Are you really mad? What can you do about that?

And it's not going to succeed, but I'm talking to a policymaker tomorrow advocating for this. So you're calling on Congress to call a constitutional ban on the soap opera effect? Well, it's the time— You and Al Pacino up in front of you. Me and Al Pacino. He's going to get up there. It doesn't look anything like I thought. I knew it was you, Fredo. 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. You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. And like any good liberal, I should question everything, right? So I should question this. For instance, when did I last make a stand? I don't care whether I'm alone or not. It's my right. But what do you want? I say he's guilty. 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 do when you get mad. Stick around. 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It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Hey out there, listener. Are any of you out there mad? Are you frustrated at the government? You just want to do something? 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. That's Peter Finch 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. 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 and my steel-belted radios and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone. Oh, but he doesn't want to leave you alone. He wants you to get mad. 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. 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 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 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. But there's just one small problem. Just one small problem. Sell their houses to who, Ben? 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 Supreme Court decision in MAP v. Ohio. And yet, this month, ICE agents were instructed to forcibly enter someone's home without a judicial warrant. 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? Yes, right. What's the point of it all? And while we're here, while we're airing the grievances, 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 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 check on my power. Could you tell everybody your name and your title? my name is Dan Barak I'm the news director here at NHPR you've checked your phone three times since I turned on the that's not even true one time? no okay that wasn't your phone no okay so 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 the rules when it comes to journalists advocating for what they want in terms of like, you know, calling their congressman or writing their senator or something like that? 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, personal needs. I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to check all that at the door and become 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 operating with any hidden agendas or other goals that, you know, that will get in the way of that. 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. 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 up a stop sign at the end of my block. I've never had a reporter ask me if they can advocate for a stop sign. And 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. This is why several members of the press don't even vote. They believe it is unethical and I respect that. I vote, Hannah votes, but a lot of folks don't. 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. If you do, I'll talk about it on the show. Woo! No, no, no, no, no. That would be a disgusting overreach of power. 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 and 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. And I wanted to explore how I could make a dent. Two things about which I am passionate leapt to mine immediately. And the first was AI. 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 write the email and the other robot to read the email and we can just go hide under the bed. 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. And you're clicking and clacking at 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 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 Kristen yes that's right ladies and gentlemen Kristen DiMera is back 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 knew about it. So listen, are you familiar with something called the soap opera effect? Uh-uh. Oh, you don't know this? 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. Hi, I'm Tom Cruise. Obviously. And I'm Chris McCoy. Obviously. And we're talking to you from the set of Top Gun Maverick. We're 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. To that end, we'd like a moment of your time to talk to you about video interpolation. 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 programming. 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. This is from a PSA 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 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 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 Cruz and millions of other people out there, it makes movies look like soap operas. Now I've gotten into fights with my friends about this. 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. Not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, not any other thing. We are the killers. We breathe war. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. 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 going to make a little confession. About a year or so ago, I was in a hotel and my girlfriend and I were watching Godfather Part 2, and the hotel TV had motion smoothing on by default. 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 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 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, some of whom might be famous, who care about the same thing. And now that I've gone on long enough by myself, I'm going to bring Hannah in here right after this quick break. Many years ago, never mind how many, but I was in high school. My very wise friend informed me that I should stop acquiring so much flimsy, fall apart in the wash, fast fashion. This was, by the way, before the term fast fashion had properly entered the lexicon, so he probably just said junk. And that I should instead invest in high quality clothes that I could wear year after year. Now, there are two reasons that I did not do this at the time. One, I believe I was like 16 years old. to when I heard invest and high quality in the same sentence, I really heard too expensive for the likes of you. Now here I am some years later, and there's finally a path to exactly the kind of quality over quantity my buddy Pete was talking about, and that is quince. Quince makes wardrobe staples that last. We are talking 100% European linen, 100% silk, organic cotton, Mongolian cashmere. High quality fabrics, well-made clothes, the stuff that you can reach for year after year. As I speak, I am wearing my Quince organic cotton boyfriend sweater, something that I reach for week after week. And it has been years. High school Hannah could not even imagine something holding up for this long, let alone keeping its shape, warmth, softness, and color like this puppy has. And because Quince works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, I did not end up paying fancy retail or brand markup prices for this. So Pete was right. I don't need a ton of clothes. I just need the clothes that I love that last year after year. And you can have the very same right now. Go to quince.com slash civics for free shipping and 365 day returns. That is a full year to wear it and love it. And you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to quince.com slash civics for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash civics. So food delivery services have been around for a while and I've tried a lot of them and I loved some and I hated others. I will say that Green Chef is the trusted authority on clean eating. They deliver only real farm sourced ingredients. So for my choice, I chose the Mediterranean option because I want to live another thousand years. And the standout to me was the fish. Oh, I've had so much trouble with fish in my life. Specifically in this box, the salmon with red peppers and olives. Because I don't live by a fishmonger. There isn't one in my town. And salmon, salmon, my whole life, it's been a gamble. This salmon from Green Chef, these were vacuum sealed. They were gorgeous cuts of fish, the kind I literally could not get at my local grocery store. And also, I haven't made a fish and olive dish in maybe ever. So I learned something, and that means it was a good day. So if you're interested in having someone else handle your meal planning and your grocery shopping in an organic, affordable, varied way, give Green Chef a try. Just head to greenchef.com slash 50civics, that's 5-0-C-I-V-I-C-S, and use code 50civics to get 50% off your first month and then 20% off for two months with free shipping. Again, that is code 50civics at greenchef.com slash 50civics. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Yeah, Bob. Would you get a Scandinavian swivel? This show is brought to you by Scandinavian Swimmers, the delicious way to start your day. Great, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, I'm Hannah McCarthy, co-host of Civics 101. So I've given Hannah kind of the lowdown on what this episode is about, but this first chunk here is about hiring a lobbyist. And Nick, we do need a full episode on lobbying, but to be clear, this is not that episode, correct? 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? Sure. Lobbying is when an interested party, be it an individual or a corporation or an interest group, 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. Wonderful. That is about the size of it. Nick, how many lobbyists are there in the U.S.? Do you know? Yeah, there are about 12,000 just in Washington, D.C. That is about 22 lobbyists for each member of the House and Senate. But lobbying happens at the state and local level as well. And how do they do it exactly? 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 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. 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. Exactly. And in terms of the interested party that we're talking about here, can that be one person? Can one person hire a lobbyist? Well, a single person can hire a lobbyist. If you got the money, they got the time. All right. But how much money? Well, of course, it is a spectrum, Hannah, a wide spectrum. But if we are talking about a federal issue. And you are talking about a federal issue, right? Banning the soap opera effect? Yes. Well, I know I can't ban it, Hannah, because people want fancy technology on their TVs and that's not going to change. But if I narrow my focus, I 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 season staff, etc., that's going to run me about $100,000 to $200,000 a month. And with this particular case, you would want to hire lobbyists who I assume had maybe worked with hotel companies before. 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 up Avoc. What is Avoc? Avoc. Avoc, Colin. Avoc is a, quote, insights-driven firm that helps companies, organizations, and industries shape narratives, manage reputations, influence debates, and engage audiences. Synergy. Influence debates. That is a real standout there. It is. The subhead of that is, quote, policy expertise and relationship building, end quote. Avoc was hired by 97 clients last year, making them $18 million. dollars. Avok claims, quote, we don't just help clients understand policy. We help them move the needle. All right. So we're talking a lot of money. A lot of money. Hiring lobbyists is very expensive. 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 savings account will get you a 5% return on your investment, but hiring a lobbyist can do a whole lot better than that. Sure can. In 2018, the top 10 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. And aside from the fact that you simply cannot lobby, I'm going to guess you don't have 20 grand just lying around to throw at a lobbyist. You never know, Hannah. You never know! Okay, can we get into the other method of getting your elected official to listen to you? reaching out to them directly? 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. But I can talk about the regular system because I hate the regular system and it's impacted everything. This is Emily Gallagher. I'm Emily Gallagher and I am the state assembly member for District 50, which is Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn. 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, Egal and I. We worked together in New York in the 2010s, after which I went to go work on a civics podcast, and she went and ran for office in her assembly. And New York is one of those states that refers to their House of Elected Representatives as a state assembly versus a state legislature. Exactly. And Emily is one of the 150 reps in New York's assembly. So she is one of those people who lobbyists meet with to try to get certain outcomes? Not necessarily. I mean, I interact differently because I'm a democratic socialist, as you well know. All right. Democratic socialist. I'm sure some people out there have heard this term. Did Emily explain what exactly that means in terms of her politics? 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. So the whole lobbying angle we talked about that would work with a lot of officials, but not with Emily. 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 U.S. House of Representatives, Greg Kassar, 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 a lot of lobbying at the state level. 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 their talking points are if you're not working with them or if they're going against you, because people will adopt them as their perspective. And one of 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. What does Emily mean by astroturf here? That they are hiding their true intentions. They 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. So, for example, the American Association of Concerned Chemists, who do you think they are? like the plastics industry well they have scientists that they hire to come and tell people why we shouldn't be doing 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. All 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? Well, first off, make sure you're reaching out to the right person. Well, if you have a 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 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, is the little angry minutia of daily life. State is like housing law, MTA, utilities and unemployment. So every office has two wings, the legislative wing and the constituent service wing. and in my office I have two people on each side of the wing and then I go in between. Do people just walk into her office and say, hi, help me with this thing? Yes, 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 communicate with 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. Did Emily have any advice about stopping the soap opera effect? 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. Who's benefiting from that being a preset? that, 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 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 are getting more money. So maybe there's something with the cable company there, you know? Did you follow the money, Nick? I did a little bit, Anna. 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 Occam 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 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 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 understandably not at top of mind for a lot of their constituents 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. The Oath and the Office is a politics, law and democracy podcast hosted by constitutional scholar Corey Bretschneider and Sirius XM host John Fugelsang. Each week they break down the biggest political stories through a constitutional lens in plain English for a broad audience. It's smart, accessible and focused on how power actually works. The Oath in the Office is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube with full video episodes each week. for starters and growing businesses, both online, personally and online. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Call you for your test period of 1 euro per month on Shopify.eu. Okay, Hannah, my third and final method to get elected officials to care about your problems, even if they're super small problems, like Robert Shaw looks like he's in the soap opera general hospital when he's stealing a subway train and the taking of Pelham 123. three. You know, that's still one of my all-time favorite movie soundtracks. It's so good. Holy God, what do you want? I'm taking your train. You're taking my train. Anyways, I wanted to talk to someone who cares a lot about film, and I 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. 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 study on colorization of motion pictures. This is 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. Oh, cool. Wait, what was that part about moral rights and colorization? I am going to get to that in a sec, Hannah. But in this study, Eric read that a lot of films made before 1950 were gone. Gone? Like disappeared? Gone? 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. The orphans? The orphans, no commercial benefactors, independent, avant-garde, films by and about women and people of color, newsreel footage, right? All of that stuff that is historically valuable culturally valuable but didn necessarily have commercial value 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. Scorsese, through his archivist, wanted to be on the board. And he showed up and he's sitting at 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 joked that, you know, you should put a little post-it note that said, here, kid, buy some pen and paper. Martin Scorsese. Oh, yes. Eric described it as a truly serendipitous creation. He was working with Lawrence Fishburne, Leonard Maltin, Roger Mayer, everybody's favorite ape Roddy McDowell, you name it. What does the National Film Preservation Board do? 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. 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 the criteria is got to be more than 10 years old. and it has to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Just last month, they announced this year's editions, which include six silent films from before 1926, four documentaries, but also, also, Hannah, films like The Staple of My Youth, The Karate Kid. Take off the glasses. Why? Because I asked you to. And Clueless. The Staple of My Youth. You mean to tell me that you argued your way from a C-plus to an A-minus? Totally based on my powers of persuasion. You do love that movie. I love that movie. Isn't it based on? It's Emma. It's Emma. Yeah. 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 want it to look, right? Right. 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. And so you have some changes that begin to be made at that point that, by the way, are irritants, to say the least, of the creative artists. because you've got to change aspect ratio changes that is screen size, width and height. 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 artist's participation, right? So the cinematographer, the director sets up a shot, And yet now there's this mechanical process going left, going right. 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 notice that the pacing has changed so that it can fit in that broadcast time slot. because at 11 o'clock, the broadcast news has to come on, right? And the film has to be over, but it normally would run however many minutes over. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Here's looking at you, kid. That is the 1960s. Creative artists are not happy. And then, in the 1980s, we see the explosion of home video. Now you can take the hippest film of the year, Home for Keeps. Awesome! Because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the movie, is on videocassette for just $24.99. And the studio who owns the film can do whatever it wants with the home video to sell as many copies as humanly possible. 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? Very little. Your rights in post-theatrical changes are limited to your guild agreements, whatever the guild agreements say. And sometimes it can be you have a right to 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. Be you 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 It's a Wonderful Life. Dance by the light of the moon. What do you wish when you threw that wrong? Now, when he was chastised for this, he famously said, quote, the last time I checked, I own the films, 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. 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. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. Crisp crumb coating. Then, frankly, the audience didn't like the colorized versions of these older films. So the whole thing sort of went away. But during that time and during the debates about it, it led to the very heated debates between the three guilds and the ASC, the DGA directors, WGA writers, SAG, the screen actors and ASC, the American Society of Cinematographers, versus the studios. At this time, the United States was moving to join an international copyright treaty. It was an old one that Victor Hugo helped create called the Burn Convention, which had an article in it about moral rights. And what are moral rights? They are personal, non-transferable rights protecting an author's reputation and connection to their work, regardless of who owns the copyright for that work. Are you with me? This is intellectual property. 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. Jimmy 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 Jimmy Stewart, whether they were for or against the bill. And that really ensured that the bill was going to go forward for the benefit of the creation of the National Film Preservation Act in 88. 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? But I think it best for you to talk to the creative 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. 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. Yeah. It's like unionizing, basically. And while Tom Cruise did a PSA that I referenced earlier, there was a cinematographer and director, Reed Murano. She directed the first two episodes of A 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, and Tom Cruise needs to testify in the House Rules Committee. So here's hoping, Anna. From your lips to Tom Cruise's ears, per usual. 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 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'm 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've got to do something. Really do. This episode was made by me, Nick Capodice, with Hannah McCarthy. Our staff includes Rebecca Lavoie and Marina Henke. Music in this 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 NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. Do you know when it snows, my eyes become large and the light that you shine can't be seen? Baby, I compare you to a kiss from the rose on a bloody grey! Not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast, The Shadow Sessions, hosted by me, Hibab Al-Faqe, a psychologist and trauma expert, we shed light on the hidden corners of the human experience. Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, The Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow The Shadow Sessions wherever you're listening now. Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-World War II East and West Germany. So what can the U.S. learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of The Future of Our Former Democracy, the Signal Award-winning podcast from more equitable democracy and large media, hosted by me, Colin Cole, and Heather Villanueva. It's time to rethink democracy. So follow The Future of Our Former Democracy wherever you get your podcasts.