A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art

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Welcome to Search Engine.

I'm PJ PJ Vote.

No question too big, no question too small, no question too repetitively echoing in my head seven times a day.

Okay.

I've been telling stories professionally for 16 years.

I complain about work like anybody else, but the more honest part of me always knows that really, I'm getting away with something.

Being paid to make art you love is as close to a scam as you can run without being in legal danger.

It feels impossible that this is all true.

And the thing is, some years, it wasn't true.

When I first started in audio, podcasting didn't really exist.

It was radio.

And there would have been no business model to support a show like the one you were listening to.

I've been here long enough that I've watched the business model arrive.

I worked for a few years where there was tons of money in podcasting.

And I'm here in the era after, where a low tide ebbs again.

The state of things comes up on the show sometimes because one of the biggest questions that actually preoccupies me day to day is how are we going to get people to pay for this shit?

Free art, pay what you want, it's a funny thing to build a life on.

It preoccupies me.

And I know it preoccupies me because lately, when I see something good, a movie, a book, a live event, I don't think so much about the creative choices enabling it.

I think, how is this getting funded?

Even...

What does the lifestyle of the person who made this look like?

That it permits them to make art?

Do they have kids?

Where do they live?

This documentary came out this week called Wise Guy, which is about the Sopranos, my favorite TV show, maybe my favorite piece of narrative art.

And watching it, it felt like the documentary was asking the same question that has been haunting me.

How do you make something personal and important when the entire system is conspiring to keep that stuff off the air?

The documentary, appropriately, is by the director Alex Gibney, who has spent his career defiantly making non-commercial films.

He made Going Clear, critiquing one of the more lawsuit happy groups in America, Scientologists.

He won an Oscar for his bleak but fascinating documentary about American torture, Taxi to the Dark Side.

He also works in the same office as me, so sometimes we see each other at the coffee machine I still don't know how to work.

I wanted to ask Alex Gibney how to work that coffee machine.

Just kidding.

I wanted to ask him how he's figured out how to make a career doing risky, creative work that other people pay for.

And also about what he learned from interviewing Sopranos creator David Chase, one of the people who most successfully made something personal and strange while still connecting with a massive audience.

Alex, welcome to Search Engine.

Hey, thanks, BJ.

Good to be here.

So this is my theory for the structure of our episode.

The Sopranos was a show about observing decline.

The pilot of The Sopranos opens with this monologue from Tony Soprano about how America is in decline, how he was born too late and he missed the good old days.

You are documenting how the story of the sopranos being made is a story of a different kind of decline, like a TV show from this blip of a moment where television shows that were that good could get on the air.

Your project is a documentary.

The documentary business, many people have observed, is in its own state of decline.

And then I wanted to interview you about all this on a podcast.

Podcasting.

In decline.

Very much in decline.

And then my plan is at the end of this interview will probably both be.

Suicide.

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.

Does it sound good?

Do you agree generally with our premise here?

I do.

I do.

Okay, so my first question is just like, the way Tony Soprano feels about America, to what degree do you feel that way about documentary film in America?

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.

I wanted to rewind a little bit before the rust, before the recent golden era.

I asked Alex to tell me the story of how he first fell in love with documentary film, one of show business's less profitable avenues.

Alex's story begins decades ago.

the first era of his career, which he spent in the creative wilderness.

He grew up in New England and moved to California in the late 1970s to go to film school at UCLA.

So I made documentaries in film school.

And one of the ones I made in film school 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, 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 Coppel, 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 AE, it's like, oh, that's AE, because you can automatically tell

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.

Yeah.

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.

So you're showing up at a moment where you are

feeling a little bit Tony Sophrono-esque in that you're missing a slightly bygone era and you have a vision for what you want to make, but where the landscape that you first arrived to was not a landscape that was conducive to it.

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'd 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, I was like,

because I was always, I had a zillion projects.

Yeah.

Right.

But the projects never went anywhere.

Alex's time in the creative wilderness, his post office era, lasted for years.

The 1980s bled into the 1990s.

In the late 90s, he has this moment that really helps him understand the art form and the industry he's pledged himself to, that helps him understand why it is he's been so stuck.

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 going to do because Michael Eisner, you know, was caught trying to make a slave ride.

Wait, what happened?

Okay, so the Disney Channel was going to change to become an Americana channel.

Okay.

And as part of that, the first show, this is going to be my big break, was going to be a doc series that I had 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.

Yeah.

But he ran into two problems.

One was he was going to build it by a Civil War battlefield.

And two, it was 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.

That's an error in judgment.

Whoops.

A quick tangent, but I think it's worth it.

This is a quote from Disney's Bob Weiss, the park's creative director at the time.

Quote, the park will deal with the highs and lows.

We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave and what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad.

That quote inspired more public outrage.

Disney CEO Michael Eisner jumped in to defend the amusement park ride, saying, quote, if people think we will back off, they are mistaken.

People were not mistaken.

Disney did back off, describing not just the ride, but the entire park and ultimately the Americana TV channel.

Executives, like the ones who made this series of decisions, are the people who control the money that determines what someone like Alex Gibney is allowed to make.

That's just the reality we live in.

In this case, though, Alex's project wasn't actually killed.

It was just moved over to a different channel.

All of this is a long way of saying that when it came time for the premiere, the 50s,

My co-creator, Tracy Dolby and 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.

Like,

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, you know, crazy.

The people who are really important are the advertisers.

It's like the paper towel company.

Yeah.

So what did you understand in that moment?

Well, I understood that TV isn't about the conversation between a creator and a viewer.

You're about renting viewers to advertisers.

Right.

And that the creators aren't really creators at all.

You're just providing the catnip that, you know, is just tasty enough.

It's good enough to lure you.

in so that you'll stay for a half an hour and please the advertisers.

And the last thing they want is any kind of personality or originality.

You thought that the ads were what was interrupting your program.

And what you understood in that moment is that you were the stuff in between.

Correct.

Alex learned the reason why it was so hard to make the complicated stories he wanted to make.

His real job, as his bosses understood it, wasn't to find audiences who wanted to be challenged.

It was to make inoffensive, mass-market content to put in between commercials.

Alex Gibney was not happy to learn that in some people's eyes, he was really there to sell paper towels.

For the record, this podcast is ad supported.

I actually feel mostly okay about it.

When we're working on a story, the person whose happiness I think about is the listeners, not the advertisers.

I've never had to worry about not covering a topic because it was going to upset like an internet-based mattress company.

I do think the thing everyone's trying to figure out is, how do I make the thing I want to make and find all the weirdos out there who might enjoy it?

And for 20 years, the audience that would enjoy and pay for Alex's work, they existed, but he couldn't prove it.

His big break would come in the early 2000s, when he'd just turned 50 years old.

What happened was that a few stylish, voicey documentaries broke out as hits.

Super Size Me, Bowling for Columbine.

Films like those, plus the rise of reality TV, meant that executives warmed to the idea that viewers might find unscripted stories interesting.

For Alex, who'd spent decades subsisting mainly on hope, this moment was a nice surprise.

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.

What were the kinds of things that you made in that moment that you feel like they were surprised to be allowed to make?

Enron.

Enron.

Who makes a film about accounting?

In 2005, Alex directed a film called Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room.

It was a documentary about accounting, but not just accounting.

It's the story of the Enron scandal, where executives at a power company used fraudulent accounting to make it seem like they were making tons of money while hiding their mounting debt.

Along the way, they wantonly committed memorable crimes.

Some of those crimes actually caught on tape aired in the documentary.

In this scene, Alex uses audio that he got of Enron employees intentionally creating a power outage in California just to juice demand.

Like a forced outage type thing.

Right.

It's a stunning picture of a company with the power to just manipulate strangers' lives at will.

It plays like a Hollywood movie.

For Alex, this is the exact kind of film that for years he could not have dreamed of getting a chance to make.

Did you feel like, I can't believe I'm getting away with this?

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?

You had the feeling of, am I too far out on a ledge, even if it was creatively fulfilling.

Right.

And so that's 2005.

Enron, it did hit a cultural narrative.

It did.

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.

And in the aftermath, Alex's career entered this new phase where people with money now trusted him.

And of course, he cashed that capital in to make an even more seemingly uncommercial film.

This one was called Taxi to the Dark Side.

It's a documentary about an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American interrogators.

Alex says he made the movie in part to broadcast this observation about human nature that he'd noticed.

He learned that the American interrogators had kept torturing their prisoner even after they knew that there was no intelligence to gain from him.

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

of cruelty.

I feel like one of the network executives, because it's like you're talking about the actual heart and meaning of these stories.

And I'm like, what were the economic conditions like over and over again?

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.

Yeah.

And that's why interesting movies still get made sometimes because people are looking for awards.

Oh, this might win an award.

And in fact, that one did.

Edwin and Oscar.

Big award.

Yeah.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but before this conversation, I never really got the point of awards for art.

The idea that you pay money to submit your work to be judged by your peers has always smelled a little bit to me like a vanity scam.

But for somebody like Alex, awards have been vital.

A movie about torture might never make a ton of box office cash, but it can win an Oscar, which can be its own motivation for a funder to put their money in.

The thing sweeping his career forward now wasn't just a greater cultural appreciation for artsy power interrogating documentaries.

It was that the business model kept changing in ways that favored creators like Alex.

DVDs arrived, allowing filmmakers to charge consumers more for home movies than they had with VHS tapes.

And then, DVDs were replaced by internet streaming companies.

In the battle to be the next Netflix, streamers spent heavily on new work, including splashy documentaries, which were a relatively cheap way to signal you were a premium channel.

Plus, in the streaming era, a film didn't need to be such a big hit because the companies were better at algorithmically targeting little sub-communities that were likely to enjoy a specific film.

They had a philosophy, which was communities of interest.

And so long as you could 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

willing to buy that soggy croissant.

Right, because a soggy croissant is always going to be like, I think David Foster Wallace wrote that we're unique unique in our highbrow tastes, but we tend to be common in our lowbrow tastes.

Like everybody's curious about a murder.

Everybody's curious on some level about a celebrity, or most people are.

But if you can target small, passionate audiences, you can target them in more specific ways.

Like you can make things that are more idiosyncratic or personal or inventive or whatever.

Right.

And you're also not afraid when it comes to certain subjects to offend people.

So what's the point at which the streaming age starts to feel, I don't want to say bad, that's like such a simple simple way to put it, but what is the part where, or the moment where the limitations of the new model start to reveal themselves to you as a filmmaker?

I think, you know, I really do think it starts with the pandemic.

Really?

That recently?

Yeah.

I think there may have been warning signs about it before it, 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.

I mean, as a viewer and someone who is completely unsophisticated in my understanding of the film industry, I don't see that much stuff in theaters, but I do use stuff being in theaters as a sign that I should pay attention to it.

Right, right.

Yeah.

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 lost leader.

Yeah.

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.

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.

And now that they have more power, they just make the cheapest thing.

They can make a product that's a little bit worse, but where they call back a little bit more money, et cetera.

Yeah.

That's right.

And so then what does it look like for you?

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,

which is kind of a look at Putin's Russia through this oligarch named Mikhail Horakovsky, 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.

No taken.

You know, because you can see the commercial considerations, particularly in a global economy, begin to take over.

What Alex is saying is that in the previous, more competitive era, some upstart streamer may have been willing to take on the risk of offending Russia.

But now, in this less competitive moment, with fewer people funding work like his, the system's overall risk tolerance goes down.

Another side effect of a system that wants less risky movies is that a lot of the biggest documentaries in the past couple years have just been adoring profiles of celebrities who frequently get a lot of creative input and sometimes even final cut.

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.

So you're just borrowing Taylor Swift's audience.

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.

Yeah.

Right.

Do never give the subject control.

Not anymore.

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

when it is in fact a commercial.

So when, to talk about this recent project, when HBO comes to you and says, we want you to make a film about David Chase, and that's about the Sopranos, which is one of their properties, were you worried that what they wanted was that they wanted to be a project.

I was.

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?

How do you make something personal and important when everything about the system is conspiring to keep it off?

After a short break, the story of a person who did that maybe the most successfully of anyone.

A guy with a tortured relationship with his mother who wanted the whole world to find that drama interesting.

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Welcome back to the show.

So, Alex Gibney, a talented and stubborn man who figured out how to make personal art in a system designed to snuff it out.

His latest film is about David Chase, a talented and stubborn man who figured out how to make personal art in a system designed to snuff it out.

Chase was a TV writer who had had a successful career commercially in the 80s and most of the 90s, but who now felt profoundly frustrated by the limitations of the form.

What is the process by which The Sopranos goes from an idea in David Chase's head to a television show on HBO?

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.

Yeah.

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 he could get a movie made.

So it was like the last roundup.

So, David Chase, frustrated, done with television, convinced that the era is just not one that will let him make work he finds interesting.

He figures he probably needs to switch to movies.

He has this one idea he wants to try.

This is a clip from the documentary, Wise Guy.

The voice you'll hear belongs to David Chase.

For years, everybody told me that I had to write something about my mother.

She was so out out there and so funny.

My wife, Denise, was the first one to say that.

And then everybody was saying, you got to write something about your mother.

In the documentary, David Chase tells Gibney about how a colleague, Robin Greene, also pushed him to try to build a story around his difficult mother.

In her pitch, though, it was more autobiographical.

Robin said, you should write the show about your mother and a TV producer.

And I thought, well, who's going to watch that?

But maybe if he was like a really badass guy, maybe that would work.

Was the bad guy already a mobster?

Yeah.

I wanted to get De Niro and Ann Bancroft.

At first, I thought of it as a feature.

It was the story that actually was the first season.

It was about a mobster who goes to a shrink after having panic attacks.

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

a famous executive at CBS, said, you know, this mobster stuff is really good, but

are you wedded to the therapy?

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.

Yeah.

Right.

So everybody wanted him to do something that was the cliche, 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.

Right.

HBO had existed as a cable network since the 1970s.

But in the 1990s, the channel was trying to transform itself.

At the time, most HBO subscribers were there to watch movies and boxing matches.

But HBO, like Netflix would 20 years later, wanted to start making more of its own stuff, to make a real name for itself.

A traditional TV network may have wanted David Chase to make the safest, most cost-effective version of the Sopranos, but HBO was competing on quality.

There might be a lesson here about golden ages, that if you're someone who makes stuff, one of the best places you could find yourself is at an upstart company trying to compete against the establishment.

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.

Yeah.

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.

Like, 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?

Yeah.

It came about because David was like,

I'm obsessed with my mother.

I mean, there's something funny about the idea that millions of dollars were spent and made for someone to just kind of have their 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 who was like, fuck it.

Let's roll the dice.

Yeah.

You know, what have we got to lose?

But a lot.

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 just they were terrified right because like how can you have a mobster who's the

protagonist yeah somebody who kills people for a living yeah is going to be the protagonist of this family drama right and they were really nervous about it and one argument that david 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.

They said, look, we're making a show about a mobster.

If he doesn't kill the guy who was a snitch,

then what are we doing?

We're just making bullshit.

And so

they move forward.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You actually, in the movie, you play a clip from that scene, which is kind of famous.

It's episode five, first season.

Tony Soprano takes his daughter Meadow on a college tour.

And it's this moment where you're really seeing him as a sweet dad instead of as a mob boss.

How'd it go?

We got a 48 to 52 male-female ratio, which is great.

Strong liberal arts program in this cool and arts center for music.

Usual programs abroad or China, India.

We're just applying here.

Ready to leave?

It's an auction, dad, junior year.

And then, while he's on this college tour with his daughter, he happens to run into a guy who's in the witness protection program, who had actually snitched on associates of Tony's.

And so, it is like a moment where you feel the show challenging you as a viewer because you're seeing him in this very domestic state-suite dad guy, and then you're watching him plot the murder of this guy.

The kill itself is very violent.

He has a lot of people who are very violent and grisly.

Yeah, he literally chokes him to death with a wire.

Come on, Rat.

Who are you?

What is this?

Don't make me laugh.

You pimp!

You fuck!

Teddy, there must be something we could do.

Tony, it's Tony, you fuck.

You know how much trouble you're in now?

You took an oath, and you broke it.

I'd vaguely heard about the argument behind this scene, but the two things that surprised me that I understood in a different or deeper way watching your film, one is you have the HBO executive who's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we totally, we're telling him to take this out.

Like, you actually, you never see the suits.

Like, people always talk about the notes from the suits and whatever, but the suits never show up and say, this is what I was thinking and why.

So you have that.

But then also they talk about how they did say like, hey, if you're insisting on doing this, like we can be convinced.

We can be convinced by the argument that otherwise he's bullshit and the show is bullshit and you have to do this for the show to have integrity and for people to care about it.

But could you make the guy he's going to kill a little bit more?

sort of malevolent.

Yeah, and they do.

There's this like moment where they're in the parking lot of the motel and you see the guy and he pulls out a pistol.

He's in darkness.

He's aiming it at Tony and his daughter.

And then he realizes there's other people in the motel and he can't get away with it and he puts the gun down.

But so as a viewer, you're feeling a bit more like, okay, this guy, he's threatened him, whatever.

And it was funny watching that moment.

I was like, oh.

you know, maybe the network was right.

Like maybe the push and pull between the artist and the people who stand for skittish audiences, maybe it had produced something that worked.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And that's the best thing often about notes in general.

You know, sometimes, particularly reaction,

not so much the prescription, but

the reaction to like, this doesn't feel right,

it's sometimes worth listening to.

There's a moment in your film where you're interviewing the writers of the Sopranos.

They say that they don't think the show could be made or made in the same way today.

It would be too controversial.

What do you make of that?

I think they were talking about political correctness.

You know, there was a willingness to say things that were downright offensive.

And also a willingness, even in the writer's room, to get ugly, to talk about stuff in a way that was brutally honest and would reveal about themselves stuff that wasn't particularly elevating or inspiring, maybe just the opposite.

In Wise Guy, the Sopranos writers talk about the freedom and tension that came with inventing all these unlikable characters and then imbuing these unlikable characters with attributes that sometimes came from the writers themselves.

You know, look at somebody like Uncle Junior or Tony or Paulie Walnuts.

I mean, these are like petty, horrible people.

So you felt free to talk about anything you wanted.

It was all just, hey, there's a writer's room.

We're writing about bad people.

Bad people do bad things and we got to access those parts of ourselves.

I mean, we said things that nowadays, you know, would be frowned upon.

We could have been mistaken for being racist,

sexist, you name it, iss, you know.

We considered having an assistant in there for a while

and realized we couldn't do that.

But that to me was actually one of the great lessons of doing the show.

It's like when you start to pre-censor yourselves all the time, we've all got weird,

dark,

inappropriate feelings or

thoughts.

And to the extent that they're routinely repressed, they'll come out in unexpected and

sometimes dangerous ways.

You know,

what was that line about if only Hitler's art teacher was a little bit

more attentive?

He could have just made some offensive paintings.

The terrifying beauty of the show was that these people were so complex.

They were both so charming and brutal.

And one of the things that they made a point of during the making of the show, which I thought was so great, is whenever it seemed that the characters were becoming too likable, particularly the mobsters were becoming too likable,

they would have them do something brutal.

Yeah.

Just to remind you, because also in the back of his mind, you know, David is making this show, which is a character drama about a family, but it's also a commentary about America and the brutality of America and the rapaciousness with which capitalism sort of

chews people up and spits them out.

And the Sopranos is kind of the logical extension of that scene in The Godfather, you know, where they're all sitting around the table asking the Godfather to share all the bought politicians and police officers.

And it's for us, we're willing to pay a fee.

After all, we're not communists here.

Right?

But it's a brutal commentary on capitalism and America and the cruelty of the country.

So all those things are going through their heads, and they're willing to be ugly.

And I think that's what people ended up loving the show for, is it didn't pull punches and suddenly the uncomfortable conversations that you shied away from because you might offend somebody.

They were engaging in those conversations on screen.

And that's what great art does, is it allows you to get into areas that maybe are not permitted to as part of your daily life.

Yeah.

And it's funny.

It's like, what's so brilliant about it being a mob show is that one,

once there's guns and murder, you can trick people into paying attention to family dynamics, which is part of what he wants to talk about.

But also,

these writers can take ideas that they have or parts of themselves that might be uncomfortable.

But now if it's coming out of like the mouth of a murdering mobster, that's a context in which we're willing to sit with those ideas without worrying if we're hearing art from a bad person.

That's right.

But at the same time, because they're all coming out of their personal experiences, I mean, it was supposed to be about David's mother, and then all the writers found out that they had major issues with their mothers.

So it ends up being, you know, a lot of this experience ends up being universal.

I think the other thing that makes this show so successful, too, is that,

you know, there are a lot of conversations

that are extremely unironic and they're very funny for it because these brutal mobsters are having very sensitive discussions about how their feelings are hurt or should I buy flowers for my wife on her anniversary?

Stuff like that.

You know, normally in most mob movies, you see the action.

Yeah.

You don't see the day-to-day interactions where you're trying to figure out whether or not you should show up for your son's soccer practice.

After a short break, Alex Gibney, someone who has survived decades, all these different eras of technological and business shifts, who's learned both from his own work and from the work of people like David Chase, his advice on how to keep going during tough times.

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David Chase has said that this moment where the Sopranos was allowed to happen was a blip.

Like whatever window that opened for a moment that he snuck through he doesn't think that window is open anymore do you agree with that well it's not open under the current system

so something new is going to have to come along to blow it open again because hbo also remember was a different kind of system and it was coming up and they knew they had to do something different or they weren't gonna

get anywhere.

I mean, what's the point of trying to become another network?

If you're far behind in in a sailing race, it doesn't make any sense to follow the same wind that's already got those boats that are way ahead of you.

You tack on a different course and hope to catch a different kind of a wind.

So at the moment, it's pretty bleak for trying to do personal art that's going to connect with viewers.

But the hope is...

And

the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box after a lot of bad shit has come out is that there is a new distribution mechanism out there that will allow this relationship once again to find a way.

You know, and it's kind of what you see happening in journalism.

Like

the Substack model is interesting because suddenly you see some people are making bank on Substack by going directly to their readers.

Interesting.

That was the hope in podcasts for a while too.

And actually, I think podcasts, you know, some over time still find a way to get audiences, but it's not as easy as it seemed like it was going to be at first.

Yeah.

I mean, I think in podcasting, certainly there was a moment where it's like you want the moments where the people with money kind of don't know what they're doing.

Right.

And they're just like betting on a lot of stuff and they're not tracking things very carefully.

And what gets harder if you're trying to make something interesting is either they've figured out what works and they just want to do that over and over again.

That's right.

Or they're scared.

And I think right now is a moment where they've both figured out which things work and and they're scared.

Right.

And also, you know, some key players in the distribution universe

are tech players who have other businesses.

Yes.

You know, if I'm Apple, do I want to do anything that's going to offend somebody and so they might not buy an iPhone or an iPad?

And if I'm Amazon, do I want to do something that

might offend somebody who might buy their sneakers on Amazon?

Yeah, and we're never going to be a big enough part of their business to be worth that much headache.

And so I think it makes sense.

And I don't think they think of it that way.

Like I don't have to.

No, I mean, I think they think, let's do stuff that's entertaining.

And they hire executives who've been in the business before.

But over time,

tendencies emerge.

Yeah.

And the tendencies are, let's do this thing that worked the last time.

That was pretty good.

Yeah.

Or do you want to do the thing that might not work?

And then you have to have a meeting and like the meeting goes badly.

Right.

But it's funny, you know, what I get from this conversation with you, it's so funny to compare podcasting to film and television because they're like cities and we're just like some little like highway town.

But there's this real sense of doom and gloom and end days and whatever, like because there was like such a surge and then such a crash.

But hearing the way you look at your industry and look at adjacent industry, it feels almost more like a sailor looking at tides.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And you're looking over into the distance for

that swell

that's going to be different.

And I think it'll come because it's always been like that.

You know, you go back to the 20s and the 30s and the 40s, think about what radio producers must have thought with the advent of television.

Yeah.

It's over for us.

It's over.

Right.

Yeah.

No, and I felt, you know, when I got into radio, it was like there was public radio and there was some great programs, but I felt like, what are you doing?

Like, this is a stupid thing to love.

You're just a person out of time.

I didn't get in thinking anything good would ever happen.

There was something I heard the other night.

I went to a benefit for this small little outfit up in Maine, which is a place called a Carpenter's Boat Shop, where

people who have found themselves

betwixt and between

spend time at a place where they learn how to build boats.

Okay.

Cool.

But this guy who's been doing that, or who founded it and has been running that place for 45 years

you know talked about his life he said I feel like

My life is a robot you know, I'm always looking backwards, but moving forwards.

And I was like, hmm, you know, it's not unlike this moment for creators.

You know, you got to know what's happened behind,

but you keep going.

Yeah.

Because, you know, there's always a place, you know.

You can't stay still, right?

Yeah.

And you don't know even when you're living through a good moment.

I mean, sometimes you do, but at a certain point, it's like you just, the people who make stuff and they figure out a way to make stuff.

That's right.

Yeah.

What was the

artist born of constraint and dies of freedoms?

Because I can remember there was a period in docs where it was like, I'm not going to do a film for under, you know, 2 million or 3 million.

That's just the way it is.

And then I remembered, like.

There was supposedly a conversation between Louis Bunuel and Nicolas Ray in Spain at some point.

And Bunuel, who had sort of learned how to save money by being a producer, was notorious for being very cheap and very efficient in his shooting.

They used to call him Mr.

Clapstick because, you know, to edit his movies, all you do is you'd cut out the clapsticks.

And then you'd send it to the lab, right?

But he was telling Ray, who was very frustrated after he'd done King of Kings, he says, I just can't get my own movies made.

He said, well, you know, maybe if you reduce your budgets by like 50%,

you'd get them made.

And Nicholas Rey said, nobody would ever respect me, you know, in the industry if I did that.

It was kind of a deeply sad moment.

And they both walked away from the dinner, like

not understanding what the other person was thinking about or saying.

And it's hard because, you know, for documentaries, at a certain moment,

instead of being

the person who had to pretend that they weren't really interested in documentaries in order to get hired, me.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, suddenly you could walk around and actually you could buy a house.

You could think about sending your kids to college.

You know, there was a business and there was an industry that could support people without you having to do some other job in order to do the job you wanted.

On the other hand, you know, there comes a moment when if you really love what you're doing,

you figure out a way to make it work.

Yes.

And screw the suits.

Yeah.

No, I totally agree.

And it's weird.

I identify with both people in that conversation.

Like, I understand the feeling of, I don't want to make something

at any less of a resource level than the highest resource level I've ever participated in.

But I also understand the viewpoint of like art is making it.

Like art is making it when it's hard.

Art is doing it under constraints.

Oftentimes the money is a

questionable gift.

Do you know what I mean?

Like oftentimes the things you invent because you have to are just as worthwhile and vital as the things that are much better catered.

And it's funny, I always end up lost in these conversations raging about the unfairness of the industry because there's a part of me that feels it and there's a part of me that's just like, get to work.

That's right.

So, what did we learn this week about surviving as the kind of lunatic who wants to make things for a living?

I think what I hear in Alex's story and in David Chase's is that to survive a creative dark age, it helps to have a kind of pathological stubbornness.

It also helps to be willing to do work you don't love while you wait for the chance to do the work you do.

And that we're at the mercy of changes in business models and audience expectations that are bigger than any one person.

That the people who make things make things.

And that success for a lot of people I admire came a lot later than I would have expected.

I did have one last question for Alex.

We've established that podcasting is certainly in decline, TV is in decline, documentary film is in decline.

Do you feel like America itself is in decline?

Yes.

Yes.

America is in decline because

the country's been ignoring all of the contradictions that have been gnawing at it for years and years and just pretending that they don't exist.

And now they're catching everybody.

Where do you think it goes?

Look backwards backwards and row forwards.

I don't think I'm going to get a better answer than that.

Alex Gibney, his new documentary is called Wise Guy, David Chase and the Sopranos.

You can see it on a channel formerly called HBO, Max, now.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthi Pinamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-Checking This Week by Holly Patton.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis.

Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

If you'd like to support the show and get access to our incognito mode feed with no ads, no reruns, and bonus episodes, head to searchengine.show.

You can also submit a question for us there, whether or not you're a paid subscriber.

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We'll see you next week.

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