Making 'The Brainwashing of My Dad'

Sept 6th, 2023

2013.

After HBO, I started working for award-winning independent director Jen Senko. She was putting together a personal project about her father, and I was putting together a project about my grandfather. She was in the early stages of writing the outline and I was intrigued by the angle she was approaching her documentary film. It was targeting the brainwashing of mainstream media, and it had a personal twist because she had seen her own father change so drastically - from sweet and fun to mean and angry. And it seemed to directly correlate to his immersing himself in right-wing media. She was on a quest to understand why.

I shot some behind-the-scenes footage for Jen at a recording studio in Harlem that she and her friends were working out of, and I began to edit pieces of her documentary for her. She was building the script and would hand it off to me to build the edit. We began brainstorming ideas and filming in her home. I started pulling together my own research as we went along. Soon I was completely hooked on it. That’s how I began co-writing the movie with Jen as well.

BUILDING OF A MOVEMENT.

Then, as the film was gaining so much traction, so much exposure on social media, Hollywood actor Matthew Modine reached out to Jen and said he wanted to produce the film. He came on not only as producer but also the narrator of the film along with Jen.

As time went by it was no longer just about Jen’s dad. It became about all the people that were calling and writing in to say they noticed the mainstream media having the same stark effect on their loved ones as well. We knew it was an important topic as more and more people reached out to help finance the project too. There were Angel Investors and political activists and organizations. We realized there was quite the phenomenon going on.

RESEARCH.

The Brainwashing of My Dad movie was really where my research skills began. At one point I spoke with a researcher at the Democracy Now studio in Manhattan asking him for research tips and sources he uses to find footage and other materials for Amy Goodman’s shows. He was so generous and helpful. I also found an amazing young author named Gabe Sherman who had just published an extensive biography book on Roger Ailes, the president/ co-founder of Fox News Corporation. We reached out to him and added him to the long list of interviewees for the film. I learned so much about the history of the media over the years we spent working on this film.

HISTORY.

Roger Ailes was a pioneer in the art of the soundbite back in the 1990’s. In media, the soundbite refers to those simple succinct catchy one-liners that permeate our culture today. And one of the most significant steps to creating the overarching mind-manipulating media system that we experience today was the 1996 Telecommunications Act that both Republicans and Democrats developed together under the Clinton administration. This gave full power of our media sources to a small handful of corporations. A divide-and-conquer monopoly was born in which our news sources became less about facts and more about pitting the two political parties against each other. Australian media giant Robert Murdoch owns news organizations all over the world including major corporations in the United States such as Fox News. He has openly expressed his aim to shape those news media sources to talk about his political opinions.

I was fascinated by the mainstream media tactics, the forces behind the scenes that utilize psychology, the use of emotion and fear, bright colors, and a little bit of seduction. The psychological advertising was borrowed directly from Edward Bernays, who was the brains behind the 1930’s suggestive advertising for cigarettes and other products, as well as the author of the book, Propaganda. He was also the nephew of Sigmund Freud. These methods were applied to the news. And we saw how these tactics had the same effect on both sides of the media, both left and right.

By the time Wikileaks came on the scene we had already experienced the ramping up of insidious brainwashing through our media sources for over two decades. Wikileaks was a revolution - a network of journalists willing to put pressure on the establishment. This was our first real glimmer of hope.

ARTISTS.

It was such a large project with many amazing professionals and artists. Great minds all working together. Academy Award nominee cartoonist Bill Plympton came on board to work with us. Jen would hand him several concepts and his team would pull together some cool animations for the film. We also had other talented digital artists like Bobby Chang who I brought on from my HBO days. He created some great title motion graphics. Towards the end of the filmmaking, I handed off the edit to Matthew Modine’s graphic artist, Terence Ziegler, who became the official Creative Director for the overall look of the film. He was in charge of the final look of the film, the coloring, the visual effects, putting on all the final touches.

FILM RELEASE.

In 2015, Michael Moore invited us to screen an early cut of the film at his Traverse Film Festival in Michigan. So then it was off to the audio engineer for sound design, sound effects, audio mixing and the post studio for the DCP package and all other post finishings. The Brainwashing of My Dad went off to many film festivals and would go on to win many film awards. On March 18th, 2016, the official release of the film premiered in theaters in both California and New York City.

MY POLITICS.

As Jen has mentioned about me in interviews and in the companion book for her film, I was non-political but I became political while working on this movie with her. That’s true although politics didn’t really stick with me too much over the following decade, except for a short stint coming straight off the release of the film. I was inspired by Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2015 because he pointed the finger at Big Banks and the corruption of the 1%. I believed this brought people together to look at who was really pulling the strings instead of pointing the finger at each other. When Bernie backed out, I also backed out of politics again for a while.

It would be four years later, in the summer of 2020, when my interest would be ignited once again.