventing distractions and wielding his Twitter account like a cat laser pointer, it's easy to get worn down and forget the insidious dangers behind RussiaGate. Let's look, for example, at the larger stories eclipsed by the Nunes memo. On January 29th, 2018, there was an assault of news stories. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Devin Nunes, defied the FBI and DOJ and voted to release a classified memo they alleged undermined the Russia investigations, known as the Nunes memo. The Trump administration declined to impose new Russian sanctions to hold the Kremlin accountable for hacking the 2016 election. Andrew McCabe, the Deputy Director of the FBI, was forced out early after being attacked by Trump for months, and we were reminded that the Department of Justice and FBI are being investigated by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Before the dust could settle, the next day we learned from Russian state media that the CIA director met in the US with the sanctioned head of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, which orchestrated the attack on our election.
Andrea Chalupa:
“The Nunes memo underlined how much Trump and his loyal Republicans want to end the Russia investigations. With the indictments of 13 Russians and four Americans who served on the Trump campaign, including infamous torturers' lobbyist, Paul Manafort, Mueller picked off the low-hanging fruit. There's no telling how wide and high up this will go and that clearly makes Republicans nervous. We also know that the Russians hacked the RNC and Republican leaders, but have yet to weaponize the stolen goods. What, if anything, have GOP leaders done to ensure that their emails and documents are not released?
Andrea Chalupa:
“In December 2017, it was reported that Mueller subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, a major lender to businesses associated with Trump, which has its own Russia scandal. The bank was fined by US and UK regulators for a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme. We are reminded yet again that Trump is beholden to the Kremlin for its support during the election and to his web of Russian money. Our system of checks and balances is straining under the fallout. With the constant humiliation of America on the global stage, the attacks on our allies, the shocking witch hunt of former British spy, Christopher Steele, which could prevent future sharing of intelligence deemed a political threat to the White House, further isolating the US, a weakened state department that's in chaos, Putin's gamble won big. Kremlin state TV, infamous for churning out surreal lies, is factually correct when it boasts, ‘Trump is ours.’
Andrea Chalupa:
“The Trump White House seems to be on track to becoming the most corrupt in US history, and the oligarchs–whether Russian or American–who support him are supporting that corruption. The virus of corruption as we've seen most in Hungary and Poland can be devastating. A United Nations official, while conducting an investigation on the matter, says that dire poverty in America will worsen under Trump, threatening democracy. America has never been in greater danger. Corruption on the scale of Trump and Putin breeds authoritarianism and protects the autocrat in part by keeping the elites happy, or keeping them in line, as long as they stand to enrich themselves. It recalls the ending of Animal Farm, when George Orwell writes, ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again. But already it was impossible to say which was which.’ Simply put, corruption kills, and exposing every dark corner of RussiaGate is an important front in the war on corruption, which is also the war against authoritarianism, which enables corruption to flourish.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, in the clip of the film Mr. Jones you're about to hear a news report based on a historical event where Walter Duranty was celebrated in a big banquet in the Waldorf Astoria in New York City in 1933 for bringing together the White House and the Kremlin. This is true. This event really happened. This all really happened. American corporations are thrilled because they get to profit off of helping Stalin modernize his Soviet Empire, nevermind that he just got away with murdering millions of people. Who cares when there's money to be made? Orwell, who's the Greek chorus of the film, an ever present reminder of the judgment of history, perfectly summarizes what's happening in this moment as American oligarchs and Russian oligarchs toast and feast. One thing you may notice if you watch the film is that, during the scene, we're focused on a worker. A waiter, a Black man, standing off to the side, taking this all in. This was intentional to show that we won't have economic justice without racial justice. Corruption kills, and the most vulnerable are communities of color.
News report:
Kremlin officials in Washington today have much to celebrate.After a series of negotiations with the White House, the United States has officially recognized the Soviet Union.
Speaker:
Cheers!
Multiple speakers:
Cheers!
News report:
American business leaders have long welcomed this move as a way to expand trade. But the man credited with convincing President Roosevelt is Walter Duranty, better known to his readers as "our man in Moscow."
Orwell:
Creatures outside look from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again. But already it was impossible to say which was which.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the front lines in the US, China, and other hard hit parts of the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate at The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon. It keeps us going.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Visonberg, Nick Farr, Demian Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the producer level on Patreon...