Maggie Gyllenhaal Takes On The Power Imbalance Of Sex Work In 'The Deuce'

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TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE DEUCE")

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) I want to learn how to make movies.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

Today, Maggie Gyllenhaal - she plays a sex worker who gets off the street, becomes a porn actress and a director of porn films in the HBO series "The Deuce." Season 3 begins Monday. "The Deuce" is set in the 1970s and '80s and is about the intersection of sex workers, pimps, porn, organized crime, cops, politicians and feminists. Before accepting the role, Gyllenhaal insisted on being one of the producers.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

GYLLENHAAL: What I wanted was to be a part of the conversation - to be in the room. I thought it could be helpful to the story that they told me they were trying to tell.

DAVIES: Also, Ken Tucker reviews the new album by Lana Del Rey, and David Bianculli reviews two new DVDs, one about a forgotten female silent film director, the other about a singer-satirist from the 1960s.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Our guest, Maggie Gyllenhaal, stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." Its third season premieres Monday. "The Deuce" is about the intersection of prostitution, pornography, organized crime, cops, politicians and feminists in the Times Square area of Manhattan in the '70s. It's also about changing attitudes towards sex in that period and how pornography became more mainstream.

The series was co-created by David Simon, who also created "The Wire" and co-created "Treme." The first season of "The Deuce" was set in the early '70s. Gyllenhaal plays Candy. As the series began, she was a sex worker. But after she was beaten up by a john, she looked for a safer alternative. She started acting in cheap porn films, became fascinated by how films are made and decided she wanted to direct.

The following season skips ahead to 1977, when porn has become more mainstream. Candy's been acting in and directing porn films, but she wants more control over the stories and wants them to reflect a woman's point of view. In this scene from the second season, she's unhappy about the latest film script and the fantasies they're creating. She tells that to her boss, the porn film's producer, Harvey, played by David Krumholtz.

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GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) I'm not doing this anymore.

DAVID KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) Doing what?

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Doing this - priests, nuns, rabbis.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) You're religious now.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) No, it just offends me.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) I stayed up all night writing this scene. Ask Joce.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Come on, Harvey. This whole script is [expletive].

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) Hey, hey, I'm trying to say something about organized religion in this movie. It's a statement piece.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Yeah, saying what exactly?

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) Anything else?

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Yeah, I'm not doing any more daddy-knows-best scenes.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) That's a fantasy.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) That's not my fantasy.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) Oh, that's someone's fantasy.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Hey, Harvey, you want me to keep banging out films for you, you've got to give me some better [expletive] to work with, and you have got to let me start drawing some lines for myself. Otherwise...

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) All right, absolutely.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) I've also been thinking about something else.

DAVIES: That's a clip from the second season of "The Deuce" set in the late '70s. Season 3 jumps ahead to 1985. Maggie Gyllenhaal's character, Candy, has become more confident as a filmmaker in the porn industry, but her efforts to make erotic films from a woman's point of view are becoming less viable, even though the industry continues to expand with the introduction of video. In this scene from the first episode of the new season, edited a bit for broadcast, Candy and her boss Harvey are arguing over how to keep their company afloat.

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KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) I have to turn products, and our customers are men.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Our customers are not all men.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) They are mostly men. They are mostly - excuse me - degenerate. Yes, you look at that ballroom tomorrow. Who's browsing, who's buying, who's taking pictures? Men.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) You [expletive]. Are we still having the same damn conversation after all these years?

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) You are a good filmmaker. But the feminist porn [expletive] is a niche product that I can no longer invest in, OK? It is negatively impacting our balance sheet.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) I'm huge in Europe.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) So go to Europe. Find a European investor. Or start making a different kind of film.

GYLLENHAAL: (As Candy) Straight porn like everybody else.

KRUMHOLTZ: (As Harvey) That's the business I'm in.

DAVIES: That's a scene from the new season of "The Deuce," which premieres Monday on HBO. A note to parents - we'll be talking about sex work and the porn industry, and you may not find it appropriate for young children.

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GROSS: Maggie Gyllenhaal, welcome to FRESH AIR. Welcome back.

GYLLENHAAL: Thank you.

GROSS: (Laughter) I think you're so terrific in this series. Was it difficult for you to decide whether to take the role? On the one hand, you have, like, David Simon, co-creator of "The Wire" and "Treme," and two great writers, Richard Price and George Pelecanos, who among their other credits wrote for "The Wire." On the other hand, it's about the sex industry, and you play a sex worker who enters the porn biz first as an actress, then as a director. The subject matter gives it the potential of being exploitive of women.

So what did you need to know before accepting the part and before feeling confident that you had a read on how the women characters and how you as an actress were going to be treated?

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah, I think the thing that was unusual about this project for me was that when they asked me to do it, they only had three scripts written. And, you know, I'm interested in the themes that this project is dealing in. You know, I didn't have a problem with playing a sex worker full stop, you know? But yeah, I felt nervous with only three scripts and, already in the first three episodes, like, my clothes off most of the time and yet very, very drawn to it, very drawn to working with David and George and Richard and also drawn to the things that were clearly on the table.

You know, I mean, it was about, even from the very beginning, an imbalance of power between men and women in terms of sex, in terms of art, in terms of business. It was about desire. It was about transactional sex and the way that's kind of a part of almost every bit of our culture at this point. But, you know, I - basically, I met with them, and I really wanted to do it after talking to them. I mean, David and George are so smart and interesting. But I guess I'm old enough, and I've been through enough that I knew I didn't quite have enough of a guarantee that I could trust it.

GROSS: So what did you ask for so that you could find out more and figure out if you could trust the material?

GYLLENHAAL: I asked to be a producer.

GROSS: How was that going to help?

GYLLENHAAL: Well, basically, what I wanted was to be a part of the conversation, to be in the room. You know, I've said this before, but I think it's a good way of putting it. Like, I knew they needed my body, and I wanted to make sure that they also wanted my mind because I thought, I'm an asset here, you know, not just as an actress, I guess. And I wanted to use that part of myself, and I thought it could be helpful to the story that they told me they were trying to tell.

I really wanted to do it, you know, (laughter) which was the - but, you know, my bargaining power wasn't, like, all that strong. But I had to say to myself, I'm not going to do it unless I can be a producer because I think that will give me this other kind of guarantee in terms of storytelling. And they gave it to me. And so I did it.

GROSS: So you wanted to be in on the conversation of how your character was going to be depicted, how sex was going to be depicted. One of the issues in "The Deuce is how on the porn sets to treat women respectfully while having performed sex. And that's something that I imagine applies also to filming "The Deuce" because the actors, like you, have to perform sex scenes. And I'm sure you insisted on treated - on being treated respectfully, though maybe you didn't need to insist. Maybe that was just a kind of given on set. But were there conversations you had around that - is, like, how should the actors and actresses be treated so as not to violate them in any way while shooting these scenes? And ditto for the scenes when you were a sex worker working the streets.

GYLLENHAAL: You know, we as a crew and as actors learned a lot about this as we went the first season. And, of course, in between the first season and the second season, there was the Time's Up movement, which brought to light a lot of things that I think people didn't want to see before that And made a lot of things explicit. So the intention was always from everybody to be as respectful as possible. Season 1, I was one of the people who was always - you know, I had my clothes off all the time. I was doing these simulated sex scenes.

And I realized, for me, the most important thing was to have a physical barrier between me and the day player who I'd never met before who I was doing this scene with. So we sort of fashioned - and there was nothing like this before. I mean, like, I was like, what do they use on "Girls"? You know, can someone - can we call them?

GROSS: On the TV series "Girls."

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah. It was like, they must know.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GYLLENHAAL: What do you - what protection do you use? How do you do this? I mean, I'd done a lot of sex scenes in my career but, I mean, not quite like these with strangers, you know? And that was something that was hard - to do it with strangers. It's very intimate.

So we fashioned this kind of thing that would keep - you know, protect us physically from actually being - even in contact through thin layers of clothes feels like too much, you know? You need something real to protect you. So we figured that out, and we shared it with everybody. But really the second season, I think we made a really big change, which was amazing, which was that I had been to some meetings of actresses talking about things - simple things that we could change on sets.

And someone suggested at one of them that - you know, when you do a fight scene in a movie or a play, there is always a stunt guy there - always - to make sure you're physically and emotionally protected. If something doesn't feel comfortable to you, you can go to the stunt guy. In fact, they even look and see if after the stunt, you might be sort of unconsciously rubbing a part of your arm or something. And they'll come and say, are you all right? Did that hurt?

And an actress at one of these meetings suggested, why don't we have that for sex scenes? And so on "The Deuce," in the second season, we did. We had this woman who was the intimacy coordinator, we called her.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GYLLENHAAL: And she was - she would call the actors the night before. She'd say, I'm here to make you comfortable. And this is what your contract says. Do you still feel comfortable with that because you don't have to do it. And then she would be there. She would help with the choreography of the sex scenes. And she would check in with people. And the truth is, for me, like you said, I feel like I can say, oh, this doesn't feel right. Hold on. Something's off.

I do know how to protect myself at this point. But I felt for people who were coming in for one day who were so happy to have the gig and, you know, don't feel comfortable saying - who might not feel as comfortable as I do saying, no, I actually don't feel OK with this anymore. That's what she was there for. And I read this piece actually that one actress wrote in The New York Times about coming on our set and how great she felt with Alicia. (Laughter) You know, I was like, that's what Alicia's there for.

GROSS: Is there anything from the physical barrier that you came up with that is describable on radio with radio standards?

GYLLENHAAL: Well, basically it was a piece of a yoga mat put inside a pillow case. And we would just play the pillow case as if it were part of the sheets and then push it out of the way in order to continue on with the scene because, like I said, for me, it wasn't nudity so much.

I like the idea of what a human body brings with it artistically to a worthwhile story. And my body - I mean, I'm 40. I like that - I don't know. I really didn't mind including my body in the storytelling I was doing. But I wanted protection from, like, you know, people I'd barely met physically, you know? So that was a good solution for me.

GROSS: Yeah. And there - you mentioned day players. There's a lot of day players because all of the johns, some of the characters in the porn films - they don't figure into other episodes, so they are the day players who the women characters are having sex with.

GYLLENHAAL: Right. And the idea is - I mean, if you want to make it not "Pretty Woman"...

GROSS: Right.

GYLLENHAAL: ...Well, then in a way, you have to show, OK, there's this guy. And then two hours later, there's this guy. And then there's this guy, and then there's this guy. And that was a part of it, and it wasn't easy.

GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Maggie Gyllenhaal. She stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Maggie Gyllenhaal, who stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." And she plays a sex worker who has become a porn film actress and director and is trying to show things more from a woman's point of view in her porn films.

There's one scene I want to ask you about where she's with, you know, a john, a customer, in a cheap hotel room. And he starts to, like, slap her and hit her, and she takes out - you - takes out some mace from in her purse and sprays him. And he's, like, shocked and temporarily blinded. She uses that as an opportunity to run to the door to get out of this hotel room, but the door is locked. And by the time she unlocks it, he's, like, dragging her back in by the hair. And then the door closes.

The camera stays on the outside of the room. You and the john are on the inside of the room, so we don't see what's happening. But we hear how your character is being really badly beaten up. And I'm wondering what that scene was like for you and how it was filmed so that you didn't get hurt.

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah. Well, that scene for me I would say is like - I know it was affecting to watch because Uta Briesewitz, who directed it, is a beautiful director. And yet for me, it was very clinical. I was like, OK, we choreographed it. We did it. Of course I was protected. Everyone made sure that my body was protected. And I OK'd everything we did.

And that scene felt like a dance. And we did the dance. Actually, there did come a time when we were shooting that where I was like, OK, we need to stop now because I can feel that my neck is starting to get sore, and if we do this too many times, I'm going to end up with an injury. And...

GROSS: This was when he's pulling you by the hair? Was that the problem?

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah. Or something. I don't know. Thrashing around on the bed, or whatever. But I'm much more interested in scenes that require something difficult or complicated or a difficult map to have to walk emotionally. You know?

So the scenes that follow it, where I put the makeup on and I go out on the street and - I loved the scene with Method Man, who played one of the pimps who's trying to get me in a stable. And he's like, you know - basically, that is a scene where I went, this scene is life or death. Either I die and I agree - I just give up. I give up my autonomy. I give up my sense of power. I give up my sense of self, and I join up with him and I just slowly die - or I get off the street.

And I don't know. I think that, isn't that, like, the way - doesn't that happen in some way, even though most people aren't doing sex work on the street in New York in '71? Isn't that sort of the question that many people have to ask themselves at some point? Like, wait, am I going to, like - am I going to live now, or am I going to slowly die?

GROSS: It's an interesting scene, too, 'cause you're talking about the emotional complexity. Like, you're feeling very vulnerable at that point because you've been really badly beaten up, and now you're back on the street again. And so when the pimp, like, tells you, like, you need someone. This would never happen. I'd protect you. Like, you are definitely pushing him away. At the same time, you're in tears and you weep in his arms, temporarily. And you can tell...

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah. And she doesn't have a dad.

GROSS: Yeah.

GYLLENHAAL: You know? That's the whole thing that's set up in the whole first season. Like, she has no dad. And the whole pimp thing, like, they're always calling them Daddy. You know, I do feel like she just wants a little support. She just wants someone to take care of her, and she never asks for that. It's too much. And so he knows just what to do to try to get her, and...

GROSS: And he doesn't.

GYLLENHAAL: I think - he doesn't. No. She walks out the street.

GROSS: My guest is Maggie Gyllenhaal. She stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." She also stars in the new movie, "The Kindergarten Teacher," which opens in theaters and starts streaming on Netflix October 12. After a break, we'll talk about the Time's Up, #MeToo movement. And David Bianculli will review the new Netflix series, "Maniac," starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MILES DAVIS' "'ROUND MIDNIGHT")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Maggie Gyllenhaal. She stars in the HBO series, "The Deuce," about the intersection of sex workers, pornography, organized crime, the police, politicians and feminists in the Times Square area of Manhattan in the 1970s. It's also about changing attitudes towards sex in that period and how pornography became more mainstream. The third episode of Season 2 of "The Deuce" will be shown on HBO Sunday night. Gyllenhaal also stars in the new movie, "The Kindergarten Teacher," which opens in theaters and starts streaming on Netflix October 12. We'll talk about that a little later.

I want to talk with you about the Time's Up, the #MeToo movement, which started in a big way a little less than a year ago after the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which means that the first season of "The Deuce" was written before that. The second season, I assume, was written after that. So how did all the women coming forward in the industry, in the Hollywood industry and in other fields, change the conversations that you were having with the people you work, with including the writers and producers?

GYLLENHAAL: Personally, I think one of the things that really spurred on the birth of the Time's Up movement was not just Harvey Weinstein but was Trump being elected and saying everywhere - on national television, everywhere - you can grab women by the [expletive] if you have enough power, and they let you do it and there being no consequence.

GROSS: This was on the "Access Hollywood" tape that was...

GYLLENHAAL: Exactly - and it being played everywhere. Everyone knows about that, you know? And there's no consequence for it. So what I mean to say is, like, even though "The Deuce" was written before he was elected, before Time's Up really happened, I think we were living in a culture that was misogynist. And this was on everyone's minds. I mean, we were watching the first season, and we would often watch the debates in our lunch break. It was a part of our cultural conversation even before maybe it was a part of everyone's conversation because that is what "The Deuce" is about.

And how did it change? I feel like everything's changed. I see the Time's Up movement is - and also just sort of everything in reaction to these - you know, the allegations against Harvey Weinstein - I see it as, like, this kind of door got pushed open - like, this old, stone door that had been closed for thousands of years and, like, light streaming through it. And I think, how do we keep that door open? And I think it involves having the most interesting, subtle, nuanced conversations, continuing to think all the time.

DAVIES: Maggie Gyllenhaal speaking with Terry Gross last fall. Gyllenhaal stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." Its third season premieres Monday. After a break, she'll talk more about the #MeToo movement and its impact on the writing and production of the series. Also, Ken Tucker reviews the new album by Lana Del Rey, and David Bianculli reviews two new DVDs, one about a forgotten female silent film director and the other about Tom Lehrer, the singer-satirist from the 1960s. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF A TASTE OF HONEY'S "BOOGIE OOGIE OOGIE")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. We're listening to Terry's interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal. She stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." Its third season premieres Monday. The series is about the intersection of sex workers, pornography, organized crime, cops, politicians and feminists in the Times Square area of Manhattan in the 1970s. Terry interviewed Gyllenhaal last year.

When we left off, they were talking about the impact of the #MeToo movement on the writing and production of the series.

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GROSS: One of the complications for "The Deuce" is that James Franco is one of the men alleged by several women to have behaved in a sexually inappropriate or sexually exploitive way. Once the women making those allegations came forward, my understanding - and you can correct me if I'm wrong - is that the producers had to figure out how and even if to proceed after that.

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah. I think we all had to do exactly what I'm - what I was just describing, which is, we had to do the most careful, nuanced, intelligent, clear thinking - all of us - and assess the situation. I felt as a producer, it was my job to confront that and talk with him and also to talk with the women on our show, both in the cast and on the crew, and make sure that everyone felt that they had been treated with absolutely nothing but respect in the workplace.

And for me - and I think this was true for everybody involved - I felt that continuing to tell our feminist story was the most important thing and made the most sense, even in light of those allegations. I mean, in terms of making a show which is about all of these things that we're talking about, I think it would be a terrible shame not to be able to continue the conversation, which is, I think, a deeply nuanced conversation about exactly what's happening culturally right now in terms of misogyny, in terms of an imbalance of power, in terms of sex as commodification, in terms of all the subtleties of that.

GROSS: Early in your career when you were, I think, 23, you starred in a movie called "Secretary." That's...

GYLLENHAAL: Younger - 22.

GROSS: 22, OK.

GYLLENHAAL: I think so, yeah.

GROSS: And you played a young woman who's gotten out of a mental health institution - you're a cutter, you cut yourself - and get a job as a secretary although you have no secretarial skill. And you ended up - you end up being in an S&M relationship with your boss, played by James Spader. And you both realize that there's something really truly fulfilling you find about that relationship.

And in a way, it's become a healthier outlet for your character than cutting herself has been. And you had to really expose yourself physically for that role as well. Did that lead you to any thinking that was good preparation for what you have to do on "The Deuce"?

GYLLENHAAL: That's interesting. I mean, "Secretary" was the first time that I was given a role where I could express something about myself, which, of course - you know, it has nothing to do with S&M. It has nothing to do with spanking. And, you know, that's the fiction, right? The idea, I think, or the things that excite me the most about the roles - you know, roles that come into my life - are, like, is there something in this script, in this story that will allow me to explore something that's on the kind of the edge of what I know about myself but with the protection of fiction?

And so "Secretary" was the first time I ever got to do that. I never could have articulated that that's what I wanted at the time. I just was like, oh, there's something in here that's for me. And it was kind of an amazing experience because the director was interested in me as an artist, was interested in what I was offering and the way that that shifted the story as opposed to, you know, whatever he'd imagined before I got there.

And, you know, at the time, like, I had gone to college. I was a little bit young. I graduated when I was 21, so this was right out of college, you know? And I went to Columbia, and I studied feminist theory and, you know, all that stuff. And I was, like, intellectually, I understand what this is. I mean, I don't think I did. I still don't know that I do (laughter), you know? In reality, I was growing up. And, you know, that's captured inside of that movie.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Maggie Gyllenhaal. And she stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." She also stars in a new movie called "The Kindergarten Teacher." Let's talk about that film a little bit. It might seem like, oh, night and day. She's a sex worker and porn director in "The Deuce" and a kindergarten teacher in (laughter) "The Kindergarten Teacher."

GYLLENHAAL: Although I do love that very odd job trajectory (laughter).

GROSS: Yes, except that you have some serious problems in "The Kindergarten Teacher" and...

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah.

GROSS: Because the character you play is somebody who writes poetry. And that's really what she wants to do, but no one takes any notice of her poems. And she finds a strange outlet for her poetic creativity and impulses.

GYLLENHAAL: Yeah. I mean, I think "The Kindergarten Teacher" is a movie about, you know, what are the consequences - the real consequences of starving a vibrant woman's mind? And it's told by a group of women filmmakers. And so in our opinion, the consequences are really dire. And it is kind of an allegory. It's a thriller. It's almost like a horror movie in some ways.

GROSS: You had said that you thought the character - your character on "The Deuce" and your character on "The Kindergarten Teacher" had a connection. Do you want to explain now the connection that you see between the two of them?

GYLLENHAAL: Well, yeah. I think both women, both characters, like many women right now, are waking up to the fact that they've been accepting a way of living that they're not OK with, and not only not OK with, but is keeping them from living, is keeping them from being who they are, you know? And I think that's dramatically interesting.

I think a lot of characters you meet when they come to a point where they're like, I can't go on like this anymore. But I think it's related to, you know, what we were talking about, about #MeToo and Time's Up - you know, this cultural moment where women are saying, I don't know how I lived like this for so long. I don't know how I accepted that. It's unacceptable.

And the interesting thing is, I think, Candy - she's really thinking clearly. She knows what she wants. And even though it's very difficult for her to get it - I mean, she's a porn director in 1977. Before that, she was a sex worker in '71. It's not an easy path for her, and the show certainly doesn't make it easy for her. But she's on a path. It makes sense that inch by inch, setback, you know, like, be damned. She's on her way, clearly, toward feeding herself emotionally, intellectually, artistically, even financially.

Whereas Lisa in "The Kindergarten Teacher" has very similar needs, very similar hunger and is not thinking clearly and is confused. And the way in which she goes about getting the things that she knows she needs is really deeply problematic. And personally, I love the idea that it's the pornographer who's thinking clearly and knows what she wants and knows how to get it, and it's the kindergarten teacher who doesn't.

GROSS: (Laughter).

GYLLENHAAL: I mean, that's sort of more of a challenging situation, I think. And I love that they're coming out at the same time, you know, and what it means when you think about them together. I mean, I'd love them to be in a room together some time. That'd be so interesting, you know? (Laughter) But anyway, that's how - yes, that's how I think they're related because those are the things that are on my mind.

GROSS: Maggie Gyllenhaal, it's just been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.

GYLLENHAAL: Thank you.

DAVIES: Maggie Gyllenhaal speaking with Terry Gross last fall. Gyllenhaal stars in the HBO series "The Deuce." Its third season premieres Monday. Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Lana Del Rey. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF NAOMI MOON SIEGEL'S "IT'S NOT SAFE")

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Lana Del Rey is a singer and songwriter who, over the last decade, has released a string of recordings that have expanded our idea of what Los Angeles pop music sounds like. She's just released her first album in over two years. It's called "Norman Rockwell!" with an exuberant obscenity inserted between those two names. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the music on this album is some of the strongest of the year.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "F*** IT I LOVE YOU")

LANA DEL REY: (Singing) I like to see everything in neon, drink lime green, stay up till dawn. Maybe the way that I'm living is killing me. I like to light up the stage with a song, do [expletive] to keep me turned on. But one day, I woke up like, maybe I'll do it differently, so I moved to California, but it's just a state of mind.

KEN TUCKER, BYLINE: Lana Del Rey is guided by what the art critic Peter Plagens has called the sunshine muse, that bright clarity of California light that also illuminates darker impulses and bleak thoughts. The singer and songwriter's new album is a series of earthquakes and aftershocks rendered with supreme confidence and a steely assurance.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "​HOPE IS A DANGEROUS THING FOR A WOMAN LIKE ME TO HAVE - BUT I HAVE IT")

DEL REY: (Singing) I was reading Slim Aarons, and I got to thinking that I thought maybe I'd get less stressed if I was tested less like all of these debutantes, smiling for miles in pink dresses and high heels on white yachts, but I'm not. Baby, I'm not. No, I'm not that. I'm not. I've been tearing around in my [expletive] nightgown 24/7, Sylvia Plath writing in blood on the walls 'cause the ink in my pen don't work in my notepad.

TUCKER: Del Rey constantly contrasts her tone of voice with the words she chooses. She creates drama by speaking bluntly through a hypnotic croon. She uses the F word a lot. Much harsher than her vocabulary, however, are her assessments of the men around her, many of them self-absorbed boobs who misunderstand or underestimate her.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MARINERS APARTMENT COMPLEX")

DEL REY: (Singing) You took my sadness out of context at the Mariners Apartment Complex. I ain't no candle in the wind. I'm the board, the lightning, the thunder, kind of girl who's going to make you wonder who you are and who you've been. And who I've been is with you on these beaches, your Venice bitch, your die-hard, your weakness. Maybe I could save you from your sins. So kiss the sky and whisper to Jesus. My, my, my, you found this. You need this. Take a deep breath, baby. Let me in.

TUCKER: That's "Mariners Apartment Complex." "Norman F****** Rockwell" is an album of 14 songs spread over more than an hour. Songs regularly exceed four or five minutes. One goes on for more than nine, and Del Rey needs every second of them. She needs to set scenes, to make small jokes and to frame her observations about the various ways we sabotage ourselves and other people.

The album was produced by Jack Antonoff, who, in recent years, has worked with women including Taylor Swift, P!nk and St. Vincent. With Del Rey, Antonoff seems to think it best to step back and set off her vocals with piano and acoustic guitar. A few times, the two of them attempt something more grand, and the gamble pays off in the gleaming beauty of a song called "The Greatest."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GREATEST")

DEL REY: (Singing) I miss Long Beach, and I miss you, baby. I miss dancing with you the most of all. I miss the bar where the Beach Boys would go, Dennis' last stop before Kokomo. Those nights were on fire. We couldn't get higher. We didn't know that we had it all, but nobody warns you before the fall.

TUCKER: Lana Del Rey is very consciously a California artist, dotting these songs with references to appropriate LA musicians and visual artists. You get the feeling her sensibility has been shaped by riding in the car, listening to the brightness of the Beach Boys during the day and then holing up in bed at night, reading, perhaps, about the doomed families in Ross Macdonald's Santa Barbara detective stories.

There are songs in which Del Rey wants you to envision her unable to sleep, climbing into her truck to zoom down through Laurel Canyon, making a right on Sunset Boulevard, heading off to Santa Monica and Venice Beach, feeling a chill of melancholy.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE NEXT BEST AMERICAN RECORD")

DEL REY: (Singing) My baby used to dance underneath my architecture to the "Houses Of The Holy," smoking on them cigarettes. My baby used to dance underneath my architecture. He was cool as heck. He was cool as heck, and we were so obsessed with writing the next best American record.

TUCKER: One of the ultimate LA writers, Eve Babitz, made this observation in her 1974 book "Slow Days, Fast Company." Quote, "you can't write a story about LA that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost." Indeed, many of Lana Del Rey's songs on this album take the same hairpin turns that Brad Pitt does driving down the canyon in Quentin Tarantino's recent "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood." The difference is, with Lana Del Rey at the wheel, you're never afraid you'll get lost or crack up.

DAVIES: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviewed the new album by Lana Del Rey. Coming up, David Bianculli reviews two new DVDs - one about a forgotten female silent film director and the other about a musical satirist from the 1960s. This is FRESH AIR.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our TV critic David Bianculli sometimes grumbles that there's too much TV and too little time, yet he continues to hunt for obscure but intriguing fare wherever he can find it. Today he reviews two recently released DVD about entertainment and entertainers from long ago, one featuring a singing satirist from the '60s, the other profiling a long-forgotten female filmmaker from the silent era. Both are available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Here's David.

DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: In my college class on the early history of film, I spend lots of time showing the pioneering early movie shorts of Thomas Edison, the Lumiere brothers and George Melies. But I didn't know anything about Alice Guy-Blache, who wrote, directed and produced hundreds of similarly groundbreaking films at about the same time - now I do.

Similarly, in one of my TV history classes, I teach about the mid-'60s political satire series "That Was The Week That Was" and that show's brilliant composer of sarcastic, topical songs, Tom Lehrer. But I had never seen a full-length concert from that same period in which Lehrer sang and played his own compositions - now I have. And both of these boutique items have given me more pleasure than most of the mainstream TV I've been watching all summer.

"Be Natural: The Untold Story Of Alice Guy-Blache" is directed, edited produced and co-written by Pamela Green. She approaches her subject like a detective story or like an episode of the podcast "Serial," where her reporting about the story is part of the story she tells. As each nugget of information about the forgotten silent filmmaker leads to another, "Be Natural" shows, in very visual and sometimes playful or dramatic terms, how Green put together the various puzzle pieces. And the pieces are fascinating.

The young Alice Guy was in attendance in 1895 when the Lumiere brothers presented their short, one-scene movie "Exiting The Factory," the first exhibition of a motion picture film. So she was present to witness the very birth of cinema and quickly began making movies of her own. And this documentary's title, "Be Natural," refers to the sign Guy-Blache hung in her makeshift movie studios in France and later in New Jersey as an ever-present instruction and reminder to her silent movie actors.

Green, in compiling her film, interviews many current Hollywood players who, like me, express astonishment at not knowing this woman's biography, much less her films. And Green threads it altogether by relying on one modern female filmmaker, Jodie Foster, to serve as narrator. It's a lovely link to past and present with one woman director saluting another.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE")

JODIE FOSTER: Alice, inspired by the Lumiere screening, thinks something better can be done than documenting daily life. Why not use film to tell stories? Alice Guy writes, directs and produces one of the first narrative films ever made. Alice is one of the first to utilize many film techniques, including close-ups, handed-tinted color and synchronized sound.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing, unintelligible).

FOSTER: Guy resigns from Gaumont to accompany her husband to the U.S. Alice returns to filmmaking and founds her own company. She directs and manages all aspects of production. Following a two-decade career in two countries comprised a thousand films that she wrote, directed or produced...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing, unintelligible)

FOSTER: ...Alice disappears from filmmaking.

BIANCULLI: My only complaint about "Be Natural" is that it doesn't include more complete examples of Guy-Blache's surviving film work. But incompleteness is not a complaint I can level at the other recently released DVD, "Tom Lehrer: Live In Copenhagen." This DVD is nothing but full-length works, more than a dozen songs written and performed by Tom Lehrer before an attentive audience in a tiny Danish TV studio.

Lehrer, who provided "That Was The Week That Was" with such wildly funny songs as "Pollution," "The Vatican Rag" and "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park," released popular record albums with all those songs but never appeared on that show himself. But on Live In Copenhagen, Lehrer plays piano, sings and offers a running commentary.

On one of his famous songs, "The Elements," in which he borrows a familiar melody from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to accompany a list of the elements in the periodic table, he even provides an update to his material.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TOM LEHRER: LIVE IN COPENHAGEN")

TOM LEHRER: Here's a song I always get requests for, but I can't understand, for the life of me, why. It's simply the names of the chemical elements set to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. I think the only reason I do it is to see if I still can. I'll try.

(Singing) There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium and nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, and lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium and gold, protactinium and indium and gallium and iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium. There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium and boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium. There's strontium and silicon and silver and samarium. And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

I left out one, actually. A new one was discovered since the song was written. It's called lawrencium. So those of you who are taking notes can write it down in your programs.

(LAUGHTER)

BIANCULLI: And as an added bonus, at the end of that same song, Lehrer tops his new update by providing an older one, a sort of brief musical prequel.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TOM LEHRER: LIVE IN COPENHAGEN")

LEHRER: Thank you. You may be interested to know that there is an older, much earlier version of that song, which is due to Aristotle, and which goes like this. (Singing) There's earth and air and fire and water.

(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

BIANCULLI: To a Tom Lehrer fan - and I am one - hearing these long-buried jams and alternate lyrics is like listening to one of the new multi-CD remastered releases of vintage Beatle albums. After more than 50 years, we're getting to enjoy newly released treasures from the vaults. And Lehrer was recording the same time as the Beatles. In Tom Lehrer's case, this concert was an absolute rarity for the reclusive mathematician who retired from performing after only a few years. And in the "Be Natural" DVD, the treasures unearthed are more than a century old.

Both of these artists, the forgotten Alice Guy-Blache and the reclusive Tom Lehrer, would themselves make wonderful subjects for scripted movie biographies. In the meantime, we have a rich sampler of their respective works, and that's a great start.

DAVIES: David Bianculli is editor of the website TV Worth Watching and teaches TV and film history at Rowan University in New Jersey. He reviewed "Be Natural: The Untold Story Of Alice Guy-Blache" and "Tom Lehrer: Live In Copenhagen."

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TOM LEHRER: LIVE IN COPENHAGEN")

LEHRER: As inspired by our great American scientists such as Dr. Wernher von Braun.

(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

LEHRER: (Singing) Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun, a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown. Nazi schmazi (ph), says Wernher von Braun. Don't say that he's hypocritical. Say, rather, that he's apolitical. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

(LAUGHTER)

LEHRER: (Singing) That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun.

DAVIES: On Monday's show, our guest will be journalist Stephen Kinzer, whose new book "Poisoner In Chief" is about the man behind the CIA's secret experiments with LSD and other drugs in the '50s and '60s in search of a drug that could be used to control the minds of enemies. Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey were introduced to LSD through the program, but other unwitting subjects in prisons and detention centers were subjected to psychological torture. Hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALLISON MILLER'S BOOM TIC BOOM'S "WELCOME HOTEL")

DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Herzfeld. Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALLISON MILLER'S BOOM TIC BOOM'S "WELCOME HOTEL")