A Doc Director Goes DIY Post-Streaming
Clay Tweel is building buzz on his opioid film the old-fashioned way. Plus: Meet the 487 new Oscar voters!
Happy The Bear Season Three day! Yes, technically that day kicked off Wednesday night, when FX premiered all 10 episodes three hours early — and felt compelled to send out a press release about it.
The level of secrecy around what’s in season three means both that there’s not a lot of juicy pre-season tidbits to draw out — at a press conference held with the cast on Monday, Ayo Edebiri was asked if she could tease anything about her character’s relationship with Lionel Boyce’s Marcus, and she offered a simple “No, probably not.”
It also means I didn’t get any screeners, and since I’m also not blessed with the ability to speed-watch television, I’ll be spending the weekend catching up with everyone else. No spoilers here! We’ll discuss more on Monday.
In the meantime, though, we have a whole new class of Academy members to welcome, a group whose make-up once again signals the Academy’s goals for its future. And I have a fascinating conversation with documentarian Clay Tweel, whose new film The Bitter Pill is not streaming or playing in a theater near you — yet — but his plan to play the long game might be one way for documentaries to survive the effects of the end of the streaming boom.
A Documentarian Rides the Wave
As my Ankler colleagues avidly cover every day, our collective moment on the other side of Peak TV continues to upend seemingly every aspect of the movie and TV business, much of which we won’t fully understand until it’s all over. But documentary filmmakers, the people trained to notice trends and connect threads into narratives, have been at the forefront of seeing their business transform.
Clay Tweel has been at it since 2007, working as an associate producer on the documentary The King of Kong, near the end of the mid-2000s boom of theatrically released hit documentaries. He then rode the wave of the streaming era’s infinite demand for content, debuting his 2016 documentary Gleason (about a former professional football player suffering from ALS making a video for his unborn son) on Prime Video and making the 2020 series Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults for Max.
“There were a lot of things being greenlit, and so you have to sort of ride that wave and be doing multiple things at once, which is honestly not my strong suit,” Tweel told me last week via Zoom, stationed in his seven-year-old daughter’s bedroom. (Pro tip: A child’s bedroom as a Zoom backdrop makes for a great conversational icebreaker.)
He points to the great Netflix correction of 2022 as a turning point, when streamers began tightening budgets and demanding both fewer and cheaper documentary projects. “You're just like, well, what can I do to still make the best stories and the most poignant things that are going to connect with people, but do it with less people?” Tweel says. “It's a workflow that I'm familiar with. Having to shoot and edit at the same time, or having to direct and edit.”
Hitting the Circuit
With his latest film, The Bitter Pill, Tweel is hitting the festival pavement to figure out not only the distribution market for documentaries in 2024, but also how to find audiences beyond a streaming service thumbnail. Premiering at the Full Frame Festival in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina, in April, The Bitter Pill recently played the DC/DOX festival in Washington, D.C., with more festivals planned for the rest of the year.
Set in Huntington, West Virginia, and following attorney Paul Farrell’s efforts to hold drug distributors legally responsible for the opioid crisis, The Bitter Pill is a natural fit for these festivals based not too far from Appalachia. Tweel remembers how self-distributed documentaries like 2008’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil went directly after their target audiences, and sees a similar potential for The Bitter Pill despite all the changes in the doc world since then.
“There are a lot of people — not just people who work in recovery centers, but EMS workers. There are healthcare workers, There are lawyers — lawyers love this movie,” Tweel says, ticking off the folks he hopes to attract. “There are lots of avenues we can take to find audiences for the film.”
When Tweel first began work on the project in 2017, he imagined following Farrell’s work and telling a story about the opioid crisis that was more akin to Michael Clayton or The Verdict than a traditional documentary. “I knew that's where our unique access point was,” Tweel says. “Paul, from the beginning was like, I'm going to let you see behind the curtain of what this is like.”
The Bitter Pill goes deep in the weeds of the legal process, explaining with remarkable clarity how Farrell developed a theory of “public nuisance” that allowed cities and counties to sue drug distributors for allowing millions of opioid pills to flood their communities. It’s a profound David and Goliath story, and a personal one for Tweel, whose family has roots in Huntington.
Since Tweel began filming in 2017, the opioid crisis has become the fodder for far more series and documentaries, including Hulu’s Dopesick, Netflix’s Pain Hustlers and Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. That shift made for yet another complication once the film was completed. “Everyone's like, we already know what happened in the opioid crisis,” Tweel says. “It's become an oversaturated space.”
Putting the Subject to Work
The advantage of The Bitter Pill is truly Farrell himself, who has traveled with Tweel to festivals and is eager to be another spokesperson for the film. It’s far from a hagiography — showing Farrell in moments of weakness and personal challenges — but the film is more powerful for it. “He wants people to see the movie, too,” says Tweel. “It’s really hard for him, but he also knows that it’s a way to get the story out there that he’s wanted to be a part of from the beginning.”
The path of The Bitter Pill will be longer and possibly more challenging than the one Tweel took with Gleason, which premiered at Sundance in 2016 and was picked up there by Amazon for a reported $3 million. But Tweel is also optimistic about what the post-streaming documentary era might look like.
“It's going to be interesting to see if that makes docs go a little bit back to how they were,” he says. “It might allow for potentially slower burns, some more academic or issue-driven subjects or quirky character pieces that I love.” Tweel is also waiting for a new, smaller distributor — “the Neon or A24 from 15 years ago,” he says — to emerge and put weight behind some documentaries that have yet to find distribution. “I still hold out hope that somebody is going to come in and do that.”
The Bitter Pill is not yet streaming or playing in a theater near you — but it will be soon, and it’s worth looking out for.
Welcome to the Academy!
A hearty congratulations to this year’s Oscar winners Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Cord Jefferson, Justine Triet, costume designer Holly Waddington (Poor Things), documentarians Mstyslav Chernov (20 Days in Mariupol), production designers Shona Heath, Zsuzsa Mihalek, James Price (Poor Things), animator Brad Booker (War Is Over!), sound designers Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers (The Zone of Interest) and the Godzilla Minus One visual effects team of Tatsuji Nojima, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Takashi Yamazaki.
None of them were Academy members in time to vote for themselves in this past year’s awards race, but all have now been inducted into the club, among the 487 people invited this week to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Not everybody who gets invited to the Academy decides to join — Ryan Coogler is probably the most famous decliner of recent years — but it seems safe to assume most will accept the invitation. Inviting recent Oscar winners and nominees is fairly low-hanging fruit, but where it really gets interesting is seeing everyone else the Academy has decided to include, and what it might tell us about its priorities.
Among the most bold-faced names on the invite list are actors Jessica Alba, Erika Alexander, Stephanie Beatriz, Jason Clarke, Fiona Shaw and Lily Gladstone (never too late to plug Gladstone’s appearance on my first Prestige Junkie podcast). Some have been recently connected to Oscar-y projects — poor Jason Clarke starred in Zero Dark Thirty and The Great Gatsby before finally getting the nod after Oppenheimer — and some, like Alba or Shaw, have simply been part of the business for so long that they’ve earned their spot. It always warms my heart to see character actors make the cut, so a special congrats to Rachel House, D.B. Sweeney and Catherine O’Hara (though I think post-Schitt’s Creek she’s probably made the leap to bona fide star.)
Behind the camera, notable directors on the invite list include Fede Alvarez (the upcoming Alien: Romulus); İlker Çatak (Germany’s international feature nominee The Teachers Lounge); Alice Diop (French breakout Saint Omer); and some of the most acclaimed first-time directors of recent years: Celine Song (Past Lives), A.V. Rockwell (A Thousand and One), Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby and now Bottoms) and Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You).
As it has been for the past decade or so, the list is largely international in its focus, representing craftspeople from many recent, highly acclaimed international hits — RRR, Perfect Days, Society of the Snow, Decision to Leave and The Zone of Interest among them.
But the “new Academy” isn’t just about expanding borders beyond Hollywood. So many of the names on the list seem to represent an effort to fix oversights of the past, from the inclusion of directors of acclaimed '90s indies But I’m a Cheerleader and Just Another Girl on the I.R.T to the large number of casting directors invited, on the eve of their work having its own competitive Oscar starting next year.
Congratulations to all the new invitees, and best of luck navigating the absolute FYC circus that awaits you. I’ll be here to answer any questions — katey@theankler.com, as always.