 Don and Kim, thank you so much for being here with us tonight and sharing this incredible film ahead of its Hulu debut later this year. I'd love to hear a little bit about how this film came to be. I know obviously it was based on these hundreds of hours of audio diaries, but it first started as a book and then a podcast, and so what was the inspiration to also see it as a film? Well, thank you so much for being here. It's so great to be here with you. So there's this brilliant book by Julia Swig, and then ABC worked with Julia to make that a podcast, a multi-part podcast, and then the executive at ABC, Jackie Glover. I had made a series about Bobby Kennedy called Bobby Kennedy for Presidents on Netflix, and I had also made a film about John Lewis. So she knew that I had an interest in this kind of time period of history, and so she just called me up and said, you know, we have this great podcast. Do you think it could be a movie? And I said, I don't know. You know, you got to see something, what's there to see. So, you know, then kind of listen to the podcast, you know, read the book. And I just was really taken with the idea of Lady Bird there in plain sight, and being, as so many women are, I think, not being given the full credit for all of her intelligence and contributions. And I think that that's a very similar story for many first ladies, not just for Lady Bird. And so it became a really delightful challenge to actually figure out how to give her the last word and telling her own story. These audio diaries covered just some of the most tumultuous periods in our country. You know, there was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that really kicks all of this off. There's the Vietnam War. We have the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the March in Selma, Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court, and then the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. This is also a period that has been documented very thoroughly. And so what was the experience of kind of hearing it through Lady Bird Johnson's perspective? And what does that add to our understanding of this period in the 1960s? Yeah, I'll start and then I'll throw it to Kim. You know, as I said, I had done other work, but it was really from the perspective of these men who, you know, I greatly admired and still greatly admire. And the idea, what listening to Lady Bird's voice, you have not just a recitation of the historical facts, but you also get the sense of what women were struggling with, were navigating. So Lady Bird, as you all know, is a University of Texas graduate, double graduate, journalist, and, you know, so smart and so strategic. She's the person who buys the radio station. I mean, she's the reason that they have the wealth that they have. And yet, if you talk to most Americans, if they know Lady Bird, they'll say, oh, she didn't she plant flowers? And that just, you know, made me crazy. So to hear her voice, but I know, I mean, Kim spent a lot of time with these tapes and would, Kim can tell you pretty much, you know, she has a love of gun smoke. We gave you only some of that. But you get a real sense of the time. And I felt like you could hear her trying to thread the needle. She's, what I think is so interesting is she is this Southern white woman who has, is so curious about the world. And she's been in Washington. But she's still a Southern woman of the 50s. She's always like in contradiction. And she's, and she's working it out. And I just found that really fascinating. And then, of course, she has to work it out on the most public stage. And so I just, I really thought it was fascinating to hear her try and have a private life, try and be a mother, try and be a wife, and also serve her country, which was very top of mind for her. But yeah, I think too, you know, something listening to the all 123 hours. You know, she didn't always know she was living through history, either. And I think we think about what we're going through right now, too. So, you know, some of, you know, the days where it's like, Oh, wow, this crazy thing happened. She's just like, Oh, yeah, then this happened. And we have a small war. Yeah, we have a small war in her hands. And now I'm going to go swimming, you know, so it, yeah, it made me reflect a lot about like, you know, the times that we're in now, just like, you know, 60 years from now, when they're looking at people are looking at this time period. It's, you know, a lot of similarities. Tell me a little bit about the process of tracking down all the archival footage for for this. You know, obviously you had 123 hours of audio, but then the archival footage that goes with it is not something that just came with the audio. This is a really arduous process, I would imagine. Yes. It is really arduous. And it was made more arduous by the fact that very early on, I was like, no people will be in this movie who are alive. And so then I was like, Okay, okay, guys, let's go. So, you know, really that falls to the lion share of that work falls to Kim and the team she's supervising, you know, to to find. But, you know, I really felt like we're living in a time where people distrust journalism. And I really, really wanted to give to follow the diaries and not have them be kind of influenced by our, you know, now we know what's important. We're all geniuses because we know what happened. We know the end and she didn't know the end. And so I wanted to be able to live in it with her and discover it. But Kim can talk about how sometimes that was not always the most fun to do. Yeah, well, first of all, I just want to think the library's archive team, first of all, we would not have been able to make this movie without them. And also our own archive team that we had, one of which I think is here tonight, Suzanne Mason, one of our archive producers. I don't know if she's here, but if she is, yay. So, yeah, so we had a great team of researchers, you know, who we kind of figured out which recordings we wanted to put in the film and then kind of worked backwards a little bit to see what the corresponding footage was. And, you know, we were very lucky we had access to ABC News' archive, you know, as well as all the other CBS, AP, you know, Getty. And what we kind of noticed right off the bat was that we weren't getting a whole lot of hits back when we were typing in Lady Bird Johnson. And it was like, well, why not? She was the first lady. And what we started to realize was that she just wasn't tagged in this archive. So when we would go back and be like, okay, well, the president's wife or Mrs. Johnson, some more would come up. So we really had to, like, think outside the box and had to, you know, find this footage. And going back to Lady Bird and, you know, these, you know, meticulous notes that she would leave, she would document what news stations were there at all of her appearances. So then we would be like, okay, well, we know she did this on this date. Nancy Dickerson from NBC was there. We'll go to NBC. We'll ask for the Nancy Dickerson report of that day. And that's really how we found the footage. And then sometimes we just had to, you know, we knew she was at an event, so we just have to scrub through and find her there. How many hours of archival footage did you say? Oh, I think we, I could be wrong, but I think we had over like 5,000 hours of, yeah. I mean, it's really incredible how well the audio diaries really tracked with the visuals. And I know we were talking a little bit during the film about the intention behind the illustrations and the animation in the film. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Yeah, there were some, you know, as much as the archive really did exquisitely match. I mean, she was such a great narrator and such an observant reporter, really, you know, that's what she was doing. But there were some things that we just couldn't find enough to illustrate. And so I've worked with a graphic designer, Molly Schwartz, for a long time. And so Molly did, those are all like hand drawn, those animations. But, you know, I come from a journalistic background, like him and I, it's really important that we had done so much work to make this be accurate and to reflect what happened through her eyes. You know, it is not meant to be the Robert Carroll books, like it is meant to be what she reported, what she remembered, what she was thinking. So when in giving instructions to the, to Molly, you know, it was in Kim can talk some more about this, but we were really intentional about what would have been there at the time, you know, using photos and using the archive of surrounding time. So the pictures, the drawings are accurate too. Yeah, I think, you know, the Jackie phone call, you know, we were like, okay, well, what was the date? She would still be in mourning, would she be wearing a veil? You know, she was still wearing all black. You know, what were the pictures on the wall? Were they doing the call at the ranch? Were they doing the call? You know, was this on the airplane? You know, so just to make sure that, you know, it was all accurate. That's just an incredible attention to detail that I think really showed in this film. You know, I want to talk a little bit, and you were just getting this done, you know, she had trained at some point to be a journalist. And I think that you see that in the kind of details, or you hear that in the kind of details that she left behind these audio diaries, what do you think that added? And also, if you could talk a little bit about the description in these audio diaries as well, because it's so rich and poetic. I mean, it sounds like it was almost scripted. You know, Lady Bird was such an acute observer. But she was also always thinking. She was always making connections. And so I think what you see in her diaries is she's she's kind of like always a few steps ahead and thinking like, so when you think, when you see her like talking about what is she going to do after King's been assassinated, but she's invited these journalists, and you see her kind of working through like, what's her obligation as First Lady? What's her obligation to these journalists? What's her obligation to history? You know, she was inviting these journalists to come so that they could document what was happening in the United States. That was very important. So I think her attention to detail. And the other thing is she very intentionally embargoed the diaries until, you know, after her death. And so she, you know, and Kim can speak to this as well. But she also said in, you know, at some point, she's like, I hope, you know, somebody makes a film about these. So she was thinking. And but, you know, and not only did she make her diaries public, she made the Johnson tapes public. So, you know, she was thinking like historians need to understand and need to know. And I think like that incredible foresight is another one of the gifts that she really has given to history. And I do know a very recent First Lady, I think she also has some diaries. So maybe we'll see those at some point. Yeah, I think to Don's point about, you know, she dubbed over all of their home videos with her commentary. And she said, she said, I hope that these will be useful to an historian one day. So she was, you know, she was thinking ahead. And I think, you know, back to just her words, you know, she she loved words and the way that she described things. And that came from very early on in her childhood. And I think it just, you know, to your point, just kind of added that richness. And it really is the way she speaks is very lyrical. And that really was kind of the soundtrack to, you know, the score to the film. Absolutely. I mean, like I said, it sounded scripted. I mean, you couldn't have asked for just a stronger narrator. I'm curious about the timeline here, because, you know, like you mentioned there, she intentionally embargoed these until after her death. When she started recording these, do we know if she intended for them to be released one day? I don't know if we if she was I mean, I think we know Liz Carpenter said, you ought to record this. And we also know that it's Liz Carpenter's son's recorder. And so we were talking today and it's it's he was a teenager, you know, who like I guess he was going to get discovered, you know, he's a great singer or something. But that's why we have these tapes. So I don't know if she was thinking about that. But I would liked I would guess like thinking about she's so smart. And so she had so much foresight that, you know, but like Kim says, I mean, there's a lot of gun smoke in here and dresses and other things. And so you really do get this. And those are helpful too for us actually, because you get a sense of who she was as a person. And so she wasn't pretending to always be thinking big thoughts. She was very much a real person. And I think she carries over that personality trait into the White House. She was a very approachable person who would listen to people who would remember their names, you know, who would go out. She wasn't afraid of people. You know, she would she did not want to be, you know, a hot house flower. She definitely wanted it to be, you know, the presidency to be for the people. And I think it goes she was a journalist. And she wanted her record recorded. And I think, you know, with the diary entry about, you know, hoping that the home videos would be useful to a historian, you know, like to think that she she knew her tapes would be too. I think too, you know, and something you see that that's small, but I think very significant is her inviting female journalists into the White House. And so thinking about what would have been the opportunities for women at the time. I think Kim's point is really important that she knew historians, she read the papers every day, she knew how the war was being covered, how the presidency was being covered, how civil rights was being covered. I think she wanted to add her voice to that coverage. And so was hoping people would come along and say like, this too is true. You know, inside the White House, this too is true. It I think it strikes me, you know, she we so often when we're looking at presidential, you know, presidents or first ladies who are going through times of crisis, they are expected to act in a very specific way. They're supposed to be stoic, they're supposed to be the rocks to keep, you know, the nation strong. And there were certainly no shortage of tragedies during the Johnson administration. And I thought it was a really interesting look to see how vulnerable she was being. And I think, Don, like you were saying, she was kind of working through things. And as she was watching, you know, the aftermath of MLK's assassination, it was so striking to me. And I'm curious if that felt kind of like a revelation or if that's something that we sort of saw also at the time of her in her public face. I don't think we saw it as much in her public face. And I think that that if I had to guess, that's probably also part of the thinking behind embargoing the tapes is because she could be as honest as she wanted to be. She could talk about Johnson's depression in a way that she could not, you know, contemporaneously with the occurrence. I think also, you know, what for me comes through is how much she loves LBJ and how much she loves her family and how she understands that they have a public face and they have private, you know, kind of feelings and emotions. Although she does not, you know, very famously, she does not mention any of his infidelities, which are well known. The one exception is Kim's favorite story. There's a diary entry where she says that you never know who you'll find in his bedroom. I walked in and there was Richard Dixon. We didn't have any footage for that. You know, another thing about the Johnson's, though, was Johnson's White House Photographers. I made a film called The Way I See It. It's about Barack Obama's White House Photographer. And he was inspired by Johnson's White House Photographer. That was his idol. That was his dream of how you cover a president. And you see, I always mispronouncing his name, Yakumoto. He's a Japanese name, and I apologize for mispronouncing it. But he had the photos that you see of them in bed, of Johnson kind of in the private quarters. That was because Johnson gave his photographer that access. So we have this remarkable photographic library to see, you know, so we could illustrate all those things that Lady Bird was talking about, and without Johnson giving his White House. So they were very much, you know, they were quite cognizant of their place in history. And of the idea that to some extent, you know, I guess to a large extent, the lives of the president and the First Family are not their own. They belong to America. And so to carve out what little private space you can, that's what I found really interesting is like, that's why, you know, so we kind of selected certain themes like mothering, civil rights, women, civil rights, you know, and that was kind of like the way we decided what to put in and what to, you know, edit out. You were talking earlier about kind of this perception of who Lady Bird Johnson is, and it was that the woman who planted all the flowers along the highway, right? You know, what do you want this film to really disrupt about her legacy? And did it disrupt anything for y'all when you were making it? It's a good use of y'all. Yeah, I think something, you know, so right before I had started working on this film, I did one of those ancestry.com type things. And I found out that my grandmother went to college and I had, I never knew she went to college. Like, you know, this was never a thing. And I was like, oh, wow, well, what else do I not know about her? And then I started looking at my other grandmother. And I found out all this stuff about her that I didn't know. So I had just assumed that they were just these housewives, you know, who were my grandmother. And but turns out they had a whole life, you know, before that. So it just started making me think about women from this this era that we kind of put in this box that they're just this one thing. And to really make people, you know, look into not only Lady Bird, but other women of this time, other women in their family that, you know, it isn't just this, this, you know, one dimensional figure. Yeah, I, I think it's fair to say like I knew nothing about Lady Bird. And I say that like, just like, in a mortified voice, because as I said, like, I probably spent five years between the John Lewis movie and the Bobby Kennedy series deeply entrenched in the history of the time. And I was listening just to the men. And so to hear her voice, it was like, it was like in the Wizard of Oz when like it gets in color. I was like, wait, what? So and then it just really, you know, kind of like strengthened my resolve creatively to to let her just really plant a flag about her, her observations. But I think I also had, I have so much respect for her and how she fought to keep her to make her own place and to have an identity separate from her husband, even though she was 100% team LBJ, you know, she ends with LBJ, you were good for the USA. That's one of them, you know, a huge moment of pride, like all their kids, their initials are LBJ, like she is 100% like into the LBJ kind of situation. And yet she carved out her own place. And I think that that is something a lot of women are still doing. What's our place if we're mothers, and we're wives, and we love those roles. What else is our place? And whether it's working outside the home or not working outside the home, still that individual identity. And I felt like I saw her struggling with that. And then ultimately just deciding to do to trust her own instincts. I mean, I love when she's like, you know, with, with, with Jenkins, and she's like, my love, my love, it's all been decided, you know, Abe is Abe is signed off, you know, and he's like, you can she's like, it's already decided. So just something that Ben, our editor, and I used to kind of go back and forth with on that last line, the LBJ, you were good for the USA, could be talking about Lady Bird to her initials are LBJ. So I like to think she's talking about herself. I love that interpretation. So one of the things is striking to me about the office of the First Lady still to this day is that it's kind of up to whoever is there to decide what it is, right? There's not, we certainly have expectations, societal expectations about who a First Lady can be. But right now, you know, we have Dr. Jill Biden, who is still working as First Lady. She's the first First Lady to have a paid occupation outside of her White House duties. Exactly. Yes. 2020. And that's right. And so I think that, you know, we've seen so many different shades of First Lady, right? And so I'm curious what you feel like Lady Bird Johnson did to put her own stamp on that. And if you see her legacy coming out in subsequent First Ladies. She was the First First Lady to have an official office. So the East Wing basically is because of her, you know? So it's, she really, you know, set the, you know, the legacy for everybody who else, you know, came out. And insisting that it be a paid work for and she would have her staff, they would be paid. Liz Carpenter, of course, is the heart and soul of that office. But also inviting female journalists into the White House. Those teas, you know, she was the master, mistress, I guess, of labeling things in a non-offensive way. But they were pretty revolutionary. She was having, you know, substantive conversations about current events, hosting them at the White House. You know, like, we call those really big deals if you're invited to the White House to talk about policy. And that's what she was doing. So I think she really did, she literally, first she established that it could be done, right? And then she did it with such professionalism and meticulous attention to detail. And the earth did not explode. She went and campaigned and she did speeches and she had policy and she spoke, you know, all these places. And like the world went on. And so I think, like, sometimes you just have to do things and it's hard to be the first. And she didn't let the lack of a really role model stop her from doing, you know, from carving out her way. But I think every first lady really does. It's so interesting to me that they still do have to figure out their own way. You know, I think about what Michelle Obama, I have a lot of empathy for Melania who'd never wanted that job. And it was, you know, kind of put on her. And of course, you know, Secretary Clinton, one of the most accomplished people, you know, ever. And she had to figure out, you know, how to have, you know, an intellectual life as well as a life of a spouse. So. Absolutely. Well, I think we have time for one more question. And Don, you might have hinted at this earlier, but, you know, obviously this was a really rich text to mine to make this documentary. Are there other first ladies that you would love to also make a documentary about? I like most of the first ladies. I'm, I'm, yes, I mean, I, I have, I know Michelle Obama, I think that there's a big story to tell there when she's ready to tell it. I think the same about Hillary Clinton. I think Laura Bush was a tremendous first lady and did so much just to be an elegant and kind and thoughtful example for people. And she was a tremendous mother. So, I mean, any of the, if any of them are out there and they want to talk, like, you know, if they have some diaries they want to share with us, you know, we're your ladies. So. Well, Don and Kim, thank you so much for being here.