Dis-Inherit the Wind: Film Debunks Hollywood’s Icon of Evolution

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

On this ID The Future from the vault, host David Boze interviews filmmaker Fred Foote, writer and producer of the feature-length drama Alleged, which seeks to tell the real story behind the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which pitched Darwinian evolution against belief in God. Through his own research, Foote discovered that Inherit the Wind was "almost exactly wrong" on many crucial points. Foote discusses how his movie strives to present both sides in the famous trial as fairly as possible. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:14.3	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
0:22.6	I'm David Bowes, your host. Today we're going to talk with Fred Foote, the producer and screenwriter of the new movie Allege, out on DVD Now.
0:30.5	The movie seeks to explore the truth behind the 1925 Scopes trial and the impact media bias had in distorting what really happened in the
0:39.2	famed monkey trial.
0:40.6	Former presidential candidate and law and order star Fred Thompson stars as William
0:45.3	Jennings Bryan, Brian Danahey stars as Clarence Darrow, and Cole Meaney stars as H. L. Mencken.
0:52.0	First of all, I want to tell you, I got the screener yesterday, and I was able to enjoy the movie last night, so I've seen your work. And I enjoyed it. I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought it was a lot of fun. Oh, that's great. I appreciate your saying that. Well, tell me this. The material, the trial of the century, the monkey trial has been covered a number of times, several times before, most famously as Inherit the Wind. Yes. What inspired you to take on the story again?
1:15.3	Well, I was first exposed to inherit the win when I was a sophomore in 1976 in high school,
1:21.2	he slats in high school. And I assumed it was true to what they depicted about the Scopes
1:25.6	trial and William Jennings Bryan and
1:27.7	Clarence Darrow and so forth. And then afterwards, in the meantime, I'd gotten a law degree
1:34.2	and I was kind of familiar with some legal things and then saw Inherit the Wind again as an adult
1:39.7	and came to find out that it was in further research and stuff almost exactly wrong
1:47.0	on so many, many crucial points that it seemed to me that Inherit the Wind had intentionally
1:58.0	distorted what actually happened at the trial and that everyone believed the
2:02.7	distortion. Everyone believed the caricature of Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. And so I wanted to write a movie
2:12.2	that sort of suggested how that could happen, how a public event could be manipulated and history kind of turned
2:21.3	on its head and everyone believed the distorted version. That's what made me go after
2:28.3	inherit the wind, in a completely, with a different approach. Did you find yourself going back through all the old trial transcripts?
2:37.1	Yeah, the trial transcripts are available, so that's easy to get a hold of.
2:40.5	Then there's hundreds of contemporary articles that covered the trial, and so that served
	...

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