Interview: Jacob Kornbluth of STEPHANIE'S MARSHSTREAM at The Marsh Brings Clarity & Humor to Complex Issues

Emmy and Sundance Film Festival Award-winning writer and director Jacob Kornbluth will chat with Stephanie Weisman, Founder/Artistic Director of the Marsh this Thursday August 20th at 7:30pm PDT as part of the ongoing "Stephanie's MarshStream" series. Kornbluth will discuss his entertaining and informative new animated series, "Talk Boring to Me," created in collaboration with sociopolitical comedian W. Kamau Bell, host and executive producer of CNN's Emmy-winning docu-series "United Shades of America." In light of current social issues facing the U.S., Bell and Kornbluth teamed up to make "Talk Boring to Me," which examines topics such as the gig economy, asylum and homelessness in short videos that capture Bell's trademark humor intertwined with teachable moments.

While Kornbluth's recent work has focused mainly on film and video, he is perhaps equally well-known for his theater work, including collaborating on and directing three successful solo shows in San Francisco (The Moisture Seekers, Pumping Copy, Face by the Door). He also has a longstanding collaboration with renowned economic advisor and political commentator Robert Reich, including co-founding Inequality Media, a non-profit that makes videos to explain complex economic issues in ways everyone can understand.

I caught up with Kornbluth recently to talk about the genesis for "Talk Boring to Me" and his history with The Marsh. In conversation, he is much like his new series - super smart and thoughtful, easily approachable, and prone to find cheeky humor in even the most serious of subjects. Speaking with him leaves you feeling better informed and somehow more hopeful, even as he himself would never claim to have all the answers. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the impetus to create "Talk Boring to Me?"

Well, the impetus was that advocacy videos weren't fun enough. [laughs] The people who make them are passionate about the issues, but they're putting advocacy above story telling a lot of times. I started my career making comedy theater, actually with The Marsh, and I always felt like that focus on storytelling differentiated the advocacy work that I was doing. And the opportunity to work with Kamau on this, who's both a brilliant comedian and an activist, was to blend the storytelling piece of my brain, the comedy piece, with the activist piece and see if we could make really unique videos - that were fun to watch, but also told complex stories about things like asylum, the gig economy, homelessness and the struggles with public education in the country.

Had you worked with Kamau before?

I made a video with him and Robert Reich last year called "A Tale of Two Tickets" that was about the fines that come after you get a moving violation. You get one and it's like 60 bucks, and if you don't pay it in a month or two it goes up to like $200, it just shoots up. We made a video about why that was the case and why it was a problem hurting primarily poor people and people of color. That video was fun to work on, to have his particular way of looking at things, the comedy and the activism wrapped in one. It felt like a nice match for both of us so we had some talks about how we could continue to collaborate, and that's where this series came from.

How did you go about deciding what was a good topic for an episode?

You know, it started from a discussion of what he was thinking about for his television show on CNN called "United Shades of America." We used that as sort of a jumping off point for topics. For instance, he never talks about asylum in the show, but we were talking about the issues facing Iranian-Americans and people from various parts of Central America, and we realized that asylum was an interesting topic they weren't able to talk about on the television show. So, like anybody, we'd be talking about the big issues facing our country and we just had the opportunities to make videos about 'em. [laughs]

Do you plan to make additional episodes?

It's sort of in discussion. This was in some ways just [about] the joy of making something that you feel matters. We just made them to make them, without much of an eye for what might happen to them. But what's been fascinating is it does feel like it's striking a chord for people. There's so much dark news happening in the world right now that the idea of making stuff that tackles those same topics, but does it in a way that's entertaining and uses comedy does feel like it's sort of meeting a need. I think we may very well make more episodes in the future, but the question about what and when has still not been answered.

The visual elements in the series are really effective. The image of Trump is somehow the most realistic depiction of him I think I've ever seen. Yes, it's sort of a caricature, but it's also what the man really looks like.

Well, thank you. I worked with this team, Idle Hands Studio, that I've been working with for a long time, and I think they're brilliant visually. One of the things is we're not doing animation; we are doing motion graphics. This means you have to visualize complex topics and people in ways that are more real and less literal - if that makes any sense. [laughs] People don't, just from a visual perspective, see this and animation as different. But it is. We are helping you picture these things in your mind in ways that are conceptual. We're framing the topics, we're choosing pictures of Trump that evoke something in your mind or visualize him with a certain kind of lens. That's just all kind of a filtered reality to motion graphics, but I think that's what makes it fun.

It also made it so that [we could use] the template of black and white photos. I like black and white photography in a certain way more than color photography because there's a place to hide in the pictures, like you can dream your way into them a little bit more, if that makes sense? And we tried to take that same approach to motion graphics. We wanted to explain things to people and we wanted them to see the world, but we wanted to do what black and white photography does, which is allow you to use your imagination a little bit.

While watching "Talk Boring to Me," I kept thinking "Gosh, these guys are smart!" But you must have had your own learning curve, right? Is there anything significant that you learned just from making the series?

I think every single video was a massive learning experience for me. The most joyful aspect of the writing of these pieces was I got to learn about these topics. For instance, I don't know if I could have told you what asylum was before I started making this. I knew it was a big issue, but I don't think I understood it. I don't think I understood the connections, or exactly what I thought of the gig economy before I started the video. That the gig economy is actually the same story we've been told for generations. I mean, I come from a political family and they were fighting for workers for years and years, but I didn't necessarily connect the issue of slavery with the gig economy now. Like what the robber barons of the 1880's were doing in their top hats and big cigars, and what Uber and Lyft are doing weren't necessarily connected in my brain until we started doing the research.

One of the great things about this because we didn't have a distributor, because nobody was telling us what to do, was I got to take a little extra time and read a little more and think a little bit more deeply about these topics than I would if I were on a deadline. But I also believe all of this stuff should be easy for you and I and everybody to understand. None of this stuff is too hard for us. I mean, I'd felt for a long time like everybody was telling me that we weren't smart enough to understand this stuff, and I always pushed back on that. I always thought "Of course, we should. If I don't get it, it's because you're not explaining it well enough."

You're one of the people many of us count on to bring important information to our attention. What are your go-to sources for information on a regular basis?

You know, honestly I try to read both sides of what is a really fractured political debate every day. I try to read The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. I don't necessarily watch Fox News every day just cause I can't handle it. But I do try to understand how people are talking about things, and whether or not the topics that I think should be put forth are being put forth. The other thing is I don't watch the cable news at all unless I have to [laughs], because I feel like I don't get any perspective. I always end up watching those shows and feeling like I don't understand things any better than I did going in, so I just avoid 'em altogether. I think they're a waste of time, at least at this point.

How did you originally connect with Robert Reich?

My brother, Josh Kornbluth, is a comedian in the Bay Area, and he and I were making a movie called Love & Taxes. It was a comedy and we needed to cast somebody to play a former IRS commissioner for the film. We called up Robert Reich because we thought he would have the gravitas to pull off the role, and also hopefully would love being in a little indie comedy [laughs] and to our surprise, he said "yes" right away. We wound up shooting a wonderful scene with him for the movie, but he and I also hit it off immediately. We connected in the sense that, you know, he's like a closet comedian. He's hilarious in person.

I did not know that!

The first film I made with him is called Inequality for All. (It's on Netflix these days.) And the thing that's fun about it is you've got this political guy who's obviously a very smart commentator and a lot of people know him from stuff he writes, but what a lot of people didn't get was just how funny and human he was on camera, before we made that film. One of the biggest surprises of that film was that people were laughing, in the movie theater, at a movie called Inequality for All. It was a great joy to blend those two things - you know the comedic and story-first approach that anybody who works in TV or film would have, but bringing that sensibility to issue-based film.

You started your career as a writer and director of theater. Any chance you'd return to creating work for live performance (once that's possible again)?

I would love to work in theater. The fiscal sponsor for this series was The Marsh, which is a theater I started my career directing stuff at because they would allow for experimentation. Right now more than ever in the theater, and probably in the indie film world also, there's a need for experimenting, for artists to figure out ways to tell stories when we're in the middle of a pandemic that talk about the moment, but [also] what are we gonna do when we can't get together in that communal experience of watching theater together? How do we replace that feeling? I would love to see if my blend of film and theater background could be of use in that. I certainly don't have any answers, but I find it to be a very interesting area to explore. And honestly living in the Bay Area, too, the amount of talent here on the stage side is inspiring, and I'm worried about what everybody's gonna do. What are all those actors and the theater community that I have such a warm feeling towards and that I started with, what are they all gonna do going forward? I think it's going to take some real creativity to figure this stuff out.

The whole world feels like it's on edge these days. What is currently freaking you out the most?

Beyond the election?! [laughs] Well, there's a few things. First is that I'm a parent of a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, and the whole school situation and how to survive as a family right now is completely terrifying. Terrifying might not be the word. It's just... so unclear how to do it, you know? How are we supposed to work and send our kids to school and take care of them? That is maybe the thing right now that's the most viscerally uncertain, because school's supposed to start on Monday [i.e. in just 3 days]. It's scary. My 5-year-old's starting kindergarten. This is like the first day of school and instead of going into school they're gonna do a Zoom chat or something and we have to be there, and I just don't know how we're going to juggle this. They're not gonna learn all day on Zoom at 5 [years old], so that's a real concern.

And then there's a sense about the existential, the possible, America that even I've complained about for my whole life [laughs], that maybe it's not gonna be after this what it was before and I think a lot depends on November and on the election. I'm pretty scared about that. I can't actually imagine if Trump won in November what I'd do after that, how I'd continue to function and so on. [laughs] I don't know if I've ever felt like that before.

I guess those are the two things that come up most viscerally. And you know, god, I think I also just have this looming sense of economic Armageddon that's gonna come and hit us all. So far in the pandemic there's been this sense that maybe we've had some stimulus packages or whatever, but there's all these unemployed people, and yet the stock market's going up. I've been talking for years about how the pulling apart of society economically also means we're pulling apart socially, that those two things are connected. Those were stresses that have been building over the last 40 years, and it feels like the pandemic could make the fabric that holds us together break. And I find that to be, you know in the background, a really terrifying possibility.

I worry about the people who don't have jobs, I worry about single parents trying to make it through the schooling situation, and I think if you let yourself, you can be paralyzed by that worry. Maybe if this election does flip the script, maybe we can make it all better than it was before. But, man, it's scary stuff for sure.

How do you keep from getting paralyzed with worry? Where you are you currently finding hope?

Well, one of my inspirations was Howard Zinn who wrote A People's History of the United States. He died some years ago, but I got to meet him one time and I asked him, "How do you keep going?" when things seemed really dark. He said "Well, I wake up every day and I resist." And he was laughing as he said it. I think the underlying story there is this guy found a purpose in continuing to fight. I think if we lose that, then we lose everything. So - even if it doesn't seem hopeful, the best thing you can do, if you have the energy and breath within you, is to resist and to fight and to keep on going.

My father was a communist and when I was a kid I asked him if God existed. He said, "I believe in the collective spirit of humanity to do amazing things." or something like that. And I believe that. The things you see every day of people standing up, of speaking out on racial justice issues when it seems completely hopeless and like it's never gonna change. It hasn't changed in that story since the founding of America, so the fact that people continue to fight, that no matter what there's still that human spirit that pushes though, I find that to be as close as I come to anything hopeful. Just the fact that that still exists in people, despite how dark things can get, means that we're capable of doing better, you know?

(Photo courtesy of Mr. Kornbluth)

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