FOX NEWS FEELS THE HEAT
AN ANGRY EX-PRESIDENT. NEW RIGHT-WING RIVALS. THE CHALLENGES AHEAD.
IN2 017, T E S S B A R K E R and Barbara Gray launched a podcast, “Britney’s Gram,” dedicated to humorously dissecting Britney Spears’ enigmatic Instagram account. And then #FreeBritney took f light. The hashtag’s transition into a bona-fide movement — made up of fans advocating for the singer to be released from the conservatorship she’s been under for nearly 13 years — took shape after the pair released a special podcast episode in 2019 featuring a troubling voicemail from someone who claimed to be a former paralegal for a lawyer who worked on Spears’ conservatorship.
The fan-driven campaign is a through line in the much-discussed documentary “Framing Britney Spears.” Part of FX’s “The New York Times Presents” documentary series, the film traces the pop star’s rise to fame and the controversial conservatorship she was placed
under after suffering a public breakdown in 2007-08, and which she is currently battling in court.
But just as the documentary scrutinizes the tabloid culture of the early aughts, the film and the wave of coverage around it — including in this newspaper — have led some to wonder whether the press has simply created yet another Spears frenzy. In particular, “Framing Britney Spears” has come in for criticism for its credulous treatment of the #FreeBritney movement that “Britney’s Gram” helped unleash.
Barker and Gray spoke with The Times about the comic origins of “Britney’s Gram,” the future of the podcast and grappling with their own role in an often toxic celebrity culture. This conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.
“Framing Britney Spears” highlights the invasive media frenzy — and its built-in misogyny — that surrounded Spears and contributed to her struggles. What’s your take on some of the mea culpas that have emerged since the documentary’s release?
Gray: It’s something we’ve been considering this entire time. We are around Britney’s age, so we were a byproduct of that in our own way — just kind of seeing it being played out in front of us. I think a lot of people’s reaction is, “We didn’t even realize how bad it was until you see it put right in front of you, and it’s really horrifying.” And it was not that long ago. We all grew up with that in our eyeballs every single day. It’s really nice that there’s so much reckoning going on and that people are really kind of seriously taking the conversation to heart. And actually looking at her story as an example of how we’ve failed her and, I think, failed a lot of women.
Barker: It’s been refreshing to see the mea culpas from all the media outlets, but I think in cases like this, it’s always important to be mindful that there’s an appetite with the general public that creates that market. I think you have seen the people [who] consume that media also feeling a sense of responsibility and a sense of a need to apologize to Britney.
You launched “Britney’s Gram” in 2017 after a post on Spears’ Instagram page of her painting outside. What was your goal and aim with the podcast and how did that shift as you started to play closer attention?
Gray: At that point, we were looking at them with a more innocent view. We knew about the conservatorship, but not in much detail. So we would look at them and think, “Oh, these are interesting. She’s basically posting memes that your aunt would post on Facebook, but it’s Britney Spears.” I have a picture at a friend’s baby shower of all of us looking at a new one, because it was always a fun topic of conversation.
Barker: The comedy of the podcast, we thought, would derive from us taking something so mundane incredibly seriously. We intended it to be, maybe not quite satire, but a comedic kind of take, because we thought, “How ridiculous to do a deep dive on someone’s Instagram feed.” But the New York Times had done a great expose back in 2016, sort of questioning the necessity of the conservatorship. And so we did start the podcast after that article. I think our audience was aware to a certain extent of the questionable nature of the conservatorship. And I think we didn’t know it yet, but there was a certain je ne sais quoi in those posts that drew us in. We didn’t know what we were looking at yet, but something was off. And I think that is sort of what compelled us to examine it so closely.
The podcast — at least I’ll speak for me — felt like conversations I might have with friends. We’d share posts in our group chat and try to understand the randomness of it all. And then you think about the memes like: “If Britney sur vived 2007, we can sur vive this.” Did you find yourself reflecting on, “Wait, what is my role in all this?”
Barker: Absolutely. We found ourselves ref lecting on that and yeah, like Barb said, it was a comedy podcast, so we would be ripping and we’d be silly. And like you said, we wanted it to have that feeling of just girls at brunch, talking about Britney’s Instagram. But we just didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. We weren’t fully versed on what conservatorships were. We never would have taken that tone if we knew there were possible human rights violations going on.
Gray: I’ve been thinking it about a lot lately, because people are like, “What do you want to come out of this?” And it seems when you look at old interviews of Britney — this one was specifically in the documentary where they were, like, “Oh, you’re a dancer or you’re a singer.” And she’s like, “I mean, that’s my job. I’m really a mom.” From what I can tell from interviews and stuff, I think that’s what she wants. And so to me, God, I wish for her and for so many people, we could just treat them like a human being who deserves to be able to walk down the street and not be hounded. Whether that’s by media or fans. I hope that it leads to another conversation about just letting people live their lives.
We see in the documentary the moment where things shifted and led to the #FreeBritney movement, which is when you got that voicemail. Gray:
The first [time], it was, like, Tess went to a hearing by herself, and there was one or two other reporters there. And then the first rallies didn’t happen really until after the voicemail. So the voicemail came out, [and] we had a West Hollywood rally just randomly — 20, 30 people maybe. And it just grew from there. I mean, I think the first push of it was just that this confirmed for so many people who’ve been paying attention — it was like, “Oh, OK, this is legit.”
And so the voicemail just solidified this for everybody who was wondering. So if you were already in on it, it was easy to be like, “OK, this is time to take action.” That movement moved into people trying to tell everyone else about it and trying to get the word out there and posting that line and going to the rallies and then you go to the court, and there’s 10 more people this time.
Barker: What happened with the voicemail ... I mean, we’ve been in the entertainment industry long enough that, at this point, I tend to believe rumors that I hear going around for a long time. I think we learned from things like the Bill Cosby situation and the
Harvey Weinstein situation. Those are not things that happen overnight. Those were things that they’re whispering about for years. And so that’s sort of what felt like happened with the voicemail.
I think people who have been paying attention to Britney had their suspicions and had been having these conversations for a long time. So I think it just kind of galvanized people into action.
Have you ever been contacted bySpears’ father and conservator Jamie Spears or his attorneys about the podcast? Barker: Gray:
No.
No. We were very aware that that is a thing that could happen. We were scared and expecting it for quite a while and — knock on wood, you know?
There have been a few postings on Britney’s Instagram since the documentary’s release. What’s your take on them?
Gray: To be honest, we don’t analyze the posts as much as we used to, because we’re kind of busy really trying to research everything else that’s going on. So we don’t spend as much time nitpicking them as we used to. I thought the Super Bowl one was interesting. It almost felt like she was trolling a little bit in a funny way. It’s hard to know, because, again, there’s a whole question of, “Does she post these directly? Is she the one writing these?” People don’t really know the answer to that.
Barker: I thought about the one with the “Toxic” video. My take on that was the documentary did a good job of really reminding people what an icon she is and what an impressive career she’s had, so I thought she was kind of riffing off of that and just reminding people like, “Guys, this is who I am — ‘It’s Britney, bitch.’ ” And then maybe also agreeing with part of what the documentary was saying, which is, this is a real human here. This isn’t just any character. This is a human being.
The thing I’ve been thinking about is: If she gets her freedom, what next? Because there’s no stopping the media frenzy. Is the cycle too big to be broken? Gray:
That’s got to be the media. They’ve got to make that choice to leave her the f— alone. And I hope they do. And I know that’s probably way too much to ask, but that is what I hope.
Barker: In terms of the logistics of what will happen to her, we’ve talked to attorneys at the ACLU and places like that. There are a lot of other options outside of conservatorship that you can give to support someone who might want support in their lives. So I think that’s something that I’d like to see happen for her, if that’s something she wants. I hope that all of these mea culpas from the media and from the fans, I hope that when she does get free, that does make people pause before asking her for a selfie if they see her at Starbucks or asking her for an autograph if they see her somewhere. I hope all of this really does sink into people that this is a person and when you see them, they’re a stranger, just like every other stranger you see out there. You don’t go up to a random person when they’re eating their dinner and bother them and you shouldn’t do it to Britney Spears.
Gray: And that’s why it’s so complicated, because of course there’s a whole economy there. There’s people that want to read those stories, and we’re all guilty of it still. I was reading something today, I caught myself reading some kind of pop culture news today. And I was like, “Oh no, this is exactly what it’s all wrapped up in.” It’s so part of our culture now. But I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about how we can try to encourage a change there. And it’s like “OK, well, you can say a lot, but where’s your action?”
So what happens from here with “Britney’s Gram”? Gray:
Well, we actually have been working on something for a while that we finally announced. We’re making a serialized investigative documentary podcast with [Stitcher’s] Witness Docs. [“Framing Britney Spears”] was really good, but it was just the beginning. Basically, there’s a lot more, so we’ll dive deeper into all of it.
ON A SATURDAY morning 14 years ago, I was asked to come meet with Steven Spielberg at his house. He told me he wanted to make a movie about the Chicago 7 and would I be interested in writing it. I said, “Yes! The Chicago 7! I’d love to write a movie about the Chicago 7!”
As soon as I left his house, I called my father and asked him who the Chicago 7 were. I was just saying yes to working with Spielberg the way literally any member of the Writers Guild would. But over the next 14 years, my relationship to the story would change into something else.
I began the research — a dozen or so good books (some of them written by the defendants), a 21,000-page trial transcript and, most critically, time spent with Tom Hayden, who would pass away in 2016.
It was through Hayden that I found the more personal story of his tension with Abbie Hoffman.
The film began to organize itself into three stories that I would tell at once: The courtroom drama; the evolution of the riot (how did what was supposed to be a peaceful protest turn into such a violent clash with the police and National Guard); and Tom and Abbie — two guys on the same side who couldn’t stand each other, with each thinking the other was doing harm to the cause. I’d gone from “a chance to work with Spielberg ” to “a good story to tell.”
I had a problem, though — I didn’t get Abbie and it seemed like everyone else did. I’d get emails from people with Abbie Hoffman quotes they thought were brilliant, clever and heroic. I thought he was a clown, not particularly clever, and I wasn’t seeing the heroism. I thought he was the worst kind of caricature of the left as seen by the right and I had the same problem with him that Hayden did.
Then I saw a piece of film. It was from a press conference that Abbie, along with his running buddy, Jerry Rubin, gave one day after court was adjourned. That day’s testimony had been about a joke Abbie made to David Stahl, Chicago’s parks director, when Abbie and Jerry were applying for a permit to protest at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968. Stahl was horrified at what the two peace activists were telling him — the number of protesters he could expect and what their plans were.
Abbie said, “You could give me a hundred-thousand dollars and I’ll call the whole thing off.” Abbie was asked by a reporter if he would have taken the hundred grand to call off the protest. He said, “I’d have taken the hundred-thousand. As for calling it off …,” he smiled and shook his head. Then a reporter asked him, “What’s your price?” Abbie didn’t seem to understand the question, so the reporter asked again — “What’s your price?”
And in an instant, every drop of clownishness drained from his face, and he answered … “My life.”
Here’s the thing. “My life” is a bad line of dialogue. It’s a clunky cliche that sounds like it was stolen from 10 different movies. There’s only one way you can get away with saying, “My life” — you have to really mean it. There can’t be a trace of bluster or affect or grandstanding. You can’t get away with it unless you absolutely mean it, and Abbie absolutely meant it.
“My life.” Stack that up against senators who aren’t willing to risk facing a primary opponent and tell me who the patriot is. I was on board with Abbie Hoffman.
Ten years, 22 drafts and three directors later, the “good story to tell” still hadn’t been told. Then we elected Donald Trump. When a protester would show up at a MAGA rally, Trump would get nostalgic about the old days when “they’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks” and they’d “knock the crap out of them” and “I’d like to punch him in the face.” And Steven felt the time to make “The Trial of the Chicago 7” was now. (I’d directed my first film by then — “Molly’s Game” — and Steven was pleased enough with it that he thought I should direct “Chicago 7.”) It had gone from just an opportunity to work with a great director to a good story to tell to a story that had sudden relevance. But last winter, when we were making it, we had no idea just how relevant it would get.
In May, after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, protesters hit the streets in cities across America. And in many of those cities, the protesters were met with clubs and tear gas. If you degraded the color of CNN’s coverage of the protesters clashing with police, it would look exactly like our archival footage from 1968.
And then the grand finale. Trump stood at a microphone and did exactly what the Chicago 7 were on trial for doing. That very conservative jury in Chicago would have taken all of 10 minutes to find him guilty, for the simple reason that they were conservative, they weren’t demented. Feb. 18 is the anniversary of the verdict in U.S. vs. Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner and John Froines (with a mistrial having been declared for Bobby Seale). The anniversary comes just five days after the verdict in U.S. vs. Donald Trump, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the Three Percenters and Fox News.
Abbie, forgive me for ever thinking you were a clown.
IT’S 5 O’CLOCK somewhere — London, to be exact — and Stanley Tucci isn’t in a fitted shirt pumping a cocktail shaker. But he is talking about how he almost threw his back out trying to lift a 40-kilo wheel of Parmigiano so he could cut it into two moons, hollow out one and make carbonara inside of it. Same Tucci, different flex. Looking distinguished in a black turtleneck and thickframed eyewear, the 60-year-old actor is video-chatting from the backyard studio of the London home where he and his family have been riding out most of the last year. He’s grown used to these virtual conversations — except his extra screen time has earned him a spot in the club of unexpected quarantine social media stars, alongside Patti LuPone, Leslie Jordan, and husband-and-wife duo Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody.
In late April, Tucci posted a three-minute video of himself shaking a Negroni on his Instagram account. The internet drank it up. And more cocktail content, obviously, followed.
But in addition to promoting his new film “Supernova,” which is garnering Oscar buzz for him and co-star Colin Firth, his life has been consumed of late by “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” a six-part travelogue on CNN in which the culinary enthusiast roams different regions of his ancestral homeland to learn about local cuisines while chumming it up with locals and speaking enough Italian to make Giada De Laurentiis beam.
Best known for his roles in films like “The Lovely Bones,” “Julie & Julia” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” everyone’s favorite character actor has, through the years, sought to nourish his passion for food. He’s released two family-centric cookbooks, “The Tucci Cookbook” and “The Tucci Table: Cooking With Family and Friends.” And while he’s been approached several times about doing a cooking show, he says it never felt like the right thing for him.
Hatched from a flurry of notes he scribbled about a dozen years ago, “Searching for Italy” was, he says, “more right.”
“If I wanted to cook something I could do that — like I do in one episode,” he says. “I’m more interested in talking to people who cook, and being the liaison between the chef, or the home cook, or whoever it is, and the audience. Because I’m somewhere in between.”
Tucci visited six regions in Italy. Production on the six episodes was scattered. He shot two in 2019 before pausing to film “Supernova,” starring opposite Colin Firth as a novelist in his 60s with early-onset dementia. He then shot two more episodes before the pandemic hit, and resumed production on the final two as things were winding down from the first lockdown.
Arriving at a time when people ache to travel and eat dinner among friends without worry, the opening minutes of the Valentine’s Day premiere came with an acknowledgment from Tucci that it was filmed during the summer of 2020, just months after COVID-19 devastated the country.
“It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago the first wave of COVID-19 had emptied the streets of Naples, and Italy was in lockdown,” he says in the voice-over. “Thankfully, I’ve arrived during a brief moment of normality: Restaurants are open and masks are not required outside. We’ll be sticking to the local rules.”
From there, the delectable journey begins. He visits Michelin-rated pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia to learn the art of making a pie — including the importance of genuine San Marzano tomatoes — and walks you through how Italians fought Mussolini’s oppression through pasta.
“Obviously, the first episodes prior to the pandemic were much easier,” says Tucci, who shares that he had COVID-19 and lost his taste for five days. “After the pandemic, it was harder, but it was incredible to see the resilience of the Italian people. And they are indefatigable — I mean, if we just look at their history, how many different invasions they have lived through, how many different plagues they have lived through, they figure it out. ”
THE ONE WHERE STANLEY TUCCI EXPLAINS HOW TO MAKE CARBONARA
> As we talk, Tucci mentions that he and his wife, Felicity Blunt, are planning to make a simple dinner later: spaghetti alle vongole with some “beautiful” clams they procured. “It’s the easiest dish in the world, but there’s something that just makes you want to be in Italy by the seaside. And of course we’re not, we’re in freezing cold London, with a little snow on the ground. But it’s like a little gesture towards hope.”
He says he tends to be impatient in the kitchen. And he’ll admit he’s hardly a refined cook, nor is he someone who reviews a recipe before getting to work on a dish. “I’m terrible. I’ll look at it, I go, ‘Oh yeah, I know how to do that,’ ” he says. “Sometimes it works, other times I go,‘Why didn’t I follow the recipe?’ ”
He then turns the tables on me — “What do you make? What did you grow up eating?” — which leads to a story of the time I made carbonara with shredded Parmesan cheese. And, well, it was a goopy mess.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he says. “Sorry, I’m talking to you like I’m your father.”
And then, the guidance: “First, the key thing is you can use pancetta, right? Which is easily accessible. And it’s great. But when you get guanciale — go online and look it up and you’ll find somebody who will sell it. It’ll probably cost way too much money, but it’s worth it. And you have to have really good eggs, really good Parmigiano, and the guanciale. And the pasta has to be a really, I know no other word, but strong pasta. In other words, it can’t be some over-starchy, crappy, kind of ... you know what I mean?” Yeah.
“There’s this one pasta, which you can get in America, called, I believe, Di Martino. And it’s the one that the guy uses in Italy, in the show. And it’s about timing, and making sure you use the pasta water to help ... what’s the word I want? Just to help make it viscous. In the weirdest way, it’s like a lot of Italian food, it’s the simplest dish in the world. And yet, if the ingredients aren’t right, and you don’t do it right, it falls apart. But definitely invest in a good hunk of Parmigiano for your fridge and grate it yourself.”
He’s still making his way through that 40-kilo wheel of Parmigiano that nearly took out his back, which he shoved in the bottom of his wine fridge and eventually cut into 25 “chunks, huge chunks.” “I bought a vacuum sealer to seal them all so that it wouldn’t go bad,” he explains. “And now we’re just distributing them to people all over the place. And then some of it got grated, but I had to use these huge knives that my grandfather had used, one of which he had made. And I had to hammer it down and just be very careful so it wouldn’t — I’m sorry, am I giving the most boring interview ever?”
Hardly.
THE ONE WHERE STANLEY TUCCI MISSES PEANUT BUTTER
> Tucci grew up in a family where people cooked all the time. But it wasn’t until “Big Night” — the 1996 film he cowrote, codirected and starred in, about Italian brothers who open a restaurant along the 1950s Jersey Shore — that his food obsession took shape. For the film, he shadowed famed maestro of Italian cuisine Gianni Scappin, who was central to igniting that appreciation; the two would later collaborate on 2012’s “The Tucci Cookbook.”
“I never really was a particularly good cook — I could cook certain things, but really, not much,” he says. “But once I went into Gianni’s kitchen, and I really started to understand what went into so many different dishes — besides my parents’ dishes — and the rigorous work that has to happen, it was fascinating. When I coupled that with my mother’s rigorous work, and my grandmother’s rigorous work, and then the work of a person who grew up in a family not dissimilar to mine but then became a professional chef, it was amazing. It was this conjoining of imagination and prowess, and it was just so exciting to me. I really thought, after the movie, ‘Well, I’ll keep cooking, and I’ll keep learning.’ But then I just really became head over heels in love with it.”
His parents, Stanley Sr. and Joan, appear in an upcoming episode of the series. In it, Tucci talks about the time in the 1970s, when he was 12, that his family uprooted from New York and spent a year living in Florence so his father, a high school art teacher, could follow his dream and study figure drawing and sculpture. In the episode, Tucci joins his mother, who studied Florentine cuisine, to make a family-favorite dish named after a beloved neighbor: Salsa Maria Rosa, a vegetable sauce with Italian soffritto as its base.
“I did ache to come home. I really wanted to come back to America,” Tucci says. “I missed peanut butter, and stuff like that, and my friends. But it was great, it completely changed my life. It made me realize that I really like living in, I suppose in some ways, a more European lifestyle . ... As I got older, I thought, ‘Oh, I think that’s where I want to be.’ ”
I ask Tucci if he thinks this sojourn was in pursuit of something deeper, like his father’s. He paused as if something just occurred to him.
“You’re absolutely right,” he says. “Because I greatly admired my father for doing that. I think one of the things that I learned, maybe from that, is that if you’re focusing on something as an artist — and I’ll use that highfalutin term — the hardest part is not just doing the thing, it’s the time around the thing that you need in order to do the thing. And sometimes you don’t know how long that time is going to be, or where you need to go to find that time. The artist is a casualty of the idea of indulgence. But you need that, you need that time.”
The TV series is not the only way he’s exploring his food side more earnestly. During the first phase of his COVID-19 confinement, he began working on a food memoir, “Taste,” that will be released later this year.
“It kept me sane during the first lockdown,” he says. “It’s about growing up in a family that put a great importance on food, and on tradition, culinary traditions, and keeping those traditions going. And making those recipes again, and again.
“Food was the connective tissue that held the family together, both sides of the family,” he continues. “I have experienced my life, in a lot of ways, through my mouth.”
THE ONE WHERE STANLEY TUCCI MIXES A NEGRONI
> Putting the finishing touches on the book is largely why Tucci has fallen behind on entertaining us with his cocktail videos.
A former bartender, he describes the attention as “flattering but weird.” “I’m completely shocked. But I’m not going to pretend I’m not glad about it. I mean, you’d be an idiot. ‘All it took was a Negroni’ — that’s going to be on my tombstone.”
Blunt originally shot the cheeky video to send to her coworkers at Curtis Brown literary agency, to cheer them up in the early days of lockdown.
“I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ ” he recalls. “So we did it, and then she and Lottie, my assistant, said, ‘Well, why don’t we put it on your Instagram?’ I was like, ‘All right, yeah, go ahead.’ And then ... Lottie said to me, ‘Your Instagram is going mad.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ She goes, ‘You’re trending.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means.’
And the comments? Oh, he’s read them.
“Yeah ... we had to kick the kids out to read them aloud. They were filthy, funny. I was crying, I was laughing so hard.”
But there hasn’t been a video since the one on Christmas Eve, which featured cameos from sister-in-law Emily Blunt and her husband, John Krasinski, as Tucci made a Christmas cosmo.
“No, I know. I know, I’m sorry. I’m writing, I’m trying to finish the book. I’m going to do one ... not this week, next week.” Is that a promise? “Yeah, I promise.”