Ivy Meeropol Tells Ryan Millsap the Story of Roy Cohn: Bully, Coward, Victim

Ryan Millsap, Chairman & CEO of Atlanta-based Blackhall Studios, is one of today’s top entertainment executives! With a vision for Blackhall that’s ambitious, energizing, and boundless, Millsap is blazing a trail through the heart of the South – and setting his sights on the future of entertainment. Listen and learn as Ryan Millsap journeys through the myriad industries, people, and landscapes that traverse the complex and dynamic world of film production.

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Ryan: Welcome to the Blackhall Studios Podcast. I'm Ryan Millsap. I got into the moviemaking business by being a real estate entrepreneur, but also because I'm a big movie fan. I get a huge kick out of watching blockbuster movies that I watch being made at Blackhall. COVID-19 has put a temporary crimp in production — hasn't it for everybody? But some amazing movies will be shooting at our studio soon, and I'll have some amazing folks on the podcast.

I'm also into ethics and philosophy, and I think you'll see those themes throughout the podcast. So, you're wondering: where exactly does the movie business and philosophy come together? That's the journey I want to take you on the Blackhall Studios Podcast. I’ll bring you guests from both worlds, and I think you'll be surprised at how much philosophy goes into the world of making movies. Plus, you'll get an inside look at the new Hollywood of the South right here in Atlanta, Georgia. Give a listen. I think you'll enjoy what you hear. I'm happy to have you along for the ride on the Blackhall Studios Podcast.

My guest today is Ivy Meeropol: director, producer, and granddaughter of the couple convicted and executed for espionage in 1953 — Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Ivy Meeropol directed and produced the HBO documentary Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, which premiered at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Meeropol is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was a 2013 Sundance Institute Fellow. Listen up to this profoundly current conversation I'm privileged to have with Ivy Meeropol.

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Ryan: Welcome to the Blackhall Studios Podcast. My guest today is Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — who many of you may know the story of, but we're going to talk about it a little bit today. Specifically, we're going to talk about her documentary that is on HBO right now, which is excellent: Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn. It premiered at the 2019 New York Film Festival, and is now on HBO. I watched it on HBO Max. Ivy, welcome to the Blackhall Studios Podcast.

Ivy: Thank you so much for having me, Ryan.

Ryan: I'm glad you're here. Share with us a little bit about the organic evolution of telling the Roy Cohn story. I mean, obviously, this is a story that was in your family. But walk us through a little bit about that evolution for you.

Ivy: Sure. I mean, as you see when you watch the film, as you know, it opens with some old Super-8 footage of myself and my family. I'm around ten years old, and I'm pointing out these portraits on the wall of my grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. And so, the idea there was to bring people into our world immediately in the film.

I grew up knowing, from a very young age, what had happened to my grandparents, my father, and my uncle — which was that my grandparents were accused of stealing the secret of the atom bomb and sharing that information with the Soviet Union. And they were executed in June of 1953, when my father was ten and my uncle was seven. I grew up with this horrific story looming over us. Also, there were many names associated with it — many figures associated with this story — who were kind of like the bad guys in my in my young mind.

They included everyone from J. Edgar Hoover to Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn featured into our story because he was the assistant prosecutor in their trial. It was his first big job out of law school. I mean, he'd done a little bit of work, but this launched his career. He was only 23, and he had a lot to do with sending them to the electric chair — getting them convicted, of course, but also specifically pushing for executions; for the execution of my grandmother. He helped manufacture a story that my grandmother's brother, David Greenglass — who was arrested first before they were — he basically guided Greenglass to tell a story that would get Ethel arrested, which was that she had typed up some notes. He later admitted that he had lied, and that Cohn had given him that story to tell.

So, sorry. I know that may not have told you the whole thing. I just wanted to give everyone the full background there.

Ryan: No, I like that. One of the things that I was wondering — as I read a little bit around the internet, and some more about the story after I started watching the documentary, which I watched in two pieces — I watched the first half and then I took a break. I did some things, and I watched the second half. One of the questions that I had is, what is the family's position today on... These are your grandparents?

Ivy: Yes.

Ryan: Right. So, what is the family's position about what they actually did or didn't do? And then the question of, then, what did Roy Cohn do with them that was unethical, perhaps? But start with your grandparents. Tell me what, today, the family position is on what they did or didn't do.

Ivy: Well, the position is that Julius was involved in some low-level espionage — actually, before the Soviet Union became our enemy. They were still our allies. This was, like, the late 1940s. They were still our allies. And what we have come to kind of understand as we try to grapple with — and we can't really put ourselves back in time, necessarily, and we don't have enough information — but what would compel him to do that, other than being a member of the American Communist Party, and believing that the Communist Party was the most progressive movement, and it was going to save our country also — because it was more equal, and more fair, and cared more about civil rights and all the kind of progressive movement issues of the time.

But it also had to do with the fact that the Soviet Union was fighting the Nazis. And they were fighting them before we were. So, for a Jewish American like my grandfather — my grandparents were — my father always talks about this. He probably felt that supporting the Soviet Union was also supporting the defeat of Nazi Germany.

So there's a lot of different layers to this, if we try to imagine what they were up to. We do know that he was actively trying to share military industrial secrets with the Soviet Union. But he was a very low-level. And so the idea that they could have helped get that secret — the so-called secret of the atom bomb — and be the people to give that to the Soviet Union, was outlandish. And we still we still feel that to this day.

Now, that said, David Greenglass — who was working at Los Alamos, where they were developing the bomb — he may have been trying to do that. And he may very well have. I mean, now experts look at what he did; the secrets that he did pass — because we know that Greenglass was involved as well — that they were of minimal import. They were kind of basic, rudimentary drawings that wouldn't have led to much discovery, or much that could have accelerated the development of the bomb for the Soviet Union. But that doesn't mean he wasn't trying to. So, we grapple with this. We live with this, which is a big change from when I was growing up; when my father was younger. Also, what you see in the film — where we really believed that they were totally innocent — because that's what they said.

So, I'm sorry — I don't think I answered your question fully in the beginning. How my understanding of our story, and then the interest in Roy Cohn, has changed over time — and led me to make this current film — had a lot to do with what I went through making my first film, Heir to an Execution, which really focuses on my grandparents and what happened to my father and my uncle as a result of their trial and execution.

But in that film, I focused on David Greenglass as the worst person you could imagine. Right? I'm like, “He's my grandmother's brother, and he makes up this story — which causes her, both of them, to be convicted and be executed — but specifically her,” because there was no code name. We know that she was innocent. We know that, even if she was a supportive wife — even if she was very smart, very political, and supported what Julius was doing — there was absolutely no evidence that she was a spy, or doing anything that would have at all justified her being convicted, and certainly not executed. So I fixated on that.

But, making Heir to an Execution, I kind of came out the other side, and I started to understand that David Greenglass was used as well, and that he was terrified. And he was basically confronted. Cohn came to him and said, “If you don't cooperate with us, your wife is going to be arrested next.” So, if you understand, he's been arrested — and his wife, she has a codename. She is part of this spy ring that the family has participated in. And he has two young children at home as well. Cohn is saying to him, “You're going to go to the electric chair. Your wife's going to go electric chair unless you cooperate.”

So I started to shift. I started to think: “Who is the real villain here?” Much more than David Greenglass, it's Roy Cohn.

Ryan: So, the belief is that the family was involved in a spy ring. Your grandmother's brother and your grandfather. Your grandmother knew about it, and was maybe a supportive wife to her spy husband. But then, the contention is that the spying was at really such a low level — and the information flow at a non-critical import — that it didn't really deserve the death penalty.

Ivy: Absolutely. Just to be precise, they were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. There was never even enough proof of treason. They were executed at a very low bar. They were convicted of just conspiracy to commit espionage. But because of the frenzy of the time, and the fear mongering, and the anti-communist fervor that was growing and growing, and just exploded exponentially once Cohn goes to D.C. and becomes McCarthy's right-hand man — that all helped. That all created an atmosphere where executions were tolerable, and actually demanded.

Ryan: Sounds to me like, then, Roy Cohn wasn't alone. There was obviously some sort of government mechanism behind him.

Ivy: Oh, absolutely.

Ryan: Right? It seemed like they were asking, or begging, or maybe demanding, bodies being drug into the streets, so to say. And maybe your grandparents, unfortunately, were caught in that political power struggle.

Ivy: Absolutely. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that they wouldn't budge. There's a whole culture of naming names at the time, you know? You get arrested; you get accused of something; and they'd say, “Well, can you can you tell us about some of your comrades?” That would lead to the next and next. It kind of stopped with them.

Victor Navasky, who was the editor in chief of The Nation, wrote a book years and years ago called Naming Names, that explores this in depth. But they were stubborn, and they said, “No, we're not going to do it.” And a lot of what I uncovered in Heir to an Execution was that they were asked to give other names, and they refused. Even bringing in my grandmother, and trying to arrest her, was a way to try to break my grandfather, and it didn't work. And it frustrated everyone involved.

You're absolutely right that Cohn was just part of it. But Cohn — he would call the judge, Judge Kaufmann, to discuss the sentencing, and discuss the death penalty, and urged him to apply the death penalty to Ethel. That's not legal. That's ex parte communication. You're not supposed to do that when you're on the prosecution team. You are only supposed to speak to the judge when the other defense attorneys are present. And he ignored that completely — which, as we know, is no surprise.

But I think if you ask how my understanding of Cohn, and my interests, grew to the point where I wanted to make this film — to be honest, I didn't want to make a film about Cohn, because I didn't want to revisit my family story. I had done it. I have a lot of stories I want to tell. I have a lot of things I want to do. And making Heir to an Execution was a grueling and cathartic experience. But I also didn't want to just be the granddaughter of the Rosenbergs again in my work.

So I resisted it, even though Cohn was so fascinating to me. And I kept thinking, “Why doesn't somebody make a film about this guy?” And no one had made a feature length documentary. Of course, as soon as I decided to, I learned that someone else was. I don't know if you've seen the other.

Ryan: I haven't.

Ivy: There was another feature documentary that came out a little bit before ours, but I just decided to keep my head down and say, “I think I'm telling the story my way, and it'll be its own film. And hopefully there's room for two films about Roy Cohn.” Turns out, I think, there is.

Ryan: I thought I thought you were incredibly sympathetic — maybe ‘empathetic’ is even a better word — with Roy's life arc.

Ivy: Yeah.

Ryan: I thought you were very kind to him. You obviously include the portions where people call him the devil. But you also tell the stories that make him feel human — when it could have been really easy to tell a story that made him look only like a sociopath.

Ivy: Yeah, yeah.

Ryan: What did you do — was that a spiritual exercise?

Ivy: I kind of actively pursued empathy, I have to say. Like, when I decided that I was going to make this film, I knew right away that I could not just... for basic storytelling purposes alone, right? I mean, it's not interesting to have character that's just one note. There's only so many times you can hear people saying how evil someone is before you're like, “Oh, yeah, right, I get it.” And then you don't care. You're not engaged.

And the same holds when you're the filmmaker. I had to be trying to find out more about him and exploring the complexities of this person — or how am I going to spend two years of my life researching, and then shooting it and editing it, and spending all the time that we do? I wanted to know more. But I think the moment that that started to happen for me was way back when I first saw the AIDS quilt panel, and I explored it. I talk about this in the film. I was a college student, and I had traveled to Washington, D.C. with my father.

For those who don't know, the Names Project was the official name of it. There's this massive display, rolled out on the mall of the Smithsonian — at the Smithsonian Mall in Washington, D.C. Thousands and thousands of these little panels that people lovingly made for friends and family who had died from AIDS — HIV, and AIDS. And my father and I walked. We could have commented on any part of the mall, the but the very first panel we walk up to says “Bully, Coward, Victim: Roy Cohn.” Somebody had made sure that he was included there, even though he had denied he was gay his whole life, up until he was dying of AIDS. He denies he has AIDS. He says he has liver cancer, till the very end.

I didn't know that he was gay. I didn't know he died of AIDS. I was a college student. I hadn't thought about Roy Cohn really at all — except for the what I knew of his relationship to my grandparents’ trial. And so, I was shocked. I just had that moment where I thought, “This is good; the guy deserves it.” And then I felt horrible for feeling that way. And I thought, well, “The poor guy,” you know?

I started to understand that you can hold both of those feelings at once. You don't have to only despise this person. You can also try to understand how they became monstrous. To humanize him is to also take away some of his power, I think.

Ryan: Let me play documentarian critic for a second, and share with you what I was observing — and what I thought I was observing — the spiritual exercise that I thought I was observing while I watched this documentary, which may have been unintended, but you tell me. I'm going to lay this out. You tell me if it was intended or unintended.

As I watched this documentary, I felt like... Let's imagine your grandfather. And we can tell that he is a man of principles. He is a man who has his own ethic. Right? He's not going to turn people in. He is willing to fight for things he believes in, to the to the level that he's willing to fight a fight against the country that he lives in — on whatever low level. But yet this man who does some things that people would call evil was a man who actually had his own set of ethics that he was willing to die for.

Ivy: Yeah.

Ryan: Right? So interestingly, as you then explore Roy Cohn in this very empathetic way, I felt like in many ways it was this exploration of a man who many people called the devil — who many people believe did lots of evil things — and yet you were telling the story about how even this man had a code of ethics.

Ivy: Yeah.

Ryan: And had principles, and had discipline, and had a certain ethic of ruthlessness and winning that was important to him. That he was willing to sacrifice basically everything for. And so, I didn't know. Was that on purpose? Because I felt like, emotionally, you were comparing Roy Cohn and the difficulty of finding empathy for him — but you did it, and you allowed me to do it, watching the documentary — to the same difficulty that someone might have, having empathy for your grandfather as a convicted spy.

Ivy: I think you're right in the sense that... it wasn't a conscious thing, necessarily. Although I did start to see as we were structuring — because it was very challenging structuring this film in the edit — that it was more that it was almost like my father versus Cohn. But I think what you're getting at is even deeper. And, for me, I think part of why I look to humanize — and I do this with all my work. I mean, I made a film about the Indian Point nuclear power plant north of New York City, which is such a touchstone, right? People have been trying to shut that plant down. And I wanted to humanize the guys who work at the plant.

I'm always trying — even though I'm much more on the side of the activists trying to shut it down — my focus was to try to humanize. I think what you're getting at is that, because I grew up with so many people thinking my grandparents were evil, and struggling with that kind of simplistic and devastating label, which is dehumanizing — I think that it's made me someone who, no matter what the subject is, I'm going to fight against that.

Ryan: Well, that came through, I thought, incredibly clearly in your approach to Roy — because you of all people would have a psychological excuse to not treat him with that much empathy. And you did. And so then, conversely, you have the perfect position to treat him with empathy in a way that would encourage other people to do that — because he committed atrocities against your grandparents.

Ivy: Yeah. It's almost like, by having me be the one to do it, it gives other people permission to kind of open up and be okay with understanding him a little bit more. It doesn't mean that we forgive him. It doesn't mean we don't think that he behaved horribly, and was cruel, and I think history judges him that way. But I just think it doesn't really further our understanding or conversation about how we how we allowed him to operate the way he did, and enabled him, and how so many people — liberals and Democrats and all sorts of, supposedly, people who would reject him — actually embraced him.

I think, for me, it was very poignant that he lived so much of his life in hiding, and lying, and what that does to a person. And I think that if there's anything we can learn from Cohn’s story, too, it’s that any kind of great societal bigotry that forces people to live a lie... now, of course, he chose that as well. But you have to put it in the context of the times. It was terrifying to be a gay man, especially when he was in Washington, DC in the 50s during the McCarthy era.

I actively tried to imagine what it would have been like for him to go to Washington — where more gay people were being run out of the government than suspected communists at the time. He had to really be extremely careful. And what does that do to a person? I mean, he's a young guy. I looked at him. I looked at the photos of him, and the footage, and I tried to understand. You can see that he's happier in different places. You see he looks happier in Provincetown — in all those photos that we ended up getting.

Ryan: The boat photos.

Ivy: The Polaroids, where you really see him relaxed, right? He just looks like a different person.

Ryan: What did you learn in your research about him — about his youth? Did you uncover any things that might tell us about traumas that would have affected him in such a way that kind of followed him throughout his life?

Ivy: It was very hard to find out a lot about his childhood. I think I didn’t uncover any real traumas, but what I discovered was that he was almost like a grown-up by the time he was five years old. He was someone who was sitting at the table with his father — and his father was a judge, and a big part of the New York Democratic Party. He knew all the party bosses. So he would sit at the dinner table, and be part of these very heady, adult conversations. And they would engage him.

He learned early on about what he called the ‘favor bank.’ You know: “You do something for me, I do something for you.” And that was part of how he operated, of course. But I think, interestingly, his mother and his Aunt Libby were two figures in his life — probably the most important people who shaped him. And they were very different. His mother doted on him, but was, I think, kind of cold and withholding and difficult — and also extremely ambitious, and wanted him to be a huge success. And there was a lot of pressure on him.

Meanwhile, his Aunt Libby was more warm and fun-loving, and I think he could be more open with her. From what I understand, she knew he was gay, and in later years, he would bring her to parties and be very open about who he was with. And you see her at some of those parties. Meanwhile, he never came out to his mother. Maybe she suspected. We don't know. But it was a very different kind of relationship.

So, it's almost like those two women represent these two sides of Roy. But I think, also... he was so ambitious. He's gay, and he's also Jewish, which was also not easy. And so, some people that call him a self-hating Jew. I think I'm not quite sure I would call him a self-hating Jew. He was careful to make sure that he was aligned with the so-called ‘good Jews’ versus the ‘bad Jews,’ who are people like my grandparents. You know — “lefties,” “commies” or potentially, spies. And they they're lumped together that way.

So for him, to distinguish himself from the ‘bad Jews’ was really, really important. I think it drove a lot of his anti-communist activity and positions. And same with his homophobia. I mean, we have him in the film publicly decrying and condemning the gay civil rights bill that was working its way through New York City's council. So, he would do the same thing with being Jewish. I think the anti-communist stance was his way of just saying, “I'm a good Jew. These are the bad Jews.”

Ryan: I thought, in the film, the relationship with Donald Trump was fascinating as well.

Ivy: Oh, yeah.

Ryan: Did you learn a lot about that? I mean, did you know about that before?

Ivy: No. What finally got me to — after thinking what a great subject Roy Cohn is, and wondering “why doesn't somebody else do this film?” — what really got me to finally decide to do it myself was the election of Trump. And it was because I knew that he had been his mentor. I didn't know to what extent. I also knew that he'd been the Trump family lawyer for years, and that they would be seen parties together. But that was about it. I had no idea just how crucial Cohn was to the creation of the Donald Trump we know today, now, as president.

I mean, he was instrumental in putting Trump together with the very people who got him elected. Roger Stone, Paul Manafort — they were Cohn allies. They were Cohn people. And Cohn introduced Trump to everybody. I mean, he brought him into Manhattan from Queens, in a way that he had not had access before. He connected him with the mob. He connected him with all these political figures, and very directly connected him with the Reagan White House — because Cohn had been essential to the Republican Party work in New York, and supporting Reagan. And he had a very good relationship with everybody at the Reagan White House. And that's how Trump started to imagine himself on the national stage, and in politics.

We actually pinpoint in the film — I think — the actual moment that that started to happen. It was Cohn using his contacts in media, with a Washington Post reporter, Lois Romano, who was one of our wonderful subjects. Cohn asked her to do a major interview with a young Donald Trump, where Cohn basically set up this story, and had Trump saying, “Hey, Roy thinks I should do this. I could be the nuclear arms negotiator for the United States with the Soviet Union.”

I mean, this is this dopey real estate millionaire at the time, in New York City, who wasn't taken very seriously — because it was his father's business. And there he is, all of a sudden, because Roy Cohn is so powerful and so connected — there he is thinking he could serve in that role. And, for the work that we were doing on this film, that felt like a really important thing to uncover. It’s just amazing. So many people have no idea who Roy Cohn is, never mind how much he influenced our current president, or the situation we’re in now.

Ryan: When Roger Stone appeared in the film, I almost fell over. I went, “Oh, my gosh. Look at the way these things just all come back around.”

Ivy: Exactly. I think people felt like McCarthyism, and the world of Roy Cohn, was so far away. Right? But now we see that it's not. I mean, we took great pains to not focus so much on Trump, but all the stories and things we were discovering and showing about how Cohn operated are just so reminiscent. So, what you have is scenes where this journalist, Peter Manseau, is going through all these unpaid bills of Roy's. And we don't need to say it — but, basically, you get it. This is Trump. The Cohn who is so proud of not paying his taxes, and who's openly flouting the IRS. That's all — that’s Trump.

So I think history's repeating itself — in a more subtle way. But once you really look at it, it's not so subtle; once you really bring it out.

Ryan: So, there's quite a few listeners to this podcast who are movie makers. Tell us a little bit about the actual deal-making of this documentary. How did you put the money together? What kind of a budget did you have? Was HBO involved at the beginning, or did they just buy the film once it was completed?

Ivy: Well, I was very, very fortunate with this project. I mean, my relationship with HBO goes back to Heir to an Execution. I had never made a film before. And Sheila Nevins, who was then the head of HBO Documentaries — a well known, amazing executive producer there — she had a lot of faith in me, and gave me small amounts of money, and allowed me to figure out how to make Heir to an Execution, even though I’d never directed anything before.

I had worked in politics for years. I’d worked as a journalist. I had written some screenplays, but that story really led me to make a documentary; my family's story, I knew, had to be a documentary. So, it's kind of like the story dictated the medium. So, that's way back. That came in 2004, but it was a big success for them. We premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was quite a heady experience for me, never having done this before. We were shortlisted for an Academy Award, and that did very well for HBO.

So, all these years later, I went back to them. Now Sheila is not there anymore, but Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller are both at the helm of the documentary side of HBO. And I'm very close with both of them. What happened was, I did not feel strongly enough that I had a film just based on my own personal connection. So I set out — I gave myself the task of getting a hold of some rare materials that would make me feel like I had a film, or I had the foundation of a film.

What I mean by rare materials were audio, or video — film, video, whatever — that no one had ever heard before, and that would allow Cohn to almost narrate his story. I knew there had to be audio out there. So I started I started digging around in Provincetown, which led me to Peter Manseau. I won't get into all the details, but I made a deal with Peter Manseau that I would get access to these audiotapes from a big interview he did with Cohn for Playboy Magazine in 1981. And these are incredible. You get so excited, when you're a documentary filmmaker, to find something like that, right?

I took that to Nancy, with my producing partners on this — a company called Motto Pictures. Julie Goldman, who I made Indian Point with. I love them, and we have a great relationship. They’re very close with HBO as well. So Julie and I went to see Nancy, and I said, “Look, I have these tapes. I have this, I have that. This is why this story is so important. We need to go quickly on this.” Now, everyone out there who knows this business knows nothing moves that quickly. While HBO is trying to figure out what they wanted to do — if they wanted to give us development money — and I really felt like we had to move fast with this. Like, it's really timely. And I know how long it takes to really uncover new material, and great subjects to interview, and everything. So I was feeling very anxious about how quickly we could move.

In the meantime, I'm at a party, and I'm talking to people from Magnolia Pictures. I’m talking in the meantime with CNN Films; with Courtney Sexton, because she is someone I worked with on a film about the last days of the Obama administration. I worked on a film for CNN Films about that. And so I had a good relationship with her. There was a moment where it was like, “Oh, maybe Magnolia and CNN are going to come together and give us enough of a budget combined.”

We were looking for over a million for this, easily. And it ended up being, I think, like 1.3 — maybe even a little more, because of archival being so expensive. And I know, in some worlds, that's not very much money. But in documentary, that's a little bit on the high end. So, what happened was, as we were doing that, we circled back to HBO. We said, “Hey, we are talking to other people, but how are you guys feeling?” And within a week, they said, “That's it. We're in. We want to finance the whole thing.”

Ryan: That's fantastic.

Ivy: And it's thrilling for me, because I'm so used to cobbling together budgets — where, in the end, I don't even have enough, even after everything is said and done. This was great, because we were able to go straight into production. We started editing almost simultaneously, so we could move more quickly. And you can't do that unless you get the full budget right away.

Ryan: Well, I thought you just absolutely killed it on this documentary. It's fantastic. What's next for you? And what are you working on?

Ivy: Thank you. Well, one thing I really want to do is a scripted version of Cohn's life. I uncovered so many great stories, and so many details, and so much material, that I want, I think, a limited series — along the way of... did you see the Roger Ailes The Loudest Voice in the Room?

Ryan: Yes. Excellent.

Ivy: So, I am actually writing a pilot myself, and kind of an outline of what I see could be eight hours, possibly — a limited series based on the doc. So that's one thing.

Ryan: The pieces you put in about the play — the scenes from the play that that are basically based on Roy Cohn's life — I thought were incredibly indicative of a show that would be not totally different than, maybe, Succession.

Ivy: Right. Yes.

Ryan: That has that kind of same feel. That gritty, wealthy, power-struggle, Illuminati-esque kind of feel.

Ivy: Absolutely. And, of course, HBO would be my first choice to partner with on that. I'm definitely going to be talking to them. But I'm trying. I have enough written, and I'm supposed to start having conversations. In fact, I was actually in Los Angeles just before the pandemic, meeting with people about this idea. I was hoping to kind of time it to the release of the documentary to get something going.

And I've never done anything like that before myself. But I feel like I could be a writer, and even direct some of it. I don't know; I'd love to have that experience; to do that. And I just have so much good material. I mean, you can just imagine how he intersected with so many parts of American history — right? — and had an effect. I think it would be great.

So, I'm working on that. I've got some other documentaries. Of course, we're all kind of waiting to see what's going to happen, but I'm exploring a documentary project right now that would take place on Cape Cod, where there's a great white shark problem. I don't know if you heard about this. The Outer Cape — and the ocean and bayside — there are more and more great white sharks coming here. And I've been exploring the idea of doing this kind of ‘behind the scenes,’ more of a verité doc, where you're getting to know all these different players — the scientists, the environmentalists, but also the town board; tourism interests; all the clashing interests. Like, what the hell are we going to do about this? Because someone was killed in 2018. Someone almost died. The sharks are becoming more of a problem.

And it's the story of Jaws, of course. So we want to shoot it as an homage to Jaws. Because all the settings look the same. The characters are very similar. But what's interesting, as I'm exploring this, is actually... the virus. I've put this on hold. I was going to shoot this this summer, but then when everything fell apart in the spring, I couldn't get the financing, or people to commit to it who had been very interested. All hell broke loose. We didn't know what to do.

But now, I'm realizing that COVID, actually — the virus — is so relevant. You know how in Jaws, how recklessly this danger was dealt with? Famously, the mayor decides to lie to keep businesses going, right? And rushes to the idea that... we're rushing to reopen the economy at the expense of people's lives. There's just a lot of overlap here. It made me feel like this is actually a story that refers to the virus without talking about it directly, if that makes any sense.

Ryan: Absolutely. I get it.

Ivy: So I've got a lot that I want to do.

Ryan: Well, you're just at the very beginning of your career. It looks like we're right at what, in venture capital, we call ‘the bottom of the hockey stick.’ Right? So your career is about to explode upward. If people want to follow you, do you have social media? Where can they find you? How do they keep tabs on what you're doing, and be ready for your next movie or television show?

Ivy: Oh sure. Well, I'm not all that active on social media, but I am on Instagram. You can find me at @IVMeeropol, but it's just IV. No Y. And I'm on Facebook. Also, we have the Bully, Coward, Victim: Roy Cohn Facebook page — although I guess you can’t learn about new material there. I would say I will try to do a better job at posting about things that I'm going to be working on, but I do — as soon as something is happening, I'm usually putting it out there.

Ryan: Ivy, your future's bright. Thank you for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

Ivy: Thank you for talking to me, Ryan. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Ryan: I did too. That was fantastic. I love what you're doing. I mean, you're telling really good stories, and I can't wait to see what's next. Thanks for your time. This is Ryan Millsap, and this is the Blackhall Studios Podcast.

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Ryan: I'll leave you guys with thoughts that I write on Instagram. “No one ever said, reflecting on the whole of someone's life, ‘Man, that monstrous ego sure was worth it.’”

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Thanks for listening to the Blackhall Studios Podcast with Ryan Millsap. We want to hear from you! Find us on SoundCloud, iTunes or Spotify, and follow us on Instagram at @Ryan.Millsap.