01x06 - Episode 6

[bunniefuu]

[yowls]

[helicopter whirring]

[sirens blaring]

Male Reporter: O.J. Simpson is believed to be armed and dangerous.

Man: I was watching the O.J. car chase with my daughter in New York.

Tears were streaming down my eyes.

And my daughter turned to me and she said, "What's wrong? Did you know that guy?"

And I said, "Who cares about that guy? It's that light. That's the light I keep telling you girls about. That's it. That's it right there."

And the light off all those mountains.

The desert. The pink light off the ocean, into the smog, onto the palm fronds.

It is absolutely the defining character of the place.

The soul of the place is that light.

Like any exile from Los Angeles, I've thought about, and I think about L.A. light all the time.

What I decided to do was to go and talk to people who spend their lives in the light.

I talked to Vin Scully, the great broadcaster of the Dodgers.

He gets to watch the sunset every night.

Scully: Boy, what a sky.

Cotton candy pink, with a canopy of blue.

Good enough to eat.

The painter David Hockney told me how growing up in England, where it was raining all the time, what amazed him was to see Laurel and Hardy movies.

They were wearing winter clothes, but there were sharp, crisp shadows.

Hockney made us see shadows that we'd never seen the beauty of.

Architect Coy Howard talked about the "threeness" of light, the object, the shadow, and reflection.

I was talking to everybody. It occurred to me I should talk to the O.J. chase helicopter pilot...

We're gonna go to a picture inside Chopper 2 here.

Whose name in those days was Bob Tur and now goes by Zoey Tur.

It turned out she did the news for money, but what she really loved was the light of L.A.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

We're about to fly.

My name is Zoey Tur. I'm a helicopter pilot, reporter, fire chief, transgender warrior princess.

We were covering O.J. Simpson.

Because the pursuit began in the afternoon and traveled into the golden light period, Los Angeles was showcased... and O.J. went off to jail.

We shouldn't show this to people back east, because they'll move out here.

I mean, look at this.

This is one of the rarest days of the year, because you have the combination of clear air, we have a sunset, and then we also have a supermoon.

Los Angeles has always been my home.

Our light here is addictive.

You got a city with over 350 days of sunlight.

That's why the studios came here.

Movies like "Annie Hall" made fun of Los Angeles.

Keeps out the alpha rays, Max. You don't get old.

They're making fun of Los Angeles light.

And he hates it.

The people who hate L.A., Peter Bogdanovich for example...

He said, "I can't stand the place."

There's something trance inducing about the light.

He quoted a conversation with Orson Welles who said, "The trouble with L.A. is you sit down at 24 and you get up and you're 65."

When German Expressionist filmmakers encounter that light of L.A., which they can't make heads or tails of, they invent something called film noir.

They do all of their erotic films at night or indoors.

The other way that people talk about the light of L.A. is smog.

Movies like "To Live and Die in L.A."...

It was gritty, it was harsh.

The mean streets of Los Angeles.

Smog played a very important role in creating a feel.

People told me, if I wanted to talk about smog, I should go to Caltech.

There's characteristics of Los Angeles that make the pollution here a much more challenging problem than most other cities.

The San Gabriel mountains trap the air, and so anything we put in the air in L.A. lasts a lot longer.

Then when you combine 14 million people, all the emissions from all those cars, and allow a lot of sun to cook it all up, you end up with these very small particles causing the atmosphere to be glowing.

That's the L.A. glow. Yeah.

Thankfully, there's not the smog there was, so I don't wanna romanticize that at all, but what can I tell you? It was pretty amazing light.

And thankfully it still is pretty amazing.

As we make this left turn, wait till you see this.

This is the money sh*t.

♪ In the light, in the light, in the light ♪
♪ We're going out of our heads ♪
♪ In the light, in the light without even knowing ♪
♪ How to forget ♪

[radio static]

I shall propose mandatory new, tough penalties... resurge in violent crime.

And that's the hard fought battle to take back our streets...

Man: We have to get these people off the street.

People who commit crimes should be caught, convicted, and punished.

Man: A prison is a trap for catching time.

That's why no one who has been inside a prison can ever forget the feeling.

Time stops.

A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia, anxiety and boredom and fear mix into a kind of enveloping fog covering the guards as much as the guarded.

For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world, time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today, perhaps the fundamental fact as sl*very was the fundamental fact of 1850.

Overall, there are now more people under correctional supervision in America, more than six million, than were in the gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

That city of the confined and the controlled Lockup Town is now the second largest in the United States.

While definitely I understand that people have committed crimes and they do have to be penalized, we have to understand how money, class, race, plays a part in that.

I don't think a lot of individuals understand how mass incarceration does trickle down and affect the community and then individuals.

It is traumatic to a community when disproportionally there is an absence of men in the community because so many of them are serving such long sentences.

Children of incarcerated parents are nine times more likely to enter the criminal justice system.

You know, and having a parent that's in prison, you don't have your mom supporting you through life, or you don't have your dad encouraging you in ways that are necessary to develop.

They're also wearing the burdens of their parents' crime.

They didn't commit a crime.

[siren wails]

Man: In 1980, there were about 220 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans.

[siren chirps]

By 2010, the number had more than tripled.

No other country even approaches that.

Mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow.

Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites.

The system isn't broken.

It is doing what it was designed to do.

How did we get here?

How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disemboweling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction.

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies.

The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons.

It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit.

A capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

I'm a senior equity research analyst.

I focus on real estate companies which includes the private prison sector.

The reason why we like the private prison industry from a stock investment perspective, we think that there's substantial opportunity for growth.

In 2004, there was about 6% market share.

2014, 8.3%

With the past 10 years, they gained about 35%.

If sentencing reform does materialize across the country like we think some of it will, we don't think there's too much concern.

It's an interesting and compelling investment opportunity for a lot of investors today.

Man: How did you come to be here at Children of Promise jail?

My mother was incarcerated when I was younger.

I was a baby, like a young, and I went into foster care.

I was in my mom's belly when he went to jail.

When my dad gets out, I'll be 15.

My dad is so far.

My dad is in jail because he was selling dr*gs.

Drug related reasons.

Drug use.

Drug situation.

They gave my dad 20 years, and that's a long time.

It was kind of hard for my mother, 'cause she tried to teach me everything, how to be a black educated man.

I have nobody to talk to.

That's like... like, everybody has their mom to talk to, but I don't.

The things that I want to do with my dad is, like, have a dad-to-daughter talk.

She said, "It will be all right.

"You'll see your mother one of these days, "and you're gonna have the biggest smile you'll ever have in your life."

Man: What are you gonna say to your daddy when he comes out of prison?

I love you so much.

And can we go to the park?

In Dickens' and Hugo's time, it was the Industrial Revolution that drove kids to mines, but every society has a storm that poor wretches suffer in.

And the attitude is always the same...

Either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity, or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world.

At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community's life, and in every case, the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order in order to change it, which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order.

In every case, humanity and common sense eventually made the insoluble problem just get up and go away.

Reforms begin.

Prisoners needlessly incarcerated start to be released.

But prisons remain our storm, our unmissable injustice, and their hail falls hard on all our heads, not just those of the imprisoned.

We cannot make them go away.

But we can make them get better.

♪♪ [violin]

Excuse me, ma'am?

Is everything all right?

Yeah.

Can I take your coat?

Yes.

Woman: Ladies and gentlemen, we have just closed the door to the main cabin.

Please take your seats to ensure an on-time departure.

[dings]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached our cruising altitude.

Hello.

How long have we been in the air?

About an hour, I think.

I always like to let men see me asleep early on in our relationship.

Keeps them from being intimidated by my height.

May I offer you some mixed nuts, Mr. Spivey?

Thank you so much. [clears throat]

What?

It's ceramic.

What?

They're warm.

They actually took the time to heat these up before they brought them to us.

I take it you don't fly first-class very often.

They're actually sort of weird when they're warm, sort of strange.

Yeah, you're right.

[alarm dings]

Oh, no. I wasn't...

I was just wondering, would it be possible for us to get unheated nuts?

Of course.

My friend here...

Janet.

Janet really prefers her nuts...

No... I...

What do you think?

Cold? Room temperature?

It doesn't matter.

It's... I really...

These are... I really just want these.

Okay. Keep these nuts.

But could we each have a second bowl at, um, 68 degrees Fahrenheit?

Of course. I'm so sorry about that.

What's the point of paying four times the regular fare for first class if you can't get your nuts at the correct temperature.

I didn't pay for first class.

Are you a first-class interloper?

No, I just gave up my seat on an overbooked flight earlier, and then they upgraded me on this one.

So you didn't even pay for those nuts.

You do realize I'm gonna have to take the other nuts when they come, too.

I'm Rory.

I know who you are.

Would you like a nut, Janet?

Well?

Mm-hmm?

Everything you've read in the tabloids is true.

It is?

Oh, yeah.

Especially the eating disorders.

But the affairs?

No, not the affairs.

Of course, not. You can't believe the bloids.

Bloids?

[chuckles]

We call them bloids or tab...

Uh-huh. Oh.

Don't judge me.

I'm not. No.

This is what you become when you spend too much time in L.A.

Mm-hmm.

Promise me one thing, Janet.

Never go to L.A.

I'd never go back if I didn't have to.

But you don't have to do anything.

You're famous. The whole world knows who you are.

What else could you possibly want?

Like to have an Oscar.

Like an Oscar.

Hmm.

Okay, but then what?

Not the most glorious.

Or an EGOT.

That's when you win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.

Hmm. [clears throat]

What about you? What do you want?

I want everything.

Of course, you do.

Sometimes I just stop walking right in the middle of the room, just to see if I can start again.

And I never can.

Once I've stopped, I can just...

I can't generate the momentum to eat or clean or sleep.

If it's in public, then usually someone will say something to me, and then out of embarrassment, I can move, but when I'm at home, the longer I stand there, the longer I have to stand there, and I just...

I'm stuck standing there... in the middle of the room.

[sighs]

Let me see what you look like.

Well...

When you're sleeping.

You're right. I do feel less intimidated now.

[chuckles]

[switch clicks]

Um, I'll be right back.

You're leaving me?

Mm-hmm.

♪♪ [indie rock]

♪ Baby, can't you hear the rooster crow? ♪
♪ Something's coming from the east ♪
♪ Be still, be still ♪
♪ Be still ♪
♪ Be safe ♪
♪ Be safe ♪
♪ Be safe ♪

You came back.

What happened to your skirt?

My armpits were smelly, and I tried to wash them so you wouldn't notice, but then I got water on my skirt, so I put water on the whole thing so you wouldn't notice that.

And were you able to wash your armpits?

Not really.

Are they smelly?

I think so.

I can smell them.

No, no.

It's okay. It's part of the showbiz.

Really?

Yeah. Here.

It's smelly.

I tried to wash it.

Fabreze.

Oh, I've thought about that.

It dries in seconds, takes odor with it.

Arms up.

It's best if you hold them up until it dries.

[chuckles]

I sat next to Jason Kidd on an airplane once.

Are you telling me I'm not your first?

We didn't talk that much.

I did ask him why he didn't sit in first class.

And?

He said his cousin worked for United.

That was it.

His cousin works for United?

Yep.

[both chuckle]

[barks]

What was that?

That means I like you.

Okay.

You wanna bite me?

No.

You don't like me?

No, I do.

Is it because I'm famous?

No.

Just because I'm famous, it doesn't mean that I don't need what everyone else needs.

Here, bite me. Anywhere.

Bite my shoulder.

[dings]

Hey.

Hey.

I had a really amazing time with you.

So did I.

My people are gonna be waiting for me out there.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, I know. That's okay.

No, it's really not. It's a travesty.

I understand.

Here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna write down a number, and I want you to guard it with your life.

Okay.

This is my kids' nanny's personal line.

The only people who call her on this are her boyfriend and her son, so she'll always answer, and you'll always get through.

And she'll know where I am.

It's missing a digit.

Yeah, I know.

I want you to memorize the last number, okay?

Okay.

[chuckles]

It's four.

Four.

Four.

Four.

Four.

Four.

Keegan Lily, you have four minutes to take it outside. Four!

Okay, okay. What hospital did they take her to?

Four.

Okay, we're on our way.

Tell her to hold on until we get there.

[keypad beeping]

[line ringing]

The number you have reached has been disconnected.

♪♪ [theme]