Despite critical acclaim and overwhelming evidence, W. Kamau Bell knows what is coming. His four-part docu-series, “We Need To Talk About Cosby,” not only chronicles the influential African-American comedian’s rise in the entertainment industry but his subsequent crimes of rape and sexual harassment against women throughout his career. But, for many, those criminal charges are simply conspiratorial accusations against a revered member of the Black community. Bill Cosby has become, and likely always will be, a polarizing figure.
Best known as the star and producer of CNN’s “United Shades of America,” Bell says he has already been attacked for the “Cosby” series by people who haven’t seen it, don’t want to see it, and believe he is “tearing down a black man unnecessarily on a white network and using the tools of the master against black folks.” But, from his perspective, that’s the main reason he tackled the subject.
“I take that seriously, but also how are we supposed to talk about this? And I think it is a critical subject,” Bell says. “I understand ‘the we’ and ‘The We Need To Talk About Cosby’ isn’t everybody. And I respect that after I talked to a lot of people because some people I talked to they said, ‘No,’ over the course of an hour-long conversation. So, I get that this is hard. How am I preparing for it? It’s that thing where you start to check your notifications less, or you don’t scroll all the way down to the bottom of your tweet and you don’t hit that thing that says show more. And then also I’m not going to get engaged in the back and forth, because that has never worked well on social media with people who are already angry. I already learned that lesson a long time ago. And so I’m just being more circumspect and careful about how I engage with it because it’s already hard.”
Over the course of our interview, Bell reveals what surprised him about Cosby’s history in Hollywood, the difficulty of getting some key people to participate in the project and much more.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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The Playlist: Congratulations on the series.
W. Kamau Bell: Oh, thank you. I’m sort of still struggling to know how to respond to congratulations on a project like this, but thank you. I really sort of look at it as like on the work that me and a bunch of other people put it and on the honesty of the interview. So, thank you.
What spurred this idea to tackle this subject matter as a docu-series instead of a film?
I mean, there are two docu-series that are touchstones of this for me. One is Dream Hampton‘s “Surviving R. Kelly” which showed that if you’re going to talk to survivors, you have to let them talk and not just focus on their interactions with the person who they are telling you assaulted or raped them. And then the other part is also Ezra Edelman’s “O.J. Simpson, Made in America,” which showed that if you’re going to tell the story of a complicated man, you need to really zoom out and look at the world in which he lives in. So for me, those are the two things. And I think specifically with “Made in America,” Ezra Edelman always let you know we’re going to get into the awful details of the crime, but he earned your trust in such a way that like 20 minutes in you’re just like, “Man, O.J. was good at football.” And I think that’s a cinematic achievement that I don’t know that had ever been done before and I think I was inspired by that. I’m not comparing myself to that, but that was very inspiring.
Did you always know the general structure you wanted for the series? Or was it formulated after the interviews?
No, the structure emerged very much from the beginning, because I think me and the producers from Boardwalk just sort of organically talked about comedy documentaries and like the idea came up. Could you do a documentary about a comedian who had fallen in the public eye? And of course, when you talk about that, I was like Bill Cosby was who came up and I’d been thinking about this for a long time, really in many formats as I’ve talked about because I was raised in some part by Bill Cosby. I think that once you sort of get over that, once you sort of realize it’s an idea we’re going to work on, me, Geraldine Porras who’s one of the producers on the show who I met through “United Shades” and started as a field producer. I really helped her sort of advance in her career and she helped my career advance through her good work and Kelly Rafferty who works with me and then Jamilah King, who’s a journalist who had been with Mother Jones but with Buzzfeed, got into a conference room in Oakland and just sort of like, “First of all what is Bill Cosby’s career? What is the timeline of the assaults? What was the world doing?
And it was clear that it was so much, and he had covered so much ground that like you have to sort of meet everybody where they’re at. And some people remember seeing him on “The Jack Paar Show,” but most people don’t. We all sort of started Bill Cosby in different places. And, so, I think it was important to make sure we hit all the places along the way. And then it became clear that nobody from his life is going to talk to us. So we have to really focus this on when America met Bill Cosby.
Doing this research and interviews, was there anything that had been lost to history that surprised you?
I mean the story that I first read before I ever thought about doing a documentary was after the allegations started to come out en masse. There was the story I read about in Noni Robinson’s [documentary] film about the black stunt industry and how Bill Cosby basically single-handedly credited with integrating the black stunt industry in Hollywood. Because he refused to do a stunt because he wanted a black stunt man and not a white man painted black. I was like, “That’s history” and she had to pull his interview out because of the allegations, and then I never saw the doc come out. I was like, “If we lose that story, we’re losing a key part of history.” And as Roland Martin says, “You can’t tell the story of black people in America in the 21st, then the 20th century without talking about Bill Cosby.” Also, that thing was an empirically good thing he did. It’s hard to sort of like a lot of times you may be the kind of person who goes, “I don’t think he’s funny” and that’s debatable, but you can’t argue that that’s a good thing. And it became, like, this is so complicated. And also we’re losing a part of our history if we don’t talk about it. That was one of the early things that I thought was like this is something we have to figure out how to talk about.
When I watched that, I realized that if none of this had ever come out or if he had been a different person, that’s the sort of achievment they give you an honorary Oscar for.
Sure, for sure.
I thought it was one of the more impactful parts as a learning mechanism for people who might just only know about “The Cosby Show.”
Yes, and we know him to be a philanthropist. I mean, he gave 20 million dollars to Spelman College and he would wear HBCU sweatshirts and college sweatshirts. Lili Bernard who talks about her assault later in the doc talks about she was impressed with the number of black people who worked behind the scenes on “The Cosby Show.” And that’s specifically because he knew it was important to hire black people, not just on camera, but behind the camera, and many black people in Hollywood credit their early days to “The Cosby Show.” And those people have risen through the ranks and so you look at that and go, “We had to highlight that, we can’t pretend that didn’t happen.” But it’s also impactful that the person who’s saying that is also saying, “He raped me.” Like those things can exist in the same person, which is I think where the doc really lives. It’s like competing truths in one person’s brain.
You have journalists, you have the victims, you have people who were close to Cosby in the sense that they might have worked on his show or been near him. Was there anyone in particular that you were hoping to get that you were surprised either said no or maybe there was someone who said yes, that you weren’t expecting?
I mean Joseph C. Phillips was in the cast, but he’d been pretty public about his belief of the survivors. I felt like he would say yes anyway. Who I was surprised said yes? I mean, we got Clarence who was a black stunt man who we got through Noni Robinson. So, we reached out to her and she connected us to him. And I was really surprised that he would say yes because his memories are all positive but we got him through Noni. We never talked to him directly, but we got him through Noni. I was maybe surprised at the initial no’s, but there were so many no’s eventually that I was like, “Oh, I was more naive than I realized.” I think when we started this Bill Cosby was in prison and it sort of seemed like he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison or get out as a very old man. So, to me, the story felt like it was over maybe it’s safe to talk about, but it became clear that it wasn’t safe to talk about. And then when he got out of prison, it was less safe to talk about.
It premiered at Sundance and critics have seen it but now it’s going to be coming out on Showtime. Are you preparing yourself for the reaction on social media? Do you think people are going to attack just to attack?
Some of that has already started, people who haven’t seen it are already judging it and making it clear that they don’t want to see it and don’t trust me and think I’m tearing down a black man unnecessarily on a white network and using the tools of the master against black folks. I take that seriously, but also how are we supposed to talk about this? And I think it is a critical subject. I understand “the we” and “The We Need To Talk About Cosby” isn’t everybody. And I respect that after I talked to a lot of people because some people I talked to they said, “No,” over the course of an hour-long conversation. So, I get that this is hard. How am I preparing for it? It’s that thing where you start to check your notifications less, or you don’t scroll all the way down to the bottom of your tweet and you don’t hit that thing that says show more. And then also I’m not going to get engaged in the back and forth, because that has never worked well on social media with people who are already angry. I already learned that lesson a long time ago. And so I’m just being more circumspect and careful about how I engage with it because it’s already hard. And you know, Bill Cosby’s team they’re going to release his statement tomorrow and I know that’s going to cause a lot. Yeah, yeah.
I was just going to ask about that. Are you expecting him to file a lawsuit?
I mean we’ll wait and see tomorrow. Luckily I don’t have to expect for much longer if we’re good or for bad. They’re going to say something tomorrow, but we’ll see tomorrow.
[You can read Cosby’s public statement on the docu-series here. ]
You’ve tackled a lot of serious subjects over the course of your career. Is this at the top of the list of one of the most challenging projects you’ve ever done?
No, I mean, I said to my best friend yesterday, I was like, “Well, I’m finally not going to be just the guy who talked to the Ku Klux Klan.” Like this will push that out of the way I believe. So for good or for bad, I think this is going to be the new bar. And I don’t know how I navigate through this yet. I think it’s interesting times over here but I think this is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, but also because it was four episodes. An episode of “United Shades” it’s 42 minutes and I’m not directing it.
For sure.
This is almost four hours on one subject and a very challenging subject. So, you know at some point in the middle of it, I would sort of go, “Why would they let me do this?” You know? Like Ezra Edelman had a thick resume of amazing sports documentaries before he got to O.J. Simpson. And I had one documentary that I think is great about Chris Rock and “Bring the Pain” but it’s just praising Chris Rock and “Bring the Pain,” basically
I still think your previous work set this up, but that’s just my opinion.
No, you’re a hundred percent right about that. I think that, like, even allowing me to do this by the producers, by the people who lead Boardwalk is about what they’d see me do in the world. And then the fact that they were like, “We’ll help you do this.” And also putting a strong team behind me and also people like Geraldine Porras who has been with me for years on “United Shades,” knows how I work and knows what I do. And is there sort of to like be the come out translator if other people aren’t understanding.
“We Need To Talk About Cosby” is now available on Showtime. New episodes debut every Sunday for the next month.