As hosts of a civics podcast, we are not allowed to advocate for policy. But you can. Here are three things you can do to get your elected officials to listen when you're mad about something.
By way of example, Nick reveals his pettiest, most apolitical gripe; and methods he would hypothetically use to address it. We talk lobbying, contacting your electeds, and getting (possibly famous) people together to advocate for change.
This episode features Emily Gallagher, serving District 50 in the New York State Assembly, and Eric Schwartz, of the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Here is Eric's piece on the National Film Preservation Act of 1988.
Here is our episode on Who REALLY Writes Bills.
Here is a video of Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie complaining about the soap opera effect.
Transcript
C101_Soap opera.mp3
Nick Capodice: And it's not going to succeed. But I'm talking to a policymaker tomorrow and you're calling on Congress to. I'm I want to call on Congress on the soap opera effect. Well, it's the time. It's the time. You and Al Pacino, me and Al Pacino, he's going to get up there. It doesn't look anything like. Like I thought I knew.
Dan Barrick: It was you, Fredo.
Movie archival: I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window.
Movie archival: You want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso [00:00:30] around it and pull it down.
Movie archival: And like any good liberal, I should question. Everything. Right. So I should question this. For instance. When did I last make a stand?
Movie archival: I don't care whether I'm alone or not. It's my right. What do you want? I say he's guilty.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice. In today's episode, I kind of have an existential crisis about my job. I'm going to talk about what you can [00:01:00] do when you get mad. Stick around. Hey out there, listener. Are any of you out there mad? Are you frustrated at the government? You just want to do something.
Movie archival: I don't have to tell you. Things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth.
Nick Capodice: That's [00:01:30] Peter Finch, and in the Movie Network, it's one of my favorite movies ever made. He plays a news anchor who's unjustly fired, and he has a breakdown on the air where he speaks his heart about the problems in the world.
Movie archival: We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller. And all we say is, please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV [00:02:00] and my steel belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.
Nick Capodice: Oh, but he doesn't want to leave you alone. He wants you to get mad.
Movie archival: I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.
Nick Capodice: So, look, I get mad. I get mad a lot. I get mad at big things, and I get mad at little things. So what can I do about it? And what does this have to do with Civics 101? Well, let me give you a [00:02:30] tiny bit of background. The first episode of Civics 101 was in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected for the first time, and people frankly had a lot of questions about what would happen. And the podcast team at Nhpr, which didn't include me yet. Hannah was there, but I wasn't. They were sitting around. They were talking about Trump's potential pick for chief of staff and somebody quite bravely. And I really mean this Bravely said, what is the chief of staff? [00:03:00] And this person received blank faces all around the room, and in a moment which we at Civics 101 consider akin to sainthood. Then producer Logan Shannon Logan, I miss you, she wrote on a post-it note. Schoolhouse Rock for adults. Question mark. And the show was born. The podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works.
Nick Capodice: But there's just one small problem.
Movie archival: Just one [00:03:30] small problem. Sell their houses. To who? Ben?
Nick Capodice: Who in their right mind wants to listen to a show about rules and systems? If those rules and systems are manipulated to serve whomever is in power at any given point, or if those rules and systems are just flat out ignored. And let me give you an example. We spent tons of time meticulously breaking down the Fourth Amendment's protections against unlawful search and seizure in the fascinating [00:04:00] Supreme Court decision in Mapp v Ohio. And yet, this month, Ice agents were instructed to forcibly enter someone's home without a judicial warrant.
Archival: Mr. speaker, you're a constitutional lawyer. Can you detail the Fourth Amendment protections and rights someone has? If an Ice agent approaches their home with an administrative warrant?
Archival: Um.
Archival: Yeah.
Archival: Right.
Nick Capodice: What's the point of it all? And while we're here, while we're airing the grievances, [00:04:30] the word civics. Civics is a word that I and Hannah and Rebecca and Marina wrestle with all the time. Because people hear the word civics and they think just schoolhouse Rock. How a bill becomes a law. Separation of powers, checks and balances. All that stuff which I love, I love more than the average bear. And maybe you do too. Which is why you're listening to our show. But civics isn't just that, gosh darn it, civics is navigating how we exist in a [00:05:00] society. The rules about what we do to others and what others can do to us. And in times when the rules about what we do to others and what they do to us don't seem to matter. What the heck can you do? That's what today's about. And you, gentle listener, can do a heck of a lot more than I can. You can do things that I can't because I am a journalist. There is wonderfully, though sometimes frustratingly, a [00:05:30] check on my power.
Nick Capodice: Could you tell everybody.
Nick Capodice: Your name and your title?
Dan Barrick: My name is Dan Barrick. I'm the news director here at NPR. You've checked your.
Nick Capodice: Phone three times.
Nick Capodice: Since I turned on the. That's not even true. No. One time. No. Okay. That wasn't your phone. No.
Nick Capodice: Okay. So I, I asked you in here today. We have sort of different jobs, but we work at the same radio station. Can you explain to me just basically. I know you don't work in HR, but basically what are [00:06:00] the rules when it comes to journalists advocating for what they want in terms of like, you know, calling their congressmen or writing their senator or something like that?
Dan Barrick: Generally speaking, we try and recognize that people are journalists, which has a very distinct code of ethics and expectations, but they're also humans who have personal lives, personal identities, uh, personal needs. Uh, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to check all that at the door and become [00:06:30] kind of reporting robots when they step into the newsroom. But our credibility hinges on the fact that the public believes and can trust that the people reporting the news and telling them what's going on are not, uh, operating with any hidden agendas or, um, or other goals that, you know, that would get in the way of that.
Nick Capodice: All this to say that I, as a member of the media, cannot write my elected member of Congress. I cannot call them. I cannot call my representative. [00:07:00] I cannot publicly advocate for policy. Even if, hypothetically, that policy was more money for civics education, I can't say I want it to happen. This also means that I can't go to a protest. I mean, I could go to one to cover it, but I can't hold up a sign. So I asked Dan, is there anything out there so small, so personal that I, as a member of the press, would be allowed to advocate for it? Like the tried and true example, putting [00:07:30] up a stop sign at the end of my block.
Dan Barrick: I've never had a reporter ask me if they can advocate for a stop sign, and I would want to. I would want to think about that a little bit before I would answer, but I would say, yeah, that would be included because you're reaching out. You're asking a public official to do something personally, whether it's something as big as, you know, voting on a major piece of legislation or to change the trash pickup day.
Nick Capodice: This is why several members of the press don't even vote. [00:08:00] They believe it is unethical and I respect that. I vote Hanna votes, but a lot of folks don't. Now, the second reason members of the press don't advocate for policy is because it is a gross abuse of power. If I went to my local New Hampshire state legislator and said, hey, I work for a civics podcast, I want you to support this bill for civics education. And if you do, I'll talk about it on the show. Whew. No no no no no, that would be a disgusting overreach of power. [00:08:30] But you there. Hey, you. I want to tell you how you can do it. Not necessarily how you can ask for something that might benefit me in my work, but something you can actually do to make a change that would benefit you. So I needed a subject to demonstrate how to actually make change. And I wanted to find something so small, so apolitical, so innocuous. But it's also something I care a lot about. [00:09:00] And I wanted to explore how I could make a dent. Two things about which I am passionate leapt to mind immediately, and the first was AI.
Nick Capodice: I despise AI. I feel it's destroying our brains and our hearts. I hate that it feels like it's being shoved down my throat when I'm just trying to write an email to someone, or read an email from someone. Maybe get one robot to rewrite the email in the other robot to read the email. We can just go hide under the bed. [00:09:30] Most of all, I hate it when I'm tricked into thinking I'm talking with a real person. Like you hear somebody be like, oh, hey, Nick, just one second. Let me get that for you. You're clicking and clacking of the keyboard and people buzzing and chatting by the water cooler, and then I'm like, can I ask, are you a real person? And it says something like, chuckles, I'm an automated assistant. It actually said that to me. It said chuckles. Chuckles. But anything that touches AI can be seen as political. [00:10:00] So I couldn't do it. So my second peeve it's a big one for me and you've probably never heard of it. The soap opera effect.
Movie archival: Kristen Yes, that's right. Ladies and gentlemen, Kristen DiMera is back.
Nick Capodice: There are like five of you out there who just, like, leapt out of your chairs, but the rest probably don't know about it. I asked Dan if he [00:10:30] knew about it. Uh, so, listen, are you familiar with something called the soap opera effect? Uh oh. You don't know this?
Dan Barrick: Uh uh.
Nick Capodice: Dan leveled me with a blank stare. He had never heard of the soap opera effect. And he loves old movies. Most people I talk to don't really know about it or care about it, but I care about it. And so too does Tom cruise.
Tom Cruise: Hi, I'm Tom Cruise, obviously.
Chris McQuarrie: And I'm Chris McQuarrie, obviously. And we're talking to you from the set of Top Gun Maverick. We're [00:11:00] very proud to present Mission Impossible Fallout, and we want you to enjoy it to the fullest possible effect, just as you would in a theater.
Tom Cruise: To that end, we'd like a moment of your time to talk to you about video interpolation.
Chris McQuarrie: Video interpolation or motion smoothing, is a digital effect on most high definition televisions, and is intended to reduce motion blur in sporting events and other high definition programing.
Tom Cruise: The unfortunate side effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high speed video rather than film. This is sometimes referred to as the soap opera effect.
Nick Capodice: This is from a PSA [00:11:30] that Tom cruise did with Chris McQuarrie. He's the director of Top Gun Maverick and a lot of Tom cruise movies. I wrote to McQuarrie to see if he wanted to be in this episode, and he never wrote back. Didn't write to Tom cruise because I was a little scared. I hope I can leave it at that. So I love movies a lot, especially old movies. I could talk about old movies for hours. I do a pretty good Michael Caine singing kiss from a Rose by seal. Maybe I'll put that in the credits. So the soap [00:12:00] opera effect is when a newer model of television uses something called motion smoothing. And what it does is it greatly improves big massive air quotes here improves the definition of a picture by increasing the frame rate. And what do I mean by that? Film traditionally is shot at 24 frames per second. Television is shot at 60 frames per second. Soap operas are television and they are [00:12:30] shot at 60 frames per second. This is why you can just look at a TV somewhere and be like, oh, that's the news, or that's a soap opera, or that's a movie because they look different. Motion smoothing does make an image look clearer. It's useful if you watch a lot of sports, but to me and to Tom cruise and millions of other people out there, it makes movies look like soap operas. Now I have gotten into fights with my friends about this. [00:13:00] One of my best friends didn't notice he had it on his TV and I had to leave his house. I couldn't watch the movie he was watching. To me, it's the equivalent of putting a three Michelin star meal in a blender and saying, hey, it's the same food, you can just drink it through a straw now. For your convenience, to me it is like my favorite movie ever made. The lion in Winter looks like days of our lives.
Movie archival: Not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice. Nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor [00:13:30] any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars.
Movie archival: Like sands through the hourglass. So are the days of our lives.
Nick Capodice: Last quick anecdote here. I think I'm past the statute of limitations on this. I don't think I'm going to get in trouble. I'm gonna make a little confession. About a year or so ago, I was in a hotel and my girlfriend and I were watching Godfather Part two, and the hotel TV had motion smoothing on by default. [00:14:00] They usually do. But unlike if I was at home or a friend's house where I could just press the Filmmaker Mode button to turn off motion smoothing, you can't do that in a hotel. They don't let you mess with the settings. So I made a little bit of a boo boo. I went on Reddit to find out how to adjust the settings on a hotel TV by pressing a bunch of buttons in a certain order. And long story short, the TV stopped working entirely, and about an hour later there was a guy in the room sweating it out with [00:14:30] a drill. Uninstalling the TV and putting in a new one. I am so, so sorry. All this to say, I want change, right? I want motion smoothing to be turned off as the preset in hotels, and if I'm dreaming, I want it to be turned off as the preset on all TVs. And if you want change in the long run, you need policy to be enacted. You need a law, and [00:15:00] your elected representatives are the ones who make those laws. So how on earth do you get them to listen to you? Today I am going to go over three different methods to get your elected officials to pay attention to your wants and needs. Number one, hire a lobbyist. Number two, reach out to your elected official directly. And number three, my personal favorite. Get a lot of people together. Parentheses, [00:15:30] some of whom might be famous, who care about the same thing. And now that I have gone on long enough by myself, I'm going to bring Hannah in here right after this quick break. Yeah. Bob, would you get a Scandinavian swimmer?
Nick Capodice: This show is brought to you by Scandinavian swimmers.
Nick Capodice: The delicious way to start your day. Greg, do you want to introduce yourself?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I'm Hannah McCarthy, co-host of Civics 101.
Nick Capodice: So I've given Hannah kind of the lowdown [00:16:00] on what this episode is about. But this first chunk here is about hiring a lobbyist.
Hannah McCarthy: And, Nick, we do need a full episode on lobbying, but to be clear, this is not that episode, correct?
Nick Capodice: No, it is not. It is just a touch. Would you just be able to give us the sort of base layer of paint on what lobbying is, exactly?
Hannah McCarthy: Uh, sure. Lobbying is when an interested party, be it an individual or a corporation or an interest group, [00:16:30] hires people to advocate for policy like law. Lobbyists are often lawyers, and successful lobbyists are often well connected and lobbyists are paid to influence members of Congress to get them to write or vote for legislation.
Nick Capodice: Wonderful. That is about the size of it.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, how many lobbyists are there in the US do you know?
Nick Capodice: Yeah, there are about 12,000 just in Washington, D.C. that is about 22 lobbyists for each member of the [00:17:00] House and Senate. But lobbying happens at the state and local level as well.
Hannah McCarthy: And how do they do it exactly?
Nick Capodice: How do they do it? Lobbyists just talk to people. Their job is to get face time with elected officials and say, hey, so here's why this bill should be passed. Or as is more often the case. Look, we have all the information on this topic. We got a ton of lawyers who can write legislation for you using that information, and it'll benefit you and your constituents. It's a [00:17:30] win win. For a full breakdown on this, by the way, please listen to our episode on who really writes bills, which I have linked below in the show notes.
Hannah McCarthy: And I do know that a great many of these lobbyists are former politicians themselves, or the aides of politicians. They have good relationships with members of Congress, and they know how the system works.
Nick Capodice: Exactly.
Hannah McCarthy: And in terms of the interested party that we're talking about here, can that be one person? Can one person [00:18:00] hire a lobbyist?
Nick Capodice: Well, a single person can hire a lobbyist if you got the money, they got the time.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. But how much money?
Nick Capodice: Well, of course it is a spectrum, Hanna. A wide spectrum. But if we are talking about a federal issue.
Hannah McCarthy: And you are talking about a federal issue. Right? Banning the soap opera effect.
Nick Capodice: Yes. Well, I know I can't ban it, Hanna, because people want fancy technology on their TVs, and that's not going to change. But if I narrow my focus, I [00:18:30] could say I want legislation that bans it from being the default setting for hotels. So if I wanted to hire a lobbyist for this specific task, I would need to hire the services of a lobbying firm. A small firm would require a retainer of about 15 grand a month. But if I wanted a firm that has former politicians, senior seasoned staff, etc., that's going to run me about 100 to $200,000 a month.
Hannah McCarthy: And with this particular [00:19:00] case, you would want to hire lobbyists who I assume had maybe worked with hotel companies before.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. And one of the biggest hotel chains in the country is Hilton. Hilton worldwide. In 2025, they spent just over $1 million on lobbyists from a few firms and $2 million on two of their own in-house lobbyists. Now, I don't work for Hilton. I don't think I could hire them, but I would want to hire their biggest outside lobbying company. So I'd call [00:19:30] up Avoq.
Hannah McCarthy: What is Avoq?
Nick Capodice: Avoq. Ava.
Nick Capodice: Avoq is a, quote, insights driven firm that helps companies, organizations, and industries shape narratives, manage reputations, influence debates, and engage audiences.
Hannah McCarthy: Synergy influence debates. That is a real standout there.
Nick Capodice: It is. The subhead of that is, quote, policy expertise and relationship building. End quote. Avork [00:20:00] was hired by 97 clients last year, making them $18 million. Avork claims, quote, we don't just help clients understand policy, we help them move the needle.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So we're talking a lot of money.
Nick Capodice: A lot of money. Hiring lobbyists is very expensive.
Hannah McCarthy: But I do know that hiring a lobbyist has a famously profitable return on investment. I listened to that piece from Planet Money a few years back that said that a high yield savings account will get you a 5% [00:20:30] return on your investment, but hiring a lobbyist can do a whole lot better than that?
Nick Capodice: Sure can in 2018. The top ten fortune 100 companies in the United States spent $325 million on lobbying, which was directly tied to them, getting $338 billion with a B in federal contracts and grants. That is a 1,000% return on your investment.
Hannah McCarthy: And aside from the fact that you simply cannot lobby, I'm [00:21:00] gonna guess you don't have 20 grand just lying around to throw at a lobbyist.
Nick Capodice: Well, you never know, Hannah.
Nick Capodice: You never know.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, can we get into the other method of getting your elected official to listen to you? Reaching out to them directly?
Nick Capodice: Yes. Let us do that. I wanted to talk to someone who understands the system and understands that not everyone has the money to hire a lobbyist.
Emily Gallagher: I can talk about the regular system because I hate the regular system and it's impacted [00:21:30] everything.
Nick Capodice: This is Emily Gallagher.
Emily Gallagher: I'm Emily Gallagher and I am the state Assembly member for district 50, which is Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn.
Nick Capodice: Full disclosure Emily Gallagher is an elected official, but she's not my elected official. She is first and foremost my friend. We go a long way back. Eagle and I, we worked together in New York in the 20 tens, after which I went to go work on a civics podcast, and she went and ran for office in her assembly.
Hannah McCarthy: And [00:22:00] New York is one of those states that refers to their House of elected Representatives as a state assembly versus a state legislature.
Nick Capodice: Exactly. And Emily is one of the 150 reps. In New York's assembly.
Hannah McCarthy: So she is one of those people who lobbyists meet with to try to get certain outcomes.
Nick Capodice: Not necessarily.
Emily Gallagher: I mean, I interact differently because I'm a democratic socialist, as you well know.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. Democratic socialist. I'm sure some people [00:22:30] out there have heard this term. Uh, did Emily explain what exactly that means in terms of her politics?
Emily Gallagher: So I can talk about that? Because what that means is that I don't work with, like, lobbyists and wealthy people I work with. I work with nonprofit lobbyists and stuff like that. But I really I don't prioritize the normal system.
Hannah McCarthy: So the whole lobbying angle we talked about that would work with a lot of officials, [00:23:00] but not with Emily.
Nick Capodice: No, unless you're a nonprofit lobbying group or an activist group, in which case it would. Emily is one of about 250 members of the DSA in office right now. Most of them are in state legislatures around the country, but there are three in the US House of Representatives Greg Casar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And you might be thinking out there, oh, well, lobbyists probably focus the most on big national issues, but there is [00:23:30] a lot of lobbying at the state level.
Emily Gallagher: So I was quite surprised when I went to Albany. How much people are hanging out with these lobbyists for the oil companies, for the gas companies, and for the real estate board? I would say that those are the top three lobbyists that are hanging out in the state government. You know, what you end up finding out is you have to really learn what [00:24:00] their talking points are. If you're not working with them, if they're going against you. Um, because people will adopt them as their perspective. And one of the the most disturbing things that I've witnessed is the way lobbyists will rename themselves so that they look like they are grassroots organizations, but they're actually astroturf organizations.
Hannah McCarthy: What does Emily mean by astroturf here?
Nick Capodice: That they are hiding their true intentions. They [00:24:30] look and sound like a group of concerned scientists or economists or whatever, but they are actually working for corporations and industries to pass legislation to benefit them specifically.
Emily Gallagher: So, for example, the American Association of Concerned Chemists, who do you think they are, like the plastics industry? So they have scientists that they hire to come and tell people why we shouldn't be doing [00:25:00] this bill that we are trying to pass, that would make corporations responsible for the cost of recycling the chemicals that they're creating. So it's very easy to get duped. As an elected official into following and supporting initiatives that are actually just the very wealthy hiding behind like a costume of concern.
Hannah McCarthy: All [00:25:30] right. And getting back to your original question, Nick, if you have got a problem and you want your official to do something about it, what does Emily recommend you do?
Nick Capodice: Well, first off, make sure you're reaching out to the right person.
Emily Gallagher: Well, if you have a.
Emily Gallagher: Local issue that is causing you a problem, you do want to write to your city or state legislator, but not your congressperson. This is one of the things that really mixes people up [00:26:00] is like, we all have a different wheelhouse that overlaps, right? So for example, city handles, parks, trash parking, all this stuff that really gets people up in arms that, you know, it's the little angry minutia of daily life. State is like housing law, uh, MTA, utilities and unemployment. So every office has two wings. The legislative wing and the constituent service [00:26:30] wing. And in my office I have two people on each side of the wing, and then I go in between.
Hannah McCarthy: Do people just walk into her office and say, hey, help me with this thing? Yes.
Emily Gallagher: It happens every single day. And actually, I really recommend that people, if they're having any kind of issue with an agency or a service or even with a company that they come because like I also am in charge of the liquor. I'm not in charge of the liquor authority, but I, I communicate with [00:27:00] the liquor authority. So if there's a bar where they're like selling drugs and there's people getting really sick, you know, I can connect with the state Liquor Authority to get that shut down or something like that. And the other thing that happens is sometimes people come with a problem, and then you look into it and you find out that what they're complaining about is actually legal. So then you want to take that and turn it into a bill that will make that illegal.
Hannah McCarthy: Did Emily have any advice [00:27:30] about stopping the soap opera effect?
Nick Capodice: Well, she did admit that it's not the sort of legislation that actually happens. It's extremely specific. It's not something her constituents are really interested in or care about. But she did encourage me to follow the money.
Emily Gallagher: Who's benefiting from that being a preset, you know, and then I end up sounding like I'm a conspiracy theorist all the time, but it's real. Who's making the money from this? It's probably like the NFL, you know, has some kind [00:28:00] of connection to the television companies so that it preferences their format. The only way that we can really get anything through is by figuring out what is the root of somebody's opposition. It's always that they're going to make less money, but it's like, who is going to make less money? And then, you know, like maybe with this motion blurring thing, they want you to watch it at home. They don't want you to go to a bar. The cable companies [00:28:30] are getting more money. So maybe there's something with the cable company there, you know?
Hannah McCarthy: Did you follow the money, Nick?
Nick Capodice: I did a little bit. Hannah. And I've read a lot of theories on why the soap opera effect is enabled automatically on TVs. And until I get more evidence, I'm going to go all outcome here and hypothesize that the simplest answer is the correct answer. I think that TV companies want to sell TVs. I can actually say, I know that. I know TV companies [00:29:00] want to sell TVs. They sell a lot of them at stores. When you're showing off a TV in a store, you want it to look as bright and clear as possible. And when the customer gets home and they plug it in, they want it to look like it did in the store. So it is the default setting.
Hannah McCarthy: So here's where we are. You are forbidden from hiring a lobbyist because of a job. You are also, as it turns out, too broke to hire a lobbyist and an elected official is not likely to touch this because it's [00:29:30] understandably not at top of mind for a lot of their constituents.
Nick Capodice: That is about the shape of it, Hannah. But I got one more stone in my sling, and this very stone was used 30 odd years ago to slay a very similar Goliath. We'll be right back. Okay, Hannah, my third and final method to get elected officials to care about your problems, even if they're super [00:30:00] small problems like Robert Shaw. Looks like he's in the soap opera General Hospital when he's stealing a subway train in The Taking of Pelham 123. You know, that's still one of my all time favorite movie soundtracks.
Nick Capodice: It's so good.
Speaker 20: Bum bum bum.
Movie archival: What do you want?
Movie archival: I'm taking your train.
Movie archival: You're taking my train.
Nick Capodice: Anyways, I wanted to talk to someone who cares a lot about film and I [00:30:30] mean a lot, and someone who also knows about all the laws surrounding creative artists and how to convince Congress to care about those laws.
Eric Schwartz: But what happened? Just the short story, and it's not relevant for your podcast, but it's my story. I arrive at the Copyright Office April of 88. April 1st, 88. And the other lawyer who arrives with me are assigned the task of doing this moral rights [00:31:00] study on colorization of motion pictures.
Nick Capodice: This is Eric Schwartz.
Eric Schwartz: I'm Eric Schwartz. I've been a member of the National Film Preservation Board since its founding in 1988, and I'm also a member of the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, cool. Wait, what was that part about moral rights and colorization?
Nick Capodice: I am going to get to that in a sec. Hannah. But in this study, Eric read that a lot of films [00:31:30] made before 1950 were gone.
Hannah McCarthy: Gone. Like disappeared. Gone.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Irretrievably gone. Nobody had copies. Nothing had been digitized. Just. And it wasn't big Hollywood movies that were gone. It was films that the chair of the film board, Faye Cannon, referred to as the, quote unquote orphans.
Hannah McCarthy: The orphans.
Eric Schwartz: The orphans. No commercial benefactors. Independent avant garde films by and about women and and people of color. [00:32:00] Uh, newsreel footage. Right. All of that stuff that is historically valuable, culturally valuable, but didn't necessarily have commercial value. And and from that, we created the National Film Preservation Foundation. I did the articles of incorporation on that. And then we started in the first meeting was eight people sitting around a table looking at me. Um, Scorsese threw his archivist wanted to be on the board, and he showed up, and he's sitting at [00:32:30] the table, and I said, look, I'm an associate in a law firm. I know I did the articles of incorporation, but I don't have money for pen and paper. And within a week I got a check from him. I always joke that, you know, you should have put a little post-it note that said, here, kid, buy some pen and paper.
Hannah McCarthy: Martin Scorsese.
Nick Capodice: Oh yes.
Nick Capodice: Eric described it as a truly serendipitous creation. He was working with Laurence Fishburne, Leonard Maltin, Roger Mayer, everybody's favorite, AIP, Roddy McDowall, [00:33:00] you name it.
Hannah McCarthy: What does the National Film Preservation Board do?
Nick Capodice: Well, among other things, each year it selects 25 films to be added to the National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress.
Eric Schwartz: We've always said that these titles stand in for the thousands of others in need of preservation. So we're not the Academy Awards. It's not the best films ever made. Some of them, you know, are controversial, but the point is that you preserve material. And [00:33:30] the criteria is it's got to be more than ten years old, and it has to be culturally, historically or esthetically significant.
Nick Capodice: Just last month, they announced this year's additions, which include six silent films from before 1926, four documentaries, but also also films like The Staple of My Youth, The Karate Kid.
Movie archival: Take Off the Glasses.
Movie archival: Why?
Movie archival: Because I Asked You.
Nick Capodice: And clueless.
Hannah McCarthy: The staple of My youth.
Movie archival: You mean to tell me that you [00:34:00] argued your way from a c-plus to an A minus?
Movie archival: Totally based on my powers of persuasion.
Nick Capodice: You do love that movie.
Hannah McCarthy: I love that movie.
Nick Capodice: Isn't it based on.
Hannah McCarthy: It's Emma, it's Emma. Yeah.
Nick Capodice: Okay, so back to my thing. I hate the soap opera effect a lot. I hate it because it is, with few exceptions, not what the makers of the movie intended. A director directs a film. They and their cinematographer spend a lot of time and thought to make sure it looks how they [00:34:30] want it to look, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Right.
Nick Capodice: So the idea of an audience seeing something other than what the director intended has happened before, and in the 1980s, it rose all the way to Congress. And this story all begins in the 1960s, when movies start to be shown on television.
Eric Schwartz: And so you have some changes that begin to be made at that point. That, by the way, uh, are irritants, to say the least, or the creative [00:35:00] artists, because you got to change the aspect ratio changes. That is screen size, width and height. Uh, and so changes have to be made like panning and scanning. So you and I are both on the screen together. But if it was a widescreen and we're off, the camera's got to go right to get your voice and go left to do mine. And that was usually done without the creative artists participation, right? So the cinematographer, the director sets up a shot, and yet now there's [00:35:30] this mechanical process going left. Going right. Yeah. In addition, you have the so-called time compression, in which for broadcast television, they somewhat imperceptibly, to most of the audience speed up the film. But clearly the director, the cinematographers, the actors all noticed that the pacing has changed so that it can fit in that broadcast time slot, because at 11:00, the broadcast news has to come on. Right. And the film [00:36:00] has to be over, but it normally would run however many minutes over.
Speaker 6: I don't take much to see that the problems of free people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Here's looking at you, kid.
Nick Capodice: That is the 1960s. Creative artists are not happy. And then in the 1980s, we see the explosion of home video.
Movie archival: Now you can take the hippest film of the year. Home for keeps.
Speaker 11: Awesome.
Speaker 27: Because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Movie is on videocassette [00:36:30] for just 24.99.
Nick Capodice: And the studio who owns the film can do whatever it wants with the home video to sell as many copies as humanly possible.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, did the actors, the directors, cinematographers, all of the people who made these films, did they have any say in what was done to the home video?
Nick Capodice: Very little.
Eric Schwartz: Your rights in Post-theatrical changes are limited to your guild agreements, whatever the guild agreements say. And sometimes it can be you have [00:37:00] a right to, uh, consent to something. It can be sometimes a right to review, but not to consent, which is a big difference because you have the right to say, I don't like it. And they say, thanks, but we're going to do this anyway because we're the copyright owners, and colorization is basically the spark that really ignites all of it. Because from the director's point of view, the actors and certainly the cinematographers, it's an entirely different looking film.
Nick Capodice: But [00:37:30] a film buff or be you just a lover of complicated legislation. I warmly encourage all of you out there to read Eric's article on this. It's called the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, a copyright case study in the legislative process. But like Eric said, colorization was the spark that lit the flame. Media mogul Ted Turner bought the MGM library for billions of dollars, and he was releasing colorized versions of black and white films, including, notably [00:38:00] It's a Wonderful Life.
Movie archival: Dance by the light of the moon, What Do You Wish When You Threw That Rock?
Nick Capodice: Now, when he was chastised for this, he famously said, quote, the last time I checked, I own the film's end quote. Chance for me to do some old movie impressions here. Jimmy Stewart did not like the colorization. He said it was like dunking the film in, quote, a bath of Easter egg dye, end quote, and that it was wrong. Completely wrong, insulting and unfair. End quote. [00:38:30] I didn't give a full Jimmy Stewart on that. Orson Welles once asked how to stop Ted Turner from, quote, coloring my movie with his crayons. What does he say? This is a wearying one.
Orson Welles: This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding.
Nick Capodice: Crisp crumb coating.
Eric Schwartz: Then, frankly, the audience didn't like the colorized versions of these older films. So the the whole thing sort of went away. But during [00:39:00] that time and and during the debates about it, it led to the very heated debates between the three guilds and the ASC, the DGA directors write, WGA writers SAG the screen actors, and ASC, the American Society of Cinematographers, versus the studios.
Nick Capodice: At this time, the United States was moving to join an international copyright treaty. It was an old one that Victor [00:39:30] Hugo helped create called the Berne Convention, which had an article in it about moral rights and what are moral rights. They are personal nontransferable rights, protecting an author's reputation and connection to their work, regardless of who owns the copyright for that work. Are you with me?
Hannah McCarthy: This is intellectual property.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. So this was the setting for the creation of the National Film Preservation Board, and some rather famous people came to Congress to lobby for it.
Eric Schwartz: Jimmy [00:40:00] Stewart came to the committee hearing. Now, the House Rules Committee is a tiny hearing room. I know it because I worked for the House Rules Committee, coincidentally for nine years. I remember saying at the time, you know, Mr. Smith literally came to Washington to make sure that this legislation was going to get passed. And needless to say, every member of the committee wanted to get their picture taken with with Jimmy Stewart. Uh, whether they were for or against the bill. And that really [00:40:30] ensured that the the bill was going to go forward for the benefit of the creation of the National Film Preservation Act in 88.
Nick Capodice: All right. Getting back to the topic at hand here, after hearing about all this from Eric, I asked, so if I want another Jimmy Stewart moment, if I want to get motion smoothing turned off, how do I go about it?
Eric Schwartz: But I think it best for you to talk to the creative [00:41:00] artists and the guilds. Talk to the studios about what they think they need to be doing and they will be doing, or they are doing with, you know, those uses.
Hannah McCarthy: In other words. Find powerful, influential people who care about the soap opera effect and have them use the collective bargaining power of their guilds.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, it's like unionizing, basically. And while Tom cruise did a PSA that I [00:41:30] referenced earlier, there was a cinematographer and director, Reed Morano. She directed the first few episodes of The Handmaid's Tale. She wrote a petition. It's actually there on Change.org to have motion smoothing turned off by default. But as with so many petitions, nothing came of it, even though it got thousands and thousands of signatures and it just went away. So it seems like to have actual change. A group of famous, influential people need to come together, [00:42:00] and Tom cruise needs to testify in the House Rules Committee. So here's hoping, Hannah.
Hannah McCarthy: From your lips to Tom Cruise's ears, per usual.
Nick Capodice: Well. There is a lesson in how to get rid of the soap opera effect. You know, it's not really about the soap opera effect. I was reading a book yesterday about power and politics, and the author said, I think this is [00:42:30] right. About four out of five Americans said that they are politically engaged. And what does that mean? And then he said that the vast majority of people who say they're politically engaged, when asked what they do, they say they, you know, keep a close watch on the news. They argue with their friends and family. They do a ton on social media. They track what's going on and they celebrate or they boo. That is like me saying, I play football because I watch the Super Bowl. I [00:43:00] am going to look more into this in the near future. But until then, If you care about politics, if you want to be politically active, you got to do something. Really do. This episode was made by me Nick Capodice with Hannah McCarthy. Our staff includes Rebecca LaVoy and Marina Henke. Music. In this [00:43:30] episode from Epidemic Sound, blue Dot sessions and Chris Zabriskie, who deep down in my heart knows he hates motion interpolation as much as I do. Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.
Michael Caine as Seal: Do you know when it snows, my eyes become large. And the light that you shine can't be seen. Baby [00:44:00] I compare you to a kiss from the rose on the bloody gray.