Billy Corben Talks Cancel Culture and Paula Deen

An interview with Canceled: The Paula Deen Story director Billy Corben about letting the fallen celebrity chef tell her side of the story. The post Billy Corben Talks Cancel Culture and Paula Deen appeared first on POV Magazine.

From the late 1990s through to 2013, Paula Deen was a culinary star. Her southern drawl and butter-basted cooking helped launch the Food Network into the stratosphere with numerous shows, appearances, cookbooks and other means of spreading her passion and cuisine. She was raking in millions upon millions of dollars until her empire collapsed after truthfully answering a question during a deposition filed against a restaurant she owned with her troubled brother. In that deposition, the world learned that, as she stated, “Yes, of course” she had used the N-word in the past.

Deen’s fall was even steeper than her rise, with major news outlets and comedy programs alike poking fun at her descent. Now, more than a decade later, Deen and her sons open up to award winning filmmaker Billy Corben (Screwball), telling their own stories with a refreshing openness that provides much needed nuance to a story that was dominated by the headline-grabbing implications of racist speech and actions.

Cancelled: The Paula Deen Story does an exceptional job of unpacking this complex and interwoven tale, providing a time capsule of the media’s response to both her celebrity and her poorly-handled exist from the public eye. With a wealth of archival materials, as well as probing and nuanced contemporary interviews with Deen and her kids, this is a journalistically rich and fascinating look into the family and the way those events in 2013 continue to resonate with them to this day.

We spoke to Corben prior to the film’s world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

POV: Jason Gorber
BC: Billy Corben
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

POV: How did you become attached to this story?

BC: I was approached by our executive producer, Matt George, who had just finished Rob Reiner’s Albert Brooks documentary at HBO, which I loved. He was looking for his next celebrity biopic and happened upon the idea for this subject. I got an email over the transom asking if I would be interested in making a documentary about a celebrity chef. That’s all it said. My follow up was to ask, “What celebrity chef?” It was Paula Deen, and my short answer was “No.” I was not interested.

I then started to do a deep dive into it, and became sufficiently intrigued, not necessarily to commit to directing the doc, but at least to go to Savannah and meet Paula Deen and her sons, Jamie and Bobby. It was that first meeting that convinced me to do it.

The nostalgia of the aughts and the tens, and the archive alone, was delicious and fun. It’s amazing how much more innocent times those were for all of us. We got to delve into that pop culture pool there. But I was not a Food Network viewer, or Paula Deen fan, back in the day.

POV: Did you know about the cancellation?

BC: I totally knew about the scandal, and knew who Paula Deen was because she was not just Food Network famous. She had penetrated the pop culture zeitgeist and transcended all of that. I just wasn’t paying attention to other shit, I guess is the best way to put it.

When I say I was not a fan, it’s not like I disliked her, I was an Anthony Bourdain fan—I just wasn’t paying attention. I had the same shorthand that all of my friends and family did. When I did my anecdotal polling in exploring this opportunity, asking them what they remembered about Paula Deen, some people didn’t know her. Everybody who did said, “racist, N-word, butter.” Those were the top three keywords.

There was this perception that she was running around her kitchens with a cleaver dropping N-bombs everywhere. I thought, well, that’s not exactly what happened. It dawned on me that maybe people didn’t necessarily form informed opinions about this. This was Twitter 2013— we were all limited to 140 characters.

When I met up with the family, they drove me around Savannah. Bobby was driving, Jamie was in the passenger seat, I was in the back seat with Paula Deen, and they did what I call the Paula Deen backlot tour of Savannah. They pointed out their old house—two bedroom, one bathroom, six of them living there where they started the illegal catering business. They showed the Best Western where they had [their] first brick and mortar, drove past the shell of a building where Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House was, the ground zero for the whole scandal.

I realized Jamie and Paula Deen were very warm and very talkative, and Bobby, not so much. When we parked the car, having spent hours watching him clenching his jaw in the rear-view mirror, I said, “Hey, Bobby, do you think that you guys should be making this documentary?” And he was like, “Finally, somebody asks me! Fuck no! I do not. We should not be doing this.” He let it out because we were really auditioning each other.

I was deciding whether or not I wanted to tell their story, they were deciding whether or not to trust me with it, and Bobby was like fuck to the no and the next thing you know, Paula Deen is sobbing. Jamie is, like, “Listen brother, I hear you,” and he’s being very soothing. The next 20 minutes I have described as the best documentary I never made. Where is the camera when you need it?!

That was what convinced me. This isn’t just about this scandal, this is about this family. This was the episode I was trying to recreate in the [film]. I thought it would be interesting to start the documentary debating about whether or not the people in it should be making that documentary.

POV: It would be very easy to make a film like this that is simply a commercial for the sake of providing cultural rehabilitation. Could you talk about avoiding that major pitfall?

BC: I don’t think it was difficult. Our first documentary, Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, had some critics calling it a triumph of objective reporting. As a production team, we’re a group who loves to argue with each other. There’s always that constant internal checks and balances. What was unusual for this one was we didn’t into a lot of the macro topics surrounding this spate of cancellations, tied to what was happening historically in the country in 2013. There’s a little bit of that through Michael Twitty, who has his own personal involvement in the case via his viral blog post about it.

This was an internal story told by the family that survived this scandal. So in that regard it was tough, but there was also so much archive. Many were absolutely just shellacking this lady and her family and so much satire. There wasn’t a cartoon show that didn’t nail them, either. I mean, South Park and Family Guy, that’s the one-two punch right there. SNL, Funny or Die, all took their cracks. Since there was plenty of material to cull from and so it wasn’t difficult to strike that balance other than in the edit, particularly as we were cutting it down, to make sure that we maintained that objectivity.

POV: She was an easy target, but also let herself be an easy target. What was your process to get past the facade of the star that she was to actually get to the real individual?

BC: Day one, take one, was pure schtick. It started the way her episodes start, the way the doc starts. “Hey y’all, I’m Paula Deen,” you know? It wasn’t long into it [that] she remembered what we were here for.

The reason I was doing this, presumably the reason she was doing this, was to tell the truth. There really isn’t much of an “off-camera” Paula Deen. She does get a bit introspective, but there’s a word she uses a lot to describe herself: naïve. I think that that’s a pretty fair assessment. She’s lived a lot of life, she has a lot of wisdom, but she also doesn’t really understand what happened in 2013 still, I think. The film is also partly her trying to make sense of it and find her own way through it.

POV: I assume she’s seen the film already?

BC: I think so. I haven’t heard from her.

POV: Having heard the story through the likes of Bourdain and Jon Stewart at the time, one major revelation for me was the fact that the woman who sued in part for racial bias, which prompted the N-word question in the first place, was, in fact, a white lady.

BC: Yeah. It also forces the audience to confront their own bias about a woman named Lisa Jackson accusing someone of racial bias and then going, “h wait, I assumed that she was Black.”

POV: It’s part of what makes the film so effective, by having audiences reflect upon their own presuppositions about what took place, for better and for worse.

BC: I’m fine with whatever conclusion you draw, but let it be informed. I think it does make you question whether the punishment fit the crime. There were a lot of people debating that contemporaneously, on The View, and Bill Maher.

POV: What most fascinating is the contemporaneous response of Black Americans.

BC: Reverend Al Sharpton had a very nuanced take on this. He’s, like, “We all said dumb shit back in the day.” But also, I’m sorry, can we play the #metoo bingo game that is the pop culture footage in this movie for a moment? Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose? Not all cancellations are created equal. Some people earned it, [and for] some people it’s long overdue, and other people, maybe it says just as much if not more about us and the times than it does about the person in the crosshairs.

Many great documentaries are just the start of a conversation. I think it’s great for us to have whatever conversation you want about Paula Deen, about cancellations, about social media. There’s just a lot of interesting conversations to have coming out of this movie that I’m down for.

POV: There’s the moment from merely a month ago where we learn that after all these decades the flagship restaurant has closed its doors.

BC: This is our second consecutive TIFF world premiere that we were delivering and the month before and the whole ending changed. Last year we did Men of War and our main character, who the whole thing is us being embedded with him, gets arrested by the feds in New York, on July 30th while we’re trying to finish the movie.

POV: As much as this is the story of Paula Deen, this is a story of the way the media went after Paula Deen. For you, from your journalistic impulses, do you see the critique of the way that 2013 media was handled? Do you have optimism about the nature of journalism, or does it require a 90-minute doc to actually get to the point where a three-minute headline piece cannot?

BC: Take the same set of facts from 2013 – not what people said or the headline, but just take the same facts. It doesn’t go down the same way. I don’t know if that says something about the media so much as the silos of media now, how we all have been thrust into our own kind of silos and echo chambers even more so than we were before.

Twitter was still a town square back then in 2013. We still were all sort of there for the hope and promise of being able to come together and effectuate some kind of positive outcomes. The Arab Spring happened in 2011 and there was something very new and exciting and innovative and positive about social media still at that nascent stage.

Paula Deen doesn’t get cancelled today. Whatever that means, and take from that what you will, but that’s just what I think. It would just go down so much differently now.