Navigating "Fellow Travelers": A Conversation with Ron Nyswaner, the Creator of the Showtime Series

Transcript

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WHello.

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I'm film historian Tony Maeda.

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And I'm Brad Shreve, who's just a guy who likes movies.

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We discuss movies and television from Hollywood's golden age.

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We go behind the scenes and share our opinions too, and of course, being the average guy, my opinions are the ones that matter, as does your self-delusion.

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Welcome to Going Hollywood.

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I tell you, I'm so excited about this episode, Brad, because on our itty-bitty baby podcast we have an incredible guest.

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I am so excited to have him here.

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His name is Ron Nyswaner and, for those of you who are living under a rock and don't know about it, Ron is the executive producer and creator of a wonderful series on Showtime called Fellow Travelers.

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Now, this Fellow Travelers explores the clandestine love affair between two men during the height of McCarthyism in the 50s, and their relationship unfolds amidst a backdrop of political tension, societal norms, their sacrifices.

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But it's not only in the 50s.

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The show also immerses everybody in incredibly significant moments in American history.

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You know the Vietnam War protests, the disco era, the AIDS crisis.

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So I mean it is really an epic show.

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And our wonderful guest, mr Niswainer, is not only the executive producer and the creator, but one of the writers, and he is an Oscar, emmy, bafta Writers Guild, golden Globe and Spirit Award nominee.

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Is that all, that's all?

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And for those of you who also don't know, the Oscar nomination comes from an incredible little film called Philadelphia.

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I've heard of that.

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Have you heard of that?

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Yeah, yeah, it's amazing Now for fellow travelers.

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There's a whole slew of award nominations that it's gotten.

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I do know it was honored with a GLAAD Award just very recently and Ron is incredibly modest, he won't go into this, but I just want to say it is a phenomenal show.

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I am so excited to have him on as our guest on Going Hollywood.

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Welcome, ron, thank you so much for being here.

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Oh, thanks Tony, Thanks Brad.

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I'm really happy to be here and you know I am maybe modest about some things, but I actually am certainly willing to acknowledge that Fellow Travelers is pretty darn good.

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Pretty darn good came together and everybody came to the show with the same attitude of doing their very best work and also just being incredibly sort of lovely people, so it was a very magical experience.

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Well, that's phenomenal.

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You know, Fellow Travelers is based on a 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon, who actually is one of my favorite authors.

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I just read a book of his called Up With the Sun just this past year.

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So he's a phenomenal writer.

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And what I find amazing about but we're not gonna talk a lot about the book, because this show was about your series but what I find amazing about the book is the book pretty much takes place in the 50s.

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I mean, it starts in like 1991, I believe, when Hawk is on a foreign post and he gets a letter that Tim has died.

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And then there's the flashbacks.

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But your story, it's epic.

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It covers, as I just said in the intro, an entire the life of gay history, I think, from pre-Stonewall all the way up until, you know, the early to mid-90s with the AIDS quilt.

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What inspired you to take this little nugget from Thomas Mallison's novel and expand it into this kind of epic, every gay man story?

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Well, you know, I think, actually the book you just mentioned, there is a preface, I think it's a few pages, where we meet Hawk as a man probably around 60.

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He is in Italy working for the State Department and he gets a letter that someone obviously that is important to him has died.

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And then the book goes into the 50s, as you said, really goes from about 52 to 57.

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There was something very intriguing to me about Hawkins Fuller, that main character, as a man in his 60s who has a wife, who has children and grandchildren, and I thought, well, I want to see that.

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And then I thought, well, where would Tim have been?

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So then I put him in.

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It immediately came to me that the AIDS crisis is a real parallel to what we call the lavender scare or the lavender purge.

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The lavender scare, which many people don't know about I didn't know much about it when I started working on the show was the literal purge of people who were suspected of being sexual deviants from our government.

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It was officially sanctioned by the government.

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President Eisenhower signed an executive order and there were multiple, multiple investigations and people.

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It's estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 people lost their careers and at one point it was estimated that of the people being investigated by the State Department.

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For example, one of the investigators said we were experiencing one suicide, a oh my God, Wow, If you can imagine any other part of American history where and this lasted three or four years, so for three or four years a group of people are officially designated, not allowed to be part of the federal government.

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Their parents, their families, were notified.

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Their son or daughter is being investigated by the FBI as a sexual deviant.

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People came home and found their partners hanging, had hanged themselves, and one a week people were committing suicide and we don't know about it.

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I heard that in the show and I was like, can that possibly be true?

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But I also know how much you researched this, so I was astounded and disgusted.

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Yeah, Brad, and something that I do like saying about the show that I'm very proud of.

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You know it is meticulously researched and we had a lot of rules.

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I'm a guy who likes rules.

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One of the rules is that everything that, for example, joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn say in public, they have to have actually said we're not going to put words in their mouths.

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So every hearing that takes place in front of the McCarthy-Cohen committee, those are all from transcripts.

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You know, Langston Hughes is interrogated, the Army McCarthy hearings that's all from transcripts.

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Even McCarthy's first entrance into the show at the very top of the show, when he shows up at a rally in 1952, election night.

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And I'm going to tell the story because I think it's kind of fun.

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It's a little insight as to how films are sort of sometimes happy accidents, films and television shows.

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We were in this huge ballroom in Toronto that we had for the night.

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We're shooting at night, so everyone's going to be up from, you know, to dawn, 200 extras through several cameras.

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You know it's a big, big, big scene and through several cameras.

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You know it's a big, big, big scene and we're blocking the first part when McCarthy enters to the applause and takes the stage and I just we're just rehearsing it and I realized, oh, I didn't write anything for McCarthy to say and I thought, huh, well, this is a problem.

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So I called my researcher Luckily he lived in LA, so he was three hours.

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He was still awake and I said I need a speech from McCarthy to give at this rally and, lewis, I need it in 15 minutes.

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Wow, wow, when he takes the stage, we have a new president, one who no longer tolerate party line thinkers or fellow travelers.

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Wow.

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One said Lewis, that's not real, you made that up.

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He said no, he said that literally on the night we were shooting, on election night, 1952.

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And I said, okay, well, the gods have aligned for us.

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So that's how meticulously researched the show was there yet.

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But one of my favorite episodes is the Fire Island episode, which I believe is the next to last episode, pent ultimate episode, and the way that you blend what's happening in San Francisco with Harvey Milk and Dan White and with what's going on in Fire Island on the two coasts.

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There's a moment where Tim has taken is it Ecstasy?

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I think yes, and he's on the dance floor and there's a certain song playing.

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Yes.

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That is very identified with that era.

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Can you talk to us a little bit about the significance of that song?

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Yes.

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And how it was also kind of something that was guided and that was meant to be.

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Yeah, well, all of the, you know, there's so many what we call needle drops throughout the show where people are actually listening to music, and you know, from all the different decades, and that was really one of the joys of making the show, just getting you know.

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You know Anita O'Day from the 50s and Tony Bennett was one of my favorite singers and you know, putting that through the 50s, the 60s, then the 70s, and I came out of the closet in 1977, 78.

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So that's the height of disco, the height of Donna Summer, and I spent many nights dancing to Donna Summer, you know, and really associating that with my liberation.

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And I've always loved that song, MacArthur Park.

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It's actually one of my favorite favorite.

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It's so weird and mystical.

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It is, yeah, you know, favorite.

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It's so weird and mystical.

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It is, yeah, you know, and someone left the cake out in the rain.

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What does that mean?

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What does it mean?

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Yeah, exactly, probably nothing, but it means something to me.

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And at the very last minute, actually, we lost the rights to use the song and my music supervisor called me and said I have really bad news.

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I don't think we can use MacArthur Park and Michael Perlmutter his name, and I have to give him a shout out because he worked so hard on this show.

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And I just said, michael, that song has been in my head since I first started thinking of doing this show 11 years ago, so I can't live without it.

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And so we wrote a letter to the Donna Summer estate and I just said how I knew Donna Summer was a Christian and when I came out, yet her music really helped liberate me and I wanted to sort of sort of express I, donna, actually allowed me permission to be okay as a gay man out gay man.

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I said that.

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So I actually.

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It's a tribute to her Wonderful.

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You know the song.

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We got to use the song.

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Oh yeah, and it's just it's perfect, it's perfect.

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Ron, I got to sing your praise about something and ask you a question as well.

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This show gave me goosebumps and I'm going to tell you why.

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I came out late in life and I came out in Las Vegas and I used to go this gay men's group before I came out and I talked with men in their 70s and 80s that waited until their wives died before they came out and they talked about how if you hooked up with somebody, you don't want to give them your name because then they could turn you in late and I was in the closet and lived in North Carolina during the AIDS crisis.

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So that was kind of this foreign thing to me, and Fellow Travelers made me feel like I was there through the entire time For the first time.

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Having been told these stories, I finally experienced it.

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It was brilliant and I thank you, but could you elaborate more on what made you expand these stories from the 50s for another 30 plus years?

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I got a little distracted early, but so the AIDS crisis actually is, I think, quite a great sort of parallel situation to the Lavender Scare, but the difference was the AIDS crisis.

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Thousands of homosexuals were dying because of the government's indifference.

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So rather than actively purging us from the government, the government just let us die by, you know, by being ignored, through indifference, and actually that's a line actually in the script.

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So I knew I had those two things.

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You know, I approach everything really from a kind of Matt.

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This disappoints people who talk about, think about writing as this great mystical, creative thing, intuition sort of channels through me and things happen.

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I'm very mathematical, you know, I'm very.

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I think writing is solving problems.

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So I want to get from the 50s to the 80s.

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Well, gee, that'd be kind of interesting.

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What are Hawk and Tim doing in the 60s?

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Hawk would have and Lucy would have children by then.

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Oh, I want to see their children.

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How do I get Tim there?

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What are they doing in the 70s?

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Oh, maybe Hawk has started to like play with being sort of out as a homosexual.

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But where would he do that?

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Well, Fire Island.

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Play with being sort of out as a homosexual, but where would he do that?

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Well, fire Island, of course.

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And I was looking for moments in history and I knew that the White Knight riots had taken place in 79.

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And I just thought, and there's something about White Knights and I thought, you know, being on Fire Island doing a lot of cocaine, those are sort of White Knights and then you have the White Knight riots and then boom, the sort of San Francisco to do.

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The two stories in the same episode were born.

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So those were early, early, early in the pitching process.

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I knew we would hit those spots, those moments in history.

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I think, too, it gives us like as I said before, it gives such an incredible panoramic view of gay life from where it started, from where, literally, you could be arrested, people would lose their jobs or were suicides in the 50s, yeah, all the way up to the point where there was a freedom that was so mind-boggling to so many people.

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I mean the scenes on fire island and the meat rack and and, and then what, what eventually we dealt with in the 90s and I think that's so incredible.

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So the show to me, because we meet people, sometimes I meet people, but there are people out there, exist the young kids exist out there who have no clue about their history and what your show does and does so beautifully and does it in such a relatable way that you don't even feel like you're learning, but you're seeing the entire gamut of a gay man's life, from when you couldn't speak the name, all the way up to there was so much freedom.

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you know that there were no limits whatsoever, and I think that's what's amazing.

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And you not only do it, but you do it with a phenomenal cast who bring such incredible empathy and love to these characters that you're immediately affected by it.

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I mean, it's incredible.

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You kind of did a good job on casting.

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Yeah, it was kind of perfect.

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Do you enjoy going to Hollywood?

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Well, of course you do, and Tony and I would like you to do something for us and, more important, for other podcast listeners out there.

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Go to Apple Podcasts, itunes, spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts and rate and review this show.

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A five-star would be especially nice.

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That way, when others are looking for a new show, they'll see ours and see those reviews and they will stop and listen and boy, that will make their day.

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It will be much appreciated.

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Let's talk a little bit about the cast.

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We did have help from Avy Kaufman, who is the legendary casting director of films and television.

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I shouldn't say we have help.

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Avy was our casting director, you know, of films and television.

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I shouldn't say we have help.

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Avy was our casting director.

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But Matt was attached early on, before the show was even in development.

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So Matt was part of the pitching process.

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Robbie Rogers, my producer, introduced me to Matt.

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Matt read the book and wanted to do it.

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You know that's always this thing where you're, you know, an actress or holding space for a show that doesn't yet exist or doesn't yet have a green light, and you never know like he has the right.

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You know if something great comes along he might take it.

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Luckily it all worked out for us.

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Jonathan pursued us before we were actually officially greenlit Really Wow, sending Robbie texts and saying Jonathan would do anything to be part of fellow travelers, and so we were thrilled with that casting.

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We hesitated with Jonathan a little bit because he was also doing Bridgerton at the same time and then ultimately he was doing Wicked.

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He was doing three things at the same time.

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We didn't know how we were going to manage our show in Toronto and Bridgerton in London.

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So it was a little scary.

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But we did what's called a chemistry read where you put the two guys together and you know they, they do a scene and you see what's the chemistry between these two guys.

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And Matt was in LA and Jonathan was in London.

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So this is a chemistry zoom and they were acting a scene where their characters were sitting on a park bench next to each other and they and they and they act this.

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They do probably a couple of times in my memory, you know.

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We all say great, great, great, thank you, guys, you know, hang up.

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And then we all gather again to have and I actually got a text.

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One of the executives said well, that's a first.

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I cried in a chemistry read.

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That's amazing, their chemistry connected 6,000 miles.

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Through Zoom.

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Through Zoom.

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It's like, okay, this is whatever it takes, whatever it takes, whatever it takes.

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And you clearly know, you clearly feel that that chemistry between them from the very first meeting.

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And I want to jump in and say Matt and Jonathan get all the attention and they deserve as much attention as I get.

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But, Jelani Alladin, you can tell me if I mispronounce this.

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Erin Neufer, Allison Williams, Will Brill - I'm going to stop because I could just go on forever.

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I don't want to leave anybody out Right down the line.

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Will Brill made me despise Roy Cohn all over again.

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You just got over Al Pacino's depiction in Angels in America, and now Will Brill makes you hate him all over again.

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Again, that was like the stars are really aligned, you know.

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And Allison Williams as Lucy is, you know, so spectacular.

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So, yes, so we just kept going.

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And Noah Ricketts as Frankie, Noah's ability to sing also informed.

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Like, well, what if Frankie performs with Stormy DeLarverie, who is a real character, who is in the bar and played by Chelsea Russell, and you know that's Stormy DeLarverie is a real person from LGBTQ history, an icon really, who performed in clubs in Washington DC in the 50s.

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So, again, you know, history comes in.

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Yeah, Brad, thank you so much.

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It was an extraordinary cast and, you know, it was one of those magical things where this impeccable cast who are so smart, many of them write, produce, they do all these other things but it was the kind of set where an actor would come over to me and say can I change they to them in this line, and I'd say, of course, you don't have to ask my permission to change a word.

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I think it was Allison who said, oh, yeah, on this show we do.

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That's incredible, this immense respect, you know.

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And obviously there was collaboration and they had ideas about the characters, et cetera, et cetera.

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How amazing for you on your part, though, Ron.

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I mean Billy Wilder wouldn't have said that.

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Billy Wilder would have said, no, I wrote they say they.

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And you were just so plugged into these acts.

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Not that I'm just not disparaging Billy Wilder I mean, we all love Billy Wilder but what I'm saying is that you were obviously.

00:19:56.050 --> 00:19:56.491
This was such a.

00:19:56.491 --> 00:20:01.423
It shows what a collaborative effort this entire series was.

00:20:01.423 --> 00:20:02.598
It comes right out of the screen.

00:20:02.598 --> 00:20:16.138
Everybody was working at their utmost level to create this epic story for all of us to enjoy but learn from and I most hesitate saying that because I don't want people to think for a second that this is dry I mean the sex in this show.

00:20:16.138 --> 00:20:19.126
Can we just okay, we just have to talk about the elephant in the room.

00:20:20.996 --> 00:20:33.163
I know one thing that I appreciated and one thing that I was blown away by, and one thing I realized watching, you know, the first sex scene that I had never seen, I was like, oh my God, that's incredible.

00:20:33.163 --> 00:20:43.958
And I was like I've never seen that depicted between two men so realistically, so passionately, like we see it between men and women all the time.

00:20:43.958 --> 00:20:45.601
So thank you for that.

00:20:45.601 --> 00:20:55.996
First of all, for showing that this is what it looks like and we should be absolutely as proud of it and as in love with it as the straight world is.

00:20:57.097 --> 00:20:58.682
The chemistry between these two men.

00:20:58.682 --> 00:20:59.923
It's mind blowing.

00:20:59.923 --> 00:21:04.882
But I had a friend who asked me if they were really having sex and I said, of course they were.

00:21:04.882 --> 00:21:16.009
You can't do that, you can't really have sex on a set, but my God, the passion between them was just, yeah, the chemistry, I'm sure, was 6,000 miles.

00:21:16.009 --> 00:21:25.356
So I really feel like that was such an incredible step forward for us as gay men to see ourselves depicted.

00:21:25.356 --> 00:21:38.682
Finally, we've had some depictions here, and they're usually by straight men, but, okay, by two gay actors, by the way, which I also oh God, it drives me crazy which also we have to point out.

00:21:38.682 --> 00:21:48.304
These are two out and proud God bless them gay actors whose bravery is something that I will always be grateful for as an audience member and as a sometime gay actor.

00:21:48.695 --> 00:21:56.548
Well, Tony, I just want to say actually we have five out LGBTQ actors playing five of the LGBTQ.

00:21:56.548 --> 00:22:09.121
It's amazing, so that you know, aaron Neufer identifies as LGBTQ, as Jelani and Noah and Johnny and Matt Just phenomenal, it was really so moving.

00:22:09.121 --> 00:22:09.682
Yeah.

00:22:10.134 --> 00:22:12.182
And Ron, I'd like you to speak to what Tony said.

00:22:12.182 --> 00:22:13.461
I'm going to toss something in there.

00:22:13.461 --> 00:22:18.280
Sure, when I wrote my first novel, I was really reluctant to put sex in there because I didn't want people to think it was erotica.

00:22:18.280 --> 00:22:27.866
And author Michael Nava, who's a brilliant author, I talked to him about it and what he said was how a character has sex says a lot about the character.

00:22:27.866 --> 00:22:32.859
He totally changed my perspective and I feel like that's what you did here.

00:22:35.486 --> 00:22:49.883
Yeah, we had a rule for every scene, which is a rule that I sort of I was inspired by my three years working on the brilliant television show Homeland with a group of brilliant writers, and the rule on Homeland was there's not a scene in Homeland that doesn't move the story forward.

00:22:49.883 --> 00:22:53.419
So there aren't scenes where people just sit and talk and how are you today?

00:22:53.419 --> 00:22:57.227
And you know it's like you know, oh, there's a Russian behind you pointing a gun.

00:22:57.227 --> 00:23:08.891
It has to, has to move, has to move the story forward, to take a love story and to take that kind of thriller approach to it that every scene moves the story forward.

00:23:08.891 --> 00:23:13.844
The characters are slightly different, they're slightly somewhere else than they were at the beginning of the scene.

00:23:13.844 --> 00:23:21.819
So that and apply that to the sex scenes as well- and I have to say, you know, Thomas Mallon's novel, one of the things that comes from Mr Mallon.

00:23:21.839 --> 00:23:35.843
There are two things that I can think of right away that come from Mr Mallon's novel.

00:23:35.843 --> 00:23:37.124
One is the who's my boy?

00:23:37.124 --> 00:23:38.365
Who do you belong to?

00:23:38.365 --> 00:23:40.266
You know, and then it gets a little tougher.

00:23:40.266 --> 00:23:43.567
In episode three there's a slap involved In the book.

00:23:43.567 --> 00:23:45.388
There's just one slap, but I made it two.

00:23:45.388 --> 00:23:50.653
I also added the tying, the hands up and the other stuff that we see.

00:23:50.653 --> 00:23:53.883
A lot of the sex was scripted.

00:23:53.883 --> 00:23:55.132
The foot sucking was scripted.

00:23:55.132 --> 00:24:03.422
As a matter of fact, when I got the notes on the pilot script, I remember one of the executives when we got the scene, saying well, I've never read this in a script before.

00:24:03.422 --> 00:24:10.259
Again, one of the many rules is that we don't want to do the same sex act twice.

00:24:10.259 --> 00:24:23.080
So I have to say, by the time, my colleagues and I Anya Leita and Jack Solomon, who co-wrote episode eight with me- we were kind of stuck Because, wait, we're now in the eighth episode.

00:24:23.121 --> 00:24:23.742
What can we do?

00:24:23.742 --> 00:24:26.332
That's a little different, but we found something.

00:24:26.332 --> 00:24:28.577
We found something actually a big thing actually.

00:24:28.577 --> 00:24:43.717
We switched to who's in charge, so to say, of the sex, and I think that Johnny and Matt both have said and responded to what allowed them to be very free in those sex scenes was that the sex scenes had a point, and it was the point.

00:24:43.717 --> 00:24:46.820
As I said, on the show, every scene is about power.

00:24:46.820 --> 00:24:48.780
We'll find that like a little.

00:24:48.780 --> 00:24:53.423
Some people have found that a little offensive in a way like, oh, this is a love story.

00:24:53.423 --> 00:25:01.037
It's about power because you always have.

00:25:01.037 --> 00:25:02.580
You know, if I love you more than you love me, you have power over me.

00:25:02.580 --> 00:25:03.924
You know you have power over me, obviously in some ways.

00:25:03.924 --> 00:25:08.923
So that's, you know, if I'm attracted to you more than you're attracted to me, somebody has power in that situation.

00:25:08.923 --> 00:25:11.298
So you apply that to sex scenes and it gives it.

00:25:12.038 --> 00:25:23.728
It gives it them something to it's a it's the shifting of the sex scenes also depict the shifting their relationship thing, dynamics of their relationship and the shifting power in their relationship.

00:25:24.194 --> 00:25:29.041
If you cut everything out of this film and left just the sex scenes, you would know exactly where they were in their life.

00:25:29.663 --> 00:25:29.824
Yeah.

00:25:30.195 --> 00:25:32.042
I agree, yeah, no, absolutely.

00:25:32.516 --> 00:25:35.003
You're going to be asking us to actually release that version.

00:25:38.336 --> 00:25:38.916
I would watch it.

00:25:38.916 --> 00:25:39.898
I would watch both.

00:25:39.898 --> 00:25:44.656
Regarding the love story aspect, because I have heard you call it a love story.

00:25:44.656 --> 00:25:55.000
Sure, it's beautiful and difficult at the same time, and I have heard arguments that this is not a love story, and I heard the same argument about Brokeback Mountain.

00:25:55.000 --> 00:26:17.336
I would guess, because it's not a traditional love story, that it is so painful and it doesn't have a happily ever after per se does it have to be tragic.

00:26:17.356 --> 00:26:18.521
Why can't we have a happy LGBTQ story and I just say yeah.

00:26:18.521 --> 00:26:19.305
So why don't we apply that to Hamlet?

00:26:19.305 --> 00:26:20.208
Drama comes from human struggle.

00:26:20.208 --> 00:26:28.576
It doesn't come from you know everything working out and by the way if there's anybody out there that has a love story that doesn't have some struggle in it?

00:26:30.096 --> 00:26:32.038
it's a boring love story.

00:26:32.038 --> 00:26:32.880
No, I don't either.

00:26:32.880 --> 00:26:35.301
And let's talk about the classic love stories.

00:26:35.301 --> 00:26:37.344
Let's talk about The Way We Were.

00:26:37.344 --> 00:26:41.727
Let's talk about these films which are iconic and then no one ends up together.

00:26:41.727 --> 00:26:45.891
Maybe it's just the same movies, but you don't end up together in the end.

00:26:45.891 --> 00:26:46.592
Gone with the wind.

00:26:46.592 --> 00:26:47.571
You know what I mean.

00:26:49.755 --> 00:26:50.556
She realizes she loves him and he's gone.

00:26:50.556 --> 00:26:51.698
I was just going to say that actually.

00:26:51.698 --> 00:26:55.284
By the way, matt sometimes has referred to our show as The Gay We Were

00:26:56.365 --> 00:26:57.247
I would agree with him.

00:26:57.586 --> 00:27:04.496
I want to do someday a screening of the way we were in, like an episode from a show, because I literally stole things from the way we were.

00:27:04.536 --> 00:27:08.068
Yeah, you know, one of the big things is HUAC, of course.

00:27:08.068 --> 00:27:14.426
I mean, they're both set against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which I want to definitely talk about with you.

00:27:14.426 --> 00:27:31.806
But I want to loop back to the love story, and that criticism people have, you know, when it was crystallized for me is in the last episode, when tim says to him at the very end that he had an all-consuming love and some people don't have that and he had that.

00:27:31.806 --> 00:27:44.474
And that's the point he said I spend my I'm sorry if I'm paraphrasing in front of the writer here and I might paraphrase, but if I he says all my life I've been trying to get God to love me and I realized that all was necessary for me to love God.

00:27:44.855 --> 00:27:46.655
You know, that's the thing he had.

00:27:46.655 --> 00:27:49.038
Hawk allowed him to have this all-consuming love.

00:27:49.038 --> 00:27:49.637
Was it perfect?

00:27:49.637 --> 00:27:53.000
Hell, no, but he experienced it.

00:27:53.000 --> 00:28:08.627
And sometimes I think we're so worried about whether or not the other person loves us we forget that the real active thing, the thing that matters to us, is whether we love them and how that colors our lives, and I think that's beautifully summed up in that final episode.

00:28:08.627 --> 00:28:11.670
It puts a cherry on the top of that for me.

00:28:12.230 --> 00:28:13.671
Mr Mallon actually has.

00:28:13.671 --> 00:28:23.170
One of his chapters is prefaced by a poem from Auden, and the last two lines are if equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.

00:28:23.170 --> 00:28:24.654
Isn't that lovely.

00:28:24.654 --> 00:28:26.801
In episode six that used to be in.

00:28:26.801 --> 00:28:31.820
Tim used to tell that poem to Marcus and it was a whole sequence that didn't make it to them.

00:28:32.756 --> 00:28:33.156
Back on that.

00:28:33.156 --> 00:28:42.207
You know, the thing that always bothered me about the Wizard of Oz was when and bring the Wizard of Oz into this was when he gives the Tin man.

00:28:42.207 --> 00:28:42.627
I'm gay.

00:28:42.627 --> 00:28:43.557
When he gives the.

00:28:43.557 --> 00:28:51.826
Tin man his heart and he says to him and remember my friend, a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved or by others.

00:28:51.826 --> 00:28:53.701
And I'm always like no, wait a minute.

00:28:54.575 --> 00:28:56.019
I think you got that backwards, wizard.

00:28:56.019 --> 00:28:56.820
I mean, you're a humbug.

00:28:56.820 --> 00:29:07.278
So it makes sense Hard to judge by how much you love, and that's what Tim is saying at the end it's that I have loved you and that has been my great joy in life.

00:29:08.420 --> 00:29:11.265
And that's, by the way, and just again, how collaboration works.

00:29:11.265 --> 00:29:19.486
In Mr Mallon's novel, that letter that Tim writes in the preface, Mary says that Tim decided that what was important is that he loved God.

00:29:19.486 --> 00:29:22.199
So I took that, I had that in my head and I thought, well, yeah.

00:29:22.199 --> 00:29:24.945
But I added that Tim says it's the same with you.

00:29:24.945 --> 00:29:35.207
Hawk Thomas Mallon has been so supportive of the show, even though there's a lot of difference between the show and the book, because he recognizes that his book is really all through the show.

00:29:35.207 --> 00:29:37.142
I just build on and do other things.

00:29:38.434 --> 00:29:44.685
Talking about Thomas Mallon, there's one thing that really jumped out at me and my husband, after the first episode, bought the book, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

00:29:44.685 --> 00:29:49.787
One thing that jumped out at me that is really simple is Mary Johnson.

00:29:49.787 --> 00:29:55.923
It's such a basic, simple name and something tells me that wasn't by accident.

00:29:56.914 --> 00:29:57.055
Brad.

00:29:57.055 --> 00:30:01.363
Interesting, by the way, Mary in the book is not LGBTQ.

00:30:01.363 --> 00:30:12.259
She has an affair with a married man, which is a different way and actually early in the early development, that's what Mary was, but there were too many different stories.

00:30:12.259 --> 00:30:15.847
So, again, that book comes from.

00:30:15.847 --> 00:30:18.743
That name comes from Mr Mallon's book.

00:30:18.743 --> 00:30:25.044
All the names come from the book, although Marcus and Frankie don't exist in the book.

00:30:25.044 --> 00:30:30.221
So that actually, I think is a big difference between the book and the novel.

00:30:30.555 --> 00:30:36.188
And for whatever reasons and I know that there are reasons not to speak to anything about Mr Mallon, that's negative but there weren't black characters in the novel.

00:30:36.188 --> 00:30:38.913
And I, for whatever reasons there and I know that there are reasons not speak to anything about Mr Mallon, that's negative, but there weren't black characters in the book.

00:30:38.913 --> 00:30:47.421
And I just know, in 2023, I'm just not going to create a television show that you know has all white characters.

00:30:47.421 --> 00:30:48.503
You know that thing.

00:30:48.503 --> 00:30:49.365
That often happens.

00:30:49.365 --> 00:30:51.642
You know Jelani and Noah, and I have all talked about this.

00:30:51.642 --> 00:30:54.834
You know often that issue is addressed by having you know Jelani and Noah, and I have all talked about this.

00:30:54.834 --> 00:30:56.778
You know often that issue is addressed by having you know the judge is black.

00:30:56.798 --> 00:30:58.282
Supporting characters are black.

00:30:58.282 --> 00:31:00.617
They show up and they give advice or whatever.

00:31:00.617 --> 00:31:10.039
It's kind of like how gay characters used to be treated, right Like the next door neighbor gives the straight couple advice on how to decorate their apartment and how to fall in love with each other.

00:31:10.039 --> 00:31:27.781
What I found is that the black press because there are many, many, many black owned and written and edited black newspapers in the United States in the 50s was really powerful and I thought, okay, there you go, a black journalist would be there in Washington and that's where Marcus was born.

00:31:29.227 --> 00:31:30.471
And I want to give you kudos for that.

00:31:30.471 --> 00:31:43.450
There's an author named Cary Alen Johnson who wrote a beautiful novel called Desire Lines and it's about black men during the AIDS crisis and he wrote it because he said I haven't seen anything that talks about my experience during the AIDS crisis, the black experience.

00:31:43.450 --> 00:31:47.436
Kudos to you for putting that in there so important.

00:31:47.457 --> 00:31:49.000
You know, very again, significantly researched.

00:31:49.000 --> 00:31:57.538
It seems like a stretch that maybe there's a black man covering the Senate hearings, but actually that's not a stretch.

00:31:57.538 --> 00:31:58.142
There were black reporters.

00:31:58.142 --> 00:31:59.749
There was a White House correspondent who was a black woman.

00:31:59.749 --> 00:32:02.017
Actually Eisenhower, appointed, brought her into the White House press court.

00:32:02.017 --> 00:32:07.590
So that was, again, it's very well researched.

00:32:07.590 --> 00:32:23.307
And Marcus's whole storyline, the whole thing at the Washington Post actually happened to a black journalist named Simeon Booker, where he was hired to be the first black journalist on the Washington Post is actually happened to a black journalist named Simeon Booker, where he was hired to be the first black journalist on the Washington Post and the editor said look, I just have to ask you to use a different restroom Now.

00:32:23.307 --> 00:32:25.096
He didn't have the reaction that Marcus had.

00:32:26.859 --> 00:32:27.402
It's truth.

00:32:27.402 --> 00:32:30.428
You know you're bringing truth back into these stories.

00:32:30.428 --> 00:32:33.306
And speaking of truth, I want to make a correction.

00:32:33.306 --> 00:32:46.962
Earlier, when I was comparing the way we were to the gay we were, as Matt calls it I love that to your show I mistakenly said both involved HUAC and that's incorrect.

00:32:46.962 --> 00:32:54.501
Fellow Travelers is actually later, when Joseph McCarthy took up the mantle in the Senate Committee on Investigations in the Senate.

00:32:54.501 --> 00:32:58.308
It's the same era and they're all hunting communists.

00:32:58.308 --> 00:33:03.529
But I just want to make that distinction between.

00:33:03.549 --> 00:33:03.894
HUAC and McCarthy.

00:33:03.894 --> 00:33:10.618
And McCarthy had built his career starting in 1950, building on what the House, the HUAC, had started.

00:33:10.618 --> 00:33:12.880
He gave a speech.

00:33:12.880 --> 00:33:13.961
He talks about it in the show.

00:33:13.961 --> 00:33:16.061
He was a nobody and he goes.

00:33:16.061 --> 00:33:19.804
He's saying there are 200 communists in the State Department Overnight he's a huge celebrity.

00:33:19.804 --> 00:33:31.531
So he turned his committee, which was basically a committee that checked government agencies for overspending on their budgets, and he turned it into a way to to hunt commies and homosexuals.

00:33:37.476 --> 00:33:47.508
what I found fascinating about the show was was that, you know, we always think that suddenly people got a conscience and this whole circus ended.

00:33:47.508 --> 00:33:51.295
And, as you point out in the show, it wasn't that really.

00:33:51.295 --> 00:33:55.846
It was really homophobia which brought down McCarthy.

00:33:57.154 --> 00:33:58.558
I would say it was both.

00:33:58.558 --> 00:34:01.488
I mean, that's my theory of it.

00:34:01.488 --> 00:34:14.385
One of the differences I think that we are seeing from the 50s and from the 70s, when Richard Nixon resigned rather than being impeached, is that there were people in both parties who despised McCarthy.

00:34:14.385 --> 00:34:26.996
They despised him, including President Eisenhower, and it was President Eisenhower's idea, once they knew that the army was going to investigate, use the Senate committee to investigate McCarthy himself, which is kind of interesting.

00:34:26.996 --> 00:34:33.702
Eisenhower is the one who said let's get the television networks in there, let's show America what this guy is.

00:34:33.702 --> 00:34:37.306
So there was this revulsion toward him among many people.

00:34:37.786 --> 00:34:46.639
But, yes, the Pixie Ferry moment in episode five, seen in episode five is from the Army McCarthy hearings and in the end.

00:34:46.659 --> 00:34:51.615
Yes, what they, what they did is they painted McCarthy with the gay brush.

00:34:51.615 --> 00:34:55.023
In other words, you're defending this guy, roy Cohn.

00:34:55.023 --> 00:34:59.679
Roy Cohn is obviously in love, has an obsession with this guy, David Schine.

00:34:59.679 --> 00:35:06.922
All that's documented, all that's true, and we now are going to make America see the three of you as being similar.

00:35:06.922 --> 00:35:14.400
And it really, you know, and especially climax, when Joseph Walsh, the lawyer, had this conversation about pixies and fairies.

00:35:14.400 --> 00:35:19.545
It was humiliated, you know, in the hearing, and humiliated McCarthy.

00:35:20.626 --> 00:35:21.429
That took me aback.

00:35:21.429 --> 00:35:27.181
I've been researching gay bars throughout history in Los Angeles and most of those clubs.

00:35:29.545 --> 00:35:30.510
That's personal Brad.

00:35:34.766 --> 00:35:42.251
Most of these, really before the 70s but even earlier, were hidden but they were hole in the walls and I'm sorry I don't remember the name of the club

00:35:43.599 --> 00:35:44.096
Yeah, yes.

00:35:44.356 --> 00:35:45.519
That was beautiful.

00:35:45.519 --> 00:35:46.943
Is that based ?

00:35:47.894 --> 00:35:54.500
Well, the Cozy Corner existed, but of course course we have no idea what it looked like, because people did photographs inside places like that.

00:35:54.500 --> 00:35:59.701
So I have a feeling it was not as beautiful as our beautiful club.

00:35:59.701 --> 00:36:02.733
But you know, that's where you take a little bit of dramatic license.

00:36:02.733 --> 00:36:06.842
You know my production designer, Antonio Massaro, is a genius.

00:36:06.842 --> 00:36:08.485
You know we built it.

00:36:08.485 --> 00:36:09.527
That's a set we built.

00:36:09.527 --> 00:36:14.103
You know everything is set, the Senate hearings, you know those are all constructed sets, we built from scratch.

00:36:14.103 --> 00:36:16.259
So that isn't but the Cozy Corner.

00:36:16.259 --> 00:36:21.842
And I don't even know I don't know the Stormy DeLarverie ever performed in the Cozy Corner.

00:36:21.842 --> 00:36:24.356
I'm not even sure the Cozy Corner had live music.

00:36:24.356 --> 00:36:31.121
But I do know the Cozy Corner was a real gay bar near Howard University, that its customers were mostly black men.

00:36:31.402 --> 00:36:32.862
Well, I'm glad you went with the vision you had.

00:36:32.862 --> 00:36:34.483
Yes, yeah, it's too beautiful.

00:36:34.684 --> 00:36:38.126
Well, the amazing thing about that is it's all shot in Toronto, right, Ron?

00:36:38.126 --> 00:36:40.547
I mean, everything practically was shot in Toronto.

00:36:40.547 --> 00:36:43.489

Navigating "Fellow Travelers": A Conversation with Ron Nyswaner, the Creator of the Showtime Series

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