Alex Gibney

Gibney at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival Vanity Fair party

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."^[1]

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.

Life and career

After attending Pomfret School, Gibney earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University 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 Festivals.

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:

[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.^[2]

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."^[3]

He also writes for the Huffington Post blog.^[4]

Suing his distributors

On June 19, 2008, Gibney's company filed for arbitration, arguing that THINKFilm failed to properly distribute and promote his film Taxi to the Dark Side.^[5][6] 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 Room (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 Side (2007)
• Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008)
• Freakonomics (segment producer, 2010)
• Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010)
• Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010)
• My Trip to Al Qaeda (2010)
• Catching Hell (2011)
• Magic Trip (2011)
• The Last Gladiators (2011)^[7]
• The Road Back (2011) in post-production^[8][9]
• Biba! One Island (2011)
• Untitled Lance Armstrong (2011)
• Silence in the House of God (2012)
• Gravity (2013)

References

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)
• Alex Gibney at the Internet Movie Database
• Gibney interview on Democracy Now! (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
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Gibney about Casino Jack and the United States of Money, June 13, 2010