Zendaya was one of six actresses to take part in the Hollywood Reporter‘s Drama Actress roundtable, along with Janelle Monáe, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Helena Bonham Carter, and Rose Byrne. The Euphoria star is the newest to the business we call show (she’s 23, although she’s been acting since she was 13), and the other panelists were impressed by the relative youngster. After Zendaya said her age, Bryne replied, “That’s extraordinary. I mean, at 23, I was a depressive weirdo. You are so composed and erudite.” She also had the best starstruck moment among the actresses.
“I mean, this is exciting. I’m proud of myself for speaking at all because I was very nervous,” she said after Aniston raved about meeting Julie Andrews and Monáe and Byrne did the same for Julia Roberts. “But when I met Beyoncé, that was the only time I’ve ever acted like, real not cool. I just lost my cool. My dad even said it because I was with him at the time and he was like, ‘Dude, you nerded out just then.’ And I was like, ‘I know, I’m being weird.’ Usually I can keep it together.” Zendaya appeared in the music video for Beyoncé’s Lemonade standout “All Night,” along with Chloe x Halle, which she called “a really powerful moment and I feel like I was a part of music history.”
It’s impressive that Zendaya has “nerded out” only once. I know I would have lost my sh*t being around Jake Gyllenhaal when he started doing this on the Spider-Man set.
We need as many excursions from the present moment as we can get these days. Thank goodness for music videos. While many video directors and artists have had to get extra creative of late to account for quarantine restrictions, there were still plenty of visuals filmed before the country went on lockdown.
There was Future’s acting debut in “Life Is Good,” where he and Drake played every day 9-5ers dreaming of becoming rap stars — with cameos from several people, including Lil Yachty. Lil Yachty’s own “Oprah’s Bank Account” video, gave us the unforgettable visual of him in full Oprah cosplay, interviewing Drake and DaBaby. Other notable visuals include Drake’s megamansion in “Toosie Slide,” and DaBaby’s mini-caper film in “Find My Way.”
The prevailing theme for this year’s most impactful visuals has been sweeping narratives and celebrations of pop culture icons. Here are the ten best rap music videos of 2020 so far.
10. Suigeneris — “Brown Justin Beiber”
Suigeneris is the least known name on the list, but that could change with more catchy tracks like “Brown Justin Beiber.” He got our attention with the song title, and kept it with a fun video which showed the young artist partying with friends — including a scene in a giant vat of Flaming Hot Cheetos. For the bravery of that stunt alone, he deserves every one of his 2 million+ YouTube video.
9. Blueface/DaBaby — “Obama”
Barack Obama is the most charismatic President in modern history. Similarly, Blueface and DaBaby are two of the rap game’s biggest characters, and decided to take us back to simpler times with their fun video for “Obama,” which featured a Bill Clinton-oval office “reference” and an Obama impostor legalizing weed in DaBaby’s native North Carolina with a 3-second phone call. That’s not quite how the legislative process works, but we salute the hilarious visual nonetheless.
8. Drake — “Toosie Slide”
The prevailing visual of Drake’s “Toosie Slide” clip is supposed to be him doing the TikTok-ready dance in the hallway of his home, but many people barely remember the dance as much as the fly on the wall access to his gorgeous mansion. He got his MTV Cribs on and let director Theo Skudra lead us from room to room of his Toronto estate. By most any standard, the house is impeccable, automatically making it one of the year’s best videos — and the most confounding, as every luxurious nook of the Toronto estate makes his idle threats seem more pointless.
7. Armand Hammer – “Charms” Feat. KeiyaA
Armand Hammer’s “Charms” visual is an eerie reflection of the times. One can’t help but notice the ominous fog in the orange-tinted distance, which resembles the smoke billowing through cities having a national uprising. Why is it happening? Because as Billy Woods narrates, “I was given this world, I didn’t make it / This a crazy place.” Video creator Joseph Mault, a previous collaborator with the duo, offered viewers a first-person perspective of an uninhabited jungle that’s open to interpretation. Maybe the area reflects a left-behind region — or maybe it reflects an opportunity to build anew. The sprawling jungle, like life, is what you make of it.
6. DaBaby — “Find My Way”
DaBaby opened up his “Find My Way” video by asking if “you ever seen someone become a monster for a good cause,” setting the stage for the Reel Goats-directed mini-movie chronicling he and his girlfriend’s spree of robberies throughout rural California. The Bonnie & Clyde concept isn’t exactly a new video conceit, but “Find My Way” is at the top of the canon. The 10-minute video reaches a crescendo when they’re discovered at a hotel, ending the video off with a bang.
5. R.A.P. Ferreira — “Leaving Hell”
R.A.P. Ferreira’s animated “Leaving Hell” video is a perfect addendum to his intrepid narrative of self-discovery. Most videos that closely follow an artist’s lyrics are obnoxiously literal, but there’s a charm to the Ben Clarkson-directed visual. When the chorus comes in as Ferreira, fka Milo, comes across a giant trumpet in the sky, it’s beautifully evident that the song and video are working symbiotically. The renowned lyricist’s abstract poetics are in tandem with the colorful, multi-dimensional video, and one may not be sure if they want him to keep weaving his tale so the animation continues or the other way around.
4. Joyner Lucas — “Will“
Joyner Lucas is known for left-of-center video concepts, and he decided to pay homage to one of the culture’s biggest legends on “Will.” The song showcases Joyner paralleling the rap star’s legacy with his own walk through life, as the video showcases him culling through Will Smith’s extensive catalog of blockbusters. The video was so impactful that it even got Will Smith to do a remix of the song.
3. RMR — “Dealer” Feat. Future and Lil Baby
RMR went viral with “Rascal,” but his “Dealer” video, featuring Future and Lil Baby, is a more captivating concept. The three-minute visual shows RMR bringing over 18 classic art pieces to life under a golden sky. Who knows where RMR’s country-trap forays will take him, but we can forever thank the unorthodox artist for the visual of Future rapping as the Statue of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II.
2. Future & Drake — “Life Is Good”
It’s an event whenever Future and Drake link up. They decided to play into the magnitude of their “Life Is Good” collaboration with a fun Director X-helmed video where the two rap gods explore a range of other careers, including mechanics, chefs, and agents at an off-brand Apple Store. The video features cameos from the likes of 21 Savage and Lil Yachty, who joined the often brooding, braggadocious duo in having a little fun with their image.
1. Lil Yachty — “Oprah’s Bank Account” Feat. Drake and DaBaby
Some rappers are prone to title their song after a name referenced on the track. The galaxy brain version of that circumstance is the video for Lil Yachty’s “Oprah’s Bank Account,” where he turned his “you look as good as Oprah’s bank account” punchline into a nine-minute ode to the media mogul. Yachty was bold enough to dress up as Oprah and reenact her talk show, interviewing Drake about “reaching your full light skin capability” via a beard, and DaBaby about his glass-half-full perspective on making repetitive songs. Yachty may not get any calls to star in Oprah’s biopic, but it was fun to see all three artists make light of themselves.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Last week, Phoebe Bridgers released her new album, Punisher, a day early, and now she has given fans another treat. She guested on last night’s The Late Late Show, and she gave James Corden a taste of his own “Carpool Karaoke” medicine by singing “I See You” in her car.
Donning her signature skeleton outfit, a bike helmet, and black sunglasses, Bridgers drove around and sang out the single as she drifted around corners and did donuts in a parking lot (although stock footage of professional drivers doing those stunts did the actual heavy lifting).
Before the performance, Bridgers took a few minutes to chat with Corden, and she explained why she decided to release Punisher early and not “push” it:
“I just had a couple people reach out and ask me if I was going to put out the record at all with the political climate, or even push it down the line, and I just feel like the subtext of that is waiting for people to forget about Black Lives Matter, or waiting for white people to be able to talk about themselves on the internet again, which I find insanely cringey and offensive. […] I think it really worked out and I hope that this movement goes on for as long as it takes, which I think is going to be a long time. I feel like it’s like Kony 2012 energy but over months and months, so it’s cool to see.”
Last week, comedian and actor Chris D’Elia denied accusations that he’d sexually harassed and groomed several young women when they were underage. His statement included a claim that he’d “never knowingly pursued any underage women,” although he stated that he was “truly sorry” for allowing himself to be “caught up in my lifestyle.” It’s not clear what exactly D’Elia was apologizing for, although he acknowledged that he’d offended people over the course of his career, and he has since been dropped by his agent and manager. Now, the lead actor of You — for which D’Elia portrayed a pedophile character in Season 2 — is speaking out about the allegations.
Penn Badgley, who’s very open about how troubled he is about his own stalker character’s popularity on the show, spoke with the LA Times and condemned the behavior that’s described in the allegations against D’Elia:
“Systemically, it needs to be addressed. Individually, it needs to be addressed. Am I the person to address all of those things? You know — it did affect me deeply. I was very troubled by it. I am very troubled by it. I don’t know Chris. I know that, if there’s anything we need to do in this age, it’s to believe women.”
He further expressed disappointment on how You may have unwittingly acted as a haven for a truly abusive man:
“[T]he idea that a show like ours would indirectly, unwittingly be a haven for people who are abusive is disturbing. It’s very disturbing. What does it take to change that? Because it’s not just vetting individuals. There needs to be a change in culture and attitude so that that kind of behavior is so clearly reprehensible, it’s so clearly, like, anti-human.”
Badgley also stressed that the You producers have spoken with 17-year-old actress Jenna Ortega, whose character interacted with D’Elia onscreen, “to make sure she felt safe” following the surfacing of allegations. And Badgley further explained that You attempts to deconstruct the systems that help create cultures were predators can flourish. “I would hope that at least our show is not serving to uphold these kind of, like, bunk ways of being and these systems, right?” he added.
Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings, who starred alongside D’Elia in Whitney, also reacted. In doing so, she described the accusations against D’Elia as pointing toward a “pattern of predatory behavior,” against which she vowed to never be silent.
Walmart’s website strikes again. Just a day after Lil Baby snapped on the retailer for offering a knockoff of his signature 4PF chain, another Atlanta rapper found his own trademark looks up for sale. However, that rapper — 21 Savage — merely chuckled to himself and Lil Baby, posting a screenshot of the bootleg chains on his Instagram story with laughing emojis and a cryptic reply.
The product in question is a two-chain set — which is ironic, considering 2 Chainz was one of the first Atlanta rappers to get ripped off back in 2017 — featuring 21’s “Savage” and hockey mask pendants, retailing at $39.99. 21, laughing off the poor-quality duplicates, told Lil Baby, “We finna own 1,” although whether he was referring to one of the chain sets or a branch of the family-owned Walmart he left to the imagination.
Of course, Walmart, like Amazon, allows third party retailers to “rent” space on its site to sell their goods, so there is likely another culprit than the still-controversial Walton family — nothing a cease-and-desist couldn’t handle. However, it has been pretty funny to watch rappers’ signature looks pop up on the website of a brand which once refused to carry uncensored versions of their albums.
Meanwhile, on the music front, 21 Savage recently teased an upcoming video with Gucci Mane and last appeared on “Secret” with Summer Walker. He’s been hard at work on Savage Mode 2 with Metro Boomin.
Check out 21 Savage’s reaction to having his Slaughter Gang chain knocked off above.
NASCAR is in the midst of a change, as Bubba Wallace, the series’ lone Black driver, speaks out on the Black Lives Matter movement and successfully pushed NASCAR to ban Confederate flags from events.
The backlash to Wallace from a certain subset of NASCAR’s fan base, the ones that would like the sport to remain a safe space for racism, has been swift, but so has the support from new fans that want to watch races and cheer on Bubba. My Twitter timeline, which is typically fairly quiet during races given that I mostly follow folks interested in basketball, was more active than I’ve ever seen it in the last stage of Sunday’s race at Talladega.
As Wallace charged to the lead briefly and then battled in the top 10 for much of the final stage before being forced to pit on a late caution as he was running out of fuel, fans were enthralled by the action on the track — which, I must say is particularly unique to superspeedway racing at Talladega and Daytona — but also had plenty of questions.
I hope folks tuning in recently to support Wallace stick with NASCAR, a sport I’ve enjoyed watching for years but could desperately use an infusion of a younger, more diverse audience. As such, I’d like to try and answer some of those questions fans may have about terminology they hear on the race broadcast — I will say NASCAR broadcasts do a better job defining terms than most any other sports broadcasts — as well as some of the things that will happen during the race that may not be familiar to someone new to the sport.
Loose vs. Tight
You will hear announcers and drivers talking about their car being “loose” or “tight” throughout a race, sometimes with regards to one driver fighting both issues at the same time. That, unsurprisingly, is very bad. A loose race car means the rear tires lose traction first and make the back end of the car step out. The telltale sign of a loose race car is the back end sliding out in the corners, which can lead to spinning and wrecking. Sometimes, you’ll hear that one car forced another to “get loose,” which is the act of disrupting the air flow to the back bumper of the car, forcing the back end car start sliding up the track, which can lead to a spin or, at the least, forcing the other driver to really work the wheel to save it.
A tight race car means it doesn’t turn as much as the driver wants it to because the front tires lose traction before the rear tires, and this means they have a hard time sticking with the bottom line on the track. A driver with a tight race car will have to step out of the throttle to get the car to the bottom of the track or getting out of turns, losing speed in the process. Sometimes, a car can be both things, loose getting into turns and tight getting out. Again, that’s extra bad.
How do you fix these issues? That gets us to our next terms.
Trackbar, Wedge, Air Pressure Adjustments
Once a car is on the track there are three main ways for drivers and the crews to make adjustments to help the car’s handling. One is the track bar, which crews can adjust with a wrench that goes in the back windshield and drivers sometimes will adjust with a rod in the car (although some feel they only screw things up more when handling it themselves). The track bar runs underneath the rear of the car and can be raised or lowered to shift weight distribution from one side of the car to the other, and can change how it handles to either tighten or loosen up the car.
A wedge adjustment can only happen on a pit stop and requires a crew member to adjust the tension in the rear spring of the car. Sometimes you’ll hear about them calling to add wedge or taking out wedge during a pit stop. Adding wedge (increasing the spring tension) raises the car and makes it tighter, while taking out wedge (lowering the tension) lowers the car and loosens it up. Wedge adjustments are done in “rounds,” which is the amount the crew member will turn the ratchet. Sometimes it can be a quarter or half round, and sometimes it’ll be more than a full turn.
Finally, crews will toy with the air pressure in the tires to get the car to handle better. Lower air pressure will make a car tighter, while adding more air pressure will make the car looser. Most adjustments in air pressure are made to the right sides, particularly the right rear, because of how much force is put on the right sides on the banked corners.
Four Tires vs. Two Tires
For that same reason, that the right sides take more wear on the banked corners of NASCAR tracks, sometimes on key pit stops some drivers will take just two new tires (you might hear an announcer call them “stickers” because they’re new and came with the sticker on them still) on the right side rather than a full four to shorten their time on pit road and pick up some positions on the field. While that can be a good strategy for track position, if it’s done with too many laps left in a race, the worn left side tires will cause them to lose a bit of speed and the cars that take four tires will be at an advantage. Sometimes guys will take no tires and just get a splash of fuel to ensure they can make it to the end (we saw this some at Talladega on Monday).
Green-White-Checker
This is the “overtime” format NASCAR introduced years back to keep races from ending under caution, which is the most anti-climactic finish and fans hated it. The fix was to ensure a race always gets at least one full lap under green before being officially called. The Green-White-Checker designation refers to the flag order, with the first lap starting with the green, the white flag indicating the last lap. Once the leader takes the white flag (crosses the start/finish line for the final lap) the next flag ends the race. Sometimes this can mean a yellow and a checker, but typically if there’s a wreck on the final lap that’s not towards the front of the field well before the finish line, they’ll keep the race green for the leaders to battle it out (as we saw this Monday at Talladega).
Stages
NASCAR recently introduced stages to each race, breaking them up into three segments in an effort to make things more competitive. The first two stages each award points to the drivers in the top 10, making them valuable to the race for the playoffs, and reward drivers for running up front, even if they have issues or wreck later on in the race. The stages also work to prevent as many runaway winners, as there were times when, over a 500 mile race, you’d end up with the majority of the field getting lapped by the eventual winner. Since a caution flag is thrown after each stage, it ensures fewer green flag pit stops, closer fields, more restarts (where action tends to happen) and incentivizes the early and middle portions of the race.
Drafting
One of the first things folks notice when watching NASCAR is how close the cars get to one another and to the wall. That’s all part of the plan to reduce drag and increase speed. At Talladega and Daytona, the 2.5 mile superspeedways on the circuit, the use of “tapered spacers” to reduce horsepower by limiting air flow to the engine, bunch up the field and you get the type of racing we saw Sunday, where they’re nose to tail 5-10 deep and three-wide all the way around the track. Most tracks aren’t quite like that, but drafting is key at all of them, both in pushing someone to the front and also drafting to gain on them and, potentially, “slingshot” by them by using the speed you pick up drafting off of them to pass.
“Bump-drafting” is an aggressive form of drafting where the car behind will literally bump into the car in front at nearly 200 miles per hour. Some tracks, like the superspeedways, this is encouraged because the cars stay “wide open” (full throttle) the entire way around the track. At other tracks, where you let off the throttle in the corners or have to even use the brakes, bump-drafting at the wrong time in the corners can send someone into wall.
Drafting is also done by “side-drafting,” which is when cars get real close to each other when running side-by-side, this is done to manipulate the air flow on the side of a car and push more air onto the other car’s spoiler, slowing it down. When a car breaks a side draft, the resulting pocket of air that gets quickly filled can disrupt the other car, getting them loose or slowing them down as well.
In “Moving On,” the 16th episode of the final season of The Office, Pam interviews for a new job in Philadelphia, only to discover that her would-be boss, played by Bob Odenkirk, is essentially a bizarro Michael Scott. She declines the job because she realizes that she cannot work for another Michael Scott again.
In one way, that episode of The Office comes full circle for Better Call Saul‘s Bob Odenkirk, with him playing a version of the character for which he was very nearly hired back in 2005. The hiring of Michael Scott on The Office, in fact, was probably the most difficult casting decision that had to be made on the show for legendary casting director Allison Jones.
Casting Michael Scott was “the longest part of the [casting] process,” The Office producer Ben Silverman said in Andy Green’s book, The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s. “We were circling Bob Odenkirk. He was available. He had a great reputation in the comedy world, and he hadn’t yet become famous. He wasn’t really well known.”
However, Odenkirk wasn’t the only actor on their radar. In fact, over 35 actors were at least under consideration for the role of Michael Scott, including Robert Townsend, David Arquette, Jason Lee, Dave Foley, Dan Castellaneta, Thomas Lennon, Mark McKinney, Horatio Sanz, Ben Falcone, Owen Wilson, David Koechner, Hank Azaria, Rick Moranis, Kevin Nealon, Dan Aykroyd, Jon Favreau, Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, Jason Segal, Andy Richter, Jeff Garlin, Cedric the Entertainer, Richard Kind, Matthew Broderick, William H. Macy, Paul F. Tompkins, Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi, Gary Cole, Stephen Colbert and John C. Reilly. Most of those actors obviously did not make it past the “consideration stage.” However, Paul Giamatti and Phillip Seymour Hoffman were offered the role, but both declined, Louis C.K. came in and read, but he was barred from starring on The Office because of a holding deal with CBS.
Ultimately, the field was narrowed down to two names: Steve Carell and Bob Odenkirk. They wanted someone with a sort of “generic Americana” feeling, along the lines of Jerry Seinfeld or Tim Allen. They liked The Daily Show alum Steve Carell because of his work on Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty. However, Carell was on another NBC show at the time called Come to Papa as the fourth lead, and NBC — which also owned Papa — would not let The Office connect with Carell until the show was officially canceled.
Meanwhile, Bob Odenkirk “really wanted the part,” and “had a great take on the character.” The problem with Odenkirk — which is also what eventually made him so perfect for the role of Saul Goodman — is that “he had an edge to him. His take was as funny as Steve’s, but it was darker,” according to Allison Jones.
He wasn’t “soft” or “likable enough,” according to Silverman. “He was a little tougher and meaner.” Still, as Jones noted, “how often do you have two people as good as Bob Odenkirk and Steve Carell testing for the same role?”
The decision to go with Carell, however, came down to the fact that he was more of a “jerk and a douche,” while Odenkirk was closer to an “asshole.” Carell wasn’t very threatening, which they felt would work better with an American audience.
“The worst thing I have ever had to do ever,” Allison Jones remarked in Andy Greene book, “is to tell Bob Odenkirk’s agent that he didn’t get The Office … Believe me, it was a bummer to make that call and I do suspect the show would have worked with Bob Odenkirk.”
Of course, while Odenkirk did not land that role, he’s doing just fine for himself, approaching the final season of Better Call Saul after several successful seasons on Breaking Bad. Meanwhile, Carell and Odenkirk have 10 Emmy nominations between them, and both can boast about starring in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed television shows of the 2000s. Not bad for two actors who were not very well known in 2004.
Doja Cat is riding high right now: “Say So” became her first No. 1 song last month, and the hit single is still in the top 10 on the latest Hot 100 (which Tekashi 69 leads). Now she has given fans something else to enjoy, by sharing a late-night (or early-morning, depending on your perspective) upload of “Unisex Freestyle.” The track appears to be exclusive to SoundCloud, as it is not currently available on streaming platforms.
The song is driven by hard-hitting hip-hop beat contrasted by light synths sounds laid on top. On the song, Doja brags about her multi-gender appeal, rapping, “All the girls like me, and they mans / Unisex, unisex / I’m for all the ladies and gentlemen / I’m unisex, unisex.”
Doja got scatological with her descriptions of the track. Sharing it on twitter, she wrote, “I made some more horny sh*t check it out.” In the SoundCloud description, she called the song “just a pile of a poo poo honey,” and she tagged the track #peepeebaby.
During Jon Stewart’s tenure as host of The Daily Show, from 1999 to 2015, his head writers were six white dudes. Many of his top correspondents, including Steve Carell, Ed Helms, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert, were also white males. Stewart originally dismissed the show’s “women problem,” as Jezebel called it, but during an appearance on The Breakfast Club, he remembers “going back into the writer’s room and being like, ‘Do you believe this sh*t? Kevin? Steve? Mike? Bob? Donald?’ Oh… Uh oh. Uh oh.”
The Daily Show had a policy that kept the names and races of job applicants a secret, so as “to not be sexist and racist,” but Stewart eventually realized “the river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia. And you had to say to them, send me women, send me black people. And all of a sudden, women got funny… but they’d been funny all along. We just hadn’t actively done enough to mine that.” He also discussed the time he told Wyatt Cenac, the only Black person on staff at the time, to “f*ck off” over an impression of Black presidential candidate Herman Cain:
“It took me a long time to realize that the real issue was that we hired a person who is black… [and] they felt like they’re carrying the weight of representation. So they suddenly feel like, ‘I’ve got to be the speaker of the race.’ So we think we’re doing the right thing, but we’re not doing it in the right way. Those were hard lessons for me, and they were humbling lessons. And I was defensive about them and still didn’t do it all right.”
Stewart (whose new movie, Irresistible, comes out later this week) shared advice for a white man in a position of authority: don’t be complacent. “What’s hard about that for people is you get defensive. Nobody likes to be called on their sh*t, especially when they feel like it’s not really their sh*t,” he said. “But what you realize is, just stopping active persecution isn’t enough to dismantle. It has to be actively dismantled.”
I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, the 2018 true-crime masterpiece by the late Michelle McNamara, will land on a TV near you this weekend with a few additional layers. The book, of course, helped nab the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California in the 1970s and 80s, leaving a trail of 50 rapes and 12 murders in his wake. Michelle, who passed away in 2016, didn’t live to see the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, although there’s no question that her dogged pursuit of the truth, as well as the public awareness that she generated for the cold case, led to renewed law enforcement action that finally brought results. That process, along with much of the book, is detailed in a six-part HBO docuseries that takes its title from the McNamara-penned source material.
The HBO project is epic in its scope, not only following much of the book’s content but also including interviews from survivors, investigators, and McNamara’s husband, Patton Oswalt. True crime fans will find themselves unable to stop watching, and Michelle’s own obsession with unsolved cases — and her non-sensationalized, empathetic treatment of the subject matter — is clear to anyone who’s read the book. The series not only dives into Michelle’s soul but also layers in archival footage and police files, along with anecdotes about her life. Director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn, What Happened, Miss Simone?) was nice enough to speak with us about how this docuseries came together.
Even the opening credits of this docuseries are gripping. I can’t think of a better mood-setter than a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche.” How did you decide upon that song?
The cover is performed by Aimee Mann, who was a friend of Michelle and Patton. And if you know the song, you know it’s rather apt for the kind of ghost that haunts the series, but we felt that kind-of flipping the switch and having it in a female voice was appropriate and haunting for our show.
There are so many Cohen covers out there, but this one really hits the mark and sets a mood for what’s to come.
Oh good. We were really thrilled that she did it and with the performance.
You started work on this docuseries before Michelle’s book was published, yes?
You are right. HBO sent me a manuscript of the book before it was published, and I didn’t know much about the case at all. It was probably somewhere deep in my brain, but I hadn’t followed it closely. I think people were less aware of it, or people like myself anyway, and I was just really drawn in by Michelle: by her voice, by her ability to inhabit the world of her survivors. And my hair would stand up while I was reading it, but at the same time, I could feel her tremendous empathy. And also, at the heart of this story was this woman, the artist, who I felt that I identified with. And I just felt like really excited it on, not really as a crime story but really as a portrait of a woman, and a portrait of an artist, and that’s what really lured me in.
This is not only a crime story but a celebration of Michelle’s work, and also a cautionary tale on prescription drug addiction, so how did you strike a balance?
I think that was the challenge: balancing Michelle as an artist, who’s maturing and becoming a wife and a mother with a career, and managing all of those stretches with pills, and then, of course, she succumbs to them, and that kind of narrative. And interweaving it with the narrative of the survivors, not only the trauma of the crimes but also the trajectory of what happens in years after, with their relationships, how they were able to talk about or not talk about this. Then there’s law enforcement and their hunt for the perpetrator, and these threads are interwoven throughout, and that was really the challenge and the joy of it.
Michelle’s blog was wildly popular, and the book took off. So many people have theories on why true crime is so fascinating. Why do think our culture is so obsessed with it?
I definitely think a lot about it, and I know that Michelle thought a lot about it. I think it’s interesting to note that women are particularly part of this audience, and I guess I wonder if women being vulnerable in this world or often victims of domestic violence or other types of sexual violence, if it’s almost like a safety valve, where you can explore your greatest fears in a way that’s controllable? You can turn it off when you close the book. But I also think that storytellers and readers and audiences have always been interested with the most extreme, transgressive types of human behavior. It helps to kind-of understand the outer limits of humanity, and it’s inherently interesting. And it’s interested writers and poets since the beginning. Perhaps in this moment in our society, it’s taken on a bigger spotlight.
HBO
The book and the series both touch on how, in the 1970s, rape was not a felony. It was treated like a simple assault, and women were outright blamed in messaging for becoming victims. We’ve made progress, but do you feel that it’s enough?
Yes and no. Things have evolved. It was seen as a misdemeanor, a simple assault, and one of our subjects talks about being processed by male officers and her body being treated like a crime scene. Of course, that still happens in some cases, and in some cases, it doesn’t. And obviously, rape is now a felony, but a lot of rapes go unreported with women fearing not being believed, so there’s a lot of work to do. What I found great is that the survivors in this series, many of whom have been quiet for so long because of shame or stigma, or just social norms from when they were kids, that they decided to come forth and talk about it, and share with their family members. Because holding these kind of things back in private is too much on a person, and you need other people, you need your loved ones to be able to be there for you, so that was a wonderful thing, seeing those folks persevere in that journey.
It was striking, too, how when DeAngelo was arrested, the reaction from some of the survivors was like, “Really… him?”
Right, and Michelle predicted that. She said that it’s [a predator’s] actions that make them so powerful, and then you see that they’re Bob, or Bill, or in this case, Joe. Just some pasty old guy who’s barely worth your thoughts, you know?
And with that “Letter To The Old Man” that Michelle wrote in her book, how did you decide exactly where to put it in the series?
I think that the letter is such a prescient, powerful piece of writing, and she predicts so many things about what would happen in that letter, so we put it in a very special part of the series. It shows Michelle’s power and prowess, so it was very important for us to include it and dramatize it, very specifically.
You had cameras rolling when the team (including Patton) found out about the arrest. That timing.
It was crazy, that night — the first night of shooting — we went to Chicago. It was really early days of the project, and we thought we were just going to get to know [each other]. Patton was doing a book reading in Chicago, and we were all going to meet Michelle’s relatives, and then we filmed the reading, and then went to sleep. We woke up in the morning to text messages blowing up the phone about a suspect arrested. My camera crew had already boarded a flight to another city, and we shot Patton with an iPhone, and we were all booked on different flights back to New York, and then Patton was booked on Seth Meyers, and we were able to regroup with a different photographer and shoot them watching the press conference and their first reactions, so it was really a wild 24 hours.
Patton’s mentioned in the book, and he was obviously a huge supporter of Michelle’s work, so how did you decide how much of him to include?
Patton was always clear in that “this is not about me.” We agreed, and I think he was able to shed incredible light onto Michelle’s character, onto their initial romance, which made some great stories, and into struggle with writing, being a mom, and all those things. So, he was really there in service of Michelle’s story, and he never wanted anything more than that, so it really wasn’t that hard.
HBO
To wrap up here, DeAngelo is expected to plead guilty on June 29th.
Yes. The day after the premiere. His journey through the justice system is what really bookended our production. I hope that he does plead guilty, and that happens, for the survivors who were not named in the current suit. It’s really important for them and their closure, so I do hope that it goes through.
HBO’s ‘I’ll Be Gone In The Dark’ premieres on Sunday, June 28 at 10:00pm EST.
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