Live with Ronan Farrow from the Tribeca Festival

0:00Ryan Lattanzio:You have one new message. Translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney+. You could say that again. Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot. Now we party. This is incredible! Wow, I am clear in the rest of the day. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney+. Rated PG.

0:36Anne Thompson:Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on the latest goings-on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson. We're live at the Tribeca Festival in New York with Ron Latanzio.

0:49Ryan Lattanzio:I'm Ryan, and I'm here in New York. Hello, Ryan. It's good to see you in person. You just got here yesterday from LA. Right now, the Tribeca Festival is underway with premieres of many new films and series, including two from our guest, Ronan Farrow, who has been digging deep into many disturbing, fascinating stories as a journalist, including most recently an expose on Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO in New Yorker.

1:14Anne Thompson:And other profiles include his 2017 expose of Harvey Weinstein, Pulitzer Prize winning story, and other stories investigating sexual aboose, including Leslie Moonves. I think you cost him his job, as I recall. And Jeffrey Epstein and the Britney Spears... Let's see if I can do this. Conservatorship debate. You got it. And you're bringing, of course, two new documentary crime series. They're called Not a Very Good Murderer and The Palladino Files. And both shows are produced for HBO in collaboration with great documentary filmmakers, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who I know well. Did I say it right?

2:01Anne Thompson:Barbato? I always say Barbato, you know, Barbato Barbato. Welcome Ronan, please, to the podcast. Thank you for having me and thank you everyone for coming. And if you're intrigued after this conversation, you can get tickets on the Tribeca website and join me and Randy and Fenton at 5.30 for previews of these two series. So tell us about how you got into documentaries in the first place. I mean, your background is video, so it sort of makes sense. Talk about it. Yeah, I think that's exactly the link. You know, I started as a cable news anchor and network. I was like the B team filling in for Matt Lauer over the holidays.

2:43It was me and Tamron Hall on the Today Show. And look, I have a lot of love for that world. But what we are all in media experiencing now in terms of broken business models, a fractured landscape of consumption habits, that was already so apparent at the moment in history when I was anchoring a cable show. And when you're in midday cable, you really feel that. It's a little like fiddling on the deck of the Titanic. And I was so proud of my colleagues on that team, partly because we started using our time on air to do really consequential investigative stories. You know, I'd go out on the weekends and I'd do stories on over-prescription at VA hospitals or, you know, nuclear leak issues off on the Hanford side in Washington State.

3:35I'd go all around the country and I'd try to find little stories that I thought could matter at a time when, you know, I figured no one's going to be watching anyway. You know, it's just like my mom watching. So I might as well do this. And I would put those on the Today Show or Nightly News. and working with the NBC News investigative unit, which, by the way, is still a repository of many great career journalists who are there at a tough time in network news. I really was drawn towards that and love the ephemeral headline reading in some ways and admire those who do it well, but did feel that against the backdrop of this changing landscape, but the thing that I could do most with most impact was this sort of longer form storytelling.

4:26I still have a foot in each. Some of these projects are, they live in print, they live as podcasts, they have a talk dimension to them, but they also pull out wider to study a character, hopefully teach us something about the world we live in. And then the transition to this multi-platform approach happened naturally my hand was somewhat forced because I was working on a big investigation my network didn't want to do it it was a whole thing at the time this was Harvey this was the Harvey Weinstein story and other journalists have since reported out what happened there and Rachel Maddow looked at it Ken Oletta did a book where he looked at this and documented the conversations that happened between you know the Harvey Weinstein and some of the executives at NBCU at the time, a lot of whom are gone from there now.

5:16And the long and short of it was I had to sort of hurdle headfirst into print on that story.

5:23Anne Thompson:At the New Yorker. At the New Yorker. And, you know, I love the New Yorker and what it does in our country so dearly and the people there so dearly. And there is still a unique power in working in print, too. So now very often, I will appraise a story for its potential across these different formats, which both is creatively what I want to do. We were just talking a little bit about when I'm working on a documentary, I really am fine-tuning with whatever filmmaker and collaborators I'm working with, the image, the sound, using all these different approaches to storytelling in a way that feels just as integral to me as the writing, because I'm also then writing the scripts.

6:07and being a language stylist too is something that I guess I was doing both from early on because I started out writing like Wall Street Journal op-eds and little I'd be traveling around doing humanitarian stuff you know in my teens I had this Doogie Howser history of starting things young so I had that print piece of it in my backdrop too and I had written books early on I'm very very fortunate at a time when there's a lot of headwinds in what we all do to be able to work across these different formats and hopefully use that cross-format approach as a bulwark against the threats to each of these types of journalism.

6:48Ryan Lattanzio:Well, I'd love to know about one of the series that you're bringing to Tribeca. What's unique about your work is that often you are a character in these stories as well, and that appears to be true of the Palladino files. Can you tell us about that project? Yeah, for both of these, I think a lot of us probably go through this dilemma. I certainly started out in this business from a standpoint of feeling maybe even more acutely than most journalists. Like, good Lord, the last thing I want is for the story to be about me. I had grown up in a prominent family. That was all associated with negativity and scandal for me.

7:26I had a real chip on my shoulder about the work standing on its own. and not just a chip on my shoulder, but more charitably to me, we all have, I think, a meaningful and right value of keeping the focus on the sources and on the story. Because of the headwinds our industry faces, I have increasingly found in the way people respond to me opening up a little more about the process, that there's value in that. To show people, hey, this monolithic thing, journalism, the free press that's enshrined in our Constitution that's so important for informing people and empowering them, here's how it works.

8:08And here's evidence of someone who is, you know, an imperfect human trying their best, but hopefully doing so in true good faith and fairness. And showing that much leg, I just have found audiences really do connect with it. And I think there's a a bit of a public service in showing that much. So it's vulnerable and it's revealing, but both of these two projects, it's not every project there's somewhere I look at it and creatively it's clear the right thing is for me to step back. We were talking about a collaboration I did with these wonderful filmmakers, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, where I was the interviewer with a lot of our sources and we had shot a lot of stuff with me and I just felt with the way the shape of those stories was coming together that actually removing myself from it was right.

9:03On the other hand, these two series, both of which involve a complicated arc where I kind of get pulled in on a personal level, and both of which involve a really volatile source-reporter relationship at the heart of it. for both of those, it actually felt like it elucidated really meaningful things about journalism in this country to show all of that. So in the Palladino files, it originates from one of the weirdest calls I ever got in my career, which is back during the pandemic, I got a call from someone saying, you don't know me, but I'm Jack Palladino's lawyer. Now, Jack Palladino was this famous, legendary private investigator to the stars.

9:50And he represented R. Kelly, and he worked on the Michael Jackson case. And going way back, he had represented the Black Panthers. He had worked on the Patty Hearst case. Jane Mayer in The New Yorker called him the president's dick. Because during one of the Clinton campaigns, He was responsible for digging up dirt on the women who had these stories about Bill Clinton. So he had this kind of storied career and actually had been in a kind of adverse posture towards me in life. He was hired by Harvey Weinstein late in his career to look into who my sources might be, to look into who was reporting on that story about allegations of abuse by Weinstein.

10:40so he was one of the PIs essentially digging up dirt on me and I when I was reporting on that story was able to publish dossiers he'd compiled email traffic from inside his company and it became a part of his legacy when he died tragically the obituaries all led with that this was this storied PI who in the end was working for bad guys so not a lot of love there and he dodged my comment requests at that time. So I did not expect to get this call saying I'm Jack Palladino's lawyer. He's been brutally murdered, which I also at the time had not known. And it turns out before he had died, late in his life, he had contacted his lawyer and said, look, if anything happens to me, I have this grudging respect for what Ronan did on the story.

11:38and could you enlist him on helping with what I was working on at the end?

11:44Anne Thompson:You can't make this shit up. Well, I saved the voicemail and said, well, that'll be a documentary trailer. And lo and behold, what's fascinating about this, and this goes to why I'm a character in it on camera too in this case, is that I did develop a kind of posthumous relationship with Jack. his legacy is complicated and the legacy of private investigation in America is complicated. It felt like a meaningful opportunity for me as someone who has reported on so many stories where money and politics and private espionage can really shape the outcome to look at these issues of privilege in the criminal justice system through the lens of Jack's career and he you know I I don't demonize him in this.

12:34Quite the contrary. Those early years of in the 70s, he's working for the Black Panthers. He was representing indigent clients who otherwise wouldn't have access to a fair case. He really started out very idealistic. And there's an amazing saga of him building a business that kind of helped define the playbook of modern private espionage with his wife and business partner, Sandra Sutherland. They had this firm, Sutherland and Palladino. They met, actually, while they were both separately undercover in the prison system, working a case. And they fell in love, and they were very glamorous and romantic, and the archival footage and photos of them, it's incredible.

13:18And at the heart of it is also a relationship that develops over the course of the series between me and Sandra, who's grieving and a little annoyed with me that I kind of my reporting torched her late husband's reputation in a way but in the end we both are invested in figuring out what happened with his death and the strange case that emerged around his death which I won't spoil for you now but looking at in the present day at what happened to Jack Palladino did also reveal I thought some meaningful things about, again, the criminal justice system.

13:57Anne Thompson:These are amazing stories, and you must have a lot of choice in terms of what you'd like to do. How do you pick? How do you just decide? Well, how do you choose what you're going to spend all this time on? Well, we're all, as journalists, just so lucky. Anytime we get a lead that's meaningful, doubly so if it's a lead that feels both meaningful and like it has a human component that people are going to be moved by. These two became the series that they did because out of the many, many, many things that I work on, things that I've appraised for potential, they had all of that and then some. You know, they're both really stranger than fiction stories with really complicated relationships and people at the heart of them.

14:43I think that's a through line. I increasingly, when I make those decisions, of course I'm thinking about the things all of us think about as reporters is it gonna reveal something that is not just new because I think actually our industry puts too much of a premium on like what's what's new and what's happening advance but revealing and something that has both a revealing granular mystery in it that I can help elucidate for people and also hopefully revelations about the systems and world around us in addition to all that I think I'm increasingly the older I get thinking about what are the stories with that human complexity you know even when I'm reporting on someone accused of terrible crimes I'm not I think there's you know there was like a period of a few years where it was a running joke at every awards show or correspondence dinner or a comedian would get up and say like I bet you're all glad Ronan Pharaoh's not here.

15:46I'm not that bad a party guest, you know? But the truth is my experience of even those kinds of stories that involve allegations of, you know, terrible misdeeds, it's not a takedown relationship. Actually, the opposite. In those cases, I feel this tremendous burden of empathy. I understand, you know, someone may have committed terrible crimes, but also their suffering in the process of being caught. I understand the effect on their family. I feel an intense responsibility to, in the part of the reporting that's about the portraiture of that person, capture their complexities. And so these two documentaries that we're previewing here are both series that really live in that space of shades of gray and human complexity.

16:40They're both about central figures who have their foibles and their sadnesses and their desires and their difficulty in their relationships with me. And both of them therefore involve self-searching on my part too because it brings up personal questioning. So I look for that, I think. I look for the complexity now.

17:04Ryan Lattanzio:Well, the other series is called Not a Very Good Murderer. and that actually began as a podcast. And you see the podcast to the true crime or limited series pipeline. That's a recognizable pattern. But tell us a little bit about that project and what it's like to go back to something that you had reported on already via the podcast. Well, it's actually not so much that I went back to something that had been a podcast. I think when I get a lead, I'm always engaged in the thought process of what format does this make sense in? Where is it going to be powerful to tell this story? Is this a very visual story?

17:44Does this have audio components that are going to make it suited to being a podcast? These two happen to be ones that really just had everything going on in terms of the emotion and the mystery, my role in it, and how fraught and difficult it was for me over the course of, you know, there's an arc to both of them. So they felt like they deserved to live in long form in multiple places that could tell multiple different versions of the story. So both of them were developed as both podcasts and TV shows from the beginning. Some of these also I'm developing even as like for print and podcast form and for television from the beginning.

18:27I've done that. And I try to be very thoughtful. I'm fascinated by the interlocking puzzle pieces of true transmedia projects. I'm a giant nerd, so I'm fascinated by what George Lucas did with his Star Wars prequels era, which was polarizing and kind of maligned at the time. I feel like now people my age, coming of age, have more appreciation. Maybe not this crowd. Jar Jar Binks. Okay, okay, well there's that critique. He did something that was kind of very political and dry and interesting, I thought, challenging, considering the genre. But more to the point, he did this thing of, you know, part of this story is going to live in an animated series, and part of it is going to live in a novel, and part of it is going to live in a film, and maybe at his own peril, because film critics were like, what?

19:28Where is the character development? then where's the rest of this story? But actually, if you consume all of that, it is like a true story where meaningfully different parts of it live in different places. So I had an experience, for instance, on one project I did where you would experience my interaction with a set of sources in a book where the narrative spine was more my reporting. And then in a documentary series, which I also did with Randy and Fenton who you mentioned, you would meet all of those characters and it would be not my story but theirs. Each episode was one of their life stories so that you would experience their background and then lead up to the moment where I knock on their door or I interact with them.

20:17And then in a podcast form where you can go deeper on their stories. And I really thought about how each of those would be a different experience that contained different parts of the reporting. And there were actually, the reason I made the Star Wars comparison is there were actually people who came up with the terms of machete viewing order, which is a thing that came out of nerd fandom, where if you have things that live across different formats, maybe you want to not just watch one and then the other, you want to inter-splice them. So there were some people tweeting, you know, like, okay, you can read this chapter of the book, and then you can watch this episode of the documentary series, and then you can listen to this episode of the podcast, which I thought was fascinating.

21:01And it's quite a hat trick to pull off all of those interlocking things that have to stand on their own, but then interrelate. But I find it rewarding to leverage these different formats in different ways.

21:11Anne Thompson:So if we go back to the long form magazine reporting that you do, but also just in general, there seem to be a dwindling number of places where your level of muckraking scrutiny is welcome. And I wondered how they just seem to be dwindling in number. Yes. And I think all of this, all this thinking about how and where do you tell these stories, how do you leverage every different medium and every different audience, and really strive to connect with people in ways that require thinking outside of the box, it flows from the backdrop you're referring to. We are in an era of media consolidation under a regime of oligarchs.

22:04you know um fewer and fewer platforms are independent uh within a broader landscape of media consolidation and brokenness of business models and political headwinds that demonize uh the free press within that the kind of investigative work we're talking about is particularly unwelcome by people in power uh expensive and unwieldy I'm in a very rare position of privilege where I can leverage what profile I have and an audience that I've built that you know I hope will keep coming back for these kinds of stories and understand what I'm earnestly trying to do to to try to make it sustainable but it's never easy it's always a fight you know each of these stories we're talking about I shot for years I think both Both of these documentaries are five-year projects.

23:07You mentioned the last New Yorker investigation I did. That was more than a year of reporting. And it's travel, and it's extensive research, and it's a team of editors at the New Yorker. And in that case, I reported it out with a colleague, Andrew Morantz, at the New Yorker. So it's two reporters. It would be fascinating, actually, to tabulate the budget. but that is an expensive, time-consuming body of reporting. And I am always thinking about how to make that work and how to talk about these dilemmas to the public, to people like you, because I think we all need to support, forget my example of it, where I am able to have a higher profile than most in it, but all of the versions of that that need to be happening around the country.

23:59So many counties in America are now just news deserts, and the research is fascinating. Just hard numbers showing that when either the last significant newspaper in a county shuts down or one of the last two or three, you see these knock-on effects of actually per capita taxes go up because there's more government spending, because there's more government waste, because there's less accountability journalism. There's a real correlation, not speculative. Environmental pollution goes up on average because there's plants that are operating without the scrutiny that it turns out if you have a local newspaper of significance reporting on industrial facilities and power plants, you have companies that are more on guard and more respectful of regulations.

24:53The list goes on and on and on. There's more corruption when these local outlets shut down. So it's predictable. It's documented. This is like academic research that you can all pull up. And I just am really grateful anytime I'm sitting in front of a room of people who care and want to talk about journalism for that reason. Because I do think we all really suffer when it goes away. And we all need to think about how we can support it. And when we see journalism, we rally behind it. Yeah. Thank you. Sincerely.

25:30Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, obviously we are journalists, so we're very curious about this too. You know, you've spoken about the headwinds and the broken business models and so forth when it comes to journalism. But what really is the climate? What is the situation that journalism is dealing with? Is it AI? Is it the attention economy? Is there a way to save it? Can we turn it around? So I've done a lot of thinking about this and looked at it as a comparative problem, right? Because we're not the only place in the world that needs journalism and access to high quality information to inform a functioning voting public.

26:08the reality is sustaining journalism as a for-profit widget is really tough and not necessarily the only right way to think about it um it's all of the factors that you talk about as the headwinds it's you know the classic historically recurrent playbook of uh you know the the crooked good press, the press is your enemy, they're out to get you, don't trust them. It's the consolidation environment that I talked about, where more and more the platforms are being gobbled up by individuals who want to, for their personal reasons, control the town square. Very often we see as a result of that a real thumb on the scale in terms of the editorial content that reaches the public.

27:02it's the thing that I talked about of simply having a product that takes a lot of time and resources the deeper that it is and often the more significant it is and not really having a clear path to making that big business so you had a moment in time where like okay 24-hour cable news came around and then And advertising kind of worked to sustain that. And people were making money in and off of television. That soured in various ways. I mean, it led us down the path of hyper-partisan commentary eclipsing serious reporting in the world of television news, which in turn was fertile ground for some of the critiques and some of the demonizing of the press.

27:50And that now is, you know, a mirage of the past to some extent. You know, there's varying degrees of success in TV news now. But the reality is that the consumption landscape is just so, so fractured. I think if you look comparatively, there are places around the world where the NPR model, the public broadcasting model, does work. And where, you know, in places like Canada, Germany, Norway, you can look more deeply into the examples. but you have had success in government subsidies with structures in place to ensure independence editorially. So you don't wind up with the thumb on the scale. Of course, that's perilous.