The Force Behind HBO’s Documentaries
[Source: The New York Times, by Elizabeth Jensen, June 11, 2010]
One recent midday eight producers, editors and researchers of an HBO documentary on postwar traumatic stress, “Traumatology: The Art of Coming Home,” were gathered in Sheila Nevins’s “documentary clubhouse” — a pale turquoise, art-filled 12th-floor apartment on East 86th Street in Manhattan, downstairs from her home, that serves as an editing room. They were there to view work in progress, but Ms. Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, wanted to talk about one producer’s unusual medical condition.
Work stopped while Ms. Nevins — curled in a leather recliner, wearing the loose black ankle-tied knit pants she adores — bore in. “I’ve never heard of this ailment,” she said. Soon everyone knew intimate details about salivary stones, the equivalent of gallstones in salivary glands. Then it was back to war.
Lowbrow to highbrow, the political to the personal, what captivates Ms. Nevins matters, because that’s often how HBO documentaries materialize. She has talked openly of how her son’s struggle with substance abuse motivated HBO’s 2007 multipart “Addiction” project, and the similar “Obesity,” planned for 2012, dovetails with her fascination with eating issues. “Taxicab Confessions,” filled with passengers engaging in often-bawdy conversations and activities, stemmed from her chats with cab drivers. After she saw the cellphone video of Neda Agha-Soltan, killed a year ago in Tehran during the protests following the disputed Iranian presidential contest, she commissioned a project to track down the back story. “For Neda,” part of HBO’s 10-week summer documentary series, will be shown beginning Monday.
Ms. Nevins has been at HBO since 1979 (with a brief time out to produce), having figured out how to use her editor’s eye, knack for zeroing in on viewers’ appetites, competitive drive and outrageousness to build a successful empire. Now, at 71, her influence is greater than ever, even as many in the documentary community fret both about her outsize power and if HBO will continue its commitment to documentaries after she leaves.
Would-be filmmakers, spurred by the advent of cheap digital technology, are churning out documentaries in startling numbers. The Hot Docs festival in Toronto and the Full Frame festival in Durham, N.C., for example, each received about 2,000 entries this year, said the veteran documentarian D. A. Pennebaker, at a recent event at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
But getting a payday afterward is tough. “It’s as much a business as the priesthood is a business and as financially rewarding,” said Thom Powers, a filmmaker and the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, who has had three films shown on HBO.
The commercial market for feature documentaries has crashed after briefly flourishing when “the Michael Moores of the world” were seen to have breakout potential, said Geoffrey Gilmore, chief creative officer of Tribeca Enterprises and the former director of the Sundance Film Festival. Risk-averse distributors have concluded that “the upside potential just isn’t as great,” he said.
While Oprah Winfrey’s forthcoming OWN network has announced plans for a documentary film club, in public television the already tight money situation has deteriorated. Some money-strapped foundations have stopped financing documentaries altogether, causing several longtime producers to throw in the towel; other producers are competing for funds with the most successful public TV documentarian, Ken Burns, after one of his corporate underwriters ended its commitment. And “American Experience,” on PBS, a series devoted to historical documentaries like Robert Stone’s “Earth Days,” just lost financing and will be cut back in 2012.
All of which has meant a “pitiable line of filmmakers trailing out the doorway” of the HBO headquarters, Mr. Powers said.
Ms. Nevins’s budget hasn’t increased in recent years, but she can produce more films for the same money, thanks to digital technology. On average HBO pays in the “mid to high hundreds of thousands per hour, equal to the highest end of PBS,” said one executive who has worked in both worlds. The difference? HBO pays immediately, while public television can take five years.
This year Ms. Nevins’s unit will put out 45 documentaries for HBO and HBO2, not including late-night and family programs; 10 years ago that figure was 27 (for HBO and Cinemax). While that is a mere fraction of HBO’s offerings, she provided a steady hand as HBO’s original programming team grappled to find its footing post-“The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.”
HBO specializes in celebrity-filled premieres, and Ms. Nevins is at the center of many of them, with her poofy blond hair, giant dangly earrings (the length dictated by the seriousness of the topic, she said) and a $600 silver sequined oversize Coach bag, which she said she bought using credit card points.
In contrast to her public persona, she insisted, she’s really a loner who hates being bored. She studiously avoids pre-event cocktail parties and rarely attends dinner parties. “I don’t like to see baby pictures,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about their travels. I don’t want to pretend. It’s just exhausting.”
Theater, however, is a passion. (She said she sees about 30 shows a year.) “Somebody wrote it, so they must have edited it,” she said. “It’s the unedited part of talking that’s rough.”
Her own editing skills draw praise from filmmakers. “Sheila has opinions, and she has a lot of good opinions,” said Mr. Powers, whose films include “Loving and Cheating.”
At the “Traumatology” editing session, in the space of two hours, Ms. Nevins praised the choice of interviewees in one section, but rearranged the sequence of video, pressed the filmmakers on the overall message (“We don’t want to give the message you send your son to war and he comes back half a person”) and vetoed a clip from a John Huston short film about World War II veterans with mental trauma. (“I didn’t believe it,” she said, questioning whether the vets interviewed had been rehearsed. And, she added, “I’m bored.”)
Jon Alpert, who has made at least a dozen films for HBO and is working on “Traumatology,” said of working with Ms. Nevins: “The sword that gets tempered in the fire comes out stronger.” He added later: “There is a dreaded existential moment in every production in which Sheila looks up and says: ‘What’s this film about? I don’t understand what this film’s about.’ ”
He has been banished more than once because “we’ve had disagreements in which we needed time to cool off,” he said. But he added, “If I didn’t think this was the best and luckiest place for a documentary filmmaker I wouldn’t be going up to her office.”
HBO won’t break out financial numbers, but former HBO employees say Ms. Nevins’s internal success is partly due to her more salacious productions, like “Real Sex,” an explicit magazine series about sexual trends. Her tastes, however, seem to be mellowing. Where a decade ago she was fascinated by what she calls “freaks,” including people who have sex with animals (a project that was eventually scrapped, she noted), the most provocative documentary in this summer’s Monday night lineup, which began last week, is “No One Dies in Lily Dale,” about a New York town that is home to the world’s largest community of mediums.
The others look at the paparazzo Ron Galella, homeless children, a Florida abortion rights battle, lottery winners, Jack Kevorkian, a Kenyan man’s quest to find the woman who sponsored his childhood education, natural gas drilling and salsa dancers. On tap later this year are Spike Lee’s follow-up on Hurricane Katrina, Alex Gibney’s “My Trip to Al Qaeda” and “Traumatology.”
Since the terrorist attacks in 2001, Ms. Nevins said: “I’m more interested in the world. 9/11 made me less narcissistic about what we choose.”
“For Neda” began, as many projects do, with Ms. Nevins — a graduate of Barnard College and the Yale University School of Drama — in the gym, watching reports of Iranian protests on CNN. Five minutes after seeing a video of the final moments of Ms. Agha-Soltan’s life, she called Nancy Abraham, senior vice president of documentary programming for HBO, and that day the British filmmaker Antony Thomas agreed to see what he could find. “It took a lot of guts to go out that day,” Ms. Nevins said of Ms. Agha-Soltan. “I wondered why a woman would go out like that.”
Given her power in the industry, public criticism of Ms. Nevins is minimal. But murmurs persist that she favors directors of the moment, whose work she acquires postproduction, sometimes in a bid to ensure HBO’s continued dominance at the awards ceremonies.
Last year the channel originated 60 percent to 70 percent of its documentaries, provided finishing funds to 15 percent and acquired the remainder. “If I want something badly enough, I’ll take a bigger part of my budget to get it,” Ms. Nevins said. (She does occasionally lose a project she wants, like “Restrepo,” about a United States platoon in Afghanistan, and “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.”) During her tenure HBO’s documentaries have won 21 Academy Awards, 47 Emmys and 31 Peabody Awards.
“There’s a yearning for HBO to be there for everyone and when what you’re doing doesn’t fit for them, it does give you a burning feeling as a filmmaker because where else are you going to go,” Mr. Powers said of the criticisms of Ms. Nevins.
She has no plans to go anywhere. The job, she said, “is my life, I love every minute of it, and I’m never bored.”
If she ever leaves, Rosie O’Donnell, with whom she has made three films, wants her to do a joint stand-up act. Never, Ms. Nevins said. “It’s spontaneous. I can’t do it rehearsed.”
But Alexandra Pelosi, who has done six documentaries for Ms. Nevins, has long badgered her to be allowed to turn a camera on her patron. That will never happen either, Ms. Nevins said. “I think I’m in all of the documentaries a little bit and it would be redundant,” she told the 92nd Street Y crowd when Ms. Pelosi publicly renewed her quest.
She added, “I don’t want to know more than I already know about myself.”
