Alex Gibney
speaker
375 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 27 Mar
Alex Gibney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, God bless HBO.
Yeah.
Hey, thanks, BJ.
The Japanese have a term for that, shinju. It's a mutual suicide, right. That sounds like a lovely, that's what we're going to teach listeners today is how to do shinju.
Well, at the moment, I kind of feel the way Tony does. I think the golden age of documentary, which was proclaimed maybe even as recently as like four years ago, now feels like it's got a lot of rust on it.
So I made documentaries in film school, and one of the ones I made in film school, I actually got on TV, which was back then, you know, hugely successful. But then I went through a long period where... I was underemployed, even after I'd had kids. And if I was going in to look for a job, my wife would always say, honey, listen, if they ask you what you do, don't say you make documentaries.
Because then you'll never get hired for whatever it is you want to do because you couldn't get hired to make documentaries. Oh, they would see it as like, why would we hire you even for like a commercial or something like that? Right, because you're interested in documentaries and documentaries are spinach and nobody cares about them. Why did you like them?
I liked them because, I mean, when I was going to college, you'd see them at film societies alongside the feature films. So to me, they were movies like, you know, Gimme Shelter, documentary, great documentary, really entertaining. And then Fred Wiseman, I always liked his films, and Barbara Koppel, Harlan County, USA, Woodstock. I mean, they're documentaries, right?
So, I thought they were great, but there came a period, and particularly the period of cable TV. was a period where channels were like, you were supposed to be able to recognize them as you went up and down the dial with your clicker, before there were too many channels to use a clicker.
So that if you went by A and E, it's like, oh, that's A and E, because you can automatically tell, like... in three seconds, what the channel is. And so documentaries just became either something that was dull, that was on PBS, even though they weren't always dull on PBS, or that was just a cable channel documentary, which meant it was just... more fodder.
They were all stamped with a kind of corporate seal. There was no personality to them. Like the documentaries that I liked, like the ones I just talked about, even the cinema verite ones where you don't hear a narrator or anything, you know, the cinema verite filmmakers saw themselves as visual poets.
So there was a mark of personality to them. That's what was intriguing and engaging. They were engaging with real life, but it wasn't some stentorian narrator telling you the way the world was.
That's right. There was a lot of years in the wilderness I spent doing other stuff, whether it was doing some journalism or I cut exploitation trailers for a while, you know, all sorts of stuff. Did you feel like a person who had, like, fallen in love with the wrong thing? Yeah. I had. And my wife was particularly convinced I had fallen in love with the wrong thing. What about the post office?
The regular hours? You know, it was like, because I was always, I had a zillion projects, right? But the projects never went anywhere.
That was the period when I was scuffling up in Canada trying to make something. I was trying to make it for the Disney Channel, and then... the Disney Channel had a change of heart about what it was gonna do because Michael Eisner, you know, was caught trying to make a slave ride. Wait, what happened? Okay, so the Disney Channel was gonna change to become an Americana channel. Okay.
And as part of that, the first show, this is gonna be my big break, was going to be a doc series that I invented called The 50s, based on a book by David Halberstam called The 50s. And it was cool. It was like toe-tapping music, but it was serious stuff, but told in a very entertaining way.
Somewhere along the line, Michael Eisner, as part of this Americana project, decided that he was going to build an Americana museum, sort of like Disney World.
But he ran into two problems. One was he was going to build it by a Civil War battlefield. And two is discovered that one of the highlights of the park was going to be a slave ride. Like an amusement park ride. To show you what it would have been like to have been a slave, yeah. Yeah.
All of this is a long way of saying that when it came time for the premiere, the 50s, my co-creator, Tracy Dolbin, I went down. And at some point during the big party, which was at the Hard Rock Cafe, they said, and now we'd like to introduce the people who are responsible for this series.
And I had, you know, bled this series for like three years, you know, moved to Canada in order to be able to do it. And so Tracy and I are puffing ourselves up. And then they proceeded to introduce the advertisers. The execs at A&E didn't really even understand why we were there. Like, why would you bother to show up? You're just... Widgets.
Showing 281–300 of 375 · page 15 of 19
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