Alex Gibney
Encyclopedia
Alex Gibney is an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time."
His works as director include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
(nominated in 2005 for Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
(short-listed in 2011 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Casino Jack and the United States of Money; and Taxi to the Dark Side
(winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature), focusing on an innocent taxi
driver in Afghanistan
who was tortured and killed at Bagram Air Force Base in 2002.
, Gibney earned his bachelor's degree
from Yale University
, where he was a member of the literary society St. Anthony Hall
, and later attended the UCLA Film School. He is the son of journalist Frank Gibney
and the stepson of the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin
.
He served as executive producer of the documentary No End in Sight
(2007). His film
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
(2008) is documentary based on Hunter S. Thompson
and his "Gonzo
" style of journalism. Under executive producer Martin Scorsese
, Gibney was series producer for the PBS television series The Blues (2003) producing individual episodes directed by Wim Wenders
and Charles Burnett
, and writer and producer of the series The Pacific Century
(1992) which won the News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Historical Program. Several films he directed and/or produced have been screened at the Cannes
, Sundance
, and Tribeca Film Festival
s.
Gibney's film style traces much of its origins back to the film The Exterminating Angel, said the director to Robert K. Elder
in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life
:
Gibney is currently directing The Road Back, a film on Lance Armstrong
. He is also contributing a film to ESPN
's 30 for 30
documentary series: called Steve Bartman
: Catching Hell, it will look at "The Inning" in Game 6 the 2003 National League Championship Series
.
Gibney is President of Jigsaw Productions, a production company which produces independent films, music documentaries, and TV mini-series. This year he won the Yale Film Studies
' Program Award for his contributions to film culture. In 2010, Utne Reader
magazine listed Gibney as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
He also writes for the Huffington Post blog.
Gibney will be next working on a documentary about WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange
. The documentary was acquired by Universal Pictures
.
, arguing that THINKFilm
failed to properly distribute and promote his film Taxi to the Dark Side
. He is suing for over a million dollars in damages. He stated that the film has grossed only $280,000.
His works as director include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history...
(nominated in 2005 for Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is a documentary directed by Alex Gibney about former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and the sex scandal that derailed his political career...
(short-listed in 2011 for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature); Casino Jack and the United States of Money; and Taxi to the Dark Side
Taxi to the Dark Side
Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, and produced by Eva Orner and Susannah Shipman, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature...
(winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature), focusing on an innocent taxi
Taxicab
A taxicab, also taxi or cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice...
driver in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
who was tortured and killed at Bagram Air Force Base in 2002.
Life and career
After attending Pomfret SchoolPomfret School
Pomfret School is an independent coeducational boarding and day school in Pomfret, Connecticut, United States for grades 9 through 12 plus a post-graduate year. Pomfret School was founded in 1894, on the principles of intellectual rigor and the development of character...
, Gibney earned his bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, where he was a member of the literary society St. Anthony Hall
St. Anthony Hall
St. Anthony Hall, also known as Saint Anthony Hall and The Order of St. Anthony, is a national college literary society also known as the Fraternity of Delta Psi at colleges in the United States of America. St...
, and later attended the UCLA Film School. He is the son of journalist Frank Gibney
Frank Gibney
Frank Bray Gibney was an American journalist, editor, writer and scholar. Correspondent of Time, editor of Newsweek and Life, he was the vice chairman of the Board of Editors at Encyclopædia Britannica and wrote several books, most notably about Japan...
and the stepson of the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. was an American liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist. He was ordained in the Presbyterian church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ....
.
He served as executive producer of the documentary No End in Sight
No End in Sight
No End in Sight is a 2007 documentary film about the American occupation of Iraq. The film marks the directorial debut of Academy Award winning documentary film producer Charles H. Ferguson. The film premiered January 22, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in limited release...
(2007). His film
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is a 2008 documentary film directed by Alex Gibney. It details Hunter S. Thompson's landmark writings on music and politics...
(2008) is documentary based on Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
and his "Gonzo
Gonzo journalism
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to be first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style...
" style of journalism. Under executive producer Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
, Gibney was series producer for the PBS television series The Blues (2003) producing individual episodes directed by Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
and Charles Burnett
Charles Burnett
Charles Burnett may refer to:*Charles Burnett , American film director*Charles Burnett , Scottish Officer of Arms*Charles Burnett , Royal Air Force officer and Australian Chief of the Air Staff...
, and writer and producer of the series The Pacific Century
The Pacific Century
The Pacific Century was a 1992 PBS Emmy Award winning ten part documentary series narrated by Peter Coyote about the rise of the Pacific Rim economies. Alex Gibney was the writer for the series, and Frank Gibney, his father, wrote the companion volume, The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a...
(1992) which won the News & Documentary Emmy for Outstanding Historical Program. Several films he directed and/or produced have been screened at the Cannes
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
, Sundance
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...
, and Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca Film Festival is a film festival founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the consequent loss of vitality in the TriBeCa neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.The mission of the festival...
s.
Gibney's film style traces much of its origins back to the film The Exterminating Angel, said the director to Robert K. Elder
Robert K. Elder
Robert K. Elder is an American journalist, author and film columnist.- Early life and education :A Montana native, Elder interviewed Ken Kesey for his high school newspaper. The author encouraged Elder to attend his alma mater, the University of Oregon, which Elder did two years later...
in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life
The Film That Changed My Life
The Film That Changed My Life is a non-fiction collection of interviews compiled by American journalist, author and film columnist Robert K. Elder...
:
[The Exterminating Angel is] dark, but it's also wickedly funny and mysterious in ways that can’t be reduced to a simple, analytical explanation. I always thought that's what's great about movies sometimes—the best movies have to be experienced; they can’t just be written about.
Gibney is currently directing The Road Back, a film on Lance Armstrong
Lance Armstrong
Lance Edward Armstrong is an American former professional road racing cyclist who won the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times, after having survived testicular cancer. He is also the founder and chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation for cancer research and support...
. He is also contributing a film to ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
's 30 for 30
30 for 30
30 for 30 is the umbrella title for a series of documentaries airing on ESPN and its sister networks. The series, which premiered in October 2009 and concluded in December 2010, chronicles 30 stories from the "ESPN era," each of which detail the issues, trends, people, teams, or events that...
documentary series: called Steve Bartman
Steve Bartman
The Steve Bartman incident occurred during a Major League Baseball playoff game between the Chicago Cubs and the Florida Marlins on October 14, 2003, at Wrigley Field in Chicago....
: Catching Hell, it will look at "The Inning" in Game 6 the 2003 National League Championship Series
2003 National League Championship Series
-Game 1:Tuesday, October 7, 2003 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, IllinoisThe Marlins took Game 1 of the series, coming back from an early 4–0 deficit. They scored five runs in the third on three home runs from Juan Encarnacion, rookie Miguel Cabrera, and Ivan "Pudge" Rodríguez. In the sixth inning,...
.
Gibney is President of Jigsaw Productions, a production company which produces independent films, music documentaries, and TV mini-series. This year he won the Yale Film Studies
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
' Program Award for his contributions to film culture. In 2010, Utne Reader
Utne Reader
Utne Reader is an American bimonthly magazine. The magazine collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music and DVDs...
magazine listed Gibney as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
He also writes for the Huffington Post blog.
Gibney will be next working on a documentary about WikiLeaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
founder Julian Assange
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, writer, computer programmer and Internet activist. He is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks with the stated purpose of creating open governments.WikiLeaks has published material...
. The documentary was acquired by Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures
-1920:* White Youth* The Flaming Disc* Am I Dreaming?* The Dragon's Net* The Adorable Savage* Putting It Over* The Line Runners-1921:* The Fire Eater* A Battle of Wits* Dream Girl* The Millionaire...
.
Suing his distributors
On June 19, 2008, Gibney's company filed for arbitrationArbitration
Arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution , is a legal technique for the resolution of disputes outside the courts, where the parties to a dispute refer it to one or more persons , by whose decision they agree to be bound...
, arguing that THINKFilm
THINKFilm
THINKFilm is a privately held production and distribution company founded in September 2001. It has been a division of David Bergstein’s Capitol Films since 2006. Bergstein also serves as the company’s chairman...
failed to properly distribute and promote his film Taxi to the Dark Side
Taxi to the Dark Side
Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, and produced by Eva Orner and Susannah Shipman, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature...
. He is suing for over a million dollars in damages. He stated that the film has grossed only $280,000.
Filmography (as director)
- The Ruling Classroom (1980)
- Manufacturing Miracles (1988)
- The Fifties (1997), television mini-series
- AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies: Love Crazy (1998)
- The Sexual Century: Sexual Explorers (1999)
- The Sexual Century: The Sexual Revolution (1999)
- Jimi Hendrix and the Blues (2001)
- Behind Those Eyes (2005)
- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the RoomEnron: The Smartest Guys in the RoomEnron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, a study of one of the largest business scandals in American history...
(2005) - 3 Doors Down: Away from the Sun, Live from Houston, Texas (2005)
- Time Piece (segment "Empire of the Pushcarts") (2006)
- The Human Behavior Experiments (2006)
- Taxi to the Dark SideTaxi to the Dark SideTaxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, and produced by Eva Orner and Susannah Shipman, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature...
(2007) - Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. ThompsonGonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. ThompsonGonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is a 2008 documentary film directed by Alex Gibney. It details Hunter S. Thompson's landmark writings on music and politics...
(2008) - FreakonomicsFreakonomics (film)Freakonomics: The Movie is a 2010 documentary film based on the book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The film had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2010, with a theatrical release planned for later in the year. Freakonomics is a documentary featuring Steven...
(segment producer, 2010) - Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010)
- Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot SpitzerClient 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot SpitzerClient 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is a documentary directed by Alex Gibney about former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and the sex scandal that derailed his political career...
(2010) - My Trip to Al Qaeda (2010)
- Catching Hell (2011)
- Magic Trip (2011)
- The Last Gladiators (2011)
- The Road Back (2011) in post-production
External links
- Alex Gibney video discussing his new film on Lance Armstrong Youtube
- Interview with Alex Gibney at IFC.com
- Plum TV Telluride Interviews Alex Gibney About Gonzo
- Gibney Bio (Jigsaw Productions)
- Gibney interview on Democracy Now!Democracy Now!Democracy Now! and its staff have received several journalism awards, including the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio & Television; the George Polk Award for its 1998 radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, on the Chevron Corporation and the deaths of...
(video, audio, and print transcript) - Alex Gibney's Commercial Work
- IONCINEMA.com TIFF 2010 Viral: Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer