Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.

Aral Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers. He's the kind of director that gets shown

in film schools all the time. He's contributed that much to the field of documentary making.

If you've actually seen his movies, Gates of Heaven, a fast-cheap and out of control,

or even the short documentaries that he made for ESPN, they are entertaining and fascinating

and exceptionally watchable, not like impenetrable or boring art house films. Morris has a way

of painting these portraits of people nuanced and funny, tragic, fascinating. His newest

movie, My Psychedelic Love Story, tells the tale of LSD advocate Timothy Leary's longtime

partner, Joanna Harcourt-Smith. She was an author, an activist, and according to Aral,

maybe a CIA plant. That's classic Aral Morris material, folks. When I talked with him

in 2018, he just released something really interesting, a Netflix mini-series called

Wormwood. It was a bit of a departure for Aral. First, he set aside his signature in

Terratron, which is an elaborate device that lets his subjects make eye contact with him,

while also making eye contact with the viewer. Instead of using the Terratron, he's conducting

interviews on camera. He also draws on the work of actors to tell the story for much

of the film as well. The movie is classic Morris in a lot of ways. It focuses on Frank Olson,

a former CIA biochemist who died mysteriously decades ago, and his son, Eric, who's worked

for years to uncover the truth about his life and death. Let's take a listen to a little

bit from Wormwood. In this scene, Eric Olson is talking about reading the results of a

1975 government investigation into his father's death. When the story came out in the Rockefeller

Commission report, I get this phone call from my brother-in-law. You should read The

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