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[0:19] Maria Judice: You is kind. You was smart. You is important. You is dead. Tonya Pinkins' horror film RED PILL brings African American perspective to the progressive movement. We are a majority in this country. And we're gonna win the election. Do you know what the red pill is? A red pill is someone who infiltrates a group and then destroys them from the inside. This place is spooky. Some people like to live dangerously. Are you so jumpy tonight? You know what, guys? I'm gonna go back tomorrow. Did you hear about the creature woman that attacked a father and son hunting down here? I don't see the case. They're after all of us. What do we do, Amelia? We die. But we take some of them with us. I was reading a quote on, I don't know, I think it was on Twitter, but I probably had read it before.

It was Toni Morrison saying that racism was mostly a distraction. That it mostly just took people's energy and distracted them from being creative. And I was thinking that so is fear. Fear's a distraction. So is, you know, all of those things, anything that keeps you off of your creativity. And even though, you know, I had that wonderful rage moment with my friend, that came after two days of being angry with someone where I had started off with this really creative day, and then things got mad, and then I couldn't get myself back to creating. And I'm sharing with you, don't even know this. One of the things I've been creating is the world of RED PILL because all of the pieces of RED PILL right now we're in the conform is done, they're ready to go to color.

We have a new composer in Greece, the VFX is coming in, all of the stock footage is in. So, you know, it's I can't do anything except show up in studios and look at things. So my creativity is still going. So I started an interactive story branching story game so that people will be able to enter the universe of RED PILL. And the way it goes is you sort of start at the beginning of RED PILL, and there's a few questions that are asked, and then you can click on a hyperlink and you can go off on different branches to explore whatever part of RED PILL you want. You can go off and explore a character and their background, or you can head along the road of the movie. But then I have moments where, like in the trailer, there's that sign that they come to.

I give you three options of what could happen at that sign. And there's an option where you can choose to turn back. And so then if you click on that hyperlink, you turn back. And then you go along the thread of what happens. And then there are other options that can bring you back. So that's what I've been building. That's one of the things I've been building is the punching off choose your own adventure of the RED PILL movie. You can go along the RED PILL movie as written, but you can also go off and go on a whole nother adventure of a whole nother way that it could go. They'll all be horror stories. But, um, and then I also started writing the making of RED PILL so that it could be we're gonna do like a picture flip book where people can come in every day and a new installation of the making of RED PILL will be there. So to really start expanding this universe out. Since I don't know when RED PILL is coming out, but I want people to come and be able to engage in the world while we're waiting for it to come out.

[4:40] Tonya Pinkins: Oh my gosh, do you know how much we think alike? That's really amazing. And that idea, like, I'm not giving any part of RED PILL away, but knowing the story is it's so made for that. Like, like I almost want to pick some of the character, like I wanna I want to go through every character and take that journey, you know, which is it that is like kind of for me the next level of innovation within storytelling is this kind of sense of when we really take all this technology and we let you go deeper into the story and navigate maybe multiple story streams simultaneously going on, you know that woo that's crazy. But in terms of elephant, I also have a couple things like I have um I have a book of poetry that I released alongside of it.

I have a documentary that goes with the narrative around the inspiration story of a young kid who is, for lack of a better term, lynched in 1985 in California. So that's a documentary I'm also working on. And then also I have like a kind of like a book of like collages that I've done around elephant, just just so many ideas actually honestly just came out. The elephant transmedia, the red pill transmedia, yeah. Exactly. And I think also that this like need for me to investigate things further, like I can't imagine like just putting to bed a movie without like all this other piece of it, you know, like in the idea doesn't go to bed when you finish your movie, like the idea of what does a black woman do when she's traumatized?

What do we do as a people when we're traumatized? What is collective witnessing? You know, what is our truth that is for us to validate versus what is invalidated by dominant culture, right? So much of that just didn't end for me with this film that I just kept writing and writing and writing. And even that even got me to the screening series that you're in. Like even there, I was like, I need a whole protest screening series. Black Film is protest. When will that start up again?

[7:03] Maria Judice: So, uh, Black Film is Protest has one screening left after 20 we did this year. We're gonna be watching on Thursday of this week My Brother's Wedding by Charles Burnett. Very excited. And then I'm going to bring it back in March of 2021, where we do a whole new set of films. We're gonna move from Criterion. We're probably gonna dig into these films that aren't easily screened. So we're probably gonna like dip into some archives and some distribution places to like pull out some black films that don't have readily available distribution. And we did a lot of work this year to kind of we released a couple films like that. We screened a couple films like that. But then through this whole screening series, I just realized how many black films aren't readily available and people don't have access to, you know.

What has been exciting about me about these films that I've seen in this weekly screening is for me, I had been a little scared about thinking that what I was doing with RED PILL was pretty radical, this kind of a taking on the system and kind of looking at it. And I thought I was doing something radical. Then I'm going back and looking at these films from the 60s, like, oh my God, they were doing it. I mean, they've been doing it forever. Now, granted, nobody got to see many of those films, and I want to have a wider release than they got, but people were doing it. You know, people are always taking on their world and their time. And you know, the system manages to shut those voices. So it's our hope with RED PILL, which I'm hoping you will be some do some impact producing for us to get it out in the world. So it's not buried somewhere, so it'll be another 40 years before people go, oh my God, Tonya Pinkins was doing that 40 years ago. And we think we're doing something radical right now, you know?

[9:00] Tonya Pinkins: Right. I do think though, a whole purpose of really doing study of these filmmakers is to understand how we can navigate that space of being omitted from the conversation. And you know, maybe not completely effectively, but we can do a lot of putting probability more on our side so that we're not right, like trying to, I mean, so much of that is around like black politics of the 60s, trying to build like collective spaces, trying to build cooperatives, a forest bias kind of space. And I don't think any of that shouldn't be in 2020. I just think we need to build from where they left off in 1968 or wherever it is. And I think we're not having those conversations enough. And your film is radical, right?

Like that that is the place you're in in 2020, is that your film is still as radical as Bill Gunn's, um, uh what I'm blanking on the Ganjan Hess, like your film is still as radical. And I'm looking at Gangja and Hess and RED PILL right next to each other, right? Like that's the place that I would love is a screening series where we have this. And sadly, what we're gonna come up with one radical horror film every decade.

[10:16] Maria Judice: Yeah, yeah. Let's hope that that's not the case. So, how do we start to like I just came from American film market, and what I walked away from the film market, really, this was my takeaway from the film market. You like to talk about the math, and this is the math that I walked away from the film market with the balance sheets of these various studios and distributors, they're just moving numbers around and they're just moving money around into their own pockets. I don't know if any movies ever make any money, but what I do know is the people who are running the studios are making money. The house always makes money.

[10:52] Tonya Pinkins: The house always makes money.

[10:57] Maria Judice: I love that.

[10:59] Tonya Pinkins: The house always makes money.

[11:02] Maria Judice: So that you see that, like if you have this little indie film, um, short of being, you know, picked by the house to be, you know, you get in that honorary status and they just pay you a bunch of chunk of money up front because they made you part of the house. If you're not, if you don't get that honorary status, then you come in with your little low budget movie, and by the time they add all their salaries and all their expenses on top, your movie is a this budget movie, which means you have to pay back all that money before you go and profit. So they get paid twice before you even see a dime. If you feel that you must go that studio route with your film, and you don't get anointed as being one of ours and get paid a big chunk up front. What's your take on that?

[11:57] Maria Judice: It's just it's a laugh. I think you know this laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha. We're stuck in a fucking um matrix that we want so much to be invited to and want so much to um be successful in that we're not figuring a way out of it. You know, decades we're regurgitating and repeating the same fucking system and the same monetary system within in the economy within the film industry. And it's not just a black problem, it is an industry problem. And you're seeing what white filmmakers deal with it in the same way, but you're seeing black filmmakers and black women filmmakers deal with it in an exponentially way, exponential way.

[12:43] Maria Judice: And so the sense It's not just go ahead. It's not just film. I mean, people talk about, oh, the outrage. You know, Trump only paid $750 in taxes. Half of the journalists and networks didn't pay any taxes either, because that's the system. But they feed into our outrage about it, and they just quietly go, well, that's how it goes if you know how to play the game. And the average person isn't taught the game. And the average person is actually taught disdain for the game. For me, that's another kind of red pilling where you tell people that it's a shame to get welfare. That's something you should be ashamed about. But corporations and the Pentagon get welfare. To me, red pilling is any time you can convince somebody to take actions and talk against their own interest.

[13:36] Maria Judice: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Um, I do uh I do impact producing, but right now I'm I have a group that I have of like maybe five or six, um, particularly black women who are coming out with films um in a year and they're looking to raise funds. And I can tell you, I wish that conversation was like we just sit down and I give you a strategy on how to impact impact produce. That is not our first session. Our first session is how to heal yourself from your distaste of money and and gaining money and bringing money and funds to your art. And I say this because I've had to do it for myself. Like I really got into impact producing and fundraising because I was perfectly happy being poor and never making art because it seemed way too stressful to do the industry game of that I grew up in, which was like be with all these like white male producers and just watch them harm people and step on other people's necks and take money. And that just didn't seem like a way that I wanted to move.

[14:42] Maria Judice: So I was just like, well, I won't have anything to do with money. Money is dirty. And then I was like, well, you're not doing shit. So you're gonna have to figure out your relationship to money. And that means you're gonna have to do that healing work. And you're gonna have to kind of sit in a space where you stand in your truth and you say to motherfuckers, like, I need money, give me money. Like, my shit is just as important as your shit. Give me that money to make my stuff. And that is like been a place for me of like especially 2020, where I'm just like, again, back to my labor. If I'm gonna give free labor out, I'm gonna give it out to the people that I want to give it out to. And I'm gonna make sure that it has this kind of uh exponential impact on it, right?

And I sit in a circle with these black women who are all making like their first feature, first short, first dock, and they have no idea how to do it. And so, since I've done a number of films and I've raised a number of so much money for these films, I'm like, I'm literally giving you free advice that you would go to another impact producer and she or him would charge you what 100, $150 an hour for for this information.

[15:48] Maria Judice: So I've listened to, you know, you talk to other people, and I've talked to you many times, and I wonder have you been putting any of this down in writing? Because things that you tell me that you have other people do, you know, if it was codified in a book, you could go like here and turn here's your book, and now you do all you make the calls to these people and tell them they need to hit up these 10 people and you make the calls of those because those are the kind of things that I know that you do.

[16:14] Maria Judice: Yeah, I'm I am working on that right now. I'm trying to I put together kind of through this group, which is why I did this group. So, you know, there's kind of a mutual appreciation thing. You know, I put this group together so I could put together all my kind of thoughts in some kind of form and whatever. Um, so that's what these black women are helping me do when I'm helping them kind of raise funds for their project. And I'm very much working on a book around the black film's protest. So right now, you will heal here on Thursday my first three pages of this introduction, which I'm very embarrassed to read out loud. But right now I have 30 pages of what is black cinema. And that is something I'm very interested right now around, because I think that's the bigger picture, and it does investigate, you know, our relationship to money and and for us by us, right?

We can fund our own filmmaking. We don't have to be this little dot inside of you know, dominant culture filmmaking. We could literally be over here and they can be over here, right? And funds can go.

[17:19] Maria Judice: I I mean, I think that there's a red pilling that has gone over the entire globe, this idea of scarcity. Yeah, this is a rich globe that is full of enough resources for everyone. And then when we invest in the story of scarcity, we do ourselves and everyone else in our world a disservice. There is more than enough on this planet for everyone to have what they need. I also want to say there's something I was reading this week. We're gonna have Tyson Young Caporta here in two weeks. And he wrote this book called Sand Talk. And it's been changing my brain. It's been changing my brain. And he says, for the first peoples of the Aboriginal culture, they recognize that violence is a natural part of this existence.

And so violence is spread across the entire community. Even children have access to violence. In the domesticated cultures, we put violence in a small group of people's hands. And then that allows those people to get too powerful and enact violence on us, but we also export our violence. So we can sit here and be holier than thou and talk about those people who have guns, and I don't believe in guns, but guns make it possible for them to get the coal tan and makes the cell phone work. Guns make it possible for me to have the oil that is in my car. Guns make it possible for me to eat that seafood that they're, you know, people are being enslaved and forced to work to get all of these things that I love that allow me to be nonviolent. So we are violent, and our pretense to not be violent. And it's that thing for me of like I, you know, I don't judging people. We we are all violent.

[19:12] Maria Judice: So many pieces there. I want to I can I just speak to a couple of things very lightly. I'm not even gonna say much of it, but I think there's a huge piece from for me that I've been like reckoning with myself about my own complicity in violence, in patriarchy, in capitalism, in even my own safety, right? Like the how and I think I think there's a piece here of like just because I'm a black woman in America doesn't mean I'm not complicit in this violence that America seems to keep just mining. Like it's like we're mining violence. And then there's another piece of domesticated, right? Like I've been thinking about that from the position I'm in in California and being born and raised in San Francisco and my grandfather came out here in the late 40s after World War II, as many Black folks did a part of the great black migration.

But that sense of California being this kind of utopia of palm trees, but the palm trees are domesticated. This is one big fucking sand dune. It is a desert every piece of green we see is domesticated. And so if we don't even understand that our natural environment is domesticated, how much do we know how much we're domesticated? And so that investigation has really kind of brought me to like then what is the California black aesthetic right? Who are we when we decided to come here and and run away from those trees that were so strong with these strong branches that they were lynching us from. And we're like, oh well they have palm trees here. You can't lynch us from a no palm tree but yet they still continue to lynch us in California. So I that's a whole like that's a whole essay.

[21:08] Maria Judice: Yeah, but it's like there's the layers and the layers and the layers and the layers that you can keep going with anything. My daughter came in one day the other day and she was like, I'm bored. And I'm thinking, you're bored out here, and I've just invented a game and I'm writing a story. And like, like what have you bored? Like, there's just so many things to be thinking about and do, and so many things to create out of the ether. Like, there's just I'm never bored. I am never bored. Pandemic has been such a great place where nobody bothering me. I can be in my space. I can be investigating the internet. I can be searching Google nonstop. Like I from for my documentary, I got these FBI files, and it was just like this mind-blowing 300-page document that I still could still pull art out of. You know, like so much of that is this sense of of this narrative that we've seen for the past 30 years that it's been called a suicide, but everybody else called it a lynching.

[22:06] Maria Judice: Like everyone else. And then we see all these other lynchings that happen, and oh, it was a suicide. Oh, it was a suicide. And I'm just like, like I could be here for days. I could, I could literally do this investigation work. Plus, my in my alternate life, I am a detective. Like that is what I really want to do. What is that? I just want to be a detective. I don't know. Like, I want to detect be detecting stuff. I want to be investigating, right? Like, who put this chair on the street? Maria's on the case. You know, that's like my I love being a detective. My favorite genre is the detective genre. Like, I love it.

[22:44] Tonya Pinkins: Really? Fascinating. Now I know, you know, when you talk about this money thing and your own disdain with money, I know that you have raised a lot of money for the nonprofit for the homeless that you work for. And I'm sure that money has no politics attached to it. There are people who are doing their philanthropic work and you know, their service and their public relations. And you've raised millions of dollars.

[23:06] Maria Judice: Yes, this year alone, I will hit a 2 million mark just in raising 2 million dollars this month, I hopefully, um, for Code Tinderloin, which is my uh screensaver behind me, which is an organization in the tenderloin of San Francisco, which is one of the most concentrated places for unhoused and homeless people, but also it's the highest concentration of children and the highest concentration of elderly people. So, and it's also the highest concentration of nonprofits, which is like we have all these services in this area, but the need is just growing. And it's also growing within this 2020 year. It's growing as of 2021. We're preparing for what will happen in 2021 when all these evictions happen in San Francisco in California, and we're still in a space where like Middle California kind of drops its homeless people in LA and in San Francisco.

So we see the kind of uh concentrated services that are needed for all of California in really just two places. Um so the politics on that are insane. Um raising money is is also fun because I get to feed people and I get to help them, you know, get jobs and find places for their families. Like we fed about 400 people on Thanksgiving, and we could have fed 4,000 people on Thanksgiving. You know, I cooked a big ass pot of beans that fed 100 people, but I literally stressed out at the end of it, like fuck, I should have bought like six pounds of beans. That wasn't enough. And that is the place that we're in. But at the same time, it was so joyous to be like with folks in community in whatever pandemic has made community for us six feet away, and just people just having smiles on their face because they had food, you know, for the week of the holidays. Like that's a huge thing. And that's like basic necessities that the US and even California is not providing for our folks.

[25:12] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, it's the 28th, which is uh two days after Thanksgiving, and much of the country is still having you know fairly warm weather. I know that um Minneapolis and New Hampshire have had snow, but um the hunger that we have in America right now, people do not have enough food. And as these evictions happen with the cold weather coming on, we are going to see death that is not just COVID-related, but COVID and hunger and homelessness and poverty related. And as the current person leaving the White House is going out and intentionally wreaking havoc, intentionally moving funds from places that could do could serve the nation. Um, there will be a lot of work that we all have to do in the new year, and we're gonna have to help one another. We're gonna have to think of everybody as we are all our brother and sister's keepers because um we all need some help right now.

[26:14] Maria Judice: Hence my give care slogan here, right? Like, I'm like, forget all the other stuff. Just give care. Like whatever religion you co-sign on, whatever politics you you uh send your campaign money to, just think of it as giving care and whatever that means for you. And somebody has like something for that, right? Like you want to drop off socks, you want to you want to give just money so that we can go buy turkeys, like that's all good, right? You don't have to actually be down in in the tenderloin helping us out. You can just give in any way you can. And if giving means that you just are less shitty to folks that are on the street, that are my bus stop neighbor and and my sidewalk neighbor, that also too can be give care in this period. And that that is the latitude of care that we need to give. Our our sense of care is so narrow right now. And because of this president, I think we have to reevaluate for ourselves like how we give care to one another, right?

[27:20] Tonya Pinkins: Even uh uh the ED of um Code Tinderloin has this great quote that I love. And he was like, if everybody go get their mama, they brother, they uncle, they grandpa, they wife that's out on these streets, we would take care of homeless because homeless people don't just appear out of nowhere, they are related to somebody. They are a part of somebody's family and somebody's community. And we have just decided to stop giving care towards them. So if we can kind of say, like, all right, let me go get my auntie. I know she's out there somewhere, at least I'm gonna bring her some food if she don't want to come home. That is where we're at. And that makes a huge difference. And it don't have to be our own auntie. We can go get somebody else's somebody else's brother. But if we each take care of someone else, and because you talked about the thing of the energy, you know, our energy and attention where it goes, that's what we grow.

[28:12] Maria Judice: And you know, if I'm sometimes I don't carry cash anymore because we live in a world where you don't have to carry cash. I try to just give a blessing. If I'm walking by somebody who is homeless or without, I try to just bless them that they will have all their needs met. And I think that just even the quality of attention and energy that we um project towards people in our community and in our world has the power to help it become a better place.

[28:40] Maria Judice: Yes, I have a new project that I'm writing about um a black woman from a very um wealthy family who has schizophrenia and um her daughter dies and she breaks down and ends up out in the streets um and becomes homeless. And nobody knows her background, they don't know who she is. She's a dancer, she's an artist, she has a very wealthy family, but she just can't get her mental state together to do the the call, the tell my family to come pick me up. And she's treated like crap, right? Like she's treated by by regular ass people who we call liberals, we call Democrats, we call Republicans, we call all the politics, and she's treated like shit because she's seen as you know, an um a homeless person, you know, somebody who has a lot of so many names, you know, you can hear on the street when it comes to homeless people when you work in in the field, and that sense of of that story for me is every person that I've met has a story that's similar to that.

They might not be a wealthy black person, but they are somebody who is a veteran that worked in, that uh served in our one of our wars, you know. We still got Vietnam vets out here on the streets. We got folks, we had a doctor at Code Tinderloin who ended up homeless in LA because of drug addiction. And he came through our organization, got himself back on his feet, got into a program, and now he has a practice again in San Francisco. It took him about five to six years to get back on his feet. But before that, everyone just saw him as this dude, right? This dude asking for money, this dude that's high. Now they see this dude that they can go and get medical care from.

[30:35] Maria Judice: And I just want to say the last piece of it is like this kind of sense of life transitions, which a lot of the work we do is about getting people living wage salaries. So we try, there's a big chunk of people we've gotten jobs within tech companies. But we also kind of do this work with the tech companies to say, what is the kind of care that you're giving for your employees that have life transitions? Because being in San Francisco, we got a lot of tech folks from the first dot com era, from this.com era that have found themselves in some kind of trauma within their life that has brought them to the streets, that has brought addiction into their life, that has put them in a kind of space of being unhoused and homeless.

And they were once at Google, they were once at Facebook, they, you know, they they were early Yahoo people. I don't know how old people are, but Yahoo. It was an internet site that we used to be on. Um, and in that sense of like everyone's got life transition. I think Maria could easily have a life transition. And who's gonna who's gonna catch me? Who's gonna care for me?

[31:42] Tonya Pinkins: Well, it has been so lovely talking with you today, Maria. Thank you for coming on our red pilling of America, which we do every week at 5 p.m. with Marissa Lynn. Studios, right? Am I saying it right? You know, I get all of her names wrong. Marissa Lynn Daniel Studios, um, so grateful to Marissa for hosting this and and thank you for coming and and talking with us because it's a conversation we can have forever. We all have these stories we have to uh to let go. It's all a story, and we can let them go. And every time we let one go, we allow ourselves and our world to become bigger and more expansive and to work for more people. Thank you again, Maria.

[32:25] Maria Judice: Thank you, Tanya. I really appreciate your voice and our conversations always have so much energy. And you know that thank you so much, Marissa and Will. I appreciate you. This has been a great talk, and thank you for letting me share my work. You know, it's still really special for me as a filmmaker and an artist and an organizer to share the work that I do with others, and that really does mean a lot to me. So thank you.