Jeremy McBride

educating them on these kind of moral issues surrounding animals, the anthropomorphic characters that are created to describe the feelings and where they should live and how they should feel. And kids relate with them in some form of a bridge to humanity, I believe. And you ask this fundamental question when you go to the zoo, hey, where did all the animals come from?

No one really begs to think that question.

Jeremy McBride.

But the zoo thing, I mean, you're into that. You get emotional on this. And I am. And what's really cool about this kind of medium that we're in, we have access to all this information and all these people over large decades of work in conservation and zoos and PETA and legislation, laws. It's really – I just love the idea of synthesizing this information to a point in today's context, which is –

Yeah, when you go to a zoo, no one seems to ask where the animals come from. It is a very simple idea that many people miss the point of when they go there. Now, I'm not anti-zoo totally either, and I have no real position or credibility to also suggest that. But I do think I'm interested in asking those questions of what we can do to make these institutions better.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of came in towards a tail end. I remember meeting you about this.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah, I met Eric kind of towards a tail end of filming Tiger King. Yeah, that was kind of the first experience I had with him.

Well, you know, where we live in California. But you just did it with the eastern box turtle.

Well, he also has communication in jail. Somehow he's able to get a phone. He's doing video calls and stuff. Well, you know how it goes. But there was a moment. There was a moment when we were filming this kind of like second installment of Tiger King where we covered this pardon, the presidential pardon.

There was a real shot where Joe was actually on a list, supposedly, that Trump was going to like. Hilarious. It's hilarious.

Don't you think—the only thing I would say, Eric, is the circumstances surrounding the change in the will. I mean, who alters it to account for disappearance? Upon my disappearance, yeah. It's a very, very strange thing. No one says that, yeah.

Yeah, we did handwriting experts. We did the entire thing to prove otherwise.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's plot and then intent. You know, paying someone to go do something. Right, right.

It is still? It's still legal.

No, there's no federal law preventing ownership of chimpanzees.

Correct. There's 20 or so states legally you can do it. Oh, my God. Missouri's one of them.

But, you know, background, we spent about four years making this documentary series.

Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. That's our kind of consensus on a lot of it.

Yeah, yeah. It's a great book you'd love. It's by this guy who had a store in New York, Henry Treflick. It's called They Don't Talk Back.

You could walk into a Woolworth and buy monkeys.

Was it snakes? The venomous snake bite, Eric?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But she liked the lesser known cats, right?

Okay, that alone. And Viagra? What? And Viagra?

Oh. But who knows?

But speaking of that, though, you saw the second episode.

No, they're very active.

It's probably close to 250 days. I mean, most people can't do that.

Yeah, we were interested in- It took a lot of time to- In the animal-human relationship in a variety of forms. I think we, and you see in episode one, one of the first things we shot years before we even met Tanya, was this woman that's part of the circus family, Pam Rosaire, watching 2001 Space Odyssey with her chimpanzee Chance. Yeah, yeah. I mean, talk about sobering experience.

Me and Carl distanced with Chance the chimpanzee, 15 years old, pounding basically a modified trailer home, the floor echoing. The loudness of that sound on the floor was so loud I had to take my headset off.

Well, they're also like human characters and wiry, and you don't know what's going to happen. They're on these kind of leashes.

Oh, sure. Very murderous.

Yeah.

The arm leverage is pretty incredible. But they also want to fuck with you.

I'm writing this. You know, what was so fascinating, you'd think, knowing all this about chimps later, remember this, Eric, we were talking about, well, there must be like reported human deaths in the United States with chimp attacks. And we couldn't find any. It's only memes.

It's only little... I mean, there are globally, but somehow... Globally, a lot of them in Africa, little kids get snatched and stuff. Well, kids get eaten. Kids get eaten. But in the U.S., there has been no really human death caused by chimpanzee. Now, what was fascinating, and you haven't watched this yet, but in episode four, we kind of go... It comes from delusion to reality, and it's heavy.

We filmed our first chimpanzee funeral. And what we didn't show... which I just remember this now, everyone that would come up to say their piece would share a story where they were attacked by that animal. Oh, God. It was so, the kind of juxtaposition of this celebration of life and these attacks in this context of a situation they shouldn't have ever been in, it was kind of remarkable.

Guys bring a puppy to the park. I mean, I'm more interested in Carl now, you know? What's your motivation over there with that baby dog?

It's the movement, right? It's the movement?

It was already in there. But that's his programming, right? Which is crazy. Which is so much of what we found so interesting about the justification for this love that a lot of the subjects we've covered had for these chimpanzees was that they love me. They do these things with me. I've trained them to believe that they have feelings for me and I have feelings for them. We have this understanding.

And I feel what we've realized is this kind of imbalance of this mutuality of caregiving that I think exists with a lot of our people. our subjects that we cover, but also some of the chimpanzees. It's very incredibly selfish around the symmetry of needs.

That's a lot of the sentiment we see from people is a reaction to that. We are basically doing that ourselves.

You're not looking at your son. You can make a choice. Yeah, sure.

Which, you know... It's hard not to be compassionate with a lot of these people, to be honest. Right. It's really hard. They're humans. They're humans.

I understand an audience reaction, though. And you can have those kind of conflicting views on it. But being part of making it as... you know, we're partially complicit to it too as well. I mean, in a way of sharing that story in a way.

What is it, Erica? Chimps are more like chimps than we are human?

Yeah.

Tell stories.

Well, the life choice is really remarkable. They're also basically in cages, the humans taking care of the chimpanzee. Right, right, right. You really think about it, and the same goes for Sandy, Sandy Harold. You know, what was so great about revisiting that story in Connecticut, you know, we basically... We were set to come out with this show in March this year.

And we were basically wrapped in November and we were going through finishing. And we suddenly got access to the entire Travis story. We work with this guy who wrote this incredible article, a New York Magazine article named Dan Lee. It's one of the best written articles about Travis. It's called Travis the Menace. He has no attribution of sources. You don't know who is talking.

So it's the kind of foundational piece for the Travis story. We tracked him down. He says, I have everyone that was part of that story and they have archive. Do you want to do it? And so we basically said, you know, is this going to make our story better? Meaning that we're going to have to extend for at least four or five months to do this right and postpone our entire delivery schedule. Yeah.

And once we got into it, it was so worth it because we got this total intimate view of what it was like to be in Sandy's world. We had this archive. The video that you see has never been seen before. This portrait of a family, this kind of very complicated, complex family life. That's been inhabited by Travis, which was a descendant of Connie Casey's place in Missouri.

If you think about that, where our starting point was for this whole project was was always around. How do we understand where captive primates came from in America? Connie Casey was this place, this kind of, you know, breeding ground for all of these animals that were kind of cycled through Hollywood. And what I found very interesting is this kind of this lineage that led to Travis.

Travis was sold to Sandy. It's so incestuous. It's so incestuous that they're all connected. And you'll see a little bit of episode four.

Travis the Menace. And it's a remarkable story. This is Sandy who bought Travis from Connie. Connie, you know, it was Susie.

Yeah.

It's more of a grimace. It's more of a happy smile, I guess, if you want to call it that. Right, right, right. So it was fascinating to us to get access to this story. We go into it and... He's drinking soda from McDonald's. That's disturbing. Yeah, he got too big.

Yeah. Exactly. That's basically it. Just so crazy. But he was, you know, this classic story. It was this kind of gothic fairy tale in Stanford, Connecticut, which was so unusual because it's a suburb of Manhattan. You know, everyone thought this was in the South or wherever. It was happening in Stanford, Connecticut. And Sandy had this kind of void in her life.

She buys Travis and raises her part of the family. And you see the story, the same arc as every other Chimp story in a family setting. Yeah. They get too mature and they have to, you know, the thing that I thought you'd appreciate in terms of our kind of this idea that we show in the story really well, I think, is this this chimp is happy and connected to the community because he's free.

He's socializing. He's a town celebrity. He's at work with Sandy in the tow shop, you know, answering phones, you know, filling out paperwork. The mascot of the tow shop, Desire Me Motors. Right. Yeah, he's airbrushed everywhere on trucks.

And then one day... Everyone gets to see the chimp, right? And then until one day, he gets too aggressive. And he this this incredible story, which we don't cover in the doc, but he's in this intersection, very busy intersection in Connecticut. A little boy throws a can of Coke over to the car with the chimp. The chimp gets out.

you know, stops traffic, you know, and it's covered in the news and it's a joke. Everyone's like, oh my God, it's Planet of the Apes again. But the chimp is trying to get a hold of the kid. The chimp's trying to, like, he's irritated. Why would you bother the chimpanzee? He threw a can of Coke at him. He runs out of the car trying to figure out what's going on.

Meanwhile, Sandy gets an ice cream cone, brings it back in the car, and everything's cool.

Two hours later, right? So the state of Connecticut says, no way. You can't have this chimp anymore out in public. You've got to put him in home. So this chimp is out in space for a majority of his life and then built to confinement for the majority of his life. And so fast forward, and I'll spare you kind of the other stuff that we learned, but...

What everyone kind of talks about in revisiting media at the time is he – it was annexed. It was the wine glasses. He was drunk. It was – Maybe a relationship. Maybe the relationship went wrong. But he grabbed car keys. He wanted to go for a ride. He could drive a car. He wanted to get the fuck out of there. Yeah. That's what happened. Right.

And the person who he runs into first, Sharla, represents confinement. Right. He was a nanny. Right. So what do you think is going to happen? It was also reported he was fucking or he left already. He was like cruising around and he was in the graveyard fucking with the guy who was digging graves.

But we love this. I'm sorry, love. But we're interested in this tension here. because we think we can control things. I mean, that's what, if you've seen the movie Nope, this great footage with this chimp Gordy, which he covers and is a through line in the show, it's inspired based on this whole idea of spectacle and humans that can control things.

Nope, in that scene with Gordy, the chimp, is probably one of the most beautiful displays cinematically that I've seen. It's horrible. It's very tragic.

She's careful. I mean, she's 77 years old, Pam Rosaire. When she was seven years old, she was asked what she wants to do with her life in this circus animal family. And she says, I want to train chimps. I want to do something hard. I want to do something difficult. The rest of her family trained horses and elephants. And that was culturally what they were part of.

How is it that Pam hasn't— Okay, you're thinking about more different measures, but like— I'm thinking about attacks.

I think she's got some, you know, look, I think she's lucky. I think it's the best way. I don't know what happens behind the scenes, to be honest. I think, you know, to be fair, I think, I don't know. But I do know that when I watched her interaction, You know, there's a real, like, understanding. And it's, and she has a leash on them.

I'm sure they're less aggressive.

you know, I'm sort of saying, well, what we, what we look, what, so yeah, yes, it is. We didn't realize also how dark this was coming out of it. Cause we were so close to it and the reaction by people, it's very heavy. Um, so I'm, we're all desensitized from, from seeing this. Um, there's some really interesting stuff that happens in for joy. I hope you finish it, uh, including another attack.

Uh, but this time with a person, uh, that we all know. And, um, Oh, you're teasing me. I'm teasing you a little bit. I'm sorry. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

But also, by the way, think about what the medical care they get. The guy who's a horse vet is the guy working on a chimpanzee? If you're lucky. If you're lucky. If you're lucky, yeah. So if you think about the care, it's really horrible. But I was going to add to what you were saying, Eric.

One thing that we learned through the process about kind of what is this about, mainly we're talking about this very niche subject matter of captive chimpanzees in America, is which we learned there really only is about 1,300 remaining in captivity, which includes those who are already in sanctuaries in the U.S., about half of that 1,300.

And big zoos. Big zoos have about 250 of them still. So in terms of the kind of roadside zoo private home environment, it's between less than 100 chimpanzees that remain in captivity. So to answer your question, there might be more. But it's hard to hide a chimp.

There's less and less. The primates in general in terms of, you know, monkeys as pets, it's, you know, it's reported somewhere around 15,000 people in America have primates as pets. 15,000 people. 15,000 according to the American Animal Welfare Institute. Yeah. So that's what we're finding. But, you know, through that, we had to zoom out.

And I think that what we've learned, what I've learned personally about organizations that are doing something to protect wild lands and protect wild populations of chimpanzees, there's a lot of great ones out there. So we've been supporting a program that's doing 12 project sites in Africa, $10 million, 10,000 chimpanzees. And that's what we're hopeful for.

I mean, Africa is basically going to be China one day.

They've done all these projects. I don't know if you like any of the other movies that were done about these scientific experiments people have in their homes in the 70s and 80s, bringing chimps and reintroducing them into the wild. It doesn't work. It ends horribly.

Yeah, we know those guys.

But think about, you asked a question about retroduction or these attacks that occur. There was a story we didn't include. It was just too tangential, but... There was a neighbor of the Missouri Primate Foundation, the chimp party place where all the animals were bred. At a time in the 90s, she had 42 chimps living in the house in a single property. One escapes.

A 19-year-old boy recognizes his dog in the backyards being attacked by a chimpanzee. He grabs a gun, shoots the chimpanzee. He gets charged with destruction of property. It's a felony. Oh, my God. He went to prison. Oh, my God. For six months. Gets out. He missed the birth of his daughter. That's insane. And his name is Jason Coates. It's a really interesting story. Who the fuck tried that?

And then guess what? Here's what happened. Two years ago, I think, he gets his record expunged finally at 40 years old. And now he can't get work. The guy's like a contractor and he couldn't get work. That's so crazy. Defending his property. He shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.

Well, you have to have some discretion in the process of casting subjects. I mean, it's a choice. But I also think the idea is it was also kind of far away from where we were going with these themes. Right. Well, it seems like you could do multiple series. Oh, my God. We could continue with this thing. It's harder. It's getting harder and harder to do.

Our insurers didn't even know. But I started making a film about the sixth extinction. Big cats in America. Yeah, okay.

I think I was telling Eric this, you know, it's so we could ask this question a lot about, you know, the state of, you know, non scripted, unscripted shows, documentaries and this this dramatization that you're seeing is a trend. People making very cinematic movies. real stories, dramatic recreations.

And Eric and I, we're talking about it a lot because so much of our content is so much more surreal than anything we can even make up or recreate. And that's what's so surreal about our process and also just the stuff we capture. It's stranger than fiction.

Yeah, and we also have, you know, Eric, we're also fortunate to have an incredibly talented team that can help, you know, create these experiences in a way on screen that make it authentic. Well, and it's also the editing process. Editing, of course. We had a great team. Incredible group of guys, of teams.

It would be very helpful. It seems like you guys are doing well. It's pretty organic. It's pretty organic. I think there's also, you know, you follow the core story, which was Tanya's story. We kind of knew that we had it. the minute the missing chimpanzee happened, or the supposed death occurred. So that was the story. Where is the chimp?

And through that story, we're able to kind of latch on all these other things. Now, what you don't know is we shot these other stories, you know... out of sequence. Travis came at the very end, so we had to figure out a way to weave it into episode two, weave it into episode four. We knew we really wanted that in to serve as thematic connection to Tanya's story.

How do we spend less time on these things is what we've realized. It's exhausting. It's worth it, though.

It's about 1,300 hours, roughly.

Yeah. Now, that's just primary camera. It's like summarizing the days. I mean, multiple cameras, multiple things happening in a day, right? We're very efficient. It's an 8- to 12-hour day. We're capturing a lot of stuff in that day.

There's a process. There's a field process to ingest that has kind of the notes that we have for the day. What happened? What's interesting about the day?

No, what kind of made it... What made it more complicated... Like, we got our star. Well, you know, what's so interesting, Joe, and I want to come back to this about... You know, I saw you get a little emotional with the Buck story because I... It was really a hard one for us to tell, but an important one to make sure we got that in. But we missed it. We missed the cover.

We were going to go, Eric and I were going to go to Pendleton to cover what was happening with Buck because we knew there was a violation that occurred from the state of Oregon that basically said, Tamara, you have to do these improvements. Otherwise, we're taking the animal away from you. And that had happened. We thought we would cover the response to that. Four days later, Buck was shot.

And we said to ourselves, and I remember this so vividly, we have to trust our instincts. When we are into something, let's cover it, film it, send someone out and cover it if we need to.

So we decided to film everything, everything including our conversations and process, like very meta, which ended up becoming part of the story too, as you'll see more in four where we have to turn her in basically. So the point with Bean is that the buck story happened.

We thought we'd just send this guy, Dwayne, who we recruited to kind of join the team into Festus to cover this confiscation, thinking nothing was going to happen. Day happens. Take the animals out. One is missing. Yeah. And then the guy that we had sent there became friends with her and we just had to keep following, following it.

So this guy became essential to the story with with no intended intended, you know, reasoning for that. So, yeah, it's it's the making of became more interesting than the actual subject matter in a way to us. And kind of weaving that together came much, much later. It's not a good formula if you want to make money with documentaries.

So you're also kind of an outsider in this. But what was your kind of response to the industry, you know, formulaic kind of way of doing things?

With reality TV programming or programming in general.

You're meeting the guy responsible for that tomorrow.

You are.

Well, and storms patterns, right? Shifting. Isn't that also true?

So what do you think? So you have Teddy Roosevelt National Park system. I like that you called me on stuff. In services, you have things like migratory board deck. You have things like the ESA, which had its own unintended consequences, which we actually cover in our series about stopping importation but propelling domestic interest through breeding and the demand that's created through U.S.

zoo systems that you see. Mm-hmm. So what happens next, I guess, is kind of the question.

But you see plenty of cows, which is amazing, by the way. Which is so nuts. Just roaming these kind of, you know, windy roads. That is fascinating.

Yeah.

And just the traffic stopping, which is, you know, in these roads that have no lanes and they're all just kind of... India is wild.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Oh, they're also probably Muslim.

Wait, so in India you can eat a hamburger? You cannot. Yeah, they don't really. Really? I was just in India. I think you can get it in hotels and stuff. I think so.

Right. When you get Indian food, it's always lamb. It's a bit more Western now. I mean, if you're going, like, kind of more, you know. Not to these people. Yeah.

Yeah, we've lost our connection. I think we had this conversation with Carl, Eric, recently, which kind of put it really well for me. So much of the conversations you have is, oh, we're going to go connect with nature. We're going to Botswana for the summer and, you know, do tourism. But what you really can do is put a bird feeder outside your window and connect to nature that way.

And you'll see lots of different birds.

Yes.

He peels, yeah.

Oh, he sucks it out?

I don't think it's in that shot. I've seen they actually peel it with their mouth.

They peel the wrapper off. Right. I saw that. They don't like wrappers.

I think they just squeeze it in their mouth. Oh, not dipping. I like that question. That's a good one.

Yeah.

I mean, the sauce toss moment was just so surreal. You want your sauce? Here's your sauce. Yeah. It was so surreal. Incredible.

But it wakes you up from human confinement to the symptom you just described of urbanization and coastal bubbles. It's kind of the, people are like, oh my God, is this America? Of course, go outside 45 minutes away from where you live. Right. Right, right.

I mean, I'm not saying that it's a common thing. If you let people do it, they'll do it. There's some strange obsessions in this world.

But think about this. A hundred years ago, you can go to the Bronx Zoo and see, you know, a boy in a cage. Adabanga. Right, right, right. Check that photo. The photo is remarkable.

Or 20s? Was it 20s, maybe? He ultimately shot his brains out. Even people then knew that Adabanga, this, you know—

Well, first he was brought for the World's Fair on display.

There's another project we've been working on for equal time to Chimp Crazy, and you've been spending more time at over 10 years, which loosely covers the exotic animal wildlife trade, international wildlife trade. And through that interest, we've had this incredible opportunity to explore all of these moral truths about American zoos.

You know, to show, here you go.

There you go. They shaved his teeth down to be more like fangs.

Like shark teeth. 1904, there it is.

Okay, so he was an exhibit in 1904. Turn of the century, yeah. So that's our history. 1964, Bronx Zoo. This incredible... I love this image. It was an exhibition, right?

uh world's most dangerous animal and it's a reflection oh yeah it's a mirror with bars and you walk into it and you see yourself wow but they were really cool they were conscious of that in 1964 1964 well it was 20 years after we dropped a fucking couple of nuclear bombs yeah this is a this is how cool is that image that is cool that's yeah you would never have that today

We probably went midstream. So we kind of typically what we do is we figure out if we have something. We self-fund and develop something until we get to a point where we think it's ready. I mean, Tiger King, I almost finished it before I brought it to anybody.

I think now we have the ability to kind of control output in terms of control of what the ultimate product can be. It was a little bit harder back then. But, yeah, we kind of figure out if it's worth it or not, and then we take it out. Joe, thanks for having us.

For us, one thing that was so deeply fascinating, I think it was something like 242 accredited zoos in this country. 750 million people visit zoos annually, which is more than the five major sporting events combined. Wow. The way in which zoos... It's like the 80-20 rule. There's five or 10 that contribute the majority of the income that cover most of the Mizzous.

And they run like entertainment complexes, like amusement parks. And very little money goes back. into conservation. Now, there's a lot of zoos that are doing great stuff. And I think the things that we're learning about is the educational value of zoos for kids is no longer as what they intended it to be.

I think there's great things that they do, but there's nothing proven around zoos are educational facilities for animals.

But Joe's daughter's grandkids will still see orcas at SeaWorld. Yeah. Do you think so? Yeah. Well, they live a long time. They live a long time. Maybe not granddaughters. Okay. But I say it more. I have little boys. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old. And I think it's particularly interesting to kind of go through this experience because they're obsessed with animals. And you're kind of...