Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary

Late one August afternoon in a Manhattan enhancing suite, with thunder and lightning raging exterior, a storm was additionally brewing inside. Or not less than on the large display on the entrance of the room.

“How’s power feeling, Mr. Musk?” a bystander calls out to Elon Musk onscreen because the beaming tech mogul strides by way of a post-inauguration Washington constructing. In the subsequent scene, Musk sits at a roundtable along with his military of early 20s DOGE staffers, trying on proudly alongside Fox News’ Jesse Watters. The younger males discuss with straightforward, deluded confidence about how they’ll repair authorities as Watters jokingly refers back to the notoriously anatomical nickname of one of many males.

At the again of the enhancing room, Alex Gibney, the longtime documentarian and the closest the present movie world has to a Bob Woodward, watches intently.

“Let’s do that ‘power’ quote hotter,” Gibney says to a crew of 5 that features his frequent producer Erin Edeiken and sound mixer Tony Volante. “Hotter? Yes,” Volante says, adjusting ranges on the display in entrance of him.

Gibney has been working since late 2022 making an attempt to get a temperature learn on Musk, solely to see the mercury proceed to climb. He had completed — or thought he had completed — a two-hour HBO documentary on Musk in late 2024, having plumbed the controversial entrepreneur’s childhood, his early PayPal-ish forays into Silicon Valley, his supercharging of SpaceX, his takeover of Tesla, his launching of the satellites of Starlink, his hirings and firings at Neuralink, his bull run into Twitter, his varied mad dashes by way of wives and child mamas, and plenty of different occasions that may make most people search out a protracted, uninterrupted Xanax trip.

Then Musk donated ungodly sums and made appearances to assist ship the presidency to Donald Trump, who returned the favor by giving Musk the Chewbacca seat on the Millennium Falcon. Suddenly the story appeared to carry one other chapter. HBO executives referred to as Gibney telling him they wished and would finance extra. He stored capturing. And shot additional. For practically two extra years, all the way in which to a six-hour minimize of the film that went deep on Musk’s 2025 DOGE period and his SpaceX IPO plate-spin this summer time. (The movie has since been minimize down.)

Over the course of a embellished profession, Gibney, 72, had taken on Scientology and Enron, the U.S. army and Vladimir Putin, the Catholic Church and Wall Street. All of that ready him, although nothing may actually put together him, for this magnum Musk creation — cinema’s premier curtain-puller on energy revealing the person who has amassed a lot of it. When it comes out this fall, Musk will look to vary the sport in a number of essential methods, lining up a goal that Hollywood by no means shoots at, looking for to turn into successful documentary in an period allergic to them, and making an attempt to open the eyes of American voters to a key Republican electoral arms supplier who Gibney says is mounting an unfair combat. At stake with Musk, its creator desires to inform us, is nothing lower than the way forward for democracy. And to unfold that message, he has enlisted a few of the greatest media corporations round — together with, improbably sufficient, the one quickly to be owned by Trump ally David Ellison.

Today, Gibney is making small tweaks to complete the movie in time for screenings on the Venice and Toronto movie festivals in September (three hours, 45 minutes), a large theatrical launch by Bleecker Street in October (ditto) and an HBO debut in 2027 (4 hours). There are sounds to regulate and results to finish and even online game reenactments to good. What higher method to tackle a maximalist than maximally?

The sound on the DOGE scene in entrance of him calibrated, Gibney provides a small look of approval. “Great,” he says. “Now let’s go to Watters and Big Balls.”

***

Elon Musk isn’t an apparent candidate for a documentary. A documentary goals to inform us one thing new, and Elon Musk epitomizes the acquainted. We take inventory of his trolls on X, we see him artwash his picture on Saturday Night Live, we get a load of his engineering and entrepreneurial genius from biographer Walter Isaacson, we study his inventory market genius on CNBC, we hear him discuss concerning the aim of additional populating the planet, we hear one instance after one other of his private efforts in pursuit of that aim, we eye with skepticism his proclaiming the age of Mars colonization and extraterrestrial information facilities, we watch him (after which attempt to unwatch him) gleefully discuss of slashing-and-burning support employees from inside White House assembly rooms.

So a lot Musk have we ambiently ingested these previous few years that maybe the most effective cultural reward may be a break from all that, an Elon-free zone populated with anybody apart from the 55-year-old provocateur.

Yet Gibney aggressively desires to problem that intuition, and he could have a degree. None of what we have now seen and considered Musk can absolutely prepared us for what the filmmaker has accomplished right here — an adventurous however methodical film grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a harmful huckster is stealthily aggregating energy to use us, primarily by centralizing and controlling huge quantities of information. Gibney’s fundamental tackle Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose energy comes solely from the inventory market and disappears the minute we see by way of the facade of gross sales pitches — however can do a complete lot of harm till that occurs.

The movie world-premieres Sept. 8 at Venice. But its cultural attain will probably prolong far past that. Musk stands poised to the touch off a contemporary wave of anger and worry among the many tens of millions already inclined to fret about him, into and effectively after the midterms, whereas fueling a complete lot of trollishness (and worse?) from the numerous who worship on the temple of Elon Musk, together with Elon Musk.

Gibney has crafted a film that, whereas not new in its specifics, is commonly damning in its totality, standing aside from something the media leisure advanced has not too long ago turned out — a portrait of energy with the cinematic scope of All the King’s Men and the potential social influence of The Pentagon Papers. (“It’s rare these days to see a complete story instead of the fragments we’re used to,” says Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker, a producer on the movie.) Some will certainly discover Musk overly destructive and conspiratorial. Yet practically each time the movie looks like it would tip into paranoid fantasy, Gibney reveals a brand new reality or asks a brand new commonsense query to regular us again.

Gibney spends the primary half of the movie coming at Musk for varied alleged sins, together with stealing credit score from unique Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a lady who birthed his little one to signal an NDA; pumping his shares with shaky discuss of Mars exploration and full self-driving automobiles (the latter of which Gibney additionally alleges are chargeable for greater than 60 deaths); and turning a lightweight on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy teams say suffered needlessly. Not practically as adept in any respect the substantive duties of working an organization as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels primarily at promoting tall tales.

Even these a number of ranges of alleged villainy, nevertheless, appear slim in comparison with what the director argues in the second half is the actual recreation: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite tv for pc web system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its essential function in Ukraine and different war-torn locations; to see NASA rely so closely on SpaceX to perpetuate its area program; to observe Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner enterprise favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with rising dread as the info collected by DOGE doubtlessly turns into a sleeper cell for marketing campaign analysis and political retaliation — to watch all of that is to gaze upon a person not solely in wealth and standing however in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump could have spent six years bringing the branches of presidency to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the method of pulling off one thing way more menacing: rendering authorities out of date altogether.

Two revelations, or not less than intimations, particularly stand out, each involving elections and Musk’s alleged techno-surveilling technique of transferring them for Republicans. In one, Musk ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a central determine in the documentary, describes the occasions of Trump’s election in November 2024. Musk, she says, had a “degree of certainty” concerning the outcomes earlier than they got here in that “I had never seen before.”

“He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” she recounts, as a textual content trade between them pops up onscreen backing up the declare. We see Musk telling her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.”

“So you think he was referring to Starlink?” Gibney asks off-camera. St. Clair replies, “I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers.” Gibney leaves the textual content’s that means hanging — was this a troll or a confession? — however hints he takes it significantly when he then says in his patented voiceover, “What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?”

The different piece of the electoral-manipulation insinuation seems not backward however ahead and means that Musk’s four-month stint in Washington final 12 months did greater than gleefully ax 270,000 federal workers and untold billions in life-saving support (although a piece on the latter, anchored by former USAID chief Samantha Power, lands with an outraging wallop). During that point, Gibney suggests, Musk additionally had entry to and doubtlessly collected intimate information on tens of tens of millions of Americans, presumably even for later political use. In a follow-up electronic mail, Gibney explains additional: “We don’t know what DOGE/Musk did with the data to which they had access. What we do know — via my own source who ran IT at a major federal agency and via the whistleblowers and public accounts — is that the DOGE Boys had Super Admin status to federal IT systems. That means they could just slide a copy of the data on all of us to SpaceX as easily as dropping a file into a folder.” (The allegation of salting away information squares with a whistleblower criticism filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief information officer.)

“How much data exists in the federal government about every single person living in this country, their voting records, everything that they had ever done?” Wired international editorial director Katie Drummond, whose publication led a lot of this protection, says in the film. “Imagine what an AI could do if it can be trained on all that information.”

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel prize-winning godfather of AI, affords a particular use case: leveraging the info into an unfair marketing campaign benefit. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”

THR reached out to media accounts at three of Musk’s corporations earlier than publication looking for touch upon the documentary and obtained no response.

***

For a lot of the previous 20 years, as tv information sources and audiences for longform investigation have waned, documentary filmmakers have risen to take their place. Leading that class has been Gibney.

A sort of documentary journeyman, Gibney’s standing modified in the mid-2000s, when, after the age of fifty, he directed the eye-opening Oscar nominee Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, an intimate, upsetting story of the killing of an Afghan taxi driver by American troopers throughout an interrogation. Arriving in George W. Bush’s second time period, the movie turned a focus for all of the frustrations and qualms across the War on Terror. A spate of exposés of different corroded highly effective establishments adopted as Gibney became a sort of investigative journalism gunslinger, coming in to showdown in opposition to highly effective establishments when few others would.

All these movies really feel like they had been resulting in this, a degree even Gibney will concede. “It’s not the end of the path, but it’s definitely a distillation of the journey,” he says of Musk.

As Gibney sits in the edit bay adjusting small particulars — “Let’s let Trump’s voice go on longer and more distorted so it reads like it’s in Elon’s head,” he says throughout an Oval Office scene — his worldview comes into focus. Gibney’s tendency is to see the darker facet of energy and the highly effective facet of know-how, tendencies that forged him as an outlier in the 2010s however have made him extra related because the years have gone on. In an interview with this reporter about his Stuxnet movie Zero Days a decade in the past, he outlined hacking threats that appeared unique, like compromising an American water system. With studies not too long ago about Iranian operatives making an attempt to just do that, they don’t appear so outlandish. “I try to tell a story that opens our eyes and makes us ask the right questions,” he says, talking of Musk however providing a touchstone which may apply to a lot of his movies.

Gibney right here has got down to make a film much less about its topic’s historical past than his future. Sam Harris, the right-leaning podcaster and pal turned enemy of Musk, lays out this theme onscreen close to the top of the movie. “We are living in a world where one person’s psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics,” he says. “It’s completely insane we have one person who’s this chaotic — who’s completely unelected — and has this much power.”

Gibney makes it clear that he doesn’t assume such voices are hyperbolic, and that it’s only a sure sort of American heuristic that stops us from listening to them. “People assume because he’s very rich that he’s not crazy,” he says. “But the terrifying thing might be that he’s crazy and he’s very rich and powerful. That’s the warning bell the film sounds.”

The director’s methodology for ringing that alarm will certainly draw debate. Musk didn’t sit for an interview, occurring the offensive on the announcement of the movie three years in the past by taking to X to name it a “hit piece.” This prompted Gibney, who by no means met a diss he couldn’t deadpan again, to answer “How would you know?” The line was meant as each undress and problem, as Gibney at the moment nonetheless sought an interview. When Musk successfully ended that hope by tweeting, “Gibney is a douche,” Gibney parried again, “Douché,” marking maybe the primary time in human historical past {that a} rap battle was settled with an accent aigu.

That rejection turned out to be a blessing, birthing dozens of out of doors sources Gibney turned to as a substitute, on- and off-camera. It additionally yielded a proper magic trick surprising in the work of an Oscar-winning documentarian. Gibney and his analysis crew scraped the web for any audio of Musk they might discover. They then created — stick to me right here — a online game avatar of Musk talking these phrases, Ready Player One-style. The Musk avatar additionally, in a pair of first-person-shooter sequences, strikes by way of the world as a classic online game character, full with well being bars and lives left and colourful respawns.

“I wouldn’t have gone there if Elon wasn’t so relentless,” Gibney tells me when requested what motivated this alternative. “But over and over again in our research, Elon kept coming back to this idea of simulation, how we’re living in an existential video game.” Gibney provides, “We’re playing with levels of reality, and the elements of the Elon Musk story are how he intends to define reality.” (This similar wry mischief will be discovered in the closing credit tune, a bouncy unique quantity written and carried out by David Byrne that takes jagged items of Musk’s personal self-mythologizing quotes and slashes him with them.)

The impact of Gibney’s digital avatar is surreal, and likewise its personal remark, without delay turning Musk right into a leather-jacketed larger-than-life character whereas utterly gamifying all his ambitions. The method to neutralize the world’s strongest man, Gibney believes, is to not cower at his affect however to increase him the identical cat-with-a-ball-of-yarn unseriousness he reveals us.

The transfer may actually backfire at a second when the documentary (and nondocumentary) movie world is cautious of digital replicas changing the actual factor and AI deepfakes blurring the truth-fiction line. But Gibney says the whimsical gadget comes in service of a bigger fact: the unmasking of a person who has aggregated energy solely by duping us into considering we should always give it to him. “The Great and Terrible Oz kept people in check because they were afraid of his visage that loomed over everybody, and he used that power to exert an enormous amount of control,” Gibney tells me. “But when a little dog pulled aside the curtain, and you can see a frumpy man operating gears and levers, suddenly he wasn’t so terrible and he wasn’t so great.”

***

Gibney presents an intriguing paradox. A Maine resident, he’s nonetheless a fixture on New York’s media and leisure social scene, transferring among the many sort of highly effective folks he steadily turns the heat-blaster on. If this has proved conflicting, Gibney doesn’t let on, marching from sacred goal to sacred goal with little obvious tentativeness.

The director has a sort of critical casualness in which he shoulders the burden of the world, however unfussily. Gibney’s is a no-nonsense, bullshit-averse demeanor, which comes out in the enhancing session when a performative Trump administration ally seems onscreen, prompting an eye-rolling expression with some salty assessments tossed in.

For somebody who has made a profession scalpeling the highly effective, it maybe comes as a shock that Gibney had by no means considered making a documentary about Elon Musk earlier than — and in reality resisted the concept when the Chinese former actual property baron Zhang Xin recommended it to him in 2022 — feeling like a lot had been stated and, additionally, wasn’t Musk generally a pressure for good, remaking industries at will?

“To be honest, I was on the fence about it,” Gibney says. “But then I talked to a close friend, and he said it was a film about 21st century power, and that resonated with me.”

Realizing additionally that a part of his day by day life — he was lengthy lively on Twitter and had as soon as purchased Tesla photo voltaic panels — revolved across the mogul, and that nobody was actually asking questions on what this meant, Gibney sought early financing companions. He discovered a gaggle of liberal-adjacent manufacturing corporations able to work with him, together with Anonymous Content (Orwell: 2+2=5), the upstart doc banner Double Agent (run by an indie movie veteran named Dana O’Keefe and three way partnership of the narrative movie producers Black Bear Pictures and New Regency) and Zhang Xin’s Closer Media.

Given the sensitivity of taking over one of many world’s strongest males (who already seen the film as successful piece), these producers might need anticipated that they must finance the making of the movie itself and not using a gross sales associate. But when producers took the challenge out to the market, they had been stunned.

Companies that enjoyed to play it protected had been prepared to tackle the far right-flirting Musk. (It was, crucially, earlier than he joined the Trump wagon, however nonetheless.) Most notably: Netflix, which pursued a deal regardless of the streamer avoiding globally polarizing matters like Jamal Khashoggi, stunning even a few of the producers.

Gibney weighed his choices however felt most comfy with one other suitor, HBO’s documentary division, with which he has accomplished a few of his most impactful work, together with films about Theranos and Scientology. And so filmmakers in 2023 signed a pact with the platform for U.S. streaming and tv rights. In doing so, the events defied a long-held conference.

“Hollywood is either averse to making Elon Musk films because of his politics or afraid of Elon Musk because he could sue,” says Ashlee Vance, the writer whose 2015 biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, itself was strangled in improvement by HBO in 2023 due to what Vance believes had been these hesitations. “It makes it that much more surprising this film got through.” (The concept of that includes Elon Musk, in fact, has not been anathema in fictional works; as Gibney reveals in the movie, image-burnishing appearances have cropped up in every single place from Iron Man to The Simpsons to SNL; see beneath for extra.)

Then there was the matter of worldwide rights. Most documentaries get offered territory by territory because the pursuits of nations on a given matter fluctuate, versus one worldwide distributor. This is very true for a controversial topic — big international gamers don’t need a headache due to sensitivities in Croatia.

All of which made it surprising that Universal, one of many greatest worldwide movie distributors round, wished all overseas rights. For the filmmakers, this in fact would doubtlessly imply much more scrutiny and studio battles than with particular person territory consumers. But the concept of creating a much bigger influence gained out.

HBO declined to remark about its involvement. This can appear to be an odd flip — you may’t put out a film to tens of tens of millions of individuals and never need people to note — however given Musk’s energy and eagerness for a brawl, maybe logical too.

Another entanglement comes in the type of one of many financier-producers. Black Bear is run by Teddy Schwarzman — son of Stephen Schwarzman, the founding father of Blackstone and somebody who has moved in shut circles with Musk, each males a part of Trump delegations that met with overseas leaders. (Stephen Schwarzman has referred to as Musk a “fascinating guy” and “good person.”) His son’s willingness to bankroll probably the most high-profile takedown of Musk in historical past makes, if nothing else, for a doubtlessly fascinating Thanksgiving household dinner. Teddy Schwarzman, notably, didn’t personally take a credit score on the movie. He didn’t want to remark for this piece.

HBO’s centrality is very intriguing. Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s father or mother firm, has been run by David Zaslav, a recognized affiliate of Musk, the 2 males prominently sitting collectively in a luxurious field on the U.S. Open two years in the past. Gibney’s film already was effectively underway. The two even mentioned WBD tv tasks on the match, in keeping with an individual aware of their dialog. But if Musk requested Zaslav to kill the movie, the media govt didn’t oblige.

Yet big questions stay given the upcoming altering state of WBD administration. Incoming WBD proprietor Ellison could effectively run HBO by the point the film hits the service on an unnamed date in the primary half of 2027, and one can’t think about him feeling too enthused by the onscreen happenings. (Ellison, by way of a rep, declined remark.) In addition to the overall air of Silicon Valley and Donald Trump skepticism, Ellison’s father and principal financier, Larry Ellison, will get a destructive shout-out when he’s proven in textual content messages prepared to airdrop Musk $2 billion to purchase Twitter, no questions requested. This isn’t what folks pay $111 billion in acquisition charges to platform. Would David Ellison ask for adjustments? Pull the plug and pressure producers to self-distribute? (The filmmakers in an unlikely coup retained paid VOD rights.) Gibney and the filmmaking crew are holding their breath. So is everybody else.

***

How will the film land with each the general public and energy brokers? Isaacson’s 2023 e book left lots of reviewers chilly with its lack of criticism however nonetheless offered a gazillion copies. Gibney’s movie may effectively show all these e book critics proper and prolong the skepticism to a basic public that Musk has thus far stored at bay.

The days of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, in which a documentary turns into an occasion that strikes each field workplace needles and public sentiment, are effectively behind us. But is it attainable that at this post-Twitter second, with a necessity for widespread automobiles of activism and a brand new city sq., a citizenry this fall will discover refuge in Gibney’s film? It may. Musk’s butchering of the previous public commons may deliciously be the explanation we make his takedown the brand new one.

The movie’s size may paradoxically work in its favor, too, rewarding those that soldier by way of its four-hour run time with a badge of endurance, to not point out cocktail social gathering cred. “The thing that drives people to theaters is urgency — people feeling that they have to be part of a conversation,” says Kent Sanderson, CEO of Bleecker Street, which is releasing the film. “And there’s no conversation like the one around someone who affects every single person’s life every single day.”

And don’t sleep on the Oscar chattering class. Musk will get a giant push for finest documentary, and it stays, at this summer time vantage level, arduous to see what can match it. The greatest X issue, because it had been, is how Musk responds. Social media trolls are virtually sure, however would he transcend that? Musk has a historical past of lashing out legally at these he perceives as harming his pursuits, submitting lawsuits in opposition to boycotting Twitter advertisers and his AI rival Sam Altman. The insinuations of enterprise hucksterism are one factor that might provoke him, extra intimate particulars are one other. Musk’s private life comes in for robust scrutiny in the movie, with St. Clair’s nauseating particulars about paternity-based NDA bullying and hush funds (stealth audio from a Musk fixer particularly churns the abdomen) and her no-comment about his drug use, and with a revealing childhood story Musk’s father tells in which a household pal undergoes a medical emergency whereas they had been all on a highway journey in Musk’s native South Africa. The man dies as everybody tries to resuscitate him. Young Elon, his father recounts, reads a comic book e book, unreactive by way of all the episode.

Gibney and HBO are insured, and a high-profile group of attorneys has been vigorously stress-testing the movie. (Helping issues is that Gibney bases massive parts of the documentary on the printed work of reporters from Wired to The Wall Street Journal; the film is nothing if not a valedictory for journalism.) Yet that has by no means stopped a litigious tycoon — particularly today — from going after a media outlet to make a degree or extract some concession.

Alternatively, Musk may study from the Church of Scientology, which to protest the alleged misrepresentations in Gibney’s 2015 exposé Going Clear took out a full-page advert in The New York Times looking for to debunk the film. It despatched viewership skyrocketing.

As Gibney locks in throughout the enhancing session, all of that future noise stays exterior. More related is Musk’s future, because the director tweaks a scene about what the mogul is as much as subsequent (humanoid robots and launching himself off a burning planet to Mars).

“As he accretes more power, he’s no longer interested in checking his worst impulses,” Gibney says to me, reflecting on Musk’s trajectory. The director pauses, remembering a second from his reporting. “Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else.” The struggling will pile up, Gibney says, till we see what’s behind Toto’s curtain.

The Musk Myth

How Hollywood burnished the entrepreneur’s picture as a benevolent genius.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

The mere juxtaposition of Musk and Tony Stark implants the concept the previous impressed the latter. The line Musk utters to a passing Robert Downey Jr. (“I have a good idea for an electric jet”) suggests an idea he by no means had and the response of Stark (“Then we’ll make it work”) a simple execution he’s seldom achieved.

The Simpsons (2015)

Musk arrives in Springfield, the place he promptly units out making various power energy crops to assist humanity even on the expense of his personal revenue. Lisa calls him “possibly the greatest living inventor,” and characters regard him as “an intelligence far beyond ours.”

The Big Bang Theory (2015)

“It feels great to come down here and help the less fortunate,” a real-life Musk tells an awestruck Howard Wolowitz in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. Elon Musk, he’s identical to us (solely extra charitable).

Rick and Morty (2019)

Musk performs an alternate-reality model of himself often known as “Elon Tusk,” who joins the title pair in a plan to defeat the evil Heisotron, even sharpening his family-man picture with a reference to his children.

Saturday Night Live (2021)

In inviting Musk (pictured above) to host (over the objections of some castmembers), the present principally let him good-naturedly clear up his COVID conspiracy theories, give free plugs to DOGEcoin, garner sympathy by discussing his self-reported Aspberger’s and speak about sending folks to Mars in a rocket ship as if it’s an actual factor.

This piece has been up to date with Katie Drummond’s present title and the 2015 launch date of Going Clear. This story appeared in the Sept. 2 problem of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.