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
The people who are really important are the advertisers. It's like the paper towel company. Yeah.
Well, I understood that TV isn't about the conversation between a creator and a viewer. You're about renting viewers to advertisers.
And that the creators aren't really creators at all. You're just providing the catnip that is just tasty enough It's good enough to lure you in so that you'll stay for half an hour and please the advertisers. And the last thing they want is any kind of personality or originality.
It felt awesome. And not only did they write bigger and better checks for it, but, you know, sometimes you could take a swing and make it for a little bit of money and sell it for a lot. And there was a tremendous amount of excitement because it was about how do you do something weird and original that was seen as a market benefit.
Ha ha ha!
Kind of, because when I made it, even in the first five minutes of that film, there's a lot going on. There's a recreation of a suicide. There's a strange Tom Waits song called, What's He Building In There?, It was an odd and idiosyncratic film in many ways. Now, it was about something that was famous. Yeah. You know, the collapse of Enron.
But I kept asking people, kind of like David Chase kept asking himself, as a cinematographer told me, he's like, is anybody going to watch this shit? And that's what I kept wondering, like, is it going to get into Sundance? Like, is anybody going to watch this?
It was like what I called a taxi driver film. Like you'd be riding in a taxi and the taxi driver would be saying, hey, man, have you seen that Enron movie? Enron was nominated for an Oscar.
So there was something terrifying at the heart of it that said something very deep and disturbing about human nature. And also it was told as a story about a poor innocent who got caught in a machine, you know, of cruelty.
Well, I think there was always this thinking, which was ironic in this case, like if you made something really well, you might win awards. Right. Now, awards are sometimes economically viable and sometimes they're good for business long term.
They had a philosophy which was communities of interest. And so long as you could keep those people subscribing to your service, that was good. Right. And they would be super happy. Now, other people might come over to it, but if people weren't that interested, maybe they wouldn't come to it.
So it was just a way of getting some people hugely excited about a film as opposed to trying to get everybody excited. willing to buy that soggy croissant.
Right, and you're also not afraid... when it comes to certain subjects to offend people.
I think, you know, I really do think it starts with the pandemic.
Yeah. I think there may have been warning signs about it before, but the pandemic really does it because the pandemic takes away theatrical. And theatrical, even in the small indie world, you know, people would go out to those films, they would pop up.
And the way you say it is exactly the way it worked in economic terms. In other words, theatrical distribution, particularly for independent films, was almost always a loss leader. It usually didn't pay for itself in theaters, but it was a signal that it was good. And also the film festival world, all of that, and then people would show up and bid for But then, you know, so the pandemic happened.
Suddenly, theaters flatline. Yeah. Nobody's going to theaters during a pandemic. And also, there starts to be a huge consolidation in the streaming industry or streaming cable industry because now streamers and cable casters are starting to be one.
Like when you're trying to make something that is... Well, then it becomes harder because, you know, you go to people and you say, I went to one streamer with a film I had called Citizen K, you know, which is kind of a look at Putin's Russia through this oligarch named Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who then, when things turned in 2003, spent 10 years in the Gulag.
And I went to one streamer and the streamer said, you know... This is a good film, but we don't want to offend Russia. Really? Yeah. We don't want to offend Russia. Okay. Wow. Okay. Note taken. You know, because you can see the commercial considerations, particularly in a global economy, begin to take over.
And I think, in a way, it's kind of obvious why that is. If you want... a big audience, you make a list of the top 20 celebrities, And you think if we do a Taylor Swift documentary, we're going to get a big audience because her audience is big. Right. So you're just borrowing Taylor Swift's audience.
Showing 301–320 of 375 · page 16 of 19
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