Pro tip: If you get an invitation to dine with Wendy Schmidt, say yes.
It was over lunch in Nantucket that Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and Schmidt, the billionaire philanthropist, discovered they shared a common cause. Both believe in the power of storytelling to illuminate urgent challenges confronting society.
They continued the conversation and in February announced Schmidt would buy a controlling interest in Jigsaw Productions, Gibney’s company, “to expand the production company and deepen its focus on impact storytelling and public interest journalism.”
“He was looking for a way to go forward and I was looking for a way to invest,” Schmidt explains, “and so we just kind of hit it off.”
Their partnership could become a game changer for a documentary industry faced with declining enthusiasm from streamers and big distributors for hard-hitting material — the very thing for which Gibney is best known. The filmmaker notes drily, “The landscape for being able to release stories that are somewhat controversial has been constrained.”
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Wendy Schmidt
John Sciulli/Getty Images
Case in point, The Bibi Files, a documentary produced by Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom that exposed never-before-seen video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu undergoing interrogation by Israeli authorities on corruption charges. Not so long ago, a hot property like that likely would have snapped up by a major U.S. distributor. But Gibney struggled to sell it. “It was and is frustrating,” Gibney concedes.
But the venture with Schmidt, wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, offers the chance to change that narrative. The expanded company plans to produce scripted and unscripted content, some of it to focus on areas of longstanding interest to Schmidt — ocean health, the environment, and climate change.
“I think the largest story of our time is the planet changing,” Schmidt observes, “and I think if we make stories that don’t acknowledge that, we’re missing an enormous opportunity to not only save the planet, but to change the way people think about the resources of the world.”
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The creative approach doesn’t need to be didactic, Schmidt suggests. “Whether we make documentary films or we tell human stories that are scripted… you don’t have to go at it with an arrow. You can tack your way towards the goal and bring people with you.”
‘No Other Land‘
Dogwoof/Everett Collection
Schmidt earned a master’s degree in journalism and worked briefly as a journalist, then in marketing communications in Silicon Valley before segueing to philanthropy. She describes her investment in Jigsaw not as philanthropy but as a dollars-and-cents proposition.
“It’s a business,” she says. “We’re going to run it like a business.”
One piece of the puzzle for Jigsaw, and the documentary field generally, is how to connect audiences to content of the sort the company wants to make. “We’re going to crack the nut in distribution,” Schmidt insists. “We’re going to figure out how to do that.”
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Gibney sees hopeful signs in the success of No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary that self-distributed theatrically in the U.S. and Canada and pulled in more than $2 million.
“You can see from what’s being done with No Other Land that there is a hunger for the content,” the filmmaker comments. “And now between, I would say a reviving of the independent theatrical market, and new experiments like Jolt.film [where The Bibi Files landed] and a couple of others, we’re beginning to explore innovative new sets of paradigms. They’re going to allow us to reach the audiences that really want to see these films.”
Schmidt’s fellow multi-billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs is the lead investor and board chair of The Atlantic and through the Emerson Collective supports Concordia Studio, a “talent-first film and television studio” founded by Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim. But for every Schmidt and Powell Jobs there is the example of Jeff Bezos to consider. The Amazon founder appeared to be the savior of the Washington Post when he bought it, but he recently intervened in its editorial processes, abandoning presidential endorsements and ordaining that the opinion page would henceforth focus on “personal liberties and free markets”.
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
Meanwhile, billionaire Jeffrey Skoll last year abruptly folded Participant, the social impact-focused production company, after 20 years in business.
“We went after Participant to acquire it,” Schmidt says. “The work at Participant pretty much tracked along a lot of work we were doing in the [Schmidt Family] foundation almost issue by issue… I don’t think Jeff Skoll wanted to sell the company.”
Joining forces with a person of enormous wealth can open opportunities but comes with no guarantee of the investor’s continued interest or alignment politically.
“At Jigsaw,” Gibney says, “we have Wendy’s full-throated support in terms of our own editorial independence to be able to pursue films that we believe are important, and that is the goal for the company.”
