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 difference is that for a network or a channel or even a streamer early on, that they would have editorial control. That would be a good thing. That showed a dedication to certain journalistic and editorial principles.
Right? You never give the subject control. Not anymore. Right. Gone. Poof. And I think that to some extent you think to yourself, well, okay, like I've made commercials before. Like when I make a commercial for a client, I don't expect to have editorial control. Because it's a commercial. Yeah. But that's the problem. It's like there's this netherworld at the moment where the celebrity –
and the channel, wants the viewer to believe that it's a documentary. Yeah. When it is, in fact, a commercial.
And look, HBO... has been pretty fearless over the years in terms of their willingness to do tough stuff. But it just felt to me like, I love the show, but do I want to do, like, a special on The Sopranos? It didn't feel that interesting to me. But then when I sat down with David and met him, he was a fascinating character. But also I realized, whoa.
He went through back then what I and many others are going through right now. The battle. The battle. Meaning, how do you get something personal and important on when everything about the system is conspiring to keep it off?
Okay, so David was just getting tired of doing the TV thing. I mean, he had had a relatively successful career. He was a showrunner at Northern Exposure, which is a very successful show. And he had done some other ones in the past. But he had always wanted to make movies. That's really what he wanted to do. And this was like his last go-round. He had some money put away.
He was just going to write spec scripts and see if he could get a movie made. So it was like the last roundup.
Was the bad guy already a mobster?
And so he writes this script, and he decides to make the protagonist a mobster, Tony Soprano, who's got a problem with his mother. And in fact, his mother wants to kill him. And he writes the script, and it's really good. And everybody agrees it's really good. And he starts to take it around. But at the time, TV was dominated by the three, possibly four networks.
And they were interested in kind of lowest common denominator programming and sort of routinized programming. So he would go from place to place and they all turned him down. And Les Moonves, who was at, you know, a famous executive at CBS said, you know, this mobster stuff is really good. But, you know, are you wedded to the therapy? Yeah.
And Dave was like, yeah, I'm wedded to the therapy, I guess you'd have to say, since it was the central engine of the entire show.
Right? So everybody wanted him to do something that was the cliché, and he wanted to do something that was completely different. And it wasn't until the script landed at HBO where they said, whoa, this is new and original and different. That was it. It was different. And HBO was looking to be different. It's not TV. It's HBO.
So with HBO, I mean, they were making money through subscriptions, and they were showing movies that they would license. They had dipped their toe into series, like with Larry Sanders and with Oz and others, and they were thinking, this is pretty good. Maybe we should try a bigger swing. And so they were looking for something.
So moment and different economic model because they don't need to have a big ratings winner. They just need some people who love a show. That's good for them. And then if you love different shows, that's okay because this group loves this show and they'll subscribe. And this other group loves this show and they'll subscribe. Good. Everybody doesn't have to love every show. So poise for that moment.
And then he walks into it with his script to HBO and they're asking the questions where everything's upside down instead of saying like, okay, so we'll shoot it in LA and we'll do second unit in Jersey, right? Because that'll save money. They were like, you're going to shoot everything in Jersey, right? That's what David said. He's like, whoa, I felt like I had landed in an alternate universe.
They were going to let me do anything I wanted. And they pretty much did. Yeah. David felt he had landed in bizarro world. It was like where the execs were encouraging him to engage his own creativity and to lean in to all the things that were important to him as opposed to, you know, invest in the stereotypes that had become so successful. The Sopranos was not a confected corporate product.
I mean, it wasn't at all in terms of its artistry and all of that, but it didn't come about because David thought, how can I make a lot of money? It came about because David was like, I'm obsessed with my mother.
To work out their own personal shit about their mother. I totally agree. And that, to me, was the beauty of the moment. You came across a network that was like, fuck it, let's roll the dice.
You know, what have we got to lose? But a lot. But a lot. I mean, it is true, and they were scared, too. I mean, because after they shot the pilot, they waited... six, seven, eight, nine months before they made the decision to go ahead and order the series. They were terrified.
Because, like, how can you have a mobster who's the... Yeah. Somebody who kills people for a living is going to be the protagonist of this family drama, right? And they were really nervous about it. And one argument that David had with the creative executives at HBO was over Tony killing somebody on camera. And they were worried that they would turn viewers off. But David convinced them.
Showing 321–340 of 375 · page 17 of 19
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