This week rolls out Alex Gibney’s Musk and You Can See Everything, about Elizabeth Holmes, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
While not directly related there is a thread of modern day myth and reality being revealed.
The Inventors: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley interview with Alex Gibney
Alex Gibney is no stranger to polemic filmmaking. Some of his documentary films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief, and Taxi to the Dark Side, the latter nabbing Gibney an Oscar for Documentary Feature.
Gibney’s 2019 documentary The Inventors: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley explores the Theranos scandal.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19 only to become the youngest female billionaire. Her company raised billions of dollars based on an invention that promised to revolutionize the blood testing industry. After years of deception the walls came crashing down leaving both Theranos and Holmes with nothing.
“For Elizabeth it was a prison of belief,” says Gibney to a round table at SXSW where the film had its regional premiere in advance of its debut on HBO.
“It’s a belief that allows you to go forward and lie effortlessly. And also be cruel to people who oppose you,” Gibney says. “When you have someone who is a true believer and they’re a good storyteller, as Elizabeth was, it strikes these emotional chords in people and they respond.”
Holmes believed that her invention, a machine that used less blood that other tests and which was called Edison, would eventually work. Her method of drawing blood used finger prick samples rather than venipuncture. There are two companies that have a virtual monopoly on blood testing – LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. The world of blood testing is as murky as it gets.
“I believe they dominate the market and not in a good way. We put a little bit of that in the film,” says Gibney about the two main blood testing companies. “They’ve been sued by Medicare and Medicaid for massive fraud in terms of overcharging.”
Gibney certainly is one of the most prolific filmmakers around. Since the 2005 Enron doc he has directed 40 documentaries and produced nearly twice that many.
“A lot of it has to do with the notion of what makes a good story. There’re lots of stories about hubris but not all of them are great. I’m interested in the people involved as characters who seem to be larger than life.”
Thomas Edison the inventor is used as a metaphor, not only as the name of the machine but for his “fake it until you make it” work ethic. Gibney uses clips from several of Edison’s silent films.
“That was really fun to get into Edison silent films, they are all available from the National Archives,” says Gibney. “Edison was a great storyteller and part of his economic empire was a mechanism for storytelling, which was cinema. We have those clips of Elizabeth telling the same story about her uncle over and over again. We shrunk the image down to the classic 4 x 3 Academy frame to recall the Edison films.”
There are several scenes in The Inventors that show Holmes walking from office to office, down hallways and basically going to and fro throughout the Theranos building.
“Some of it was shot by news crews; a lot of it was shot by their own internal unit. The thinking was ‘if only there had been a camera in the garage with Woz and Jobs’ wouldn’t that be great. Then they brought Errol Morris in to film her. They shot a lot of stuff including the company meetings where Sunny [Balwani, the company president] leads everybody in a fuck-you cheer.
“I haven’t heard from Errol but I did reach out to him. My cards and letters were not returned. Then I happened to bump into Morris at an event where he was being honored. He told me ‘I’m not going to talk about it and you can’t make me.’ I asked him to have a chat off the record. And he said, ‘For God there is no off the record, and he can be a very unforgiving person.’ That was vintage Errol Morris,” says Gibney.
“In the process of doing the film we were able to get a source talking, who then agreed to give us about a hundred hours of footage,” says Gibney.
Jessie Deeter, one of the film’s producers, had a five-hour dinner with Holmes. “She wouldn’t let me record the conversation or take notes. She wanted to know everything about the film, who we had talked to, she told me how she had been maligned by her critics,” says Deeter.
“You have a journalist who was approached by a whistleblower. But our society doesn’t do a very good job of protecting whistleblowers. Also, Theranos very much tried to find a grey zone between two overlapping regulators, and these regulators had been weakened in the past by industry groups who insisted that LDTs, laboratory developed tests, not be rigorously regulated,” says Gibney.
“Look at the system we have now with rigorously enforced NDAs [non disclosure agreements], which are supposed to be about protecting trade secrets but are really about protecting sexual abuse, protecting fraud.”
Theranos went after their critics including reporters and whistleblowers with legal action headed by their lawyer David Boies. Boies is also the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein. One whistleblower, the grandson of one of Holmes’ many investors, and who started working at Theranos as an intern and throughout his college career claims his family spent $400,000 on legal fees.
Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou turned his investigative story into a book titled “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.” A narrative film version of the story is in the works with writer/director Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence attached playing Holmes.
“One of the reasons Holmes got all the attention early on was because people were invested in the idea of a female entrepreneur in male dominated Silicon Valley. Really taking it to the man and in this case I mean the man,” says Gibney. “Yet when you cross the ethical line of dealing with people’s health you can’t hide behind that.”
This article was previously published in Free Press Houston.
