Courtney Balaker
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Courtney Balaker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think it's- I don't think she knows what it is.
Yeah. So Ted and I optioned the rights to his book. And we don't know if it's going to be a scripted series or a feature film. That's what we're trying to figure out. But it's an incredibly powerful story about, as you know, a young man who grew up in the foster care system and defied a lot of odds. that kids usually who grew up the way he did don't end up as well as he did.
He went to Yale and graduated. He was in the Air Force, and he has a wonderfully productive, beautiful life, and wrote a great book about his story, and we want to bring it to the screen.
One of the first people we discussed this project with was a very dear friend of ours who's a casting director. She's cast the past few movies that I've directed. And she said something when she read the book, because we were like, we want you to work on this project. And she said something that was really interesting.
She said, young boys right now in our current era are looking for real stories about young boys. There's tons of superhero and Marvel movies. Yeah. But you can only relate to that to a certain point.
And we're really excited to make a coming of age movie about a young man who struggled and defied odds, but ultimately just had a very real experience as a young boy, became a very successful, responsible man. And I think that the marketplace apparently is really thirsting for that. So we hope that we can do well and provide. Yeah.
Oh, I don't know if they've seen it yet. I should check in with them to see if they have. I worked with Joseph a long time ago when I was directing off Broadway theater in New York City. It was actually the first stage play he had ever done. He had just come off of a very popular TV show called Third Rock from the Sun, and he had never done theater in New York. It was really cool to work with him.
Amazing. It was totally crazy. So I'd love for him to see Coddling. And yeah, I need to check in with Catherine to see if she's seen it as well. But they were both just delightful and wonderful to work with.
I mean, he's been acting since he was a little kid. You know, he kind of grew up in the Marcy world. Warner, you know, the production company that was making a lot of those sitcoms at the time on NBC and ABC. And so he's been doing it for a long time. And he had never done live theater, as I just mentioned. But when he transitioned to live theater in New York, it was pretty natural. It was funny.
The one thing that he wasn't used to was voice projection, because obviously you're mic'd on a studio set. Yeah. We worked on that, but it is God-given talent. He's got fantastic instincts, and it was a real honor to work with him.
We do a little bit, and it's very well spoken through Jonathan Haidt, actually. You can even track it back to the disappearance of Adam Walsh, which was a horrific kidnapping of a little boy from Sears back in the 70s and the milk carton era. And parents were basically told, your child will be abducted. and instituting this fear. I have it. I'm guilty of it.
I have huge problems not seeing my 10-year-old son at the park for four minutes. I panic. I'm just so used to that instinct to not let him be free range, not let him. To answer your question, yeah, I think a lot of it does come from parenting and parents wanting themselves to be comforted and comfortable.
So what makes me as the parent more comfortable is not necessarily the best thing for my child. You literally wire the brain when you are up against conflict, when you're doing something difficult, when you're uncomfortable, because you have to react to it, you have to adjust to it.
And if we're just protecting people from being uncomfortable and doing hard things, then the brain just isn't wired to react to it appropriately. It's very dangerous. I think parenting is a huge problem. Hyde also talks about social media.
Now, when Ted and I were growing up, we didn't have Facebook and Twitter and X. We didn't have our most embarrassing moments in our middle school years and our high school years on display forever. That matters, too. And. There could be a protectiveness, which I completely relate to as well from parents. Don't get your feelings hurt. When they do get their feelings hurt, it lives forever online.
There are a lot of different factors, but it's hard as a parent to say, yeah, my kid needs to fail. My kid needs to experience discomfort. You don't want to watch it, but we all did. We all grew up feeling uncomfortable. And that was really good for us. And we all failed and that's really good for us.
What really struck us, as Ted mentioned, Greg is a very dear friend of ours. And we had known him for years until before he released this book with Hyatt. And we did not know that he was suffering from that level of depression. And we did not know he was contemplating suicide.
We did not know he went to the lengths as detailed in the book and the film, as Ted mentioned earlier, going to a hardware store to buy the plastic bags and the duct tape to end his own life. It was shocking. And it was heartbreaking because we just didn't know that our dear friend was going through this.
And what we found as we started interviewing people, finding our young Gen Z interview subjects was really astonishing that so much of the depression, so much of the negative thinking that they were experiencing was so avoidable that And Greg, that's really what drew him to write the book with height. He's like, you know what was pushing me to suicide?
The catastrophic thinking, the mind reading, all the things that we all do as human beings, which is normal. It's not generation specific. We all do it. The things that I was doing, I'm seeing happen on college campuses, catastrophic thinking, mind reading, us versus them. And I found my way out of it.
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