The Moth Podcast: At The Movies
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Visit BuyAToyota.com, Toyota's official website for deals, or stop by your local Toyota dealer to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Emily Couch, and on this episode... He's looking at you, kid. Use the force, Luke. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Yes, it's the moth at the movies. The Oscars have got us thinking all about the magic of cinema, and we've got some stories on the power of film and the hold it has on people. So whether your favorite movie of this year was I Saw the TV Glow, Challengers, or Substance, my favorite movie of 2024, get your popcorn out and get ready to watch, well, listen to a story.

First, we have Frank Ortega, who told us at a New York City Story Slam where the theme was, appropriately enough, movies. Here's Frank, live at the Moth. I love movies, and it's hard not to. I mean, you'd have to say, like, I don't love dreaming. And I grew up watching them, and one of my memories, a few times I was alone with my mom, we had a time together, was...

The Oscars, when they went really late, everyone else would go to bed and she and I would sit up on the couch and watch it to the end. And she would make these special snacks that she never made at any other time. And then I got a Super 8 camera and a video camera and I would do this stuff in high school and then in college. It was just so exciting. And so I graduated and then I came to New York. I was just like itching to make movies. And it was like hitting a brick wall at 90 miles an hour.

Because it's like it's you need to work you need rent you need to you know and so in my mother who had always been that both my parents are very sarcastic about that line of work Were were you know they're like my mom would be like well I'm sure you could go to an employment agency and just say that you want to be a director and that's that's expressing love dear child and and disapproval at the same time so so

I got my second job. All the jobs were horrible, the early jobs. And of course I was sending out resumes everywhere. You know, film crew, anything, anything, anything. Because I did a lot of film work and I'm fast on my feet. Nothing. So I ended up at the Yale Club.

This is a horrible job, the front desk. And one morning, I'd done the night shift. This is the early 80s. And so I come out at 8 in the morning, after a whole night at that place, and I'm still wearing the hideous outfit I hate, that Yale Club outfit. You've got to wear this blue polyester jacket, the gray polyester pants, the fake leather belt, the fake leather shoes, and the Yale Club tie, which they give you.

And I'm walking up to my horrible tram ride to Roosevelt Island, which is like the island of death. It was such a weird place back then. And I'm walking up, and there on the street, almost to mock me, is that whole Hollywood setup. You know, the trucks, the lights, the gaffers, the rigs, the equipment, the craft table, the whole thing. And it made me like, ugh. And I walk past it, and I walk about a block away.

And this thing rises up in me, this whole rebel yell comes up out of me. And it's like my body, without my mind, turns around and starts walking right back to the hive of the activity, the set. It was a restaurant, and the whole thing was focused in there.

While I'm walking, I'm then having this quick conversation. What are we doing? We're gonna get a job. We're gonna do this. Well, what do you know? What are you good at? I'm good at painting, and I'm good at building, and I'm good at like creating. Okay, so not lighting, not electricity, not... Oh, okay, so art, art department. Right about the time I got to like the first layer of people...

I go, hey, yeah, hi. Where's your art director? Oh, he's inside, but you don't want to talk to him now. I go, oh, no, no, I do, I do. What's his name? Well, it's James, of course. Yeah, okay, well, I've got to talk to him. He's in a really bad mood right now. Why? We're totally under budget. We're overstretched. It's a real disaster. He's really mad. Okay, thanks. Where is he? Over there. I go right over there. Excuse me, where's James? I go right up to him. Hey, James. He goes, what the? Who?

Who are you? My name is Frank Ortega. I'm from Wisconsin. And I studied film, and I'd love to work in movies. I want to work in movies. The fuck? What are you doing here? And I said, no, no, no, no. I can work for you. He goes, no. The reason, no. We're crazy right now. We're a mess right now. This is a disaster scene. Get the fuck out of here. I go, but no, no. I can work. And my brain was flying. I go, I can work for free.

And he froze. He froze. He was really a nervous guy. And he froze. He goes, "What?" And I said, "I can work for free." And he just goes, "Let me go check with legal. One second." And he goes away. And he comes back like a minute later. He goes, "If you just sign the waivers here, you can work for us. You can work for me, production assistant."

for free and I said yeah and then and they said he really said and when can you start and and I had just worked right the whole night through and I just I love that moment because it's true I said right now so I began working it was this horrific disaster of a movie it's not on Netflix it's

No, no, but it had Elliot Gould, Shelley Winters, Carol Kane, Margot Hemingway, Sid Caesar. I mean, it was over the Brooklyn Bridge. And so, okay, it was this epic education in guerrilla filmmaking because it was super low budget. What not to do, what to do. I got to meet everybody that was there. I worked on the sets and...

After a while, they put me on the payroll. They even gave me back pay to the day that I walked in and did that stunt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was $50 a day for like 15-hour days. Come on. Come on. And...

We're adults here. Come on. And so when I finally got hired, that moment I got hired, I was still, I didn't explain this part, but for five days until I really got hired, I worked both jobs. I did the night shift at the Yale Club. Seriously, I was 21. I did the night club. Because I didn't want to quit the Yale Club until I was sure I was going to get hired. I got hired. I worked that last shift at the Yale Club. I signed a note, really a vicious note. You know, goodbye, no notice. Beautifully written. And

And I went back to my building. It was one in the morning to the trash compactor shoot. And I stood there, and it goes down to the furnace. And I took off that blue jacket. And I took off the white shirt. I took off that tie. I took off the gray slacks. I took off that leather belt. I took off the shoes. I took off those gray polyester socks. I stood there in my underwear at one in the morning in my empty apartment building, and I was ready to enter my life of movies. That was Frank Ortega.

Frank has been a writer and performer his entire life and knows no other way to live. He never writes fiction because few even believe the amazing things that happen in real life if one pays attention. We asked Frank if he had any reflections on his movie experience. Here's what he had to say. That film I worked on, Over the Brooklyn Bridge, was shot in just five weeks instead of the scheduled six and way under budget, which made for some crazy times.

I got to have a great talk with Sid Caesar about the old days in showbiz, and I love dressing the sets down to the smallest details and realizing how any movie becomes a documentary of a time, a place, and people as real as anything by Ken Burns.

If you'd like to tell a story about cinema or anything else, really, you can always send us in a pitch. Here's a pitch about growing up at the movies that we really enjoyed. When I was about nine, ten years old, the only source of entertainment we had in the village where I grew up, in southern India, was an open-air theater.

where we could watch old Indian movies for free. And it was a thrill to watch all these Indian movie stars in their shiny shirts and bell-bottom pants and David Bowie-inspired hairstyles on the screen. But what we enjoyed the most were these fight scenes between the hero and the villain, and particularly the sound effects where the punches would land to the sound of the chute.

It was so popular that kids in the playground, we thought that's how real people fought. So whenever we fought each other, we would just make the sounds ourselves. Over time, as we got older, we would go into town to watch movies in the theater, fancy theaters.

And one of these bus rides, taking them was a rite of passage to adulthood. So we would go there. And during one of these bus rides, a couple of drunk villagers started fighting each other. And it was so funny to watch because they were drunk, old, out of shape guys trying to punch each other and nothing would land. Instead, they ended up hitting all the handlebars and other passengers and they were kicked out.

mid-ride. But we didn't go and watch that movie after that but the magic was gone because we knew that real life there is no Dishoom sound, there are no sound effects, it's just a bunch of old guys trying to hit each other and really the magic that we used to see on the silver screen was gone. It was sort of a coming-of-age story for us.

That was Bhaskar Sompali. If you've got a cinematic story and would like to pitch us, you can call our pitch line at 1-877-799-MOTH or just leave a pitch on the website themoth.org. Be sure to take a look at the tips and tricks on our website about how to make a great pitch. Many of these pitches are developed for Moth mainstages each year, and we'd love to hear from you. We'll be back in a second after a short intermission. Feel free to get some popcorn, soda, and maybe even some gummy worms while you wait for the next story.

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And the Oscar goes to...

On this episode, we're exploring the power of cinema. We watched a lot of old movies in my house. My mom took great pride in introducing me to some of her favorites. The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins. We'd go to the library and rent the VHSs, in case you'd like to guess my age. I was a really obsessive kid, and I'd end up falling in love with whatever movie she showed me and watching it on repeat ad nauseum. I think she ended up wanting to kill me and needing a massive break from her own favorites. Sorry, Mom.

So whether your favorite Julie Andrews movie is The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, or The Princess Diaries, we've all got strong opinions about film. And our final story is a favorite from the archive about what happened when one woman shared some of her opinions. Brittany Cooper told this at a Princeton main stage where the theme of the night was between words. Here's Brittany live at the Moth. So in the early 2000s, I became the first person in my family to graduate from college and

and to go on to pursue a PhD. Now when you go to med school, you become a doctor. And when you go to law school, you become a lawyer. But when you go to grad school in the humanities, you become a critic. Imagine studying for six years for the express privilege of telling everybody who's ever written or said anything what is wrong with what they have said. Imagine further explaining this to your family at Thanksgiving.

So, one of the ways that I would cope with this unfortunate turn of events is that I would go to the movies, typically a matinee on a Wednesday. And my favorite filmmaker at the time was Tyler Perry. When I went to see Diary of a Mad Black Woman, I thought to myself, here is a man who understands black women who have been done wrong. When Kimberly Elise's character slaps the shit out of the husband that has been abusing her...

I'm in the theater hootin' and hollerin' with all the ladies in there. But at the same time, I'm also becoming a feminist. And you know, I'm down for smashing the patriarchy and everything. But nobody tells you that the first casualty of a feminist analysis is movies. You hate them because you see the patriarchy absolutely everywhere. You become a feminist and suddenly you can't like anything anymore. You're a professional unliker of everything.

Or as they say in the hood, I'm getting a PhD, playa hatin' degree. It occurs to me though, that I like these movies so I'ma keep going, but I'm just not gonna tell my feminist friends how much I like the movies. Because every time I talk to them, they're using language like tropes and representations.

and how problematic the films are. But what I'm thinking to myself is, but in Daddy's Little Girls, Gabrielle Union's character snacks fine-ass Idris Elba, and I don't know a straight black girl that don't want Idris. And I'm also thinking...

This feels a little bit like home. You know, Tyler Perry built his career making these Madea stage plays, and there was like an underground economy of VHS dubs that you could get of these plays. So I remember, you know, watching one of these plays with my auntie and her laughing hysterically. And I'm sitting there going like, the play look a little low budget, but Madea is a gun-toting, a pistol-toting granny, and my granny was a pistol-toting granny. So it kind of worked for me.

But I was also starting to see what my friends were saying because I went to see The Family That Prays and the female character in that movie is so villainized that by the time her husband knocks the shit out of her, the women in the theater are hooting and hollering again. But this time, I'm not hollering with them because, you know, I'm a feminist now and that's domestic violence. So I'm starting to think maybe me and Tyler might have to break up.

Fast forward, I finish my PhD, I get a job as a professor at a big state school in the deep south. Tyler and I have broken up, but his star has continued to ascend. And I'm trying to figure out how to wear this big old title as both a PhD and a critic, even though I come from people that don't really have fancy titles.

So I call up my girls, who are mostly first-generation PhDs themselves, and we form a crew and a blog called the Crunk Feminists Collective. So around this time, Tyler puts out a show called The Haves and the Have Nots. And like a good feminist, I tune in to hate-watch the show.

And as suspected, as expected, he gives me something to hate. So the next day, I go to the Crunk Feminist Collective blog and I pin a post called, Tyler Perry hates black women. Now let me say that, you know, some high profile feminists would be coming through and reading the blog. But like, I didn't really think any famous, famous people were reading the blog. So imagine my surprise the next day when I get an email subject line.

Tyler Perry wants to talk to you. I think it's a joke, right? But I open the email, I call the number back, and it's not a joke. His assistant gets on the phone and she says, "Oh, he wants to talk to you." So we set up a time to talk, like the next day. And the day in between, I spend my time calling all my homegirls going, "What we gonna do?" And the consensus among the feminist cabal is, "Finish him!"

They're like, we have been waiting our whole careers for this and you have been chosen. So you got to do that shit. And I'm like, but it's Tyler Perry, though.

So the next day, I've now moved to New Jersey. I'm a professor at a state school in New Jersey. I'm sitting in my one-bedroom apartment with peeling paint. The person that lives across the hall from me is a grad student because it turns out the professor money doesn't go as far as you think it does when you don't come from generational wealth. And I'm waiting on a famous millionaire filmmaker to call my phone. And I also have an intense need to pee, but I'm afraid to make a run for it.

So, right on time, the phone rings. Miss Cooper, this is Tyler Perry. Hi, Mr. Perry. Nope, call me Tyler. Okay, call me Brittany. Brittany, you wrote some things about me that I want to talk about. Well, Tyler, let me begin by saying that I've seen all of your films and I really respect... Nope, you said that I hate black women and I don't understand how you came to that conclusion. Deep breath. He really want to do this. All right, let's begin with the haves and have-nots.

Why in the first three minutes of that show do we have a maid, a sex worker, and a rich black bitch? These are tropes of black womanhood! And he stops me and he says, "Tropes? Let me explain something to you. You're talking to a man with a 12th grade education, so I don't know anything about tropes. But when I was growing up, the person that lived next door to me was a maid, and her daughter was a sex worker, and they were like the nicest people ever." And so then I realized like, oh wow.

Yeah, he's Tyler Perry and he's rich and I'm not rich, but I have a PhD and he has a 12th grade education. And so all of a sudden, maybe the playing field is not so disparate as I thought. And I also think to myself, like my mother was a single mother with a 12th grade education. And my uncle, who Tyler Perry is starting to sound like on the phone, also had a 12th grade education.

So I realized, like, these are the people that raised me, and let me switch my tack up a little bit. So I say, Tyler, you know, you and I have a lot in common. We're both from Louisiana. We were both raised in the church, right? We both had pistol-toting grannies. We both had an abusive parent. And he said, oh, wow.

I didn't know that about you, but I just knew you were sharp. And now that I do know this about you, I don't understand why you don't understand what I'm trying to do in my movies. And so I say to him, okay, here's really my question. Why are all the educated black girls in your movie such bitches to everybody? And he says, well, because there was a whole branch of my family growing up. They all went to college and they all treated everybody like trash. And I realized, damn, like,

That's exactly the thing that I feared, that having all of this education might make me unrecognizable to the people that raised me. Because the thing that I loved about Tyler Perry's movies is that he rides hard for working class black girls, the girls that work behind the counter at Waffle House, the church ladies, right? The grannies that press $20 into your hand when you come home from school. Those are the kind of folks that raised me, and I wanted to be recognizable to them.

So, I'm thinking about all this and Tyler breaks in. "Brittany, something urgent just came up. Can I call you back? I'll call you back in 20 minutes." And I'm like, "Okay." So we get off the phone, I run to Pete, and then I'm sitting in my house going, "Damn, like, he not gonna call me back." Because I was blowing this conversation and maybe being a little bit of a jerk. But, like he said, 20 minutes later, the phone rings. "Tyler, this is Brittany. Where were we?"

So with my 20 minutes of hindsight and hastily gained wisdom, I say, here's the thing I'm really trying to say, Tyler. Is it possible for you to uplift working class black girls in your films without throwing the educated sisters under the bus? Because educated girls love your movies, too. And he says, you know what? That's profound. Can I uplift one group without demonizing another group? I'm going to think about that. And so then I said to him, now.

"If you want to keep talking about this, I'm a professional critic and I'm happy to offer these-" "Nope," he says, "I'm never calling your ass again!" And we both screamed because it was like the realest moment in this conversation. But he said, "I always like to talk to my critics. I learn a lot from them." And I said, "Fair enough." And we hung up. And I was left thinking that

The thing that connects Tyler Perry and me is that we're both working class Southern folks who in our respective fields have quote unquote made it. And we want to do the kind of work that always honors the places where we come from. And I realized that his work called up for me the fear that maybe I would be losing touch with the folks that meant the most to me. But what I also thought was that I'm used to men dismissing me.

because I have loud opinions and I'm brash and unapologetic and I'm a feminist. But when this millionaire filmmaker read the little old blog of a not even thousandaire professor and heard me say that the way he represented girls like me in his movies essentially hurt my feelings, he didn't ignore me or act like he hadn't seen it or heard it. He picked up the phone and called me

And then he listened and called back and listened again until he could find something useful to make his art better. I had been so swift and sure to proclaim that Tyler Perry hates black women. And I was left to consider maybe listening is what love looks like after all. Thank you.

That was Brittany Cooper. Brittany Cooper, Ph.D., is professor of gender studies at Rutgers, co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Eloquent Rage. That's it for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope that the next movie you watch is spectacular. Roll credits. Emily Couch is a producer on The Moth's artistic team. She loves to work behind the scenes to spread the beauty of true, personal stories to listeners around the world.

Brittany Cooper's story was directed by Michelle Jalowski. This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Duness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of the Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Leanne Gulley, and Patricia Ureña. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese-Dennis.

All moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.