Bret Wood on 'The Control Group'

your Mind listeners will enjoy the show. It touches on a number of things that we've discussed in the past on this show. Uh, And so we're like, oh, we should, we should talk to Bratt, have him in the studio and maybe we can we can throw this at the end of an episode, at the beginning of old episode, but it ended up being just such a good little chat we thought we just put it out in its own neat little package. That's right. We had a great

time talking to Brett and we hope you enjoy our conversation. Hey, Brett, thanks for joining us on the show today. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Introduce yourself. Sure, I'm Brett Wood. I'm the writer and director of the Control Group. But I'm also a filmmaker, independent filmmaker and have been very involved in uh film restoration. I've written about film history a lot. So I'm kind of a movie guy who discovered uh the wonderful possibilities of the podcast.

So here I am. And so you have a podcast on our network right now and in the Stuff Media group of us tell us about the Control Group. The Control Group is a ten parts of scripted drama podcast and it revisits a sort of fascinating period of history, the early nineties sixties when the CIA was doing two interesting things. On one hand, conducting secret drug experimentation for the sake of finding a a an effective method of

mind control. At the same time, sort of funding medical research for the same purpose, UH in public institutions through a phantom organization. And these two phenomena have sort of been discussed in sort of the the secret history subculture that we all love. And so what I did is sort of narrativised them and combined them into one story and let them play off each other. Oh. So we've talked a little bit about this historical period on the show before, and I assume on the podcast I I

have started listening and I'm hooked now. I haven't made it to the end of the season yet, but I can't. I can't wait to see what happens. I assume you get into Project Artichoke, Bluebird, that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. And what's funny is a lot of people who were involved in these things never knew they were involved in these things, because, especially in the medical research, no one wanted to be working for the CIA or feeling like what they were doing is for government use espionage, so

they kind of covered that up. And we would never have known about MK Ultra and Bluebird, nart a Choke, and Naomi if it weren't for sort of the accidental survival of certain records, which people were then able to go back and piece together and sort of create a narrative of what, you know, what had gone on here.

And now some of this information is declassified, right right, but there's very little actual information about what they were doing other than it all sort of came together through financial records and it was pieced together, and then that gay people names interviews could be conducted and so we have a pretty good understanding of what went on, but not the thorough documentation of you know, government research programs today.

And so the context here, if I'm not mistaken, it would be basically Cold war research into the idea of how how you could get information out of people, interrogation techniques and maybe even control people's behavior without them being conscious of it, right, and Americans always wanted a quick, an effective solution that was more science e kind of James Bondi and as opposed to sort of a long

term psychological approach. You know, they wanted something you could slip in someone's glass, a dart, you could shoot in someone's neck and have that kind of control. But it just doesn't work that way. But you know, there is confidence that it could work that way, and so they applied a lot of their forces to coming up with this you know, magic bullet that would let you either affect someone's thoughts or mind them find out what they're thinking. One of the things I love about The Control Group

and it is is a lovely show. I recommend all our listeners to check it out, for sure, But but one of the things I love is that it's it's It's obviously not just a situation where someone steps in and says, hey, I represent CIA. We're up to some sinister stuff. You're a sinister scientist. Let's do some experimentations on people. Uh. It does a really great job, especially early on, of of establishing you know this, the sense of of push and pull that would uh, that would

see a professional end up and involved in projects like this. Yeah, they kind of um, you know, of play to someone's ego and uh, you know, if you're a medical professional in a someone's willing to fund your research almost without limit. And also say, you know, telling you you're onto something big, I think if you just push it a little further, go ahead and do that thing that ordinarily you might be reluctant to do, because I think you're gonna you're

gonna break through, you know, onto something big. And it's about how you wear down someone's uh, moral resistance or their ethics. You know, you know, we have certain ethical barriers which serve us well and serve our fellow humans well, and a lot of times in this for the sake of the greater good, people want to push those barriers down. Well, we've got it. We've got to tackle this problem now, so let's not worry so much about experimenting on animals,

experience many on people. You know, this is such an urgent issue, we've got to solve it at all costs. And once you drop your moral barriers, your ethical barriers, then it opens you up to all sorts of dangerous abuses of power, and we've seen that a few times in our in our history. Yes, well, you know what we're talking about a podcast, We're talking about an audio experience.

So let's let's just take a short break to listen to the trailer for the Control Group for anyone who hasn't heard it, and then we'll come back in and discuss it some more. This is a time of great opportunity for us for modern medicine. Advancements are being made every day. For more than seventy five years, the Central State Hospital at New Canaan has provided treatment for those with mental disabilities. But in recent weeks something has changed.

One of our doctors has adopted methods of treatment that are more experimental in nature, methods one might consider ethically questionable. The Control Group is a ten part scripted drama. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts and never miss an episode. Is that what you think I'm doing inflicting harm? To be honest, I don't understand what you're doing. And that's what frightens me the most. The control group from how stuff works. All right, we're back, So so Brett, tell

me one thing that I was thinking about. We already talked about some of the historical examples that are essentially the bedrock upon which this, this, uh, this fictional drama is is created. Um, what was it like to to to build with the both these historical elements and then

fictional elements. I'm I'm always your minded in cases like this of something that Umberto Eco wrote about in reference to the Name of the Rose, where he said that he would have this this list of of weird but historically factual tidbits, and then he would have the things that he just made up because they worked in a narrative sense in a fictional sense. And often people reading the Name of the Rose would confuse the two. They'd assume, oh, well,

this is too weird or too modern. You must have made this up well, and then likewise, the things that feel right they would just assume that this was just part of the history. How does this relate to your

experience with control group. It's it's very relevant because just today I as I. Occasionally we'll go back and RELI listener reviews and comments, and one person said, like, this is totally unbelievable, and it would be funny to like lay it out and sort of show, actually, this happened, this happened, this happened, And the things that I've created are there's really not that much that I've done. It's episode ten. I take a big sort of speculative leap,

and I won't spoil it until you get there. Um. But for the most part, the things that are in the show are things that actually happened, with something called the deep patterning, which is using UH drugs and shock therapy to sort of flatten someone's brain waves and basically erase their memory and make them a blank slate, psychic driving, which is too play, repetitive messages and headphones or in speakers implanted in a bed continuously around the clock. Like,

these are all things that happened. And one thing that some people are disturbed by is something that's amidst all this horror. It's pretty subtle, but was still very much a part of this is sort of the inherent sexism of what was going on, because it was frequently men controlling women because women were perceived as being more malleable

and passive. And and to me, that's the thing that sort of shows how we're crossing over from a doctor lower r his ethical standards to a person who is allowing themselves to be morally corrupted or you know, instead of crossing a professional boundary, now they're crossing crossing a personal boundary and that and I think the two are

almost interchangeable. When you start lowering one, uh, you know, social ethical restraint, others start to fall and it becomes this horror story of it's not only about medical research and mind control now now it's about you know, men abusing women or men feeling that they have the right to control women and women within in the early nineties when there's not a lot of power, when the women were the nurses and the men with the doctors, how

can a woman fight against that? And so I tried to make that a very important component of the control group and also like one of the sources of frustration and horror when you listen to the show, because that's something we can relate to we can all relate to, yeah, getting electric convulsive therapy and you know those kinds of things. So your background is in film. Did you originally conceive the Control Group as a film project and if so,

how did the transition to audio format go. Yes, it was intended as a feature film, and it had script and we have found locations and I was in the

process of casting it. Very low budget kind of stuff, and we were going to shoot it at an actual, uh, what had been a medical facility which is no longer in use, and that is where a lot of the architecture of the Control Group, even though it's audio only comes from of this sort of modern facility that adjoins this creaky old mansion that was very much part of

the space we were going to shoot it. And it's funny that same uh, modern building connected to this um sort of monument to the past is pretty common in big statemental hospitals in Millageville. Here in Georgia you have the same thing. You have these ultramodern buildings sitting alongside these crumbling Victorian buildings. So that was where we were

going to shoot. But when they reviewed the script prior to our shooting, they Withdrew permission for us to film there, and so this project went on the shelf, and I chose something else that I had in my other script drawer, which was very simple and inexpensive to film, so I did that instead, and it's a film called The Unwanted. You can stream it on Amazon um And so adapting it was a lot of fun because for a two hour movie you have to you have to be very concise.

Everything has to be short and quick and move along. But suddenly to have this expanded canvas of a ten episode podcast and having like five hours in which tell the story was very liberating. And then I think the thing I love the best is that certain things that are cheesy when you do it on film, hallucination, no one can do like an acid trip. On film, It's always gonna be cheesy. It's never going to quite be you know. It's it's someone's visual representation of the unrepresentable.

But with audio you can kind of cross that line much more easily, and and sometimes what you imagine is much more effective and much worse than what I would have been able to as a filmmaker put on screen. So like and even like the Horrors of Shop treatment.

If I had tried to stage that on film, would have probably looked, I don't know, kind of conventional, or it would have that when you just hear the sound of someone like a convulsing on a gurney and you know, choking with the mouth piece in their mouth, that's to me, that's much more visceral and what you in your mind create as much more effective and affecting than you know, what I would have literally represented for that. So the cast of the Control Group is excellent. Everybody really really

brings it. Is this the same team that you've assembled for the film or do you assemble a different team for the audio of how did how did this come together? Yeah, totally different team. Because the film was going to be years ago and I hadn't fully cast it yet, And in between making The Unwanted, I made another film called Those Who Deserve to Die, which is sort of a supernatural revenge film which we're just completing so it's not out yet, And and that brought me in contact with,

you know, another bunch of actors. And so the cast of the Control Group is basically all these actors I've worked with in previous films. So there's someone from those who deserve to die someone from the Control Group. And also in one of the other hats I wear is doing some like film and video production and things like that, and I've dubbed foreign films into English, which is a lot of fun. And so I've used some of the

voice actors from that process. So I had a little bit of experience in sort of constructing a film and they're of audio only, UM, so that I definitely used all my tools from the film toolbox in making the Control Group. Now Joe and I were off Mike here. We were already chatting a little bit about movies of the past, and Joe and I talked a lot about

especially B movies um on the show. So we have to ask you, well, what are your favorite mental hospital films and did you draw inspiration from any of them for the Control Group. Oh, that's a good question. Um. I mean, you can't not be aware of one Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest just because it is like the big one. But Sam Fuller shot Corridor was definitely influential. But there was also some lesser known films that I

like a lot. There's one called The Caretakers, which is very interesting and the snake Pit, of course, and u uh John Cassavetti's A Child as Waiting, even though it's about sort of a hospital for children with you know, mental retardation and developmental disabilities, but still these ideas of this sort of clinical setting, which some of these movies are about the horror of a mental hospital and some of them are about this is modern medicine, this is this is hope. And so I kind of like for

my world to be a little bit of both. It's a place where there are people who are genuinely interested in providing health care and looking for the latest and you know, some new means of treatment, but also a place where you know, uh, certain treatments are being performed that are maybe in ten years not going to be looked upon as the most humane. Another thing Robert and I have talked about before is how you know, there's certain professions that are very very often demonized in film.

You know, you almost never, like unless it's a vampire of you almost never get a priest character who's good, you know, And I feel like the psychiatrist is a character who's kind of like that is very very often a creepy villain in the film, and I know that, and obviously I don't feel that about psychiatrists in real life. I mean, most mental health care professionals are people who are devoting their lives to try to help people. But I wonder if that reveals some kind of underlying anxiety

that people have about the mental health treatment relationship. And so I wonder if doing this show, especially based on historical examples, where this relationship that's supposed to be a positive one that's supposed to help people heal, could go very,

very wrong and very abusive. Um. Did did that inform your your ideas about that anxiety, that cultural anxiety we have And I didn't think about it specifically, But you know, all this stuff is like we carried around with us, especially if we love movies, then we have the whether we're that conscious of it or not. UM. But you know, psychiatrists are the Frankenstein's of the twenty one century. You know, back then the horror was digging up a body to

anatomize the corpse. That was sort of the foundation of the horror of Frankenstein. Of surgery, you actually got to cut into a body. You know, now we've grown used to that. That's science. And so now it's profaning you know, the body by opening up the mind and you know, taking something that's supposed to be uh, you know, uh, invading the sanctity of the mind. That doctors seem to have this uncanny power to open crack open the head

as an expression we use in the control group. Um, So, I think it's not so much like you said, It's not that we distrust doctors and psychiatrists necessarily. It's more the fact that they seem to have this power which we don't fully under stand, but possibly have this power over us that intimidates us. That you know, they may know us better than we know ourselves and be able to unleash something within us that we didn't know was there. Yeah.

I think, well, it's something you touch on in episodes of the show, is the idea that psychiatry makes people maybe feel vulnerable because of its potential access to secrets which people don't want. The things people don't want known are potentially knowable by someone who knows how to look for them. Yeah, and you know, and and uh, and nobody wants to have their secrets known, right, especially if

they don't know them first. Yeah, it's like you know, I kind of would not spill out a dream I had and let somebody else, you know, uh, analyze it until I kind of understood it myself. And I sort of feel like it's the same sort of thing. And um, so there's that protection of yourself that you don't know yet. But then there's also the the uh, the minding of secrets.

There are things that I know that I don't want to tell anyone, and the fact that someone else may be able to get that out of me is a little frightening, right, Not me personally, of course, I'm an open book. Well, I mean, it's interesting you say that, because I mean a creative project like this, you are, in a sense taking a dream of your own, analyzing it and then putting it out for everyone else, uh to to to see and and reanalyze and say, who is this Brett Wood? And and uh and why does

he think like this? And quite often I realized things about myself that as people pointed out I as people point it out, I say, huh, maybe I you know, I knew I have certain tendencies in me, and maybe there's more tendencies or you know, there's more things like this than I realized. And also when you make a film or when you create a big project like this, you don't want to analyze it too much because you

have to kind of. I've always been a strong believer in writing from the gut, don't sensor your elf, don't uh, don't understand it too well, just do whatever it takes to open up the faucet and let the words flow. And it is, you know, like a form of therapy that you let this stuff out, you know, and you want to dig into the weird stuff that no one else or not many other people are digging into so and all my films and in the control group, and hopefully as we move forward, I'm going to continue to

do that. And you know, of course, you as you do that, you make sure you're doing something that is not morally reprehensible, and you there's some purpose to what you're doing. But I think it's it's important for the artists to not completely understand their work, because once you understand something, then there's no longer any reason to explore it.

So for me, for better or worse, it's taking that kind of muck out of the inside of me, putting it on a table and then just kind of like fishing around in and and seeing what's there and turning it into a narrative and putting it in people's ears. I think we just mentioned this on the show recently, but I often think it's hilarious when like an interviewer asks a creative person to explain their novel in terms

of their autobiography. Just is that's somebody else's job. Come on, But I'm sure that like after they read it and then after they've heard feedback, they probably discover all sorts of things about themselves that they were not really thinking of when it was being written. Because you know, any time you write or even do any kind of like extemporaneous speaking, you're just like letting it flow out and you can't stop and understand it as the words are

coming out. So it's it's kind of the a fun thing. It's like improv you know, it's kind of nice to turn the creative faucet on and sort of see what comes out, and hopefully you know, you still have your friends and relationships after you've done so well. In that case, maybe allow me to illicitly ask you to summarize what your work means, if you if you expect people to come away from the control group with a with a thought or a message or a takeaway. What do you

what do you think that thought is? Well? On a broader canvas, all my work is about people who are trying to escape some sort of control um, whether it's someone is a morally oppressive force, and how they find ways to um, you know, to resist that oppression and find a way of expressing themselves. And usually it has

to do with sexual matters. UM. That's kind of the thing that people are and I think today are most commonly oppressed, you know, by having the freedom to express themselves sexually or the kind of partner they want to choose, UM, and how you get around that. So that's kind of

the core of my films. And maybe that's not so much specific to the control group, but the control group is about someone oppressing you and how do you maintain your individuality and not completely succumbed to this force that's trying to shape you into not only something that's socially and morally acceptable, but maybe something that is shaping you into something that doesn't have feelings and doesn't have feel

like it can express itself. So I think it's about specifically, then if what I would say someone should come away from the Control Group thinking about would be that, um, there are always people trying to make you into something, whether it's overtly or just through osmosis, and it is important to sort of be true to who you are, but also to you know, find the means and find the room to express yourself and be what you want to be, even if it is flying in the face

of a giant governmental authority that wants to control your behavior. All right, well, the show again is The Control Group. Where can everybody get this? The entire series is out right all ten episodes. Episodes are live and you can stream and subscribe at Apple Podcasts and wherever find podcasts are heard, and our official web page is Control Group dot show. All right, well, well thanks for coming on the show and chatting with us as an absolute pleasure.

Thanks so much, Brett. All right, so there you have it. Thanks again to Brett for coming on the show and talking about the Control Group. Yeah, thanks a lot, Brett. Hey, if you want to check out that show, where can they go for that? What's the website for the Control Group? Well, they can go to www dot Control Group dot Show. That's right. And hey, if you want to check out more about this show about Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Maybe you even just listened into this interview and you've never listened to Stuff to Blow your Mind before, Well, you can check us out in a number of ways. You can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. You can find all the episodes there, you can find links store, various social media accounts, a store to buy some merch uh and so forth. But you can also just find us anywhere you get your media, and wherever

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