Akiva Goldsman: How Story Can Heal

Akiva Goldsman is an Oscar, Golden Globe, and WGA-Award winning screenwriter whose credits include A Beautiful Mind, The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Insurgent, and I, Robot. He’s on Pulling the Thread today, though, to talk about Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried on which he was both the writer and the showrunner.

So first, some warnings: Yes, there are spoilers, though in my opinion, nothing that will markedly change your experience of watching the show. In fact, knowing the back story made it easier for me to get through the first, very stressful episode. (It gets easier, and by episode three, I was riveted.) And also, a trigger warning: The Crowded Room and our conversation today explore childhood sexual abuse, which is also part of Akiva’s personal history.

Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM AKIVA GOLDSMAN:

“The Crowded Room” on Apple TV+

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHEN: Do you live in New York?

AKIVA GOLDSMAN: Yes, I returned. I moved to California for, you know, two months and stayed 30 years and it was enough.

ELISE: And now you're done.

AKIVA: Now I'm done.

ELISE: I know many screenwriters I've never actually interviewed a screenwriter, so I apologize in advance for whatever I may get wrong. But for The Crowded Room, you were also the showrunner, right? So were you on set? Oh, but that was in New York.

AKIVA: It was every second of every day, but it was all here. Yeah.

ELISE: Okay. Got

AKIVA: It was, yeah, it was almost a condition of sale. Actually, I batted my eyes and said no, really, we must do it in New York.

ELISE: Is that where the original book is set?

AKIVA: No, the actual story, his story is in, Iowa which is really flat and apparently has a lot of corn.

I know nothing about Iowa and since I was smuggling my story into his story anyway, I moved it to where I knew, which is New York where I grew up, so I like writing in New York for New York, it's better.

ELISE: Yeah. No, I get it. But even starting there, smuggling your story into this story and I know obviously A Beautiful Mind is also about... mental illness, but so much of your work is fantasy, right?

AKIVA: You know, I do. I like fantasy. Although, when I dig in, almost everything I do has a sort of real reversal of narrative firmament. Like, you think you're on the ground, you think you're hanging from a ledge, but actually it's a brick, and you're falling. You know, and it's only since doing this that I have started to say out loud why that is and you know it was because I was very close to someone from the time I was eight until I was 18, who was abusing me sexually and he was somebody who was a very close family friend and I loved him, and then it took a long time to get it. And the world had gone upside down, right? And so that paradigmatic shift I've actually noticed in my work without doing it on purpose. So it could be nobody's real in a beautiful mind or, you know, a similar sort of version of that in Crowded Room. Or it could be like the shark eating the lead in a movie called Deep Blue Sea or the monsters actually not being the monsters in I Am Legend. For me, it's all kind of the same story, which is you think you know it, Oops.

ELISE: Yeah.

AKIVA: I'm working. I think I'm working through it.

ELISE: Is this the closest thing that you've done, The Crowded Room, to your own story?

AKIVA: Yeah, 100%. In Beautiful Mind, there were two elements to my childhood that have found their way most explicitly into my work. And it's in the mental health stuff, the most overtly mental health stuff. And one is the very first group homes for what used to be referred to as emotionally disturbed children, which is when amazingly the diagnoses of childhood autism and childhood schizophrenia, which no longer exists as a diagnosis, by the way, were grouped together. We'd never think of putting those two populations together today, was in my house. My parents founded it. It was in Brooklyn Heights. And my mother, who was an amazing woman. And, she was a Holocaust survivor. She had me when she was older. And for a while was, you know, one of the world's leading authorities on autism back when autism was not how we understand today. And she used to write about these kids that lived in our house. And there was always somebody hanging the baby out of the window or banging the baby against the wall, and I was the baby. So for me, like, I grew up with a very labile definition of what is sane and what isn't. And so that helped me with Beautiful Mind, but I was really abstracting.

I was taking this beautiful piece of reportage that Sylvia Nasser had written, but that John Nash hadn't really participated in terms of his inner life and made one up. So I was like, well, this is what it would feel like having been around people with this diagnosis. Maybe this is what it would feel like. So it was really more an impressionistic view but it's sympathetic and it generates understanding, I hope, it seemed to have. When I got to Crowded Room, I started working on the story of Billy Milligan, and he, as I said, is contemporaneous with me, to me, anyway, we're the same age and I don't have multiple personality disorder, or what is now called disassociative identity disorder, but we had this overlap in terms of sexual abuse, and As I started writing it, my story kept finding its way into it, in a very direct way, in a very kind of, like moments and songs and things that mattered to me and city blocks I grew up on and and so it really became much more autobiographical than I had intended. And then when I wrote it I said to myself, I guess it's an exploration of all sorts of trauma.

And I was in the world as we all are today. And I said, and then I will talk about what happened to me, which is not something I've hidden. I've said it before on record and years ago in a documentary, but it's not something I typically put forward. And I thought, well, If you're going to write about shame, and you're going to write about complicity, and if you're going to write about how we wear the mantle of responsibility for our own abuse psychologically, and what we can do about that, then you better butch up and say it out loud about you, because otherwise you're kind of an asshole. You know, and so, that's been this journey, which is not one I planned to take, but I guess I did, I just didn't tell myself.

ELISE: So go back, if you don't mind, into your story and you talk about this presence of love. That didn't seem to be part of crowded room. There was an idea of feeling protected or in need of a savior. But it didn't ever seem to me like that he loved Marlon. Is that a parallel?

AKIVA: For me, I don't think he did love Marlon. I think that for me, the piece that was most useful about the understanding of love was less about the relationship between the protagonist and the abuser and more in the relationship of the healer and the healed. Amanda gets to say, it's a version of, if love can break you, love can fix you. And, you know, it sounds simple, but I really believe it that if shattered relationships can create trauma, we can have better ones and they can help us heal from that trauma. So, Billy's or Danny's reaction is really about the sort of hardwiring of what it's like to be abused by a mother or vicariously by a mother who is allowing a father or a stepfather to abuse, right?

And so, by allowing, it's a loaded word, but you know who is there, tacitly part of the system. And the hardwiring between mother and child is so intense that there's hardwired love, you know, the child needs mother to survive and can't reconcile with this picture of motherhood child needs this idea that mommy's hurting you. So that's where the split starts to happen. For me, the part that was important to bring in was that if you have even one good grown up, studies indicate just one good grown up, and you have a way out, you know, and the fuel of that is love. That's actually required for the remediation, I think, of the suffering pain trauma.

ELISE: And so for Danny, for the Amanda character, is she real? No.

AKIVA: She's not. She's a composite. My mother's name was Mira. Her sister's name was Raya, which is where I took that from. And she's a composite of a couple of women in my life who raised me and who loved me. And that idea that you can be loved was really important to me. And there was also a moment in psychotherapy, it's just before the world went into behavior modification and then came back, and then medication, and now it's coming back out into some sort of slightly return to a more touchy feely paradigm. You know, that was a time where you could get away with saying that. You could get away with saying you loved your patients. You know, it's just coming back to that now.

ELISE: Right. So speaking of your mom, and both of your parents, right, were child psychologists. And when you think about what happened to you, was that in their presence or were they completely oblivious because they were more focused on this home in your home?

AKIVA: They were completely oblivious. I mean, and I think that what's interesting about, you know, childhood sexual abuse is it's often somebody who the child knows, and I colluded, I was told this was a secret and if anybody were to find out, terrible things would happen. It was our special relationship. And wasn't I special to have a special relationship with a grown up when I'm just eight and little and struggling. And I've watched the polarization of the reactions to the show. And I've seen some people look at it the way I might look at a Saw movie. Like I can't watch like for me, and by the way, you know, I make horror movies sometimes, but there's a line I can't cross. Somehow here we have this thing that is so widely occurring, so many children, and we can't see it because it's too hard to imagine. You know, it's almost impossible not to look away. And of course, it's in that looking away that all this happened. So I think they didn't see it. Years later I told my mom, you know, literally had to hold onto, you know, I have children, boy, oh boy, that's not something you ever want, that your child and on your watch and, you know, you have to help them get through it then.

ELISE: Yeah. And the guilt and the complicity and yeah, I recently published a book and in the book I write about nothing that was longstanding, but a molestation event with a friend of a family friend. And I'm a little younger than you, but in many ways, it was a different time, right? Like, nobody was watching us. Nobody was paying attention. And when I had originally told my parents, they knew exactly who I was talking about, he didn't live in our hometown. And the response was, oh yeah, we always thought he was really weird. You know, but we were unsupervised in his presence. And it's been interesting to watch that again, it wasn't a grievous assault as far as I know but to land in the community and to have the consternation of the other parents around this, and they're more affected in a way than I think I am, if that makes sense. I had this revelation when I was doing a a therapeutic MDMA session, and so as it came up, I did not feel re traumatized.

AKIVA: Right.

ELISE: So maybe I sound insane talking about it, but I was able to be with myself and recognize what happened and downstream effects of it without feeling like, I need to know where this guy is and I need, you know, to persecute him and justice, but Similar to you, in that moment, felt my own power, my own complicity in inspiring his attention. And very hard. That's hard.

AKIVA: Very dark and extraordinary and interesting. And, you know, and of course we're children, so we should be protected from entire range of exploitation. And so often children aren't and this idea, which is what you're talking about, I think the MDMA part of it is significant because I think what's really important is to begin to be able to look at yourself with compassion and forgiveness, right? Like, this whole thing is about compassion and forgiveness, we feel such shame and that shame becomes toxic and you can't ever really fully be with yourself if there's that sort of ball of shame in there. So, you know, I think what's really interesting about MDMA, you know, there's something called EMDR, which is a kind of tappy thing with, you know, clicks in the ears or whatever. But there are things that allow you to process or re literally remember it without Re traumatizing, because the trick is to be able to look at it. And to look at it with love, compassion, forgiveness, or at least neutrality so that you can start to integrate it because right now, until it's integrated, it's radioactive, right?

We take the things that are secrets and we just hide them, and we spent all our time consciously or unconsciously protecting them. So, in a weird way, the secret becomes us. The knot around which the tree grows and it's not until you can kind of neutralize it and know it. Making the show in some ways was at times vaguely re traumatizing because really just because of the editorial process, because what you have to do when you're cutting a scene, especially like a scene where Emmy and Amanda are talking about, like, the cycle of abuse, all I can do in the editing room is sit there when Tom is confessing as Danny at the end of his feelings of complicity as Adam at the end. All I can do is keep watching it to see if an extra second here will make it hurt more or less, or, and so you want it to hurt as much as possible. That process was a little bit, I would never do that again. But, you know, mostly I'm like you, it's a thing to say so that people can understand so that it doesn't have to live inside you in a way that is protected. It's just a way of saying, Hey, it's okay. Things happen to people. This happened to me. Let's talk about healing.

ELISE: So how did you, when you had this moment when you were 18, and you had some sort of revelation, what did you do then and what was that experience like, and then how have you healed or is it an ongoing process?

AKIVA: Well, I think it is. I mean, I think for me, it's a journey, but you know, one that I've attended to with gusto. I've been very lucky for the most part to have found really good therapists. I love a feeling, there's no feeling I won't talk about. So I like to talk about a feeling, I am interested, I try to remain curious. Over periods of time and looked at myself and said, Oh, so thought that just because you separated from that person, you're fine now. And then I'm in my 20s. I'm like, well, you're doing a lot of drugs and you're drinking and you're basically sleeping with any woman who will look at you. So maybe you want to look at that right. And so you process that. And then, you know, and over time, you work through all of it enough to be able to integrate the pain. And for me, finally to turn it into an object, you can't fix it, but you transform it, my wife died some years ago and It was clear to me that if you don't actually turn that into something that you can find grace and courage in, don't stay alive.

It's too hard, right? You know, so if you get lost in the pain of having been abused, it's too hard to be on the planet. It's why some of us don't. Instead, recraft it if you can, like try to get your hands around it, turn it into a painting a song, a scream, a screenplay, a conversation. And that changes it. It takes the energy that was so hurtful and converts it. You know, and I did all the other things that you do. I reported the person, somewhere I have, I found it recently, the framed notice of the report. And, you do all these things that acknowledged to yourself that you're healing, I think, and then you just do the work.

ELISE: Yeah, I want to talk about Danny's Diagnosis and in the context, too, have you encountered IFS internal family systems and Richard Schwartz's work speaking of MDMA because I think before they submitted it to The FDA, for the protocol, IFS work was supposed to be the sort of therapeutic partner. I think it's what works, which is this idea that we all have parts. We all have these parts in us that we cordon off and protect. We have these firefighters, we have managers, and then we have these abandoned parts from our childhood. So it, in some ways, it's an argument for some variation on a spectrum of multiple personality.

And Richard Schwartz, he's amazing, if you don't know him, would be a fascinating person for you to talk to because he does a lot of work or has with pedophiles and other people who are locked up Literally, but work doing parts work to access where they invariably were injured and traumatized and what part is like loose in their psyche, inflicting harm on other people. So it's really interesting system that I think can help anyone understand the on ramp to how you get to you. Splitting in the way that Danny has split. Was that part true?

AKIVA: Yeah. I mean, the show is a reflection in some sense of exactly what the verdict was, which was there was no way to sell it scientifically, so the jury was sold emotionally, right? Again, multiple personality disorder, as you know, no longer even exists, right, as a diagnosis. It's disassociated by identity disorder, and you know, and so what we had to do in this, and which is why we had a council of really good psychiatrists, was to try to be true to the diagnostic criteria and the knowledge that we had then but also not steer somebody way wrong because, you know, these things are also helping objects. That's the outcome goal, is that somebody will see it and understand themselves or someone else more as well as be entertained. So, we wanted to be careful not to suggest something that might no longer be clinically indicated. Today, and this isn't in line with what you're saying, you know, certainly there's a notion that fusion is not really necessary, in fact there are stable systems, you know, that function quite well. That just wasn't the notion Then.

When it comes to the map of the mind that you're talking about, which is the idea of sort of personality states or the anthropomorphization of pieces of us and our feelings and our emotions. I think it is a good precursor to understanding splitting, but I don't think it's the same, because I think that we all actually develop different pieces alongside other pieces, but there's a semi permeable membrane. I think that in the case of splitting, it's starker, it's a process that's been jury rigged because of trauma, which is different than having some trauma in a system that's trying to deal with it relatively organically, you know, and I think what's interesting about healing, psychological healing, is there's always a narrative that helps. So sometimes when you go to therapy, and you tell a story, and in the story, you locate your despair, and it's a knot, and then with the therapist, you work through the knot, you feel better. And was all the pain really attendant to that knot? Or did you just kind of load up that knot with some of the despair that comes from being alive and then you kind of work through it and that story helps you live life better. And I think that's true also this idea of how we look at the different personality states and we can name them and we can give them ages and it's a story that helps us understand ourselves.

ELISE: One thing that I thought was really beautifully explored, and I'm assuming it's somewhat accurate, is the way that, one I think it's beautiful that Dani is a boy because I don't think that we spend enough time culturally acknowledging the fact that this happens to many boys and men. I don't know quite the rates. I think it, it's more likely to happen to girls, I would imagine, but it's very common, right? For boys and yet often totally stuffed and not discussed. And then I thought that there was a really beautiful way that the show explored homosexuality and the way that showed up in different parts, I thought was very deft. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys determined to do that?

AKIVA: Sure. I mean, you know, it's very interesting because Billy Milligan, the character who Danny is based on, you know, had at least one female alter who was a lesbian. And that construct and how she felt about sex and we, there's a lot of interpolation here because, you know, Daniel keys writes the book, there's not tremendous amounts of documentation, but you are starting to see a very different, forgive me because I'm stereotyping gender wise, but a very much more female, much more open, a much less predatory kind of relationship to sexuality from this boy who's been raped, right? So the splitting is so interesting. There's always this interesting need to protect what's good in us. I don't know why or where it comes from, but as if there's some light in there that doesn't want to be snuffed out. So this idea of being able to find sex and sexuality, away from what had been done to him, that it was, to me a promise again of there are ways through this. For me, Danny's neither straight nor gay, different pieces of different parts of Danny are all those things and I think that's, if you were to take a very clinical view of the diagnosis and go away from having any sort of Empathetic response, you would still admire it because in a weird way, it's all the things a human being can do. It's why it was that it's often been the source of movies about magic and monsters, right? Because it reaches beyond what we think of as typical. It's why at the end of split, James McAvoy is crawling out of ceiling, the legend has it that You know, M. Night was going to make this movie, and then he made that one because, what happens is, you get this sense that we are capable of so much. And in the shattering of the psyche, some of those fragments become revelatory. Like, you don't have to be one thing or another. And straight and gay becomes, obviously it's politically charged right now, but I'd like to think over the course of a lifetime, you know, those distinctions start to blur and people are just people.

ELISE: Yeah. No, I think that everything becomes more mutable, right? And it's true. It's like within Dani, you have a straight kid, you have a lesbian, you have a heterosexual, I mean, you have every variation of expression within this one child in a way that I think was fascinating and really well done. And it's a charged moment, of course .

AKIVA: Never has the internet reacted more.

ELISE: Really? What was the reaction to that?

AKIVA: Like so much of the show polarized, it was, but we know and oh God, thank you. This has been my experience with the show and almost every facet, of rage and a kind of gratitude. Now beautiful mind was a different time and there was no internet, but people have reached out to me and to Tom and say this show saved their life. You know, and I remember that from beautiful mind, but it was anecdotal, this is now there's a flood, right? And you're reading and it's people telling you, but they're typing it. So they're not looking into your eyes and they see stuff that's amazing. And it was around the idea of being complicated sexually, which this show touches on, you know, but with a white male, straight, icon is too strong a word, but you know, Tom's a movie star, right? You know, they think of spider man, you know, and suddenly he is there in a men's room You know in makeup having sex and that's either, thank you, or how could you?

ELISE: Yeah.

AKIVA: And it's been a lot of that. It's been fascinating.

ELISE: I mean, The show is about integration, right? It's about reclaiming wholeness and bringing all of these parts back into a functional whole. And we're just not good at that culturally, right? We, all we want to do is excise and project and disown the parts of us that we think are unsavory or bad or gross or demonic or monstrous. We've never seen more of that than we're seeing in the collective, right? Like, I don't want this, you take it. And I disown these parts of myself, you take it so that I can despise you. So I think I'm not surprised that the response is polarized, because I think that there's a certain subset of people who don't want to live like this anymore, and are tired of demonizing the other and or ourselves, and then there are people who feel like they will literally die if forced to reintegrate.

AKIVA: I think we are as confusing to them as they are to us, and I hate to use the we and they, but I know the whole purpose of storytelling is to be an antidote to otherizing. That the reason you tell a story is to climb into other people's skin, so you can approximate what it feels like outside of your own experience, so that you can connect with someone who you think is different. Right? It's the exact opposite vector. Like, it's, the intention is entirely different than what is so common culturally now, which is exactly what you're talking about, which is how do we take that which we don't like or don't understand, make it outside of this, make it other and not look at it ever again. And if we could lock it up and set it on fire, that would be better and. I don't understand it. And yet I don't understand it with the same fervor that someone doesn't understand my desire to include. I don't know what happened. I don't know how to bridge this gap. But it is as prevalent as, you know, I'm 61. At least you felt in the 60s and the 70s, there was an intention to heal. Like, I'm not even sure that's there anymore culturally.

ELISE: What do you think has changed? Is it because we used to watch these movies in the theater or our TVs in our homes and be able to process them in silo and read some critical coverage and in some ways be told how to think or contextualize what we're experiencing and now it's just so fragmented, so fast, so there's nowhere to hide? What do you think is happening?

AKIVA: I don't know. I mean, I think that part of what's gone on is a need for immediacy. And I think that there's something. More fundamentally damaging than we think when the distance between stimulus and response gets so, so tiny, like my girls just are used to pressing this thing and getting it out there and getting it back and getting it out there and getting back and getting it. I would never have been a writer if I grew up today because I only wrote because I had no friends. There was no way to talk to people. So I would go sit outside and like, write on a napkin and hope somebody thought I looked cool, you know, and then maybe they would talk to me.

It's in the time between things that we used to form opinions, and there is no time between things so I think that what's happened is instead we have kind of unconsciously or de facto curated a set of responses that we're supposed to have based on some clever algorithm and so what happens is before I know what I think of a thing I'm told but everybody in my cohort thinks of a thing and frankly, it's quicker and easier than figuring it out myself. So I think it's some of it's just speed. Maybe two generations from now the kids will be able to process in that new gap. We can't.

ELISE: Yeah.

AKIVA: We were raised that way, and yeah, and by the way, and the ones that are young now can't either. Maybe we will evolve, but it's easy to say people have stopped thinking for themselves, but people have stopped thinking for themselves.

ELISE: I think that's true. I also think that we're engineered to sort and categorize and we want simplicity, right? And we want to understand things in the most binary black and white ways. And then you have these stories about a kid like Danny and he's a victim and a villain, right? he's oppressed and he's an oppressor but even thinking about you telling your story and talking about your own complicitness and your abuse, these things are so complicated. And I could argue, we could argue with you about that, your perfect Victimhood. It's just not satisfying. It's just too overwhelming, I think, when all we want is certainty. It's like, tell us who's good, tell us who's bad. I think obviously why we like fantasy, right? And horror. The heroes are clear, the villains are clear. Don't make me, not even think, but don't make me empathize when I've been told there's nothing worse than empathizing with an oppressor, particularly in this moment in time.

AKIVA: Yes. I think that's true. And I think it is fascinating that we all are, for good or ill, hardwired to believe in this kind of binary world and fairness. This kind of life. I think to myself, you could fix everything if you just instituted a rule of fairness. Like, forget nice, forget compassion, forget all the things, if everybody was just, if the world was just fair, it would be so much better than it is, right? The world's never been fair, but it's built into us. And the upside of that is the striving for it. The downside is the blaming when it doesn't happen, and so this idea of it's what you were talking about earlier of taking that which is not what we want and not taking ownership of, but making it someone else's fault. And this is complicated because without the desire for fairness, you wouldn't strive for it. But if you can't tolerate the disappointment when it isn't fair, then you'll turn the world into an enemy, and That's what it feels like today. Like the world is everybody's enemy.

ELISE: Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, how do you think about, I'm sure you're exhausted from this particular piece, I also wanna know if it was hard to convince Tom to do it. I mean, I, that must've been an incredible workout for him. I'm sure Amanda was like, this is the dream role. And Tom was like, I mean, I don't know how he did that.

AKIVA: So, you know, Tom had never done television before. By the way, I haven't done that much television, but I knew what television was. And Apple's like, It's like a 10 hour movie, right? And Tom's thinking it's a Marvel movie, right? What I mean by that is, you know, you shoot 130 days and, some days are green screen and some of them and some days are crawling up a wall and a lot of days are stunt double, and this kid is in here and he's now doing 135 days or 137 days where he's in almost every scene. You remember for the same amount of shooting days. Basically, you're getting 10 hours, not two. So the number of scenes you're doing every day is tremendous. He's carrying all of them. He's playing umpteen different people and I mean, I have said it before, this kid can do anything, it was so awesome, I mean, it was so hard, it was so hard, this show, and he's got this work ethic, like, everybody else who came, I always say about Star Trek, you only work on Star Trek Because you like Star Trek. It's self selected, right? So the same thing about the show about trauma and sexual abuse, which is you only show up because you got a story to tell, right? Everybody, the grips, like, God forbid, we should stop for a minute. Everybody's like in an encounter group, you know, social worker on set the whole time... except Tom. Tom's just like a decent kid from England who's like, how did I get here? But he has this amazing kind of like, we're gonna get through it. And he's really talented. And he's kind. And he really started to understand the character in a way that we wanted the audience to understand the character and that became the gift of him because he was learning and creating in the same way that we wanted the audience to feel and react.

ELISE: So he had no. attachment to this material, as far as you know.

AKIVA: No, none at all. I reached out to him. When I had started, I had written a couple of scripts and Apple had said, let's make it and he was the guy I went to and he was like yeah, this seems fun, mate. It's important, and Tom, he does have a mental health charity. He really cares about mental health issues. He didn't know this piece but we talked a lot about what it was going to be, and he ended up being a co architect of it and he too wanted that really noble thing of, you know, If we do it right, somebody who didn't think they could talk about a thing will talk about it after.

ELISE: And I'm sure it's a sort of show that's very, I mean, you've mentioned the word polarizing, but it's probably magnetizing, I would imagine, or incredibly repellent. When I started, I had to stop halfway through the first episode and then I had to go and I was like, I need to understand what's, I need to read. And then I felt equipped. And then it started moving really fast for me. But I can imagine a lot of people are like, I'm out. I cannot. I don't know how that coincides with like, whether the people who have been abused are more likely to make it through or the opposite.

AKIVA: My anecdotal poll, my non scientific poll, if you have abuse in your past or in your family, you stay with it and it matters to you. If you are female, you're more likely to stay with it than if you're male. If you're gay, you're more likely to stay with it then if you're straight, white men, straight white men was probably our smallest demographic.

ELISE: Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. It's tough. It's really tough. You don't write rom coms, have you ever written a comedy even?

AKIVA: No, never.

ELISE: you're like, I'm not funny.

AKIVA: I'm not funny. I mean, I am not funny. I can write a funny line. I mean, I'm funny at like dinner, but no I'm just not good at it.

ELISE: Is that what you wish you could do? Like, after a project like this, what's, how do you restart? Or is this just a continuation of your own exploration of identity? Where we started, you know, growing up in A house full of other mentally ill children and not even having any idea of normal, I would imagine, right? Or quote unquote normal.

AKIVA: No idea. And by the way, I still find the definition vaguely dubious. I am so lucky that I get to do it. And by it, I mean, it's a little bit of, and it's it's funny I was talking to somebody today about how the entertainment business and sort of the movie business itself and would be in TV keeps shifting. And there was a thing In the late 80s, I got into the business in the 90s. Where if you could, you alternated, and today you're supposed to have a brand, and people are identified with a kind of a thing. Crowded Room was In some ways, the hardest thing I've ever done because it was that personal, and it meant that much to me, and it was an attempt to say out loud a thing I hadn't really said in that kind of form and to open up in that way and that was really extraordinarily complicated. And I am grateful for the chance to have done it. I do not want to do it again. Certainly not now. Now I want to, you know, have some zombies take over a city and have Will Smith chase them. I want to have Keanu Reeves have some magic. Yeah, you know what I mean? And just live in the make believe of it and smuggles the stuff in that matters, if you in five years, if I have another step to make on this other more personal journey, and somebody wants to let me make it and I know what it is, I will write a book,

ELISE: alright. I know we're almost out of time, but I need to understand, as someone who has never, I've seen maybe two episodes of Star Trek in my whole life, and I think both of those were when I was a kid. But what is that? What is the appeal? Like is it the sort of thing if anyone starts watching Star Trek, like you will... Become a Trekkie, but what is that? What is the mental...?

AKIVA: like a virus. Definitely started, I think, as like the Outsiders Club. It was, you know, back before being a nerd was cool, it was really not cool. I know it's hard for people to remember that, it was full on like, very sci fi, what passed for intellectual on television, and it was a refuge where, you know, if you were teased all day at school anyway, this would be the place where you would go and maybe you know, Talk to other people, ultimately, who were also teased at school and liked it. Over time, I think what really abided is, it's utopian. And it's stubbornly and beautifully utopian. It suggests a framework for a future where it's, and it has always been multicultural. Everybody is at their best. And yet within that structure, things are bad and we have to fix them.

And science fiction then becomes this great version of an allegory generator. Because you go to a planet, there's a very famous episode of the original series, which is really quite good. It's this giant fight between these two last survivors of a race, half black on one side, half black on the other. And they're fighting and they're all the way through. And finally, by the end, Captain Kirk says some version of, I'm going to get this totally wrong, you know, some version of, well, why do you hate him so much? You're the same. He was the same, as Frank Gorshin of Riddler fame or she's black on the right side and I'm black on the left. And, you know, and that was the end for that they had destroyed each other's races. And so it's, it was like the Twilight Zone and that it was very happy to where it's the moral of the story honestly, they were cautionary tales. And they said that in the future, we will fix the problems that we have today. And the future will also be a way of looking at the problems we have today and seeing them from a safe distance so we can learn how to fix them. And it's fun in that way. It's delightful. It's the opposite of dark. It's hopeful.

ELISE: Yeah, so it's the medicine maybe that we need and we didn't know we needed it but I'm gonna start watching Star Trek from the back.

AKIVA: Watch strange new worlds. That's the show that you want, to watch episode nine of season two, cause it's a musical.

ELISE: Okay, that's where I'm gonna start.

AKIVA: That's where you're going to start.

ELISE: Okay, well, thank you for your work and thank you for this show and I hope people are ready to binge it through the holidays.

“The Crowded Room” is not an easy watch, but it is a beautiful story that’s complex and confusing at times, although the resolution is near. And I think that Akiva, Tom, Amanda, and Emmy—who’s amazing as the mom, really stunning performance—create something that is alternately incredibly complex, which is hard to do in a culture that is engineered towards certainty and all the black and white thinking that we were talking about in our conversations, but it does cut through with a type of moral clarity, while also giving voice to that fact that life is so messy, so messy. So if you are looking for something to watch, I recommend and would love to hear your thoughts about the show. Alright, I’ll see you next time.