Politics is a fast-paced and grueling game. Reporters committed to a life reporting on the finest nuances of what makes the U.S. government tick scarcely ever have a true “down time.” Even if it’s not an election year brimming with nonstop twists and turns, political coverage is an arena where literally anything can happen any day, and it often does. In the last week, for example, a vote on a gigantic national infrastructure bill, debated and negotiated over many months finally took place on Friday night. One morning it might be the signs a department head might be terminated, and then later that afternoon a sitting congressman might use social media to broadcast an abhorrent meme indicating fantasy violence against a rival party member. If your world is politics and broadcast television, it’s hard to imagine having any second to take on any other project of any kind.
That is not the case if you are NBC/MSNBC host Chuck Todd and his staff at Meet the Press. For the fifth time, Meet the Press has partnered with the venerable AFI Fest to put together a curated batch of stellar up-and-coming short form documentaries entitled simply, Meet the Press Film Festival. While having previously taken place in Washington D.C., this year’s festival will take place in Los Angeles as a part of AFI Fest. Fifteen films divided amidst five programs have been chosen by Todd and his team, tackling everything from racial injustice, the tenuous trusses of democracy, police reform, gay rights and much more. Selections for the festival in the past have been nominated for Oscars and Emmys (such as Knife Skills, Edith + Eddie and Heroin(e)) and the 2019 inclusion Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) won the 2020 Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject.
Films in this year’s selection include Red Taxi credited only to Anonymous, which shows what life is like trying to make a living daily in Hong Kong. Lead Me Home, by Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, takes a close look at the American homelessness crisis. Sindha Agha’s film Golden Age Karate is a story about a teen karate pro teaching self-defense to seniors at a local nursing home.
To understand the Meet the Press Film Festival better as well as the role of curating the event, while holding down an incredibly busy weekly schedule, we spoke with Meet the Press and Meet the Press Daily anchor Chuck Todd. Todd discussed with us his passion for trying to bring documentaries to larger audiences, the state of the current political climate and former President Donald Trump’s lingering effect on politics.
mxdwn: How are you?
Chuck Todd: I’m alright. Other than as a Packer fan depressed that Aaron Rogers just tanked the season.
mxdwn: Well you must be happy at least that it’s Friday?
Chuck Todd: Well I work weekends as you know with Meet the Press so my Friday is my Wednesday.
mxdwn: If I understand your programming schedule correctly, you’re on the air six days a week right?
Chuck Todd: Yes. Pretty much. Though Saturdays, while I work Saturdays, I’m not always on air. But yes. I do take Mondays off. I always say, “Monday is my weekend.”
mxdwn: As far as the film festival that you guys have put together, the films you have selected, now admittedly I personally don’t have any experience producing any live television, but I have some idea how immensely complicated it is, the writing, the scheduling, the booking. How is it that you and your team have time enough to work on something like this with how much television you’re putting on the air every week?
Chuck Todd: Well, you sound like you’ve talked to my staff. We need more resources there’s no doubt. You know every media organization’s facing this right? You feel like you’ve got all these great ideas; you want to keep doing more things. You certainly feel stretched. It is a labor of love on this stuff. In this case, this is our fifth year doing this film festival and we’ve partnered from the get-go with AFI because we know they’re pretty good at vetting filmmakers. We’re the substance. We’re the content folks. They’re good at vetting the other half, which is also how to put a festival on.
In that sense, having that partnership with AFI allows us to do the stuff we do well. My team loves this. It’s extra work, there’s no doubt. My god, we get to screen all these great films and then decide what makes the festival and all this stuff. We’ve done this five years now. Every year, we’ve had a couple of them, you end up feeling this sense of ownership. They get nominated for Oscars and other things and it really- it’s a feeling- a point of pride for everyone involved. There’s a little bit of that.
I think every media organization. Where you have the pressures of, “Are you on streaming? Are you doing newsletters? Are you doing this or that?” I think everybody feels a bit stretched. But welcome to journalism right?
mxdwn: Yeah.
Chuck Todd: I’m sure you’ve got–how many different ways do you have to chop up content? So I think we’re all feeling it in a good way but it’s a new world and we’re in the middle of this. Tom Brokaw just said, “It’s like the big bang.” The media, everything’s exploded and we’re still figuring out where all the particles are settling. We’re all trying to figure it out.
mxdwn: So with all the other challenges that it takes to do what you guys do effectively every week–and of course on some level, higher stakes negotiations, people who are prickly, maybe don’t want to be on the air, things that you’re probably having to fight for pretty hard and win all the time–why take on this extra challenge? Why do this and try to help independent documentaries get out there to the world?
Chuck Todd: I kind of look at it as it’s scratching an itch that I want us involved in. My biggest frustration at Meet the Press is, we just have an hour. Whether it’s one hour a day or an hour on a Sunday. Some of these political topics we’re dealing with are very complicated, very nuanced. There is some issues a lot of times and we all get up in the day-to-day process of politics. I always say look, “I have to cover politics as it is not as I wish it were.” But what the documentary space allows us to do is explore, “Why is this happening? Why do we have this problem with homelessness?” That’s one of the, “this is going to resonate a lot with Californians” when they see one that we’re featuring, called Lead Me Home.
When you get into trying to understand better the racial divide, we have a couple of films. One is called Lynching Postcards. It’s funny. It’s something that I didn’t know existed. Now that I do, it was hard to look at. Now it helps, hopefully, that more people see it, they understand the racial pain that exists in this country a little bit better than they did before. It’s not always something you can make happen on a Sunday morning broadcast. I think this is just another way to do this. Then it’s about touching another audience. I do think particularly short documentaries in the twenty to forty-minute range have replaced long-form magazine articles. In the ‘70s and ‘80s some of those interesting dives maybe trying to understand why a community was doing something, why a person did something, those great 10 to 20,000 word pieces, whether it was in a GQ, an Esquire, a New Yorker, an Atlantic type of thing. I think the documentary short has provided a wider audience for that same type of journalism. Then you throw in that millennials and Gen Z folk, I think are visual learners. So this also means documentaries in some ways are not just the new magazines, but the new books too. I think it’s also an opportunity to touch a wider audience that may not come to us on Sunday so we’re going to them, and showing them, “Our aperture is a little bit wider than you think.”
mxdwn: Now in terms of selecting the films that you have chosen, what’s the submission or curation process like? Is it you call for submissions or are you guys actively courting certain filmmakers you know are making interesting topics? How are you getting the films to consider on? How are you deciding on which ones you think are worthy of inclusion?
Chuck Todd: The way our partnership works with AFI, they’re vetting the filmmakers and they’re helping get the submissions and we’re making the decisions on substance. We’re making the decision, “Does this make sense?” Is this something that fits under what we think is the Meet the Press film festival umbrella?” We sort of gravitate in each given year on to the shorts that we feel like are touching on some of the topics we’re debating right now or are being debated in the larger sense. We decide substantively which films make sense. AFI is doing the vetting on the directors and helping us make sure that we get these submissions. The documentary short community at some festivals, it’s sort of sidelined. They’re in the back corner of the theater when they do these things at a Sundance or things like this. This is the first time we’ve been out in LA with it, but the first four years that we did this, it was standalone with just the shorts. We’ve had five straight years where we’ve had at least one film nominated for some major awards whether it was an Oscar or an Emmy. We really like to think we have established ourselves as, “If you’ve got a short thing you think is influential and worthy of this,” Meet the Press Film Festival is the place to debut it. Whether it’s a Netflix production, MTV production, we’ve got you know you name it, whether independent or major studios, we’ve got a quite a few that have [been] submitted that made it through.
mxdwn: Of the fifteen that you chose, and I’m not asking you to name a favorite, in terms of the ones that have been selected, is there one that you think is particularly provocative or arresting?
Chuck Todd: Well I think I mentioned Lynching Postcards. That one I think is one, and the way we feature [them] when you go to the festival we pair a couple of them together. Two that we plan to pair together, one is about all the artwork that was inspired by the death of Breonna Taylor (Bree Wayy: Promise Witness Remembrance) and how art was used by so many people, whether paintings or murals, and it’s all about that but we pair it with this Lynching Postcards documentary, which is about the history of people literally proud to have a picture taken with them at a lynching and then literally sending the postcard to friends and family. This was happening a lot in the early twentieth century. So pairing those together I think really paints that fuller picture of sort of understanding the moment we’re in now and why the history of this needs to be taught.
Another one that just sort of hit me in an interesting way and I didn’t expect it was something I never heard of. Somebody I never heard of. This is a documentary called Coded about the story of J.C. Leyendecker who was basically Norman Rockwell before there was Norman Rockwell. At one point the most famous commercial artist in America living a, for the time, a somewhat open gay lifestyle. He had a partner for forty years for a while could live somewhat open, until he felt pressured and ended up losing his job or sort of being pushed out at the Saturday Evening Post. But it touched me because I had this obituary that my father saved of an aunt of ours in our family in the ‘50s. When she died the obituary just was… it’s so tragic to read it through today’s light. It didn’t say, “She was survived by a partner.” It just simply said, “She shared a home with,” and it named this other teacher that she taught with. It’s obvious in today’s eyes. Even in death my family decided at the time they couldn’t celebrate the forty year relationship she had with this other women because, “What would the town think?” Or whatever reason it was in the ‘50s.
And this documentary about Leyendecker, he ordered his partner to burn or destroy everything and it was just like one little attic where they found some of his work and it’s sort of what spawned this documentary. But it made me think, how much of queer history is lost because people felt like they had to hide their lives even in death. And like I said, when I watched it, it was like, “Oh my god.” It was one of those things that just personally it hit and it’s also very visually appealing documentary. They show you his drawings and they do some interesting animation and Neil Patrick Harris actually voices J. C. Leyendecker when they’re narrating some diary posts and things like that. I think that’s one that will be interesting to folks. There’s another one it’s not the best-looking film but it’s not supposed to be. It’s one about an immigration detention facility called The Facility. It’s basically all done on an iPhone. It’s a reminder how low the barrier to entry is. And I’ll tell you, this film, yeah, it maybe only on an iPhone, but it’s pretty powerful.
mxdwn: Here in Los Angeles, I know a lot of people who are interested in every year what pictures are up for consideration, what pictures are up for Oscars and of course Oscar nominations for documentaries too. But the funny thing is, almost every year the common thing I hear is, “I don’t know how to see them. I don’t know how to find them.” But of course if something pops up on Netflix or Hulu they might find things there. Do you think documentaries in general reach enough people? Of course a lot of mass market movie theaters, movie theater chains: it’s popcorn flicks. It’s the typical kind of fiction. It’s not necessarily documentary subject that they try to put in most theaters. So if they don’t reach enough people, how could they be brought to more people than they are?
Chuck Todd: Well look I think they finally do reach more people than ever before. I think there have been some great documentary shorts made over the years, but you couldn’t find them anywhere in the ‘90s. It’s impossible. There’d be the one art house theater that might show three or four or something like that. But you had to want to go find it if you wanted to see it. I do think in the era of streaming, in this case, that’s why you see more being made. The totality of the amount of documentaries being made is greater than ever, because there is a demand for content. Now do I wish there were better ways to organize content? My goodness. That’s how I feel about the entire streaming world, “Where is Seinfeld now? Oh it’s on Netflix, not on Hulu.” Sometimes in this age of streaming I can tell you what I look forward to. I think we’re a pretty good curator. I hope at some point that when you go to Meet the Press on Peacock, we’re able to—obviously some of this [with] licensing is complicated—do a temporary short showcase for a period of time where everybody gets a chance to see these films. We’re going to do a showcase on MSNBC as well for a couple hours special for some of these. But look, I have an ambition of… I want to be the virtual movie theater for hard-hitting documentary shorts. Where you come to the “Meet the Press Cineplex,” virtual cineplex if you will, and then find it.
I think you’re right, I think there needs to be more reliable places to find these. But I also think there are more people watching documentaries than ever before because of the access to streaming. I think this issue of finding stuff on streaming is a problem not just for documentaries. It’s a problem for everything. Wouldn’t it be great if they came up with a guide of what was on streaming? Maybe if they called it TV Guide? Sorry. I’m half kidding but it sort of feels like we need that again. Because you constantly need to know who’s got what. I wish on any given day I don’t know what’s new on any one streaming service let alone what’s new across six of them.
mxdwn: Indeed. It’s the same problem with music as it is for movies. Which platform has which catalog, which licensing deals exist or where they don’t? It’s a mess.
Chuck Todd: I think it’s even harder on music. I have no idea. I’m on five different music services for that very reason. Every time I think, “They don’t have it? They have it? OK.” You’re right, I find music even harder these days than the visual issue.
mxdwn: I was watching the Rachel Maddow show the other night and she devoted the first part of her show to the aftermath of the Youngkin and McAuliffe (Virginia Governorship) election. Her disposition was that she thought the media in general was overhyping McAuliffe’s loss in the election. I’m wondering if you subscribe to her thinking on that or if you think that the general assumption that the Democrats’ position in general is weakened, that President Biden’s position in general is weakened? Do you think that it’s as big a deal as it’s being made out to be or do you think it’s just the fulcrum swinging back the other way for the moment?
Chuck Todd: Well both things can be true. The fulcrum’s swinging back for the moment and this is a big deal. I don’t think the two are separated a little bit. In some ways after New Jersey, I could argue that things are being underplayed. New Jersey tells you that this was a national environment. If you were just talking about Virginia, and there was a time, if New Jersey had been a six to eight point victory for the Democrats, then this would’ve been a story about Virginia. When you actually look at it from coast to coast, whether it was Seattle, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Virginia or New Jersey, the entire 2021 election landscape was being held in Democratic territory. Various shades of Democratic territory right? From light blue to dark blue, but in every one of those cases, what I would say it was a tough night for progressives. The progressives lost in Buffalo. The progressive position lost in Minneapolis. The progressives lost in Seattle. We saw primaries all this year between progressives—and I hesitate to always say moderates—it’s always the progressive wing versus the non-progressives if you will. But primaries on the Democratic side whether it’s the new Mayor of New York City who beat back a bunch of progressives in a primary or Terry McAuliffe.
I think it’s going to be an intense debate. I do think that there’s a debate between progressive political analysts and non-progressive political analysts about “is the problem that the party didn’t animate the progressive base enough or is the problem that the party looks like it’s too far to the left of the center of American politics?” I think that debate is going to continue inside the Democratic tent probably for the rest of this year and most of next.
mxdwn: What’s interesting to me, is given the four years of the Trump Presidency and what the last election looked like, a lot of people came out to vote all over the map that might not have just because they didn’t want Trump to win. So many people so disliked Trump’s presidency and were so not a fan of his policies, his approach, the way he did things. I don’t want to find myself advocating for a double standard. But one guy was talking about injecting people with disinfectant on national television; the other guy is just a politician in all the conventional senses we’ve ever been used to. Watching this play out in real time—I’m not going to give Biden’s presidency a pass—it’s not like his team haven’t made mistakes. It’s not like there’s things that totally could’ve been done better. But the vitriol that I’m seeing, doesn’t seem in alignment with recent experience of what we’ve got compared to what we used to have. Because what we do have is someone who’s running the trappings of government, the various levers, the switches, the people that are involved. But then on the other hand, we just went through an experience where government was being hollowed out in almost every branch in every department. That’s what I find so surprising. There seems to be such animosity towards this moment and the immense challenges of this moment. I would’ve thought coming at this people would be a little more—not complacent—but a little more comfortable. Just being like, “OK. Things aren’t insane everyday.”
Chuck Todd: I have a theory. Look, I view Donald Trump as a cancer on our democracy. I think when he was taken off of social media; it was a relief to many people for so many reasons. We saw the statistics. Misinformation on Twitter went down some 70%. It was some wild number like that. I also have a family member who’s been dealing with a stage four cancer situation for some time. He’s been feeling really good lately. Cancer’s still there. Cancer’s still growing. But he feels good right now. And, you know, I do wonder, and this is just a theory I have. In the same way I was telling you about our film festival and one of them that I think is very hard to watch, it’s very important to not look away, Lynching Postcards. I think you hit on something a little bit, which is the complacency.
Which I think many people aren’t seeing the day-to-day agitation of Trump anymore. Now there are those of us that do. We do in the media. We see his crazy press releases every day. Every hour. But the average person isn’t anymore. It’s why you have this uneven turnout. The anti Trump messaging worked in Northern Virginia. Didn’t work in any other part of Virginia, but it worked in Northern Virginia. Why? Because it’s in your face. You see it. Everyone works in government or around it. What you describe, everybody is experiencing this first hand. It shouldn’t surprise people that resonated there, but it didn’t resonate in other places. Simply because it’s a little bit, I don’t want to say it’s out of sight, out of mind, but it isn’t in their face every day. Now, that opens another question, “Do we need to deal with this cancer directly? Do people need to feel the pain again, to remember what we went through?” I will leave you with… remember the old “Coffee Talk” skit from SNL?
mxdwn: Sure!
Chuck Todd: I might leave you with this: if Donald Trump were on Twitter right now, Terry McAuliffe would be governor and Joe Biden’s approval rating would be at 50%. Discuss.
===
Tickets are available for the films of Meet the Press Film Festival both in person and for virtual screenings at FEST.AFI.com
Full Meet the Press Film Fest 2021 Lineup:
Golden Age Karate
Coded: The Hidden
Love Of J.C. Leyendecker
The Train Station
Lead Me Home
The Facility
The Interview
Bree Wayy: Promise Witness Remembrance
Party Line
Red Taxi
Takeover
Meltdown In Dixie
Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’
They Won’t Call It Murder
Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis
Mission: Hebron
Leave a Comment