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Over the past 40-plus years, no figure in American documentary has been more important than Sheila Nevins. She has produced or executive produced hundreds of documentaries for HBO and more recently for MTV Documentary Films. And she’s won 32 Emmys, more than any single person.
But there’s one credit that hasn’t been attached to her name, until now: director. At the age of 84, Nevins has added that title to her long list of accomplishments with The ABCs of Book Banning, an Oscar-contending short documentary about increasingly aggressive efforts by conservatives to keep certain published works out of the hands of schoolchildren.
Nevins joins the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss her directorial debut, which she explains was inspired by seeing a viral video of a 100-year-old woman taking on the Martin County School Board in Florida. Grace Linn, who has since turned 101, denounced board members for depriving children of a growing list of books. She invoked her late husband, an American soldier killed in France in 1944 while fighting Nazi Germany.
“One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned,” Linn told the school board. “The freedom to read, which is protected by the First Amendment, is our essential right and duty of our democracy. Even so, it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups who think they hold the truth.”
The conversation with Nevins extends beyond book banning to her seminal role popularizing documentary as a form of entertainment in the U.S. Before she arrived on the scene, most documentaries amounted to placid perambulations through nature, or earnest if dull history lessons. Nevins turned that model on its ear by exploring subjects that got pulses racing: sexually themed series like American Undercover and Taxicab Confessions, true crime series Autopsy, documentaries on Heidi Fleiss (upscale Hollywood madam), Ted Haggard (the evangelical minister who hooked up with a male prostitute), and coming up with the idea for what became the landmark Paradise Lost trilogy about the wrongly convicted West Memphis Three.
How did she do it? Nevins explains she leveraged HBO’s “Total Subscriber Satisfaction” data to crack the code of what audiences wanted to see.
It’s a frank, uncensored conversation with a legend on Doc Talk, our podcast hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley and Deadline’s Documentary Editor Matt Carey. Doc Talk is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, presented with support from National Geographic Documentary Films.
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