How 'The Coddling' Became A Movie: Ted Balaker and Courtney Moorehead Balaker turn a foundational book into a film

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On podcasts devoted to free speech and so-called heterodox discourse, the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind is probably mentioned more frequently than any other. Written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar and Greg Lukianoff, who now heads the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it is effectively the bible of the Heterodox crowd. And now it’s a movie. My guests are husband and wife filmmaking team Ted Balaker, who directed the film, and Courtney Moorehead Balaker, who produced it.

In this conversation, they discuss how they took a book about ideas and turned it into an engaging, poignant, and often very funny movie about mental health and how it intersects with higher education and campus life. They relay the stories of many of the young people featured in the movie and talk about the process of finding them. They also discuss how the movie ended up on Substack, where it’s making history as the first film to stream on that platform.

You can watch the film here.

GUEST BIO

Ted Balaker is an award-winning filmmaker, former think tank scholar and network news producer. He co-founded Korchula Productions, a film production company devoted to making important ideas entertaining, and Free Minds Film, which uses workshops and project-specific consultations to teach independent filmmakers how to reach large audiences. Ted produced the feature film Little Pink House and is the director of The Coddling of the American Mind, based on The New York Times bestselling book by Greg Lukionoff and Jonathan Haidt and the very first feature documentary presented by Substack.

Courtney Moorehead Balaker is an award-winning filmmaker, adjunct professor of acting, and co-founder of Korchula Productions, a film production company devoted to making important ideas entertaining. She also co-founded Free Minds Film, which uses workshops and project-specific consultations to teach independent filmmakers how to reach large audiences. Courtney wrote and directed Little Pink House, which stars Catherine Keener as Susette Kelo, the blue-collar woman whose fight against eminent domain abuse went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Megan. Before we get to the episode, I want to tell you about the latest development
0:04.5	for my project, The Unspeak Easy. It's called the Unspeak Easy School of Thought. As you probably
0:10.8	know, the Unspeakies' flagship offerings are in-person retreats and an online community for women.
0:17.1	Those aren't going anywhere. But beginning in April, we will be offering courses for everyone, with an emphasis on intellectual curiosity, artistry over identity, humor, and of course, nuance.
0:30.1	We're kicking things off with three writing courses, a fiction workshop taught by novelist Chaley Widger, a screenwriting workshop taught by Hollywood veteran Sam Wolfson,
0:39.7	and are you ready for this? A workshop in something I just declared a new genre, writing your
0:46.0	cancellation story. That's right. After having a number of students show up in my own workshops,
0:52.6	wrestling with how to tell stories of social or professional
0:56.3	exile in the most effective way possible, I thought that there should be a whole class in this
1:03.2	subject. And now there is. Best of all, it is being taught by legendary author Sherman Alexi.
1:10.0	Sherman's classic novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a part-time Indian, has sold millions
1:14.7	of copies worldwide and is taught in thousands of classrooms every year.
1:18.9	He also knows a thing or two about being canceled.
1:21.8	This is an incredible opportunity to study with amazing teachers.
1:26.0	So if you're interested, go to the unspeakeasy.com,
1:29.5	pull down the school of thought menu, and find out how to apply. Classes begin the week of April 15th.
1:35.6	They take place on Zoom, and the application deadline is April 1st. We'd love to hear from you.
1:44.6	She has some very poignant recollections of walking down the street.
1:48.7	And if the bus doesn't pull up right in front of you, that means the bus driver is racist.
1:53.8	And if you're walking on the sidewalk and there's someone with the dog and the dog barks at
1:58.9	you, that could mean that the dog's racist. That could mean that the dog's racist.
2:01.8	It could mean that the owner's racist. And even if someone encounters you and smiles,
	...

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