Read More @HJ Reviews: Propaganda Or Fresh Perspective? Yo Ben Stein Cries Out for Freedom Darrel Manson Expelled from Narnia Mark Sommer Previews: Telecon Q & A Interview Transcript, Part 9 The Aims of Production Interview Transcript, Part 8 The Personal Impact Interview Transcript, Part 7 Darwinism and Nazi Germany Interview Transcript, Part 6 Atheism and the New Orthodoxy Interview Transcript, Part 5 Philosophy, Science, and Religion Interview Transcript, Part 4 So... What About Darwinism? Interview Transcript, Part 3 Expelled is About... What? Interview Transcript, Part 2 Telecon Introductions Interview Transcript, Part 1 The Battle Is Joined? Greg Wright Smartbombing Darwinianism Jack Cashill Do The Origins Of Life Matter? Yo SteinWatch HJ Myers Gets Some Airtime Greg Wright Trailer, Photos, Prod Notes, Overview By David Bruce, Webmaster March 28th Telecon Audio Greg Wright

About a billion words have been writ thus far about Expelled and the controversy that has sprung up around it—some would say "manufactured by its promotion"—over recent several weeks. Last Friday, I had the opportunity to talk for twenty minutes with Mark Mathis, Associate Producer on the film and one of the figures at the center of that controversy. (I published the transcript of my interview with P.Z. Myers, the other major player in that controversy, a couple of weeks ago.)

Rather than rehash a wealth of issues already covered in depth here at SteinWatch—or at Pharyngula, the official Expelled site, and now collected and distilled at the NCSE's Expelled Exposed site (with just a tinge of biased reportage)—I dove right in to try to get some hard answers from Mathis about open questions related to those existing controversial issues.

You may judge for yourself how successful I was in getting satisfactory answers. Personally, I'd feel better knowing a bit more yet before I write my own review of the film later this week.

Greg Wright: The latest "big news" is the letter from XVIVO that is being touted as a lawsuit—which is nothing more than a letter of intent to pursue legal action—regarding the animated sequence in Expelled.

Mark Mathis: Right.

GW: Obviously, if there were a lawsuit in process, you clearly wouldn't be able to comment on anything related to that. But my suspicion is, based on the letter itself—which has been disseminated on the web in PDF format, which I find a little odd—that the folks who wrote that letter haven't yet seen the finished film. Do you know whether they have or not?

MM: I think that your suspicion is probably well-grounded; but I couldn't tell you if they have. I suspect that they have not.

GW: Now, I'm also under the impression—and I don't know the facts here, so you can straighten me out—that the animation that was on the DVD that was handed out at word-of-mouth screenings is not the animation that appears in the final film.

MM: That is correct.

GW: So as I see it, XVIVO issued a letter asking for animation to be pulled from the film that isn't even in the film.

MM: Yes. I would say that is correct.

GW: I have compared the original Harvard footage with the promo DVD version that Myers has posted at Pharyngula, and though I've only seen the film once, as I recall, there are very, very substantial differences between the final cut of the animation and the version that appears on the promo DVD. Is that right?

MM: You know, I haven't made— I believe that's the case; but I haven't actually watched what Myers has posted. I haven't made my own comparison. I apologize; I should have done that, because I have the DVD version. I have the film on PC, too, so I can do that. My problem has been that I'm running so hard and fast doing twenty-seven other things that— I know that we've got Executive Producers who have dealt with this specifically, and this is kind of in the periphery of what I've been involved in. But I'm glad you brought that up, because I need to make that comparison myself, just for my own. But I know, because I've watched both, that certainly there are significant differences and improvements, and I believe that, because of those substantial differences, there isn't any merit to the charge.

GW: In a similar vein, one of the biggest controversies out there right now from those who are rather vigorously criticizing Expelled has to do with the origin of the title of the film—and the date on which the website domain was registered.

MM: Right. This is— It's so funny; it's kind of sad and pathetic, actually. But let me say something, and then I will directly address that with very specific information.

GW: Sure.

MM: Throughout the last weeks, maybe even months, what we have seen are allegations, charges that are made, that are not substantive, that don't cut to the heart of the film's arguments, that are really nothing more than insignificant distractions. And this is one of those. So when it comes to the title of the film, we argued about that very deep into the production of the film. And we did not settle on that title until very late in the process, many months, I believe, after the registration of the URL. Now, the reason that it was registered back then is that, all along the way, we were trying to come up with the best title; and we were somewhat frustrated that we had not nailed down what we thought was the best title. So along the way, we would come up with different ideas—and in this case, it was one of our Executive Producers who had thought of this title and then went and registered it, as he did others, so that when it came down to actually picking the title he would already have those URLs registered and there wouldn't be some chance that it would not be there, not be available.

GW: Sure.

MM: So this was just advance preparation for what was coming. Some of the cases that we shot came very late—like Robert Marks. Have you seen the film?

GW: Yes, I have.

MM: The Robert Marks [interview] at Waco was very late in the production. And I was talking to one of our Executive Producers, and he says he remembers us having a telephone conversation when they were actually in assembling the film. We weren't yet finished shooting the film, but we were piecing it together, sifting out the stuff we weren't going to use, pulling together the rough cut—which is a very large project. And at that point, we still hadn't actually chosen the title. So this is just a side distraction. We had to have a working title. "Crossroads" is the title we used. And this leads into the other accusation, that we somehow duped people into doing these interviews. I'm the guy who set up these interviews; I actually did many of the interviews—in the case of P.Z. Myers, Eugenie Scott, the first Richard Dawkins interview. I set them up, and I did them. I approached them and said, "We're doing this film about this flashpoint in the culture that exists; any time that you combine evolution, Intelligent Design, religion—this creates a cultural flashpoint, and it's happening all over the country. And we're doing a film on this. Would you like to participate? You're an expert." So in some cases—not in every case—I actually gave them the questions in advance. And in every case, we reviewed the questions in advance. And they all signed release forms; but there was one guy, Will Provine at Cornell, who has no objection to the film, and said he didn't want the fee. So he didn't take it; but the rest of them did. Now, I was a news reporter for almost ten years; I never gave people questions in advance. I never discussed the full context of the story that I was doing with the people before I interviewed them. And the reason—and you know this, doing the work you do—is that I want straightforward, honest answers to my questions.

GW: Right. And when you feed people the questions in advance, they're going to feed you the pre-packaged answers.

MM: Right! And so we knew we were going to get some pre-packaged answers; but you also know the free flow of an interview. They expand, and then you follow up. But you don't lay out everything for them because they're going to adjust their answers; and that's not what you want. What you want are straightforward, honest answers. So here's what's really interesting about this. You're not hearing any complaints about "I was taken out of context"—about "I didn't mean to say that." You saw the film: we have very long sections of these guys fully explaining their positions. There's no clipping, no creative editing to twist and turn what they're saying. There's no "out of context." So the concern that anyone should have when they feel they are being duped into an interview is that the interview is going to be used in a way that is inconsistent with what they believe. That's the concern. But that's not the charge being made. None of them are making that charge.

GW: Well, to be fair, Myers and Dawkins have been pretty outspoken about their objections to their segments' juxtaposition with the Nazi footage in the latter part of the film.

MM: I don't think that footage is intercut with their interviews.

GW: No, it isn't; but their point is that by sandwiching those images around those interviews, it creates the impression in viewers' minds that the filmmakers are trying to equate them with Nazism.

MM: Well, look, you can object all day long about specific things like that; but what we're clearly saying, and what we spell out in very specific language, is that Darwinism is a necessary condition to get to a phenomenon like Nazism—or for some of the other great atrocities, but we don't even get into that. You're talking about the kinds of mass death that you had under Stalin, or Pol Pot. When you have an entire society that embraces a purely materialist philosophy, this is a natural outgrowth. That doesn't mean it's going to happen; it doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen—and we state that in the film. But this is a specific kind of consequence that can happen. Now, how likely is it? I don't think anybody can even say that, because you have to have other conditions there. In the case of Nazi Germany, you had some charismatic, warped leader who was either driven by his belief system and wanted to advance the purity of the race using Darwinism as a justification and part of that belief system, or he believed is was a good piece of propaganda to drive what he wanted to do. Whether it's one case or the other is immaterial; that was the marketing of it, to the people. And so look; everyone of these guys: this is the complaint that we hear from them, from Scientific American, from any of these people who are just wedded to this Darwinian view—that it's just unconscionable to draw any connection between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas. And they make that exasperated claim because they know how powerful it is; and if they were being honest with themselves, they'd know that it's not deniable. It's there. The connection is there. How strong is that connection? It's strong enough that I think there's been a significant amount of scholarship done on it.

GW: I'm not arguing with any of that; and I think those reactions are overstated. But I think it would have been a stronger film had it concentrated on what happened with eugenics in the U.S., and not gone to Nazi Germany. But I'm not so interested in that point. To go back to the issue we discussed earlier over the naming of the film, what were some of the other names and websites that were considered for the film?

MM: As far as the ones that were registered, I'd have to check with the Executive Producer who did that. That's not in my arena. But I can tell you— Well, I was just about to reel off a list of names that were discussed; we had a lot. And, by the way, Expelled was not one I liked. I had some other ones that I was really passionate about and got ditched. But now I recall a conversation that I had with one of our Executive Producers, and I said, "They're going to want to know this"—but he didn't want to do that because of future projects. I'm sitting here, and I'm kind of ticked off because I want to give you about five of them, and I can't do that. But we had had meetings that were solely about naming the film—and at great cost, because people had to fly in for these meetings. We even had a facilitator at one of them. And it was a really frustrating process because not one of them stood out. But by the time we got to the end of production—or very nearly the end of production—Expelled became the leader by far, because of what we were seeing, because of the things that had popped up late in the process.