- ENRON THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM TRANSCRIPT DOCUMENTARY MOVIE
- ENRON THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM TRANSCRIPT DOCUMENTARY TV
So in that way, it's, you know, half the revenue for these cable companies comes from subscription fees, and half of it comes from advertising. And that's the way, and then, you know, cable, like, so my program works both ways, in the sense that people subscribe to it. You're selling the product to them, and a product there, you're just trying to attract eyeballs to sell the audience to advertisers.Īlex Gibney: Yeah, so the audience is the product.Ĭhris Hayes: The audience is the product. I'm working on a project that's related to this, which is the difference between a product made to be consumed by the consumer, where the consumer is the person you're trying to reach. And then the films had to get better.Ĭhris Hayes: Let's just stop there for a second, 'cause I think that's something that I think about a lot. The whole idea was you were creating an environment where people were going for the films. Because you weren't selling audiences to, you know, on behalf of advertisers.
But that was part of the revolution, that then the streamers took over. And there were big billboards, you know, announcing it, saying, "Henry Kissinger's a war criminal" in Times Square.
ENRON THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM TRANSCRIPT DOCUMENTARY TV
And then it started a run by a small feature-film company, a feature-film distributor, who played it to film forums, something like five months.Īnd then lo and behold, once it became entertainment, TV in this country could show it. At this human rights film festival, people were paying, like, five times ticket value in order to be able to get in. But it ended up, you know, sort of selling out. No cable channel or even PBS would allow me to do the doc.īut I joined forces with a guy named Eugene Jarecki, and we made it with money from the BBC. I remember in a way I kinda got my start on a film called The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which was a very critical look at Henry Kissinger. They became a little bit more dramatic and interesting and forceful and daring and dangerous.Īnd sometimes you could say things that you couldn't say on cable television. Well, what peculiar thing happened then, and that is that enterprising independent cinemas, like the kind that you went to, started showing docs. And for me, it's been just absolutely perfect (LAUGH) because no longer do you have to, like, schlep to an art-house cinema or trying to sort of track down your friend's tape of some title that you heard of. But basically, you know, narrative, like, dramatic, narrative of true stories has become one of the most sort of exciting genres of storytelling, I think, enabled in some ways by this technological change.Īnd it's, I have to say, like, as a consumer, it's a huge part of what I consume and listen to and really like. It can be told in, you know, limited series, it can be told in one, two-and-a-half-hour sort of film, it could be told in serialized podcasts. And suddenly, and it's one of the things I actually love about the streaming revolution, is that across all different forms, particularly both, you know, television and podcast, there's suddenly, like, it's just complete golden age of this form of storytelling, of documentary storytelling. And then, like, the streaming revolution happened. But even, like, you know, a lot of video stores didn't really stock a ton of them.Īnd it was sort of hard to get your hands on them. And then, obviously, the era of the VCR and the VHS tape came. It was a very sort of specialized art form.
ENRON THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM TRANSCRIPT DOCUMENTARY MOVIE
Great place, there was a movie theater in Providence, Rhode Island I would go to.Īnd you would go and see documentaries, if that was what you were into. In New York, when I was growing up, it was the Angelika, which was down on Houston Street. You had to find, like, the art-house cinema. But, you know, most movie theaters wouldn't be playing them, like large cineplexes. In the old days, if you wanted to watch documentary, this was a very specialized product that you could not readily access. So if you will just indulge me for a moment in a little middle-age reverie about how it used to be in the old days. You know, we don't have great audience data about the folks that listen to Why Is This Happening, although sometimes I run into, you know, in the park, on the street, in different places, I get emails from you. Hello, and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes. And you think, "Wow, this is a new filmmaker with a great vision. Alex Gibney: How are you gonna know who the next great filmmaker is unless you give them a chance? And you give them a chance on something that may be quirky or odd but seems to be particularly compelling.