Hi, my name is Kieran Deal. You might have heard me on the hysteria podcast with Erin Ryan.

And this is my very first crooked conversation. I'm super excited that today I am talking

to Oscar shortlisted filmmaker Kimberley Reed, who just made a feature film, a feature

documentary film called Dark Money. Today we're going to be talking about issues like campaign

finance reform and what you can do as an individual to help.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. First of all, I just

want to say that movie was fantastic. Congratulations. You did an excellent job. Great. Why don't you

start by just just for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet? Just give me a sense of like,

if you just want to give your elevator pitch of what the film is. Dark Money is about

campaign finance. It's about money in politics. It's an issue that people really started focusing

on after the passage of Citizens United in 2010, which a lot of people remember it as

the decision from the Supreme Court that said that money, speech, and corporations are

people. If you follow that logic a little bit, you end up where corporations who are

people can spend unlimited money in political campaigns because otherwise you would be

constraining their speech. That seemed like a really bad idea to me, but I didn't quite

know what to do about that as a documentary filmmaker. There's lots of issues out there

in the world, but I couldn't really approach it as a film until I frankly, I just saw

what was going on in my home state of Montana. I saw that it was becoming a really good,

tight little microcosm example of money in politics. So I started following that story.

Things broke our way and it turned into this kind of spy novel of following all of these twists

and turns of where the money is coming from. It's been a courtroom trial. At the end of the day,

I think, became a good microcosm to tell the story about how money works its way through a

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