Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. I'm David Bose, your host. Today we're going to talk with Fred Foote, the producer and screenwriter of the new movie Alleged, out on dvd. Now, the movie seeks to explore the truth behind the 1925 Scopes trial and the impact media bias had in distorting what really happened in the famed Monkey trial. Former presidential candidate and Law and Order star Fred Thompson stars as William Jennings Bryan. Brian Danahy stars as Clarence Darrow, and Cole Meaney stars as H.L. menken. First of all, I want to tell you I got the screener yesterday and I was able to enjoy the movie last night. So I've seen your work and I enjoyed it. I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought it was a lot of fun.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Oh, that's great. I appreciate your saying that.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Well, tell me this. The material, the trial of the century, the Monkey trial, has been covered a number of times, several times before, most famously as Inherit the Wind.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: What inspired you to take on the story again?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Well, I was first exposed to Inherit the Wind when I was a sophomore in 1976 in high school, East Lansing High School. And I assumed it was true what they depicted about the Scopes trial and William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow and so forth. And then afterwards, in the meantime, I'd gotten a law degree and I was kind of familiar with some legal things, and then saw Inherit the Wind again as an adult and came to find out that it was in further research and stuff almost exactly wrong on so many, many crucial points that it seemed to me that Inherit the Wind had intentionally distorted what actually happened at the trial and that everyone believed the distortion. Everyone believed the caricature of Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. And so I wanted to write a movie that sort of suggested how that could happen, how a public event could be manipulated and history kind of turned on its head, and everyone believed the distorted version.
That's what made me go after Inherit the Wind in a completely. With a different approach.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Did you find yourself going back through all the old trial transcripts?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Yeah, the trial transcripts are available, so that's easy to get ahold of. Then there's hundreds of contemporary articles that covered the trial.
And so that served the basis of my research. And then there was a very good book, a Pulitzer Prize winning book by Ed Larson, that tells the truth of what happened. So that's what made me want to do a movie about how Things get lied about and how there's an official version of an event and then the real version. And I thought that I'd never seen a more clear cut case of the official version being propaganda than at the Scopes trial.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Were there any media sources that treated the trial fairly at the time?
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd say there were probably hundreds, little tiny papers in and around the area, I think treated the trial fairly. It was mostly the big city papers that wanted to effectively usher out the old and bring in the new. And in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, ushering out the old meant that Christianity with its beliefs and, you know, myths in their perspective and so forth, it was time for that to be pushed off stage and to bring in the scientific revolution with evolution and its cold calculations and hard headed reality. And so they came in with the worldview, the idea that we really ought to communicate that the Bible believers in the rural south really need to be suppressed at this point. And we need to show the world that it's an outmoded, outdated, unscientific, bigoted viewpoint. And let's bring in the new world.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Do you think that the big city reporters of the time, do you think that they were willfully deceitful? Do you think they were blinded by their own ideology? What motive do you ascribe to them?
[00:04:27] Speaker B: That's a great question. I think, you know, I hate to say blinded or willful in a way because I think they were sincere. I think that like Mencken is over the top and so he lies, but not in a way that he would say he's lying. He just exaggerates.
Sort of like a modern Ann Coulter. I don't know if you've ever read or heard of her, but she's over the top conservative, she's insulting, she's funny, she's witty, but she exaggerates. But her cause is, let's say, right wing conservativism. And that she believes is true. Mencken would be the same way in these big city newspapers. And incidentally, I think evolutionists today, the stories that they put in the textbook, the supporters of evolution, they are not what they're cracked up to be. Darwin's finches, vestigial organs, the evolution of the horse, junk DNA, none of these things hold up to close scrutiny like you would think they would. But they serve a bigger purpose and a bigger quote, truth. And that is that we're biological machines and evolution is true. So even if the details look a little dinged on close inspection, the bigger truth is more important. That's what they do today. That's what they were doing back then.
They were shooting for a bigger truth. And the bigger truth was evolution is true. The Bible, Moses, Adam and Eve, all that is fiction. So let's move on from the fiction and embrace the truth. But to get there, they had to lie. And that's what Inherit the Wind did. They just lied and lied and lied about what happened in Dayton, Tennessee.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: What do you think their biggest lie was?
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Well, I would say this is maybe the first and biggest lie that the state of Tennessee outlawed evolution.
And you'll read that today. Just Google the Scopes trial and you'll see in 1925, the state of Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Except that's 99.999% wrong.
So how do you get that wrong about a simple statute that says that one species can't be discussed? Mankind. That's one out of two million. And you can teach it at home. It's not like it's illegal to talk about the evolution of man just in the public classrooms. You can't teach the evolution of 1 out of 2 million.
Why do they say that it was a blanket prohibition against the teaching of evolution. And here's why. Because that looks bigoted, backward sweeping. It looks like all those things.
And so that's a big, big lie. I would say with intentionality. Even though it probably gets innocently repeated because it gets repeated so much.
But it's just not true.
It's just not true.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: I noted in your screenplay you covered that it was almost an aside from two of the central characters as they were talking about what the law really said. Did you make a list of the different points that you wanted to make sure that you covered in the movie and, and then work them into the script, or did it just come naturally? How did you craft the script?
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Well, there were certain things that I wanted to expose, like that one, even though, even in the context. Mencken quickly brushes that aside that it was only one out of two million species. He says, but if you can't teach the evolution of man, that makes it an anti evolution law 100%. And then he marches off. Well, that's not a real rebuttal, but I wrote it in the screenplay, so it looks like a rebuttal.
There was three or four things that I wanted to get clear, but I didn't want the movie to be ideological. I wanted to be entertaining. I wanted it to be about media bias. I didn't want it to be an instruction booklet on how creation is true or the evolutionists are wicked. I think those are black and white, like Inherit the Wind. You saw it last night. Did you think watching this movie, that it was written by an ideologue who was out there with an axe to grind? Maybe a little.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: I was pleasantly surprised because the focus is on the entertaining story instead of preaching. Sometimes you go to a movie and their main focus is the ceremony of whatever it is they wanted to deliver. And they forget that the point of a movie is to entertain first.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Yeah. If you want to send a message, then write it down. If you want to tell a story, then you can film it.
So there was a few things I wanted to get the eugenics in there because no one knows that America sterilized 60,000Americans on the basis of Darwinian theory that there's people that are not as advanced blacks and Asians.
And then in Germany, they took the same thing and they applied it to Jews and gypsies and so forth. I wanted people to see that in the trial that that happened. Even though they don't admit it, they don't talk about it. And 60,000 is a lot of people to sterilize. Right. In our own.
So that I wanted to get out.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: You allow Clarence Darrow to look like the hero in that aspect for that part of the story. You're saying Clarence Darrow not so bad, right?
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Yeah, Clarence Darrow. I personally find Darrow to be morally reprehensible in his defense of Leopold and Loeb and so forth. But that doesn't mean that he was all bad any more than anybody's all bad or all good. So he does a very heroic thing in the film.
He would have done that in real life. I think he was a champion of the downtrodden, of minorities, of disadvantaged people. He was awesome in that way. What I just didn't like about him is he defended Leopold and Loeb and he personally believed that none of us are responsible, really responsible, morally responsible for what we do. We're the product of our genes. We do what we've been programmed over millions of years to do.
And so he went to the prisoners of his day and would hold seminars and explain to them that they're no worse than the guys who put him in prison. They're just unlucky because somewhere in their genetic past there's a flaw. They're marching like machines, like biometric machines or something. I think that's despicable.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: I guess free will was causing him a problem.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah, they were very deterministic. And I think that's deadly to anybody to be told that you're not responsible for the good or the bad. You're just following your genetic orders like you're a dog or a pig or something like that. That just goes by instincts. And it was widely believed eugenics was widely believed. This wasn't some little backwater group of hateful clanners that were arguing that blacks were inferior to whites. This is Harvard University, Princeton University, Columbia University of Chicago.
Everybody who was anything and had any sophistication was arguing for eugenics. In 1925, only the Bible thumpers and the Catholics were saying, no man is made in the image of God, and it doesn't matter whether they're smart or dumb or black or white. They all deserve legal protection. And I think they were right.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: It's interesting to note that while back then it was considered the uneducated who would take on that established view. Even today, when a view is established, there's this attempt to dismiss anybody who would disagree with that, say, institutionalized view.
The labeling begins.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. The labeling begins. And you're a denier, you know, you're a global warming climate denier or a. Or whatever. And it's also not reserved, of course, to the ideological left, like the progressives or the materialists in the 1920s.
I'm sure that it happens in every ideology.
You label your enemy and you dismiss them in any way you can. And it's just a weakness in our condition. But it happened in 1925 for sure.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: I think now, as producer of the film, maybe you didn't have this problem. But I thought, what would it be like to try and pitch a script where you said, I want to tell the story of the monkey trial, But I want to focus not on the trial itself. I want to focus on media coverage of the trial. What was that like?
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Well, it was hard. People thought that the trial had been done and done well, which it was, at least with Inherit the Wind. It was very successful, very entertaining, very powerful movie.
And it's hard to compete with the talent that they assembled back in 1960.
Yeah, it's not an easy pitch. I think what it had going for it is the fact that creation and evolution, that debate is still with us even however long it's been 80 years now, and it will be with us. So in some ways, this story will continue to be discussed. What happened at the Scopes Monkey trial and what about creation and evolution in the public schools? So hopefully my movie people will run across it, trip across it, you know, for years and years to come.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Well, speaking of assembled talent, what an incredible assembly of talent. For the movie Alleged, you've got Brian Dennehy, one of my all time favorite character actors, Fred Thompson of Law and Order fame, former presidential candidate. Fred Thompson's in a class by himself as well. Cole Meaney. You know, I'd forgotten that he was actually in Star the Next Generation because he's been in so many other tremendously successful projects. He just assembled a great team.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And the young actors I thought were great. Nathan west did a wonderful job. He was in Miracle, the hockey movie. And then Bring it on and then Ashley Johnson, such a beautiful young actress. And she was in the Help that was out a month ago.
And she was a child actress in Growing Pains and in Mel Gibson's what Women Want.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: As I was watching the movie, I thought, I have seen this girl's face before, but she was a kid and I couldn't place it. Couldn't place it. As soon as I was finished watching the Ledge, I was on IMDb and I thought, that's it. I saw her as the kid in what Women Want.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, she was the, the high school senior prom girl that bailed out of her date.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Yeah, she did a beautiful job in this film.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Yeah, she is. I think that she'll do very well. She's got a certain maybe classic beauty.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Yeah, she, she really pulled it off. Well, was there any hesitancy on the part of actors or actresses to participate in the film because of the subject matter?
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Well, not really. And the reason, I think, is because the film is not very ideological. So no one felt like they were on a propaganda film for either side, I think, and they were comfortable that the movie was fair and balanced. And I never discussed it. And I myself happen to be, you know, quite ideologically and religiously motivated and have strong views about various things. But I never talked to the director about it. I never talked to Brian Dennehy or, or Colm Meaney and said, you know, Colm, I really have my doubts about Darwinian evolution. And have you ever considered the design of the. You know, I just didn't do that and didn't think it was appropriate and didn't think the movie needed a heavy ideological touch. It just needed to kind of get out there.
And media bias is an easy one because everyone thinks, you know, that the media is biased whenever they say it's fair and balanced. Everyone's gotta kinda roll their eyes because so much of what's reported just reflects the view of the network or the. You know the culture and all that stuff. So I'd rather harp on that.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: I had a chance to speak with Brit Hume at one point and I remember asking him the question about media bias. And he had said something along the lines that he didn't have a problem with the media being biased so long as they acknowledged that bias and brought it forward to people and let them know the perspective they were coming from. And the problem with bias is when you refuse to acknowledge facts that don't fit with whose side you're on. If you purposely exclude information to make the other side look worse and your side look better, that's when bias becomes a real problem.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And if someone is interested or so inclined to look at Inherit the Wind, and then there's a website that compares Inherit the Wind and their treatment of the Scopes trial with what really happened. It's called themonkeytrial.com, one word, themonkeytrial.com you will see that Lawrence and Lee, the writers of the screenplay, and then the guys who made the movie, Stanley Kramer and those guys, they twisted things and distorted things so purposefully and so consistently to make the citizens of Tennessee look like idiots when they weren't.
It just really boils my blood. And then they say, hey, we changed the names. You're not supposed to think it's historical. We told you it's not historical. Grow up, get over it. You know, as if you can tell 50 truths and five lies and assume that people can sort that out and claim, you know, I've got no responsibility for what I did because I changed the names. It doesn't work. It's disingenuous. And that movie, I think, ranks up there with one of the most outrageous slanders of any individual like William Jennings Bryan or any group of people like Bible believing Christians that I've ever seen. But they get away with it.
Because who wants to go to the defense of some backwoods Bible believing guy in Tennessee? Not many people want to defend him.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Yeah, you wouldn't get away with it for a lot of different groups, but you would get away with it against, as you put it, the faithful in some derogatory manner. But I wanted to ask you about the subplot earlier about eugenics. And in your script, the heroine, she has a biracial sister who's in an institution. The institution wants to sterilize her. How did you come about that particular plot point? And then also, do you think there would have been a greater bias against not only the biracial girl inside the institution, but also the young woman who has this half sister. Wouldn't that have been a big scandal at the time?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: The way this screenplay treats it, and maybe not all that successfully is that the mother has at least two children. One is Rose, who's one of the heroines in the movie or the heroine in the movie. And she's got this biracial sister. You don't know how did she get this sister? Was it an illicit affair? Was it a marriage between a white southern woman and a black man? So you don't know how this came about, but there she is, she's got a biracial sister, she loves her and she's in a colony for the feeble minded which they had in Tennessee and elsewhere, these colonies. And the idea was for feeble minded. You can't always tell.
That's what the Germans said of the Jews and gypsies. They might look attractive, they might look smart, but believe me, they've got genetic problems. They're not of our stock.
Well, that's happened to biracial people. They had mixed blood in sort of ipso facto they are drag on the gene pool. And they were sterilized. Like I think I may have mentioned or If I haven't, 60,000Americans in the United States according to state law. And then the U.S. supreme Court endorsed and supported the state laws sterilizing people on racial grounds because they had bad genes.
And it's a terrible blight on our history.
And the reason we don't know more about it, the reason every school kid in America does not know about eugenics, is because it was embraced and endorsed and supported by the major universities, the major scientists and the kind of the progressive modern scientific elite that's who embraced this terrible idea.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: I remember seeing part of Inherit the Wind in school.
I wonder if they'll be showing alleged in schools as well.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: I doubt would be nice. You know, there's one little, if you'll permit me, one little aside, there's one line in the movie where I give the solution to this issue of what should you teach in the school? And I really think there is no answer to that question except for this.
Just like we separate the government from the churches and the government plays no role in what the churches teach or how they maintain their buildings or anything. I believe that we should go back like we did for the first 200 years in this country.
And the government should have no role in the teaching of any subject. The government should be separated from the school and it should all be Run on a private basis with charities and funds and private schools. And then this problem and a million like it just disappear overnight.
This issue arose because it was a statute for the public schools. And the public schools create this division among citizens all the time.
What are you going to teach, how are you going to teach it? And who's going to win and who's going to lose? That's an unnecessary, slow boiling civil war that we endure simply because we don't get the government out.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: The problem is ideologically, so many people do not want others to have that freedom. They want it for themselves, but they want to control what other kids learn. And you explore some of that with Mencken down describing these other people as total morons and saying that he basically needs to save them from themselves.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Yeah, people are worried about what others will teach. And of course, I mean there are toxic parents that will abuse their children in this way, but there's also toxic parents in a public school system and there's toxic schools. And I know this for sure that any argument for public education based on its good for the poor has to ignore what's happening in the inner cities where the poor in the schools are taught nothing. And they are under physical, mental, psychological assault daily. It's just dangerous.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: What's next for you?
[00:22:38] Speaker B: Well, this was really just a one off project. I practiced law for a little bit and I've been in the banking and finance business since I had this one passion to tell this one story. I learned how to write a screenplay, did that.
Today's the day that alleged his release in schools. And so it's like pushing the college graduate out the door and I'm ready just to go back to banking. I think it's my one and only movie project.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Well, that's not a bad thing. I mean, when you're able to create something like that and see it come to fruition, especially trying to at least give an alternative so that young people who see Inherit the Wind and think just like you did, ah, that's the truth, now there's something else out there that will give them a better idea and maybe open up some questions.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: That was the goal and I hope I accomplish it. We'll see.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Well, Fred, thanks so much for making the time. It's been an honor speaking with you and I think your movie is a lot of fun and it shows a lot of class.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: Well, thank you, David. I appreciate that.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: You've been listening to an interview with Fred Foote, producer and screenwriter for the new movie Alleged starring Fred Thompson. Brian Dennehy and Colm Meaney. This has been a podcast of the Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. For more information, please visit discovery.org CSC.
