Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely Director On How Floyd’s Work … – Screen Rant

Summary

Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely debuted on September 22nd and is currently available to stream on the PBS app. With a runtime of 1 hour and 23 minutes, the biopic centers around the career of lawyer and legal expert, Floyd Abrams, and how his contributions expounded upon the First Amendment. Speaking Freely highlights Abrams' most crucial and controversial cases, as well as the effect his work has had on recent political elections.

Co-founder of SALTY Features, Yael Melamede, serves as the director and producer of Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely. She has won both the Academy and Emmy Awards and worked on several critically acclaimed projects. Melamede is most well-known for titles such as (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, Why We Hate, and 1341 Frames of Love and War.

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Yael Melamede chats exclusively with Screen Rant about working with Floyd Abrams on his biopic, as well as the impact Citizens United and the Pentagon Papers had on protecting the First Amendment.

Screen Rant: Were you asked to come on board and create this biopic or was this an original idea that you wanted to pursue?

Yael Melamede: It was an original idea. I started talking to Floyd when I was doing a six-part series for Alex Gibney and for Amblin Entertainment around Why We Hate. I had finished a film a year before that on why we lie, basically a film about dishonesty. And so they thought I'd be a very helpful person for them on why we hate and got interested in hate speech, and why we permit hate speech, and why we're so liberal about hate speech. I just loved the way Floyd speaks about the importance of free speech, but at the same time, seems to empathize so much with the cost and with the sacrifice that we make.

Hate speech is very painful. He's not someone who says, "Oh, just don't take it so seriously." He understands that there's a real cost. I loved his empathy for the other side, and as things have become so much more polarized, and there have been calls from the left and the right to limit speech for different reasons, I thought he was a really interesting person to talk to to see his journey and understand through his eyes why he thinks free speech is so important, regardless of whether you're on the left or the right.

Speaking Freely was three years in the making. Was that expected or was there a delay due to COVID?

Yael Melamede: A lot of our films take a long time. They're complicated films. Speaking Freely is the second film I've directed, and the first one I directed on dishonesty was a long time coming. They're kind of thematic films. This is about Floyd, but it's also about our journey with free speech and it just took a long time. We started during COVID, and so that was certainly a part of it, but fundraising also took a long time. We were very fortunate to get a really big NEH Grant for the film and that was super helpful. Everything together just created for a long process, which I think was really good for the film. Not very good for our business, but very good for the film.

How was working with Floyd Abrams? Was he excited about the opportunity to talk about his lifes work?

Yael Melamede: He was amazing. He was incredibly gracious and generous. I think Floyd is somebody who landed in exactly the thing they should have been doing in life. It just seems so perfect for him. The way his mind works, the way he enjoys the law, the impact he's hadit was kind of this very virtuous cycle for him. I said to him, "If you hadn't done law, what could you have done?" In all seriousness, he said, "I think I would have been a really great kindergarten teacher." I think he just loves to explain. He loves to hear. He's very curious about other people's points of view.

He's really curious about kids' points of view. He has amazing patience. He was very trusting and generous from the very beginning. And I think part of it was because I've known him for a while, and because we've had such good conversations around hate speech. I think he thought that if he was going to share his story, he was going to do with somebody who seemed very open and really curious about him and wasn't coming to this with a predetermined notion. He was extraordinary.

Citizens United is Floyds most controversial case. Where do you think the controversy stems from and what impact do you think it's had on political elections?

Yael Melamede: It's such a complicated case. I think, for me, what was interesting, in terms of Floyd, was how he views the case. He was such a darling of the left up until that case, and that case together with other cases that he has taken that have to do with protecting corporate speech are not popular. I really hope that through the film, people, even if they continue to disagree with Floyd, which I think is totally valid, would see that there's a side, or at least a legitimacy to the other side, even if you disagree. I thought that was really important for people to admire and even respect somebody who is advancing an argument and even the law in a way that they really disagree with.

In terms of Citizens United's impactI think it's so complicated. Most people talk about Citizens United in terms of the power that it gave to corporations, but Floyd, I think, is very right in saying that corporations in the way we think of corporations like Apple or Microsoft or Mobile are not the entities that are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into politics. The truth is that very wealthy individuals are putting money into politics, and the way they're doing that is through corporate entities. So there is a difference between how people talk about the case and its impact and the reality. I think the reality is that people with a great deal of money can influence elections and that that is unfortunate.

Floyd's arguments to that reality would say, "Fix it, not by taking away speech, but by doing other things. Be more transparent about who's actually giving the money, because there are lots of ways today that people can hide their identity, and still give money to politics and to influencing things, and we don't know who they are." And secondly, he would say, "Tax people more. Get rid of the money. Don't get rid of the speech, get rid of the money." I think that's a great idea and solution. It's totally unfeasible in the current political system we are in, so those are hard solutions. I think transparency is a more possible solution.

It's interesting that a lot of the organizations who you would think would be in support of transparency actually aren't. And in some ways, I don't know if that's why they don't support it, but it would mean that their donors would be more known to people, and they don't want their donors to feel in any way anxious about giving money. I think part of what we hoped to do through the film was to show the complexity of a case like Citizens United to make people think twice about having just a one-sided knee-jerk reaction to Citizens United itself, but also to other cases that might seem so easy, so wrong, so terrible, and that might be more complex.

The film also touches on Judith Miller and the price she was willing to pay to keep her sources confidential. Why did you feel this case was crucial to include?

Yael Melamede: Floyd's reason for supporting Citizens United, and even corporations, comes from his long-standing belief that the press should be free. It's all as a result of looking out for the press. Adam Liptak says in the film that he's been the greatest press lawyer so far in American history. He, as part of a team, was very successful with the Pentagon Papers, but he's also spent much of his career trying to argue for the right of reporters to not reveal confidential sources, which has been a big legal issue. It's something very scary for a lot of journalists, especially journalists dealing with national security and with secrets. We chose in the film to talk about two journalists.

One, Nina Totenberg, around the Clarence Thomas confirmation, who had secret information that was published, and the second being Judith Miller, who, in fact, didn't publish anything secret, but the Special Counsel knew that she had information, so he subpoenaed her for it, which is really extraordinary. She didn't even write anything about it, but she was subpoenaed. She wouldn't reveal her sources, and at the time, was very disliked by the press, because she had been very pro the Iraq War. She had made a few mistakes on some of the articles that she had written in The New York Times, which most people believed was because she was just a mouthpiece for the Bush administration, which I don't think is true.

I think she really believed that those things were the truth. But on the one hand, we had Nina Totenberg who was beloved by the press and seen as being under siege and very defended by the liberal press. And then Judith Miller, who had come out of the Iraq War somewhat scathed as a result of her reporting, and now was being not defended by her colleagues, and instead, left out there unprotected, even though what she was fighting for was to the benefit of all journalists.

When you were doing testimonials, was there anyone whose experience surprised you or provided an unexpected angle?

Yael Melamede: There was a colleague of Floyd's who's not in the movie, but she had said at some point that what Floyd was doing was really cutting-edge law. You look at Floyd, who worked at this very respected New York law firm, and it's hard to think, "Oh, well, they're doing cutting-edge law." That made me think really differently. That sense of what they were doing at the time was revolutionary and so different. I really wanted people to understand that the First Amendment that we think of today is something pretty new, and it's because of Floyd Abrams and his generation that we are so protected in terms of free speech.

So that was really interesting to have that context of cutting-edge and revolutionary. That was a great frame for what we were doing. I loved Emerson Sykes from the ACLU in the way he talked about Citizens United. He's somebody who agrees with Floyd Abrams in so many ways about the importance of free speech but gets to it from a different perspective, which I loved. He comes out of a total belief in progressive politics and in the need to protect, largely, people who are protesting rather than entities like the press. So they come to it from different places but get to the same place.

I loved that he was quite humble at the end about Citizens United as well, saying that when he came to the ACLU, his predecessor said to him, "If you can figure it out, you'll do better than all of us." And he says in the film he's really disturbed by Citizens United, but he also doesn't have a great solution for it, and I kind of love that. That somebody who's so clearly aligned with progressive politics hasn't quite figured out how, as he says, to square that circle or square that hole. So I really liked that.

Floyd has worked on countless cases throughout his career. Were there any that you wish you couldve included?

Yael Melamede: Oh, totally. There are two that stand out. One is not so much a case, but Floyd did a lot of work outside of the US related to human rights, and I wish we had been able to talk more about the relationship between free speech and human rights and in the international landscape. It was just too hard to do when we were so anchored in actual cases in the Supreme Court and what was happening in the US. That was something I wished we could do. He had this crazy story about going to the jungle in Thailand to interview ex-Cambodian rulers about what had happened in Cambodia.

It was extraordinary being part of Human Rights Commission's and helping South Africa with their new constitution. Those kinds of things we would have loved to put in, but again, there just wasn't time. Another case that he was part of was an entertainer in Las Vegas who sued, I believe it was NBC, for libel. It was a case that Floyd was on for 10 years and at first lost and then won in the end. I just love that case. It was very dramatic, and it had echoes of where we are today with celebrities. One of the biggest celebrities at the time, and one of the biggest celebrities in the country, and certainly one of the biggest celebrities in Las Vegas, had such an influence on the way the first case was tried and basically was not guilty because he was so beloved in Las Vegas where the jury was from. Then, on appeal, he lost.

I love the way that Floyd talks about it. He says, "Even though they lost, most people in Las Vegas think that Wayne Newton still won." You may win sometimes, and yet the reality is different. There were all kinds of ways in which the cases become bigger than the law itself or the judgment, and he would say that about the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers was a big decision, but its influence has been even bigger than the Supreme Court decision. And Citizens United, I think, similarly, what the court decided was a certain decision, but it's been taken into a much larger context. And so with Wayne Newton, the reality is actually different from what the case actually was about.

I also wanted to ask about your upcoming projects. It looks like you have something in post-production.

Yael Melamede: There are two more films coming out in the next few months. One is a film that will be released in theaters called Pay or Die, which I did not direct, I produced, about the insulin crisis in America, which is a really harrowing tale about our healthcare system. That's a Paramount/MTV Films production with amazing directors. I'm very proud of that film. And then I'm doing another film that I am directing about my mother who is a very well-known architect in Israel. Weirdly, she's almost the same age as Floyd Abrams, and her claim to fame is the Supreme Court of Israel. So there's a crazy kind of legal connection between the films and that one will hopefully hit the festival circuit in 2024.

Known as the first First Amendment lawyer, see how his landmark casesfrom the Pentagon Papers to Citizens United to Clearview AIhelped define free speech as it is known today. Join Dan Abrams, Ari Melber, Nina Totenberg and more as they unpack the ways in which Abrams career has shaped major changes in law, public discourse and civic action since the 1960s.

Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely is currently available to watch on pbs.org and the PBS app.

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Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely Director On How Floyd's Work ... - Screen Rant