 Yeah, educating ourselves with bad education. And that may be a play on words, but it's a movie. It's the bad education movie made in 2019 with Hugh Jackman and others. And George Casey and me, we're gonna sit here and we're gonna take that movie apart. We're gonna tell why it's good, why it's bad, why it's relevant to our times. Welcome, George. It's so nice to talk to you. Thank you, Jay. Welcome. Welcome to you as well. You know, if you look up the articles on this movie, Bad Education, they say it's a comedy. Do you think it's a comedy? I don't think it's a comedy. I don't think if it's as a comedy at all, I don't find anything comedic. I mean, we just reviewed the Kaminsky method. That was a comedy, even though there was sadness, but there's no comedy here. I mean, this is a serious business and we'll get into all the pluses and the minuses as you just alluded to. What's true? What's not true? I mean, if you remember, we did Underground Railroad and we got into that, and I can get into that here too. There's basic really good issue, but there's certain things that are really not verous. Well, it starts on the superficial end of it. It's a movie about a true story. It may not be completely accurate to exactly what happened, but it's close enough. And it's well done, I think, and it's got a certain documentary quality to it. And Hugh Jackman is Hugh Jackman. He's very good in the movie, although I had trouble kind of seeing him as a high school superintendent. The state of New York education, Department of Education superintendent, but there you have it. He took on a lot of the characteristics and I guess that was enough. But the bottom line to use your term on this is that we're really talking about education. We're talking about education from this incident that happened in the early 2000s with this superintendent, a high school superintendent, and we're talking about corruption. We're talking about dysfunction. We're talking about really what amounted to an abject failure in the high school system in a village, if you will, on Long Island in the North Shore of Long Island called Roslin. And Roslin is a village of wealthy people. And this was their village high school. And there were lots of things wrong with this high school and wrong with the kids in this high school and wrong with the whole notion about getting into college and wrong with the administration of the high school because Hugh Jackman's character, Frank DeSone, stole at his assistant, stole $11 million and nobody knew it, not the parents, not the kids, not the Department of Education or his supervisors, nobody knew from this little relatively small high school in Roslin that $11 million was missing over a period of time. They're quite remarkable. And the other thing remarkable that we should go into this is how did this ever come to light? It was because of a young girl on the student newspaper who began to smell a rat and she kept digging and nobody could stop her and she looked at documents and she finally put two and two together and came out with 11 million and she turned them in. And that's quite remarkable, all the true story. And I'm sure there was a character just like that who did that. But the movie teaches us, it teaches us how the Frank DeSone character can get away with it. It teaches us how the parents, they didn't care as long as their kid got placed in Harvard or Yale. It teaches us about the school system itself which was dysfunctional and corrupt right up the chain and the state of New York, which wasn't watching. So that's my initial reaction, George, but there's a lot more to it. Let's talk about the movie. Okay, bottom line here is New York State decided to save money to get rid of auditing of school district finances. And Frank DeSone was there from 92. He was there about 10, 12 years when this wall broke. So he'd been there partially in the 90s. And you have to know New York, there's a lot of corruption in New York. I mean, you read every few years some public official, high public official, even Alan Havesi who was the controller. He had been a very prominent state assemblyman. Then he was New York City controller, very highly regarded gentlemen. And even he got indicted in 2006 because he was using state employee police to take care of, be a caregiver for his ill wife. And then also 2011 pay to play. And this is not unique. I mean, so many New York state officials. Well, before you go too much further, Al Havesi was my classmate in high school. I knew him. He was most popular guy, you know, he would have won the popularity contest. And he was the star of the basketball team. And he took my high school to the Madison Square Garden and won in Madison Square Garden thanks to Al Havesi. And that began his political career. Everybody loved Al Havesi. Come to find there was a different Al Havesi later on. Yes, and you find that with Tucson and you find that with Gluckin. But I mean, if my parents hadn't moved to Long Island, I would have gone to Forest Hills High School to a few years behind you and Al Havesi. My cousins still in Forest Hills. They graduated from Forest Hills High School. Okay, so bottom line is this tradition of problems with corruption is very much in New York. Okay, now then if we get into each of the players, okay, so we talked about Al Havesi and your involvement with, you know, you knew him in high school. I was not involved in his misdeeds as the controller of the state. I want to be clear about that. I didn't allude to that, just that you knew him. Now, Alison Janney, she's portrayed, they even did something with her face. They put bad skin. When she and Hugh Jackman were doing like an interview in their real personality, who they really are, she's such a gentle soul. You know, you see her, she doesn't have bad skin. She's a very attractive woman, but special effects or whatever, they made her a hard woman. So this movie did a lot of changes between Mike Makovsky, who was the screenwriter who had actually gone to Rosalind High School and then the producers, they made a lot of changes. So she's really a gentle soul, you know, in real life. So you got to look at who these people are. And then Hugh Jackman, you see with Zoom now and with the COVID, you see people in their real life, in their abode, I mean, in their house. You see Hugh Jackman's office, gives you a little flavor of who he is, right? And then you see Alison Janney in her room, bedroom or whatever, you see a little, so you see who these people really are. Now, what that gets to is Hugh Jackman, what an actor. He's never done a role very much like this before as you alluded. He's always in these action movies and medics, you know, and then the one with all those hands, he had those, I forgot the name of that one, you know, all those metal things. So this is it, but because he's such a good actor, he was able to get himself into that role and really do a really good job. Same thing with Alison Janney, Ray Romano that did the school board president, all amazing, so it's a really good movie in terms of the actors and their ability. So, and they did get Ray reviews. Now, there's a lot of things in there. No, they got some criticism too, don't forget that. We should cover this. Oh yeah, that's what I'm gonna, that's what I'm getting to now. They did a lot of changes. Frank DeSone did not get arrested the way he did in Las Vegas. He got arrested in Nassau and it was totally out of character for him. He was a white collar crime. He wasn't gonna, you know, try to not, when the police came to arrest him, he just accepted it. And then, because he was in prison, he was supposed to be four to 12 years. They let him out after three years and four months because of good behavior. So this is white collar. He wasn't a criminal in a blue, he was a white collar criminal, right? So, and then with that young boyfriend, same sex relationship in Las Vegas, that was not a Stony Brook student that had been at Plain Dome High School, had been one of his high school students when he was an English teacher. It was a guy who had gone to the University of Wyoming, was a motorcycle salesman in Las Vegas, and then a dancer, you know, because he was gay dancer. So he said, so that wasn't true too. So there's a lot of other things that, and then getting back to Tussaud, he was married to a young woman who died of Hodgkin's disease in 1973. He had a regular marriage, whatever it was, it wasn't fabricated. He was married, right? And then after, I also listened to his interview by Mike Bayer, Coach Mike podcast, where Tussaud actually says, he's in his 70s now, right? This was just last year. He's getting $173,000 a year pension because New York, there was a loophole. He could still get his pension. So he's living on 173. So he has nothing to do with it. That was a post script in the movie. And it was astounding to find that he's making that kind of money. And I don't think they recovered the 11 million either. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah. And then, I lost my twin sister for a minute. And then, so he has nothing to hide. He's talking about his wife, you know, opposite sex marriage, what, with a woman, right? And then, and that he's not really exclusively gay. He's saying this and he felt very bad that they made it sound like it was a student that he was having an affair with. But he was in a 30, at that, when he got a rest, a 33 year same sex relationship with this guy's seniority. So there's certain truths and there's certain things that are not true. And now Rebecca Rambo was the student, but she did not exclusively, it was she and a few of the other hilltop beacon students that did this research. And the main points after she did the initial was Newsday, which is the Long Island. Midweek, it's the midweek of Long Island. Yeah, well, you have to pay for it, midweek is free. But yes, it's why everybody, you know, everybody does, we got in Long Island. I was, I delivered Long Island press on Newsday. I won't get into it. My dad was sick, so I had 70 papers and we lived in the hilly part of Farmingdale near the Bethpage Golf Course, you know, where they had the US Open. So I had to take my bike with those things and really struggle. I was a kid, you know, I was 11, 12 years old. But bottom line is, the next thing is Roslyn, right? I'll go on another little aside. Isaac Asimov's nephew, Daniel, went to high school with me in Farmingdale, which is a very poor related to Roslyn, poor district. And he graduated the year before me and he went to college. I think he went to Wesleyan and he's very successful. His younger brother and sister, Isaac Asimov's brother moved his family to Roslyn with the two younger kids and they went to Roslyn and they're also successful. But Daniel was, because it's the parents, bottom line is it's what the parents instill in the children. Yes, the school district is important, right? Now, Frank Tasone had turned that school district in one of the top school districts in the country. He was getting kids into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, all these top things. So they overlooked, they never questioned anything about him because the results were there. He was very good. I mean, in terms of his job itself, but I don't know if he was educating them, but he had connections in the Ivy League. He was placing them and the parents loved it. And they were, this is a wealthy community in Roslyn. And we all knew that when we were kids. Roslyn was really the cream of the North Shore at that time. There were other wealthy areas, but Roslyn was notable. So they wanted their kids to go to Harvard and Yale. They were willing to overlook anything he did. And he was kind of a peculiar character. He was doing plastic surgery. He was wearing expensive suits. When was the last time you saw a civil servant, educator in a public high school, wearing all those beautiful clothing? It was extraordinary. And I'm sure that was an accurate statement of the way it worked. And the same thing with the plastic surgery. He was a movie star. And he was a guy in a schlub job, sorry, but he's a movie star. And everybody loves him and the kids love him and he can deliver their careers and lives to them. Well, the parents thought that was just perfect. But he had a memory. He used to take these kindergarten kids, right? And speak to them one-on-one and have them read something so he could assess what their ability was. And he was, they were teaching in the school to foreign languages in kindergarten and first grade, which is, so there were things that he was doing as a profession, in his professional capacity, which was, and yes, he was all image. He was hung up on his image, very much on image. But you know, in today's day and age, images, I guess, is important too, you know? Maybe part of the success was image. But the problem, see, when I worked corporate, they used to give us corporate credit cards. I never used it. I used to lock it in my desk, use my own credit cards, and then file an expense report. Because what that does, it keeps you in line. If you make a mistake, you'll never, you're never gonna, it'll get caught, right? Right there when it goes. So that was the mistake that he and Pam Gluckin, Carmona McGracken, Carmona Gluckin. Gluckin, yeah. Yeah, that was her fun. You know, that was part of the whole idea that it was an expense account kind of approach. And he convinced anyone who was watching him, including this auditor, this very ineffectual auditor from one level above the school, who he somehow compromised the guy, that, you know, since he was such a hotshot and doing all these remarkable things with Harvard and Yale, that he should have a credit card. He should have an expense account. He needed to do this. But then he took it to $11 million. And he was buying extraordinary things with the credit card and was, you know, and I mean, he went on and on. He was a hole in the boat over a period of years. And it's remarkable that nobody saw it. Then, you know, I think that this teaches us something about Roslyn. It teaches us not to say that Roslyn is, you know, the darkest web, but only that Roslyn should have been watching. The parents, the PTA should have been watching. The supervisors, they were not watching. They were also snowed to use that term. And they were hypnotized by this guy. He was good. And then finally, the auditor, as I mentioned, completely compromised. And I don't remember exactly how Tessone did it, but he had some goods on the auditor. Then he turned it around against the auditor. Now the auditor belonged to him. It was an example of ongoing, increasing extended corruption. And he thought he could get away with it. And so Pam Gluckin thought she could get away with it. And they didn't realize that, you know, there was this student or this bunch of students on the school newspaper that could find it, even if nobody else could find it, they found it. And that was, you know, another great statement about the fact that kids can find things. Kids can do investigative reporting. You know, good for that generation. I remember there was a postscript on her, this woman, this young girl who found out about him, how later she became, I think it was an investigative reporter. I got a job at one of the major newspapers in the country. That's the wrong bomb, yeah. But you see, Tessone was, he was a sociopath. In my career, in my life, I've had supervisors of both genders, both men and women that are sociopaths that climb stepping on other people's heads. Now, Tessone was in some ways a sociopath that he could pull these kind of things, throw Gluckin under the bus, throw the auditor under the bus to protect himself, you know, and, you know, the movie alluded to the fact that he was covering up his sexual orientation, that, you know, he's gay and all that. But the thing is, they had Sharon Katz approaching him romantically, one of the parents, and he pulls away. But in his interview, he says he's not 100% gay. He's sort of a mixed bag, you know? So there's a lot of everything today that we know about is political, it's run through a political prism, both on the right and on the left. Look at COVID right now. Everything's run through a political prism. We've got to get back to the truth. No more fake news, no more fake approach. Whatever the veracity is, let's talk that, right? And like I said earlier in this show, when you go to the actual people, whether it's the actor or the people they're playing, you find out who they really are and from their own words, what they're saying, you know? And then you can follow up on that and see, did he really have this Joan wife or not? And extend the record, I mean, she died of Hodgkins in 1973. So bottom line is, when Mike Makovsky took this and started making changes, Rebecca was not alone. It was the newspapers that really broke this, she just started it. When you have, they put the Hamptons, Hodgkins house was in West Hampton Beach and- One of her houses. One of her houses in Florida. The two of them were accumulating houses with a little money they stole. Yeah, I mean, she had West Hampton Beach, she had Bellemore, her main residence was on the water in Bellemore, and then she had another one in Florida, you know? So bottom line is, they did a lot of bad things, stealing the money and whatever. What makes this movie so interesting is that it was all kind of in plain sight and it took a kid to figure out what was going on. And all the other people, all the adults in the room were hypnotized. So, and that makes it a very interesting who done it. Now, as the movie rolled on, do you agree with me? As the movie rolled on, you knew, you the viewer knew there was something phony baloney about Frank Tassone. You knew that this, it didn't fit. Yeah, yeah, he could get kids into Harvard and Yale and he could teach them languages and make them look good. But there was something where, you know, is this really a superintendent of schools? Is this really consistent with high school education? Or was this guy, you know, so off the ground that he could not be real? And the movie little by little shows you, you know, how off the ground he is and it shows you how unreal he is. And it shows you little by little, you know, what a white collar criminal he was. I agree with you, by the way. He was a white collar criminal. He would never have done anything violent, just steal while he would pick the school's pocket. And I suppose, you know, he's not the only one who have done that kind of thing to educational institutions which have a lot of money. I'm not sure why the school in Roslyn had a lot of money, but I guess it had $11 million that never noticed was missing. I think what's interesting about this movie to me and why it fascinated me was there are so many movies today that you watch on cable and else wise that are pulp fiction, that are violence and vengeance, you know, shoot them up, everybody's got a gun, everybody's, you know, full of hate and crime. And, you know, they're all kind of terrible people shooting everyone else, even the heroes are terrible people. And so when you have a movie that's about white collar crime and in the genre of a documentary, that's very interesting. And if they went off the mark once in a while, I don't mind. I wanted to know who was this, how'd he got away with it, what his techniques were and what it showed us about, you know, the teachers, the kids, the parents, the school system. And, you know, we live in a time, I mean, this is very important. I think we live in a time where we're looking back on a country of ill educated kids. They have not been properly educated. They don't know civics, they don't know how to vote. They don't know how to read the newspaper. And this, we're suffering with it. I don't want to call it stupidity, but they call it the failure of education, bad education, if you will. And so these were all earmarks of bad education not only in Roslyn, but elsewhere. It was the study, it is the study of a generation of schools that looked like they were succeeding, but in fact, collectively, they were failing. What do you think? Well, you know, to get back the public and the school board was mesmerized, not only to the fact that these kids were getting into all these Ivy League schools, but their property values were skyrocketing over Jericho, Sayaset, other North Shore communities. So because their pockets were being filled, their houses were expanding in value, then they could take that and buy even a more expensive house, King's Point, or somewhere like that, my cousins live in Brookville and the kids went to school in Roslyn, at a private school. And the principle of the school, he's got that Hollywood kind of thing too, you know? This is North Shore Long Island. I mean, North Shore Long Island is very, very affluent, right? I came from the South Shore, more middle-class, poorer community. But the thing is, that North Shore thing, it's a lot of image. You had a lot of movie stars, Alan King and all these other ones that live there. So there's a, and New York has the Broadway, so it's just like, you know, there's a very movie star quality. So he presented himself as a movie star, as you said, right? But polished, so polished that might have been part of why he was able to influence college presidents and why he was, you know, held in such high esteem. Kids today also, they see TV, they have more respect for a polished superintendent than a non-polished one. So it was, bottom line here is, they were mesmerized by his results and they never looked at below the surface to see. And the key thing was, they did just like here in Hawaii, they're not doing adequate audits, right? They weren't doing audits. That's why even Alan Hervesi, who you went to high school with, he got caught too. And this is ubiquitous in New York. I mean, as I said, so many. So it's the culture, the culture of North Shore of Long Island, where my cousins live. I know what that's like, estates, big money, you know, I came from a poor, relatively- Yeah, all the wrong values. Right. The wrong values to instill into a generation of kids who are now in positions where they can help the community or not. And, you know, that the country lost ground because of this generation, because of people like Frank Tassone and the people who intentionally or unintentionally supported him. I mean, this makes you, this is the Marcel Proust view through the keyhole of the past, this movie. This lets you look into the past, not in a nostalgic way, but in a way that you can better understand what was happening and thus the effect of it on the country. And perhaps that's why I think it's so, it's so probative, it's so valuable to see what happened, what is the 20 years ago, and try to examine, connect the dots from there till here and try to explain why so many people in this country don't have a clue about what's going on or how you act as a citizen or a voter or how you make your mind up on political parties and vaccines, if you will. So, I mean, there's so many things wrong with the environment in which these kids were learning and the student newspaper kids, they were the best of the lot. They were the ones who had it together. You know, this kid would actually encourage a student today to study journalism, don't you think? And get on the school newspaper, don't you think? They were the only ones who were thinking clearly. And clean up what we've got. I mean, the final end to what you were alluding to was our last president, Donald J. Trump, who everything was fake news. He had very little honor talking about women in a most degrading way and he still got elected. And a lot of, I mean, he's got, he has a lot of corruption problems with his businesses and everything. And this is what the kids are, as you said, this is what the kids are learning, that that's how you get ahead. So, Frank Tussaud's story was a bad education. As you said, it was learning what's bad education that if you, no matter how good you are at doing what you're doing, you keep your nose clean. You don't get into corrupt stuff. And Gluckin, she was also a workhorse. She stayed until 11, 12 o'clock at night, but they got away, it got away from them. Slippery slope, keep your nose clean. And so it's good that they got arrested and it's good that the kids saw that what our former president got him himself in trouble. So you're right on the ball, right on target, Jay. Well, yeah, and she was spending those midnight hours cooking the books for what she was doing, trying to cover her tracks and exposing herself not only to investigation by the school newspaper, but being thrown under the bus by him to some. So what I get out of this is we have to look at our schools as more than a place to get into Harvard and Yale. These are young minds, they're being formed up. We have to teach them at an early age about the world and the country as it exists. Otherwise we'll pay a terrible price. And I think we're probably gonna pay a terrible price for missing generations of generations where education failed this country and we really didn't do anything about it. Rhetorically, I would ask you, George, do you think this prosecution where he only spent about three years in change in jail, in a white collar kind of jail? And she spent less time than that. Do you think this prosecution changed the system? Do you think this was iconic either in New York, in Roslyn, or New York, or around the country to make educators more committed, to make them more dedicated to education and schools and kids? I doubt it, because I think what was portrayed in the movie continued. There was nothing suggested that this was gonna be a lesson and things were gonna have a remarkable reform around the country. What do you think? Totally agree with you, that our whole system of checks and balances has broken down, not only in school districts, not only in universities, but throughout our society. I mean, there's no more responsibility. It's what you do to get ahead. And no matter who's head you step on, it's all individual, it's all me, me, me, and, you know, and there's no integrity anymore. I mean, as I said, look at our former president's whole life story. I mean, bottom line is, these are bad lessons for these kids and I agree with you that this didn't make, this hasn't made a difference. Our society is still very much corrupt. A lot of corruption and we're gonna have to clean it up because everything now is, as I said, polarized. It's whatever's good for you. There's fake news coming from both sides, you know? So we've gotta get back to veracity in movies, veracity in education, veracity in what financial pecuniary stuff, that's, we gotta get to that and you're right on. And how to build character. And what is character? What are the right characteristics that you should strive for? So that's why, and I hope you'll agree with me, that's why our next movie is going to be Pig, featuring Nicholas Cage, the best thing he ever did. And so the next time we meet George in a couple of weeks, let's do Pig, it's a remarkable movie. It is a very educational movie. It is a movie about character, if you will. And what I'm saying is I hope anybody watching this one here today about bad education will do a little homework and between now and two weeks from now, they'll go out and find on Netflix, find and watch Pig with Nicholas Cage, okay? Yes, yes, yes, yes, definitely. That's just right for a sequel to this, to show a little bit of integrity and care and heart, which is so important to be that way for humanity, for everybody's betterment is the role that he plays there. So we'll get into that. It'll be pretty. There's a lot of interpretation we have to make and try to figure out the meaning that the producers directors of this film, the actors in this film were trying to tell us. Anyway, George, George Cason, a movie reviewer par excellence, one of the most popular movie reviewers I know. Thank you so much. And we'll see you, we'll see you next time here on The Movie Show on Think Tech.