Pacifica Performance Showcase - Friday, June 19, 2026

Follows the audio · click any line to jump

1. Of course, Dame Helen Mirren, one of the greats.
2. And so that will be coming up momentarily.
3. I wanted to announce that this week's LA Theatre Works, this Sunday at 10 p.m.,
4. will be David Hare's play Racing Demon.
5. It's a good one.
6. And it stars Jared Harris, one of my absolute favorite actors.
7. And this has to do with four clergymen who seek to make sense of their mission
8. while being torn in all directions by the Church of England.
9. So tune in this Sunday at 10 p.m. for Racing Demon by David Hare,
10. one of our great playwrights.
11. You may know him from Plenty, among many other plays.
12. So tune in for that.
13. And one other thing I wanted to announce, I just learned of this this afternoon,
14. The passing of a comedy legend, James Burroughs, who was really considered the master of the TV sitcom.
15. He died at the age of 85.
16. He helped create Cheers, and he directed more than 1,000 episodes of hit shows from Taxi to Friends, Big Bang Theory.
17. If he directed it, it was a hit, and he proved that over and over.
18. He was known as the Steven Spielberg of sitcoms, winning 11 Emmy Awards and 47 nominations in a career that spanned five decades.
19. Tremendous loss, the great James Burroughs passing at the age of 85.
20. And we'll go out at the end of the show with the theme from Cheers in honor of him.
21. And now, without further ado, we'll get to my conversation with documentary filmmaker Nick Davis on his film, This Ordinary Thing.
22. And welcome to Pacifica Performance Showcase, Arts and Culture to Enlighten, Enliven, and Educate.
23. I'm your host, Donna Walker, and it is a great pleasure to welcome via Zoom a filmmaker, Nick Davis,
24. who is the force behind a really remarkable documentary called This Ordinary Thing.
25. And it's not an ordinary Holocaust film, whatever that means, but sometimes I think people are hesitant to,
26. oh, I just don't know if I can take that. It's too heavy. It's too much.
27. But in these troubled times, it's very, very important. It's very enlightening because it focuses on the heroism and the self-sacrifice of non-Jews throughout Europe who risk their lives to hide Jewish strangers.
28. And it seems to me in a time where there is so much demonization of the other, in addition to anti-Semitism, it's a powerful and important doc.
29. Because if you think it can't happen here, think again.
30. It includes never-before-seen archival footage.
31. And what a fantastic cast of actors, including Academy Award winners.
32. I first of all want to welcome you, Nick Davis, and congratulate you on this wonderful film.
33. Thank you, Donna. It's great to be here.
34. Now, you also, I didn't give you a full introduction because we're here to talk about this documentary, but you've got the Godspell doc I've been hearing so much about. I haven't watched that yet, but you've also...
35. Yes, that's coming soon.
36. Oh good Excellent I looking forward to it And a number of other things including something I a particular fan of are those 30 for 30 docs for ESPN So people can take a look at all that But I want to get right to this because first of all it a cast that is so extraordinary
37. And there's so many, I can't even name them all, but I'll just throw out a few names
38. and ask you how you got some of these people to come on board.
39. F. Murray Abraham, Carrie Kuhn, Hope Davis, Stephen Fry, one of my favorites, Marsha Gay Harden, Mamie Gummer, so many others, Helen Mirren, Martha Plimpton, Rufus Sewell, who I adore, David Strathern, one of my favorites, Lily Tomlin, David Hyde Pearson, so many others.
40. How did you broach this project to these people and get them on board to voice the stories of these real-life heroes?
41. Well, it's, yeah, it's a great question. And I don't really have the, I don't really know the answer. I don't know what it was that made any of them, well, I shouldn't say that. I know what it is that made some of them join, which is they all, when we spoke about it, they all felt it was an incredible story and wonderful to tell.
42. But how and why they joined this little documentary, I don't really know.
43. I began it as a project that, you know, I knew it was going to be voiceovers with all of these incredible stories, but no one main character.
44. It's really sort of a collective story.
45. A few stories may jump out at people as being more memorable, but they're all kind of incredible and intertwined.
46. And so it was a somewhat experimental project on my part.
47. I certainly hadn't done anything like this in the past.
48. So I just got my friends to say, hey, can you do a couple of voices on your iPhone, send it in?
49. And I worked for over a year with these voices, scratch voices of just friends of mine.
50. And, you know, I'd done some college acting and I knew a bunch of retired hams.
51. And so I thought they all did a really nice job.
52. But my wife and partner in my production company, Jane Mendelsohn, the author, all along was saying, yeah, OK, this is good.
53. You're figuring it out. But when are you going to get real actors? When are you going to try and get real actors? And eventually I saw, OK, yes, let's let's let's go for it. And so we did. And for months and months, nothing happened. We sent out these requests through our agents and there was no response at all. And then one day out of the blue, you get the phone message that you dream of, which is Dame Helen Mirren wants to be in your film.
54. And that kind of opened the floodgates because once she has said yes, then that gives everybody else permission to join up.
55. And honestly, within two or three weeks of her saying yes, we had, you know, 20 incredible actors.
56. And I think what it is, more seriously, when I think about it, I think what it is, is that actors are literally trained to empathize.
57. So in a way, it makes sense that they would respond to these stories that all kind of are about people empathizing with someone who is, quote unquote, different from them and helping somebody who is on a different team from them.
58. I mean, I think that everybody nowadays is so we're so siloed and the tribalization has really gotten quite remarkable.
59. And I'm not saying any you're on the blue team.
60. And so much of it is just an accident of birth that you're born into one religion or even one political party.
61. And it's not just politicians.
62. It the algorithms It the social media Everything seems to be dividing us and pointing out our differences And here were people who were acting out of a deeper understanding of the essential
63. sameness of all human beings. Getting back to your question, I think actors do that. I think
64. that's what actors, that's why they want to act, is I want to have these different lives and
65. empathize with this character and now this character. And what makes that person tick?
66. And so I think that may have played a role in why we were able to attract such an incredible cast, even aside from these great stories.
67. Well, and also it begs a couple of questions, which is what would I have done? Why didn't others do this? And of course, our common humanity, what makes people do the things that they do and make the choices they make, both on the good side and, for lack of a better term, on the evil side, because we're all part of humanity.
68. But the Holocaust particularly holds the mirror up to what we do and how we do it. And it's startling to be reminded of what transpired and through these very personal stories, which focuses on about, what, 40 or 45?
69. 45. There's 45 different characters who speak in the film and they each tell stories of how and why and they helped and they did specifically. And they're all extremely ordinary people. I mean, and they talk about the quotidian details of life, darning the socks and making the meals and doing the ironing.
70. And, you know, how do you go to the bathroom if you're hiding in the attic and all these kinds of things that make it, I hope, feel more, you know, current and alive and relatable.
71. I mean, one of the things that really blew my mind was when I saw the portraits, the color portraits that were taken of the people who did these interviews back in the 80s and the transcripts of which became the basis of the film script is I saw these colored portraits and they were in color by this wonderful photographer, Gabe Block.
72. And it really was eye opening. And I realized, oh, yeah, the Holocaust was not in black and white.
73. The Holocaust was not in sepia tones. It was not, you were saying or referring to before, like we didn't want to make your grandfather's Holocaust movie. We didn't want it to just be another Holocaust movie. Many of them are amazing. But, you know, with the sepia tones and the cello music and the dirge of the misery of it, in a way, what we wanted was kind of what was it really like? Like, what was daily life really like?
74. And for these people who were making these extraordinarily brave and courageous choices, not that they saw it that way, what were they facing and how incredibly relatable it was when you just hear these stories.
75. And so that was, you know, that was sort of the goal of the film was to bring all of that current and make it feel as current as we possibly could.
76. So the archive producers were looking for color archival footage as wherever they could, meaning stuff that in a normal World War Two documentary, you wouldn't show people just swimming in a lake or riding motorcycles on their afternoons and or eating in cafes.
77. days. And that was the stuff that we really wanted. We wanted what was daily life like
78. for these Europeans who were in the middle of a huge war and some of them were doing
79. these extraordinary things.
80. There's so many things. But of course, you know, the title of the film is This Ordinary
81. Thing And it not an ordinary thing but it full of ordinary things as you were mentioning those daily things that constitute a regular life And here are of course we know at least 6 million Jews murdered solely because they Jews
82. as many other groups were also targeted, communists and homosexuals and many others.
83. But this is really encapsulated by these stories. When you put a name to the face,
84. and they're from different countries too, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Poland.
85. Yeah.
86. So you get a different glimpse, don't you?
87. Yeah, yeah.
88. I mean, I was really blown away.
89. I just didn't know very much about this at all until I started.
90. And I had heard of Oskar Schindler, of course, because of Schindler's List.
91. And I figured there were probably a few other people out there helping,
92. but I had no idea of the scope and the variety and geographically that they were all over Europe,
93. all working independently and without conferring with each other via text or anything.
94. Like, they just knock on the door.
95. Hey, will you hide this suitcase?
96. Oh, he was a friend.
97. And to our amazement, one woman says, voiced by Lily Tomlin, to our amazement, he was a Jew.
98. And so, yeah, of course we hid the suitcase.
99. And then a couple weeks later, oh, well, can you hide the baby?
100. Well, yeah, we'll hide the baby.
101. And then a little bit after that, well, will you hide the baby's brother?
102. Well, if they'll kill us for one, they'll kill us for two.
103. Of course, we'll take the baby.
104. And, you know, the next thing you know, you've got 37 people in the attic.
105. I mean, I'm combining a bunch of stories there.
106. But that was really the central story we wanted to tell was of this collective, almost biography of the people who did this kind of thing.
107. And it's astonishing.
108. You know, it's interesting because I saw quite a few years back here at the Amundsen, the musical that Barry Manilow did on the Harmonists, and it ended up in New York. And at the end, I kind of get a chill, I get a little bit clumped thinking about this, but at the end, they showed the photos of the actual people.
109. And your film does the same thing. And it's like you witness this whole film and then there's something at the end when you see the real people that just causes me to just burst into tears because we can kind of keep it at a certain distance.
110. Yeah. When it's either a fiction story or even with the archival footage. But there's something about seeing the faces of the real life people and it suddenly hits home. This was real. And, you know, it's a funny reaction. But I mean, I'm kind of getting a little teary even just thinking about it now because these were extraordinary people and they didn't think of themselves as heroic.
111. No, they didn't.
112. And that's getting back to your earlier question about the title of the film.
113. You know, it comes from one of them voiced by Bill Irwin, who is being honored at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and they planting a tree in his honor and all this.
114. And he said, I really didn't do that much.
115. I mean, I, you know, I saved one person.
116. And the director of the museum says, yeah, but all of you say the same thing.
117. And if that's true, why didn't everybody do this ordinary thing?
118. And it's not an easy question.
119. And it's not an easy question, what would you have done?
120. I mean, this is not, you know, a judgment.
121. It's more, it does make you wonder what you would have done.
122. And you might think, well, I'd like to think I would have helped, but I don't know for sure.
123. And I care a lot about my family.
124. And would I have put them at risk for a perfect stranger?
125. I don't know.
126. even the people who didn't do what maybe they, you know, have regrets about not doing. I know
127. there's one quote about a
128. doctor. One of the people takes their Mickey to the doctor because he's ill and the doctor
129. treats him and he doesn't take any money. He says, you've made me feel like a man again.
130. It's so extraordinary. It begins, you know, the saying in the Talmud, if you've saved one life,
131. you save the world. And that's really the crux of it. But the personal, and sometimes it's hard
132. to keep straight who's who, but it's seamless, though, you know, it's very seamless.
133. Oh, well, thank you. I mean, it is hard to keep them straight. And I hope early on viewers
134. realize, oh, I don't have to keep these straight. I mean, it's a sea of voices. And maybe there
135. are a few where you sort of realize, oh, this is that same woman who was talking about Mickey.
136. And I keep hearing about Mickey. And Mickey is sick. And so we take him to the doctor.
137. And as you say, and that, you know, the doctor sort of figures out that this is a Jewish kid and does feel good and, you know, won't take any money for it.
138. And it's a it's an interesting moment.
139. But for the most part, we're not telling you biographies of these extraordinary 45 people.
140. You know, you can certainly look them up and they're all amazing.
141. But the idea was here is this collective.
142. Here is this, you know, in a way, it's like you think about the good German or the banality of evil.
143. And in a way, it's like I sort of view this as like the flip side of that.
144. It's like people who through upbringing and whatever just sort of fell in line with the Nazis and did what they were told.
145. OK, that's one way to go.
146. But then these people, because of their upbringing or personality or whatever it was, they did this other thing, this ordinary thing to behave like human beings.
147. That's the story we wanted to tell.
148. And, you know, the truth is it's pretty hopeful and it's fairly inspiring.
149. And it makes you think, OK, I think we can all do a little better.
150. Absolutely.
151. It is very hopeful.
152. I think these stories are so important and so inspirational.
153. But the questions are asked, you know, how could you not have known?
154. And, you know, I flashed on, you know, the old series Hogan's Heroes and Sergeant Schultz, you know, I know nothing.
155. And it's it's that question is asked over and over.
156. But we also feel the trauma that both the person who was being sheltered and the person who was doing the sheltering, they all experienced this extreme trauma.
157. I think Helene, I think it's Jacobs of Germany, says, my grief remains predominant because why didn't we stop it?
158. So there's a grief and somebody still has nightmares where they just think there's going to be a knock on the door and they have to be ready to jump out the window.
159. And this is decades and decades ago.
160. It doesn't go away.
161. But the hopefulness, you know.
162. And in a weird way, it doesn't change.
163. I mean, human nature, somebody says, you know, human nature doesn't change.
164. And if that war didn't change us, what can?
165. You know, it's these stories are inspiring.
166. But the sort of general trend of humanity, it's TBD, as we say, like we don't know where we're going.
167. And what I found really interesting is that the people who did these interviews in the 1980s, they said things like, look at the world today.
168. You know, we think it's OK to hate Jews again.
169. And we've learned nothing.
170. And all these things that feel like, OK, they're said in 1988, but they could be, you know, they could have been said in 2025.
171. You know, the sort of frustration that they had having lived through it.
172. And now here we are a generation or two removed It that much further away There are that many more people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened who we come further away from the Holocaust in living memory
173. And so it's in some ways it's even harsher than it was in the 80s when at least most people knew, OK, this happened.
174. It was just 30 or 40 years.
175. Well, and to, you know, with social media now, I mean, how that infected or affected everything.
176. that whole thing of people not learning.
177. I think of the mass shootings.
178. You know, after Newtown, we thought, oh, well, surely they'll do something.
179. And they did nothing.
180. You know, the murder of children.
181. And then I think about the children who were literally in the church praying,
182. and there was another shooting.
183. You think, surely, surely they will do something.
184. And they don't.
185. The anti-Semitism is rife.
186. And also what struck me, ironically, is how anti-Semitism today is also being used for political purposes to demonize the other, whether it's Palestinians or immigrants.
187. And there's kind of a perfunctory, oh, we're going to investigate this college campus for how they handled anti-Semitism.
188. It is not really about that at all, which really diminishes the true anti-Semitism and the extreme white supremacy that does exist.
189. So it's a tricky, it's a tricky period of time, you know, when we kind of throw around words like the Holocaust or anti-Semitism.
190. But, you know, we need to take a look, a harder look.
191. And sometimes the best way to do that is through the personal stories.
192. I want to just throw out a few things that quotes or things that some of these people shared.
193. And I think somebody from the Netherlands says, you know, as soon as you go and say, oh, that Jew, you know, that's where it starts.
194. That's the beginning where you start to put one race above another.
195. Or when you start to see the park benches that say not for Jews or the restaurants that say no Jews allowed.
196. And of course, we immediately think about the American South, among other things.
197. But, you know, the beginnings of how it starts are so insidious.
198. And then within a few months, it's really starting to snowball.
199. Sometime once it gets started, it rolls very, very quickly.
200. Talk about some things that stood out for you particularly.
201. I know there's so much that's kind of a hard question to ask.
202. But what did you come away with that either startled you or surprised you or moved you particularly?
203. Well, so much.
204. I appreciate that you pointed to those sort of early sentiments.
205. How could you not have known your park benches had signs on them?
206. Like, don't tell me afterwards that, like Sergeant Schultz, you knew nothing.
207. You know, I've seen nothing.
208. And it doesn't affect me.
209. So therefore.
210. Right.
211. Right.
212. So, you know, how could you not have known?
213. And so there was a, you know, it was tricky for us because it was our people telling just the history of it.
214. And it didn't really become our movie until there's a knock on the door.
215. And that doesn't happen until later.
216. So we wanted to be careful that we sort of led you through the early years without feeling like, again, this is your grandfather's Holocaust movie.
217. Like it had to be very grounded in, OK, but we're getting it from these people and this perspective of people who see he laid it out in Mein Kampf.
218. How could you not like he told us what he was going to do?
219. Like, don't act like this is a surprise.
220. I think that I think it was I mean, everything was moving to me.
221. It was moving to me that so many people were on to the Hitler and the Nazis from the start and saw where they were going And also I think just the little things the tiny little quotidian details the darning of the socks the gratitude that one woman had
222. And she says, all right, well, I'll do the stuff that you don't want me to do, that you don't want to do.
223. So I'm being hidden by you, but now I'm going to darn the socks because I know you don't like darning the socks.
224. And that was an incredible moment, actually, in the making of the film, because that story was narrated by Ellen Burstyn.
225. I thought, well, this is a really interesting thing and I want to get it in because it's such a neat little quotidian detail of Darning the Socks.
226. So she got up to that in her script and she read it and she just cried.
227. She broke down crying.
228. And I said, well, that was interesting.
229. And she said, yeah, that was interesting.
230. I didn't mean to do that.
231. And I said, well, it's OK, but try it again and throw it away because it's just a memory, but it's not that emotional.
232. You know, and she was like, all right, fine.
233. So she does it again and she cried even more.
234. And we agreed, OK, we're not going to make you do this again.
235. We don't know. Neither Ellen Burstyn nor myself knew what it was that was triggering this character to cry when she remembered this little quotidian detail.
236. But it was deep and absolutely went in the movie because it was totally what it's all about.
237. Like these ordinary things, the way we treat each other on such a moment to moment, day to day kind of life.
238. Like that's what I really wanted the film to be about.
239. When the woman says, oh, you know, for one hour a day, you're allowed to talk about food.
240. The rest of the time, you can't talk about food because it's too painful.
241. We don't have food.
242. And she says, well, who here, she says to the kids, who here remembers what a banana is?
243. Is it something to eat?
244. I mean, it's just, it's mind blowing.
245. The point is also made, too, that one of the portraits, one of the testimonies says, we did our job and the Jews did their job because it was a job just to survive.
246. And the point is also made that, you know, some people think, well, the Jews were passive, you know, marched to their death in the concentration camps.
247. And the point was made that no, there was resistance. There were escapes. There were uprisings, both in the concentration camps and the ghettos. But the massive institutionalization of this process is so extraordinary that when you hear these personal stories, too, of people who hide themselves in the trucks that are carrying the bodies to dump in the mass grave and then are able to jump off the truck and flee into the woods.
248. You know, you do see that all these people in their own way. But then as people are fleeing the city and are on the roads, you know, they're machine gunned by the Germans. Circumstance dictates a lot of what people's experiences were and how they reacted.
249. Yeah. Yeah. And circumstances, you know, that that's the other thing that you tend to ask yourself when you're watching this film or listening to these stories is, yeah, well, I'm so glad that I never got tested in the way that these people get tested.
250. I mean, I think it's William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, who said, I'm so glad I didn't face these choices because I don't know what I would have done, you know, and I definitely have felt that way working on this.
251. Well, and it's hard to fathom some of the cruelty that does exist. You know, we hear
252. the individual story of, you know, a mother holding her child and the child starts to
253. cry and, you know, the SS officer grabs the child and throws it to the ground and crushes
254. its skull I mean it just it hard to fathom the level of cruelty So that why it a lot to hold in your head you know but that also why it so important to tell the stories of the goodness because that what we are too
255. And we do face choices in our everyday life.
256. You know, if your neighbor's taken away and deported or being sent off to El Salvador, I mean, how do we deal with that?
257. What do we do?
258. There's a lot of application for so much of what we're going through now.
259. Hasn't reached this point yet, but again, how it starts.
260. Yeah, yeah.
261. I mean, who knows?
262. But I mean, I do think that, yeah, I mean, if it gets people to think that way about their own lives, I think that's really cool.
263. I mean, in some ways, it's like the people who did this, this ordinary thing again and again and again.
264. I think that they listened to their consciences in a way that many of us maybe don't or there's enough other rationalizations for not doing the thing that if we just stilled the noise in our brains, we could hear that our conscience is saying, you know, the truth is, this is probably worth doing.
265. And there's the great line from F. Marie Abraham Voices where he says, I said, well, I'll talk it over with my wife.
266. And then that night he and his wife talk it over.
267. Should we take in this child?
268. And he says, if I thought about how I would feel if later I found out that this person was killed.
269. And he said, I think I would be destroyed by that.
270. So I said, yes.
271. And so it's not like an easy choice for anybody.
272. It's not like they're different than us.
273. And for them, it's easy.
274. It's more, I think, that they have an access to their conscience, to something deep within that recognizes we're all human beings.
275. We're here for a short time.
276. Let's help each other.
277. Yeah.
278. And just the kind of the choiceless choice.
279. One says, I hope God will know I did my best to help people.
280. And another says to save someone's life is not a shame.
281. You know, we had to keep doing it.
282. We had to.
283. Now, when will they have an opportunity to see this film? Is it going to go to streaming as well as theatrical?
284. Yes, it's playing theatrically in New York and then it will drop on the streaming platforms at the end of March in time for April, which is apparently the month of genocidal awareness.
285. Oh, yes.
286. Yeah. I mean, I hope people see it. I worry sometimes when I talk about it that it sounds medicinal. I hope it's actually entertaining and it's gripping. I mean, they're great stories and there's at least one, maybe even two big laughs in the movie.
287. Yeah.
288. But I look forward to people getting a chance to see it.
289. Just as a closing note, Yad Vashem has honored 28,217 people as righteous among nations,
290. and nobody knows really how many people they saved.
291. But suffice it to say, this is a recognition of their heroism and these deeply personal stories.
292. The film is This Ordinary Thing.
293. It's an extraordinary documentary, and I want to congratulate you, Nick,
294. and thank you for taking the time to join us.
295. Thank you.
296. It was wonderful to talk with you
297. and I really appreciate it.
298. And my thanks again to director Nick Davis.
299. We're going to go out with the theme from Cheers
300. to honor the great James Burroughs
301. and Soccer Update,
302. the U.S. beat Australia to zip.
303. Stay tuned for the Pocho Hour of Power.
304. to get away
305. all those nights when you've got no lights
306. the check is
307. Coming up this week on L.A.