On a recent Thursday, Chantal Smith, a creative director, met the actor Jon Hamm and the writer-producer John Mankiewicz outside Studio 525, in Chelsea, to give them a preview of the party space for the première of their new docudrama, “The Big Lie,” débuting the following night at the Tribeca Festival. Hamm wore aviator sunglasses, a brown denim jacket, and cuffed jeans; Mankiewicz wore a suit with no tie. They both looked intrigued. Smith gestured toward the entrance, which would be red-carpeted and ringed with lights. “It looks glamorous from the outside, but you’ll quickly discover that everything is not as it seems,” she said. “The Big Lie,” in which Hamm plays an F.B.I. agent, is set in McCarthy-era Hollywood, among blacklisted writers and directors struggling to shoot a workers’-rights-themed movie while being treated as political subversives. Hamm’s character, via suave duplicity, is trying to stop them.
“The Big Lie” is a podcast, on Audible. “All these forms are breaking down and realigning,” Hamm said. (The Tribeca Festival, formerly just for film, now encompasses many genres, including virtual reality.) Smith guided them down a hall, amid noisy set construction, describing the space’s coming features: vintage anti-Commie propaganda, audio of HUAC testimony, fedoras dangling overhead, theatrical fog. Hamm suddenly spotted a friend and greeted him with a hug that seemed poised for liftoff. “That’s our director, Aaron Lipstadt,” Mankiewicz said.
Next: an F.B.I. office, with mid-century typewriters and a trenchcoat, and which, like a Sterling Cooper office, was also a bar. News clippings and photographs of film-industry leftists were arrayed like a murder board, connected by tangles of string; Hamm peered at a diagram titled “How to Detect a Lie.” The podcast’s first episode, played in the next room, would be augmented by projections of stars evoking Griffith Observatory; a shadow play; and onscreen images that stopped short of making a movie out of a podcast. After a preview, Hamm praised the shadow actors. “Looks very cool, you guys,” he said.
In a greenroom, Hamm reclined on a couch. “I’m runnin’ on fumes,” he said. “Five countries in four days, doing the ‘Top Gun’ stuff.” Hamm, Tom Cruise’s foil in “Top Gun: Maverick,” had recently attended première events on an aircraft carrier (Cruise arrived by helicopter); at the London Ritz (featuring British royals); at Cannes; and so on. Podcasts, he said, had a certain appeal: “You don’t have to buy three hundred cars and populate Hollywood Boulevard. It’s all in your mind, right?”
“The Big Lie” is set amid the making of the 1954 movie “Salt of the Earth,” a neorealist drama about a 1950 zinc miners’ strike in New Mexico, written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico, all of whom were blacklisted by the film industry for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Salt” was considered especially dangerous for its pro-labor bent. In 1997, Jarrico, who was eighty-two at the time, approached Mankiewicz with an idea for a screenplay: the “Salt” story, from the perspective of an F.B.I. agent. It sold as a movie, and, soon after, Jarrico was honored at an industry dinner at the Academy, in Beverly Hills. “It was the fiftieth anniversary of the blacklist. He was the guy who got everyone’s credits restored,” Mankiewicz said. “They reënacted Paul’s HUAC testimony, which was fantastic. Driving back to Ojai, he got into a one-car accident and was killed.” Jarrico’s wife, Lia, asked Mankiewicz to write the script.
Mankiewicz, grandson of Herman (“Citizen Kane”) and son of screenwriter Don, is a longtime television writer and producer; he met Hamm on “The Division,” a Lifetime cop drama, in the early two-thousands. “I was the token guy,” Hamm said. By the time Mankiewicz approached Hamm about “The Big Lie,” Hamm was starring on “Mad Men.” He liked the script. “But I was, like, ‘Well, it’s a guy in a hat who smokes cigarettes and drinks—that’s kind of my day job.’ ” Audio, and the current era, put it in a different light: “the power of the big lie,” and the pandemic, and the climate of the big quit. Hamm jabbed his thumb eastward. “We take it for granted now. But go to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory monument and know what working conditions were like before unions, right?”
Calling the podcast “The Big Lie” had received a bit of pushback post-January 6th: “There’s the other Big Lie in the news,” Mankiewicz said.
Circa “Mad Men,” Hamm watched the BBC documentary “The Century of the Self,” which illuminated some salient concepts about Freud, propaganda, politics, and P.R.: “It talks about hitting those pleasure centers, feeding that ego, giving people what they want: create the itch and sell you the balm. It’s Don Draper, basically. This idea of the big lie is a tale as old as time. And it’s a remarkably effective way to get populations to do what you want.”
“And you can attach the big lie to stories and songs,” Mankiewicz said.
“Woody Guthrie on one side, Toby Keith on the other.”
“That side has no good music,” Mankiewicz said.
“Don’t say that at a Nascar rally,” Hamm said. ♦
