A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Did you miss Bryan Cranston on Broadway? Not to worry: Cranston's portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in "All the Way" will be preserved in the adapted HBO movie that's slotted to air next spring.
The Tony Award-winning play, written by Robert Schenkkan, tells the story of LBJ's first hundred-or-so days in office. Assuming the Presidency in the wake of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Johnson sought both to heal the nation's trauma and to capitalize on it by aggressively forwarding legislation that Kennedy had proposed — most notably the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Jay Roach is the director of the "All the Way" adaptation. He's a veteran director of political movies, having dramatized John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in "Game Change" (2012), and the story of the 2000 Florida vote epsiode in "Recount" (2008).
John Horn recently met with Jay Roach on the set of "All the Way." Roach was in the midst of shooting the scene of the newly inaugurated President Johnson addressing Congress days after Kennedy's assassination.
What does it feel like to walk in as a director and see what your production design and extras are able to do in this space?
It’s inspiring and humbling as a – though this sounds cheesy – student of history. I’m really fascinated with those moments where things were very fragile and could have completely unraveled with a different path taken by someone. That Johnson chose this path at this moment enabled us to overcome an incredible tragedy at a fragile time.
I’m moved by people who still believe in democracy and government as a force for good . . . That we can pull together in any form, much less on such a grand scale with so many interests. Clearly, one would wish that more constructive work could be done. But that an institution like this even exists, and that democracy works as well as it does, is moving to me.
In political films that may not always be factually accurate, is there an overriding idea that you have about what you want to tell people?
The complexity of [LBJ's] psychological choices — the dysfunction in the man, coupled with the unbelievable capability to actually get something done as important as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — I have to get that right.
Is there a movie you think about as “getting it right” in terms of the way of dramatizing politics, but also revealing some other truth?
I always go back to "All The President’s Men."
One of the interesting things about that story is that Hal Holbrook’s character [Deep Throat] — who is Mark Felt, as we now know — never said, Follow the money. He never said that! He gave out a series of details that implied there there might be a paper trail, but the film was so much better because he said, Follow the money. We could understand it. We could see what they were up to . . . So that to me is a prime example of, they got that right, but they took some license.
This movie will probably come out in the spring. We’ll be in the heat of the Presidential elections.
What I think is relevant today in LBJ’s story — particularly in these 11 months from November ’63 to when he’s reelected in November ’64 — [is] that it’s a story about how true statesmen get together and figure out how to get something really important accomplished, even when they could not be more diametrically opposed . . . [LBJ] found a way to use all the forces that were part of his own dysfunction and function, and turn his own drive into accomplishment. He was able to actually fight for something through all of his political contradictions and his ego and all of the other psychological flaws that he had. He knew what mattered. And he fought for it and he didn’t let anybody step so far out of line that he couldn’t pull it off.
As someone who clearly cares about politics, what is it like to step inside the world of this film — in which politics actually worked — and then walk into the real world, where politics doesn’t work as we would define?
You know, it’s always a miracle when anything is accomplished politically. The Affordable Care Act is a miracle. Whatever side you’re on, it happened . . . Who knows what went into that deal? But there is still hope in modern government.
It drives me nuts how slow it is — how wasteful and inefficient the process seems — but I think that’s part of how the system is set up. I’m not cynical about it. I actually believe it’s the best form of government. As long as people care about it and are willing to tell stories about how it’s worked in the past, and believe in how much better it could work in the future, I believe it’s worth talking about. That’s all I want these films to do: is to spark the conversations, to get people to compare those leaders with today’s leaders. To get people to wonder, how can we do this better? There must be a better way. And to maybe get involved.