From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. So often movies, be they fiction films or documentary, deal with the idea of truth, either creating a truth or asking questions about the nature of truth and the subjectivity of truth and the subjectivity of memory, really.

And my guest, Bart Layton, has made a documentary about this and a fiction film that deals with documentary footage in this.

His new film is American Animals First. Bart Layton, thanks so much for being here.

Oh, thanks for having me. And talk a little bit about the title because it's such a great title.

Yeah, I wish I could take more credit for that. It actually came out of, so it's a true story

about a, um, the theft of some of the most valuable books in the world.

And I read about the story, this is a long time ago.

And at the time, the perpetrators of the crime, the more I read about it,

the more kind of bizarre and unexpected it became.

So the perpetrators of the crime were a group of young men, fairly well-educated young

men at good universities.

And solid middle-class citizens, which you say, too.

Yeah, yeah.

And kind of upper-middle-class kids from Lexington, Kentucky.

And one of them was at a, I think one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in America.

And in that university, there was a special collections room and in that special collections room

are the most valuable books on the planet, including Birds of America, you know,

the volumes by John James Audubon and The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

And so there was a great kind of irony in the idea of them stealing this book about, you know, evolution and about how human beings have evolved.

And there was a great quote in it about American animals and domestic animals in

particular and how Darwin was observing that, you know, over centuries domesticated animals,

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