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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Do you remember those school days when your teacher needed to grade some papers or take a breather? They turned off the lights, turned on the TV, and showed the class a documentary. Now, maybe those first documentary viewing experiences gave you the sense that this type of filmmaking was not the most exhilarating way to tell a story. Actors reading old letters, slow pans over archival images. That's certainly one approach to the format, but the documentary universe is much more expansive than that. Often docs take the viewers into worlds they never knew existed.

Female Speaker: I have confidence that this kid will go all the way to the top. She's good enough. She's got the attitude and if I have to work three jobs to get her there, I'll do it. I know me, I depend on me, and I'm going to put her there

Brittany Luse: Living Dolls, I think it came out in the late '90s or early 2000. It centers on a couple of families, but one family, specifically the family of Swan Brooner who are deeply entrenched in the children's pageant circuit. That's Brittany Luse and I am a co-host of HBO Docs Club. I'm also a writer, cultural critic, and the co-host of For Colored Nerds podcast. When I saw Living Dolls and I saw that there was this entire deep pageant culture that was so different than my life and so different than anything that I knew, it was such a paradigm shift and really expanded my mind just to how big the world truly was. It's also high camp, but that's probably the first documentary that really affected me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, in case you couldn't tell, Brittany has spent a lot of time thinking about the documentaries that have made an impact on her. Her new podcast, HBO Docs Club finds her delving into several different HBO documentaries. Revisiting these works with the people who made them as well as guests with notable connections to the stories. Her partner in this undertaking is?

Ronald Young Jr.: Ronald Young Jr., I'm the host of HBO Docs Club. I'm a cultural commentator, audio producer, and storyteller.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The first documentary that left a distinct impression on Ronald could not have been more different from Living Dolls.

Ronald Young Jr.: It was a little bit after Katrina that Spike Lee dropped When the Levees Broke. I saw that when I was in college. I remember that really opening my eyes to what documentary filmmaking was capable of.

Male Speaker: We come to you because we were there before the storm hit, we were there when the storm hit, we were there after the storm, and we're still there.

Ronald Young Jr.: Watching an event that I lived through. I remember watching this on the news and seeing this, and seeing what Kanye said, and seeing how Bush responded, and all of that. Watching this documentary and see them lay it out, beat by beat, like a story really opened my eyes to say like, "Wow, there's really a great way to tell the story and a really clear way to lay out exactly what it should look like." I really enjoyed that and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what the medium can be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The first episode of Ronald and Brittany's podcast finds them looking back at the 2020 series Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. It tells the story of the more than two dozen Black kids and young adults killed in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. I asked Brittany why they chose to start with this work.

Brittany Luse: First of all, it's an excellent docuseries directed by Sam Pollard, who is a legend, truly a documentary legend, but also even in fiction filmmaking just a legendary editor. It was such an honor to speak with him and also with Tayari Jones, who many people know as the author of An American Marriage, a huge book that came out a few years ago. She also was a child during that time. It was so incredible to be able to talk with them both. Those episodes of Atlanta's Missing and Murdered, they were hard to watch. They also conferred a level of respect and acknowledgment upon each of the people that were murdered.

Overwhelmingly most of them children. I believe it was about 40 people that were murdered during that time in Atlanta. That series is one of the, I think best and clearest examples of what documentary can do. Which is to excavate a story that maybe people got wrong before to show you a new perspective on something that you thought you knew. Also, to bring to the forefront the voices of people who may not have been heard the first time, or that many people pretended they can't hear very well now. He did such an excellent job in that docuseries talking to the people that love these children and really bringing the sadness and the grief of that time to the fore as opposed to simply the panic.

Although the documentary does explore the ways that time changed the city of Atlanta and the culture of Atlanta to a certain degree. It also really centers the loved ones who were left behind, and their experiences, and the pain that they still carry with them. It's a challenging documentary. One of the things that we always talked about with this show is that if something is hard for us to watch, that pales in comparison to the experience of the people that lived through it or didn't in some cases.

While this can be sometimes a really hard watch, it also just shows the power of the medium to be able to take stories of people who have been wronged, and really ask deep questions and excavate how that happened and what justice or retribution or healing might look like.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to talk about your second episode because it is one that basically all of us have lived through in a way the pandemic. You all take up How to Survive a Pandemic. What's it like to revisit this moment that in some ways we're still in?

Ronald Young Jr.: So much has changed in the last two years that we've been in the pandemic, and where we are now we're a place where a lot of people are vaxxed and boosted. We know a lot more about how transmission of COVID goes. We know how to be safe. We've learned how to move with this virus being all around us. That's in some cases to our detriment, and in some cases it's been what's pushed us forward as a society. If you look at things like remote work and the ways in which we've reinvented what connecting looks like there's been some things that have been a positive out of it.

Watching how to survive a pandemic I really went back and just remembered how scared I was in March 2020. The documentary opens and you see these scientists working on Zoom, asking questions, and in some cases, washing their groceries. Doing all the things that we did early in the pandemic that we all remember. We remember them because it doesn't feel like there's been two calendar years that have passed since this started. This is probably the first time that I felt this expression of time where it's just been always present all the time which is just always right now.

March 2020 could have been as soon as yesterday. Watching this it's a living record of everything that was happening as we went. The things that we thought we knew in the beginning, the things that we didn't know, and watching these scientists work forward to solve this problem as they go is really fascinating. Especially saying like, "Oh, I know what I was doing in March 2020. I know what I was doing in August 2020. I know what I was doing in January 2021." Watching them hit all these markers it's really opening my mind to everything that was going on at the time and the great obstacles that scientists were up against.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Brittany, what are some of the other documentaries that you're most excited for revisiting on the podcast?

Brittany Luse: There are two documentaries actually. Before even anybody had reached out to me about this podcast that I really just enjoyed watching at home, when I was at home most of the time, like a lot of us were during 2020 and 2021. My fiancé is a documentary editor. That's what he does for a living.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Serendipity.

Brittany Luse: We watch a lot of documentaries at home. The two that we enjoyed the most during the pandemic actually happened to be two that we covered on the show. One of them is The Apollo theater documentary. It was so much fun to watch this documentary directed by Roger Ross Williams. That just feels like, not just a walk down memory lane as far as the history of such a venerated and necessary and despite everything still living institution. Not just in the theater world or in the world of live music performance, in the world of Black music or Black America, but just it's a national treasure period.

It's so amazing to watch the journey through time where you're seeing the history of the theater, but you're also seeing the history of Black people in this country during that same timeline. It's just also there's so many amazing pop culture moments and musical moments that you forget about, or maybe sometimes you might not realize were actually associated with The Apollo or originated with The Apollo. I loved that documentary.

The other documentary that I really enjoyed-- Docuseries, I should say was The Lady and the Dale that was an HBO Max documentary that came out just over a year ago in early 2021. It is so good. I cannot overstate how good it was. It follows the story of Elizabeth Carmichael, who was this woman who really sought to take the auto industry by storm in the 1970s, in the middle of the gas crisis, by selling people on the idea of this three-wheeled fuel-efficient car.

Things obviously didn't turn out the way that she had planned because I suppose if that were the case, then we'd all be driving three-wheel fuel-efficient cars. She was so many things. She was a mother, a grandmother, but also in many ways, she was a criminal, but also a trans-trailblazer. The story of her life, her trying to sell this car and hustle, her being on the run at times with her family, and also the story of her identity and how just transphobic society has been throughout the years and continues to be. I loved that documentary just when I watched it. I was really excited that we got to cover it on the show.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering, Ronald, I sometimes feel like documentaries are meant to make me smarter or better. They should either-- Even if they're difficult to watch, they should be edifying intellectually in some way. I have to admit that I am a sucker for a scammer documentary or a scammer like docuseries, whether it's Fyre Festival, or really any of them that are just going to allow me to walk through, I can't even believe that someone did that and that other people fell for it. Is that an irritating played-out trend? Is there something valuable still in that genre?

Ronald Young Jr.: I think you've nailed it in the beginning when you say that. We watch documentaries and a good one you're going to learn something no matter what, right? I feel like a lot of the scamming documentaries, a lot of the scam content, and we haven't come up with a good name for it, we'll just call it scam content. A lot of that content that's coming out, we're still learning, we're still learning things that are happening no matter what. Even with something like a docu-series like The Lady and the Dale, and I don't want to spoil too much, but there is scamming at the center of the documentary, and I'll say center adjacent of the documentary.

There's still a large lesson that is learned about injustice, about what's right, about fair reporting, about media, all of that. Even if you watch something like The Tinder Swindler, there's still something to be said about the ways in which women are treated in relationships, the expectations that men have in relationships. I feel like there's always something else to be learned. If people just make stories where they're just, "Hey, check out this crazy scam. Oh, my God, I can't believe that this thing happened."

If there's not a whole lesson to be learned, if there's not the heart of the story there, a lot of times those end up just being like a salacious news story where it's just like, "Oh, this crazy thing happened," and then I forget about it. The thing that makes me keep thinking about a really good documentary, and including scam content is the lessons, the larger things about society that enable something like a scam to take place. A good storyteller or a good filmmaker is able to pull that out and make that the heart of their story.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The last question for both of you. You've got a lot going on in the world of audio outside of HBO Docs podcast. I'm wondering what you think about the future of audio storytelling, what gets you excited?

Ronald Young Jr.: I love narrative storytelling. Most of the storytelling I fell in love with was Snap Judgement, This American Life, even a show like Heavyweight, I love when people are digging deep and telling me a vulnerable and true story about someone. For me, those are some of my favorite podcasts to listen to. I like a good chat cast, I like to interview pod as well, but for me, being able to be vulnerable with someone on a mic and tell a full story, and the ways in which sound design can really immerse you as the listener really just put you there and transport you.

If you're driving, if you're sitting in your house, if you're cleaning your kitchen, you could just be riveted by something going on in this audio format. I really feel like it's so like, the ways in which people are telling stories via audio, they're just pushing the genre forward. I hope to be a part of that push continuing with the stories that I tell and the shows that I make moving forward. That's what I'm most excited about.

Brittany Luse: I am really interested right now in podcasts that break the rules of how a podcast is supposed to sound. Of course, I love shows that have a lot of really rich sound design and do things with binaural audio and try to make you feel really immersive. I mean that but I also mean that there are so many specific storytelling conventions in audio. There's a certain way that people feel like you have to talk or that there are certain ways that stories have to unfold, structure, and acts, and making sure that you use callbacks and not using so much colloquial language.

Sometimes I think it's necessary and effective. Sometimes, at least personally, I've felt like some of those constraints have kept me from sounding like a person. I've been really interested in audio recently that manages to follow a lot of the best storytelling rules so that there's that really great payoff and that the subjects that they're reporting on are done justice. Also, where the person who's delivering and who's speaking to the listener sounds like themselves.

There's just something so nice about that. I felt like when I was doing a lot more reported audio, I don't know if I was able to really crack that back then. It's so much fun to listen to. You feel like the smartest person you know is just casually telling you just a totally devastating and beautiful story.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Brittany Luse and Ronald Young Jr. are the co-hosts of the podcast HBO Docs Club. Ronald and Brittany, thank you so much for joining me.

Brittany Luse: Thank you.

Ronald Young Jr.: Thank you.

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