C2 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2020
WASHINGTON — As the coronavirus raged
out of control this spring, Alex Gibney, an
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker
who has released two other movies this
year, embarked on a secret project: a film
that would “tell the origin story” of the pan-
demic that has cost more than 215,000
Americans their lives.
He wanted to know if the carnage could
have been prevented.
The resulting documentary, available
now to rent through services like Amazon
and Apple (and next week to stream on
Hulu), lays bare what Mr. Gibney calls “a
story of staggering incompetence.”
It contrasts the response in South Korea,
where fewer than 450 people have died, to
that of the United States, where, in January,
President Trump declared the outbreak “to-
tally under control,” the phrase from which
the film takes its title.
As a Washington correspondent who
writes about health policy for The Times,
I’ve been covering the Trump administra-
tion’s coronavirus response.
I spoke with Gibney and his co-directors,
Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyun-
yan, about “Totally Under Control.”
Our conversation was edited and con-
densed for clarity. (Full disclosure: Michael
D. Shear, a Times White House correspon-
dent, is featured in the film, and Eric Lipton,
a Times investigative reporter, was a con-
sultant.)
SHERYL GAY STOLBERGWe’ll begin at the be-
ginning. I’m interested in knowing how this
idea came to you.
ALEX GIBNEYA friend of mine had died from
Covid, another friend was two weeks on a
ventilator. I had other friends who were des-
perately trying to get into hospitals, being
turned away, couldn’t get tests. And it oc-
curred to me that there was something
deeply wrong with the federal response to
Covid. And so I thought it would be impor-
tant to do a film — and a film that hopefully
could come out quickly — that would focus
on the early days, to go back to the origin
story to the weeks and months when a lot of
this pain and suffering could have been pre-
vented.
STOLBERGWhy compare the United States
and South Korea?
GIBNEYBecause otherwise you might get
lost in the notion that something like this
just happened, and there wasn’t anything
we could do about it. And, South Korea, a
country with a highly dense urbanized pop-
ulation — 51 million people — seemed an ap-
propriate comparison.
STOLBERGDid you film this in secrecy?
GIBNEYWe didn’t announce it — I think
that’s the best way of saying it — to avoid
publicity going in, in hopes of trying to per-
suade people to talk to us.
STOLBERGYou interviewed people outside
the administration. Did you ask for anyone
else inside to talk to you?
SUZANNE HILLINGERI put in a request to the
White House for Trump and Pence. I put in a
request for the entire White House corona-
virus task force, H.H.S. I put in requests for
Azar [Alex M. Azar II, Mr. Trump’s health
secretary]; Kadlec [Bob Kadlec, the assist-
ant secretary for preparedness and re-
sponse]; CDC; a few other high-level offi-
cials and experts. I never got a no, but I
never got a yes.
STOLBERGWelcome to my world. To me, the
newsiest and the most compelling element
of the film was the interview with Max Ken-
nedy, a young volunteer who led a crew of
other 20-somethings — working with their
own computers and cellphones — on a fum-
bling hunt for supplies overseen by the
president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. How
did you find him?
GIBNEYWe were looking for him and then
we got a tip from one of our executive
producers that she knew him and would we
be interested in being put in contact. He pro-
vided us, I think, with a level of detail that
had not been available in any of those other
pieces and that was really jaw-dropping.
There was a lot of material from him that we
weren’t able to include.
STOLBERGDo tell.
OPHELIA HARUTYUNYANThere was a very
Kafka-esque story, where the volunteerswere told that if they get any tips for any
ventilators, they should send them to a spe-
cific person at FEMA, and so they would
forward these leads to this FEMA rep. And
then she came to them one day and she
said: “You know, why are you forwarding
these leads to me? I have nothing to do with
ventilators, so please have people forward
these to this link on the FEMA website for
ventilators.” And Max said that when he
went on the website, it was very unclear but
when he clicked on enough links, he actu-
ally got redirected to an email, and that
email would forward to Max Kennedy’s
team. So they were forwarding these venti-
lator leads to themselves.
STOLBERG You also interviewed Rick
Bright, the federal whistle-blower, who says
he pleaded with higher-ups in the adminis-
tration to take the pandemic more seriously,
and Mike Bowen, a mask manufacturer,
who spent 13 years trying to get the federal
government to stock up on medical masks.
Did it surprise you that they choked up
while talking to you?
HARUTYUNYANNo. These are people who go
into the health profession because they
want to help people, they want to give peo-
ple better lives, they want to protect Ameri-
cans. It’s a very emotional responsibility
they have, and I think it’s deeply frustrating
to not be able to do that.
STOLBERGWhy do you think there was such
a difference in the outcome in South Korea
and the United States? Is it because our
politics are so polarizing?
HARUTYUNYANThe politics in South Korea
are actually just as polarizing as they are in
the U.S., but because they had the experi-
ence of enduring MERS [Middle East Res-
piratory Syndrome, another illness caused
by a coronavirus], they knew how bad this
could get and they set politics aside. That is
something that our administration was not
capable of doing.
STOLBERGOne thing that blew my mind was
the South Korean system of contact tracing,
finding people on their cellphones. Did youask anybody if that had been considered
here?
HARUTYUNYANWhen we interviewed the
South Korean folks we would always ask,
“Do you think that’s something that could
happen in America?” I think the South Ko-
rean people have decided that the public
health is more important than privacy.
STOLBERGAn editor wondered if this film
would be the “Fahrenheit 9/11” — the Mi-
chael Moore film released the summer be-
fore the 2004 election — of the coronavirus
pandemic.
GIBNEYI hope it has an impact — a powerful
impact like “Fahrenheit 9/11” did. Here’s
the thing, though: we made it as a film that
was just about competence. And that’s what
we were looking at, to see whether or not
this thing had been bungled. We also made
it to have an impact — as in right now. That
was always the intent. And I think that par-
ticularly for those people who are still unde-
cided, this issue of the pandemic is huge.
STOLBERGThe timing of this film is no acci-
dent, three weeks before the election.
GIBNEYThere were a lot of people who felt
that we should collect evidence but wait for
a year or so, and then render a historical
verdict on this moment. But in this case, it
was important to put that story before the
American public, at a time when they were
making a critical choice about the future of
the country.
STOLBERGSo now you have had this really
dramatic event that has just happened. The
president gets coronavirus and the whole
White House becomes a hot spot. I couldn’t
help but wonder if you were thinking,
“Wouldn’t it be a great ending?”
GIBNEYA week ago Thursday, we officially
finished the film. And so, we debated long
and hard: Should we open up the film?
Should we delay it? And ultimately, we
ended up putting a card in the film that says,
“The day after this film was finished, Presi-
dent Trump declared positive for coronavi-
rus.” It was a way of saying that we were
ending a film there, but the story goes on.Top and above, two scenes
from the coronavirus
documentary “Totally Under
Control.”PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEON AND PARTICIPANTIt’s Documentary
Season, Too
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG The directors of
a film aboutcoronavirus are
hoping to havean impact.
der to the algorithm. Those two companies
together control an ever-larger share of the
global attention span, and their growing
reach can’t help but raise troubling
thoughts in a movie lover’s mind.
What if the pandemic, rather than repre-
senting a temporary disruption in audience
habits and industry revenues, turns out to
be an extinction-level event for moviego-
ing? What if, now that we’ve grown accus-
tomed to watching movies in our living
rooms or on our laptops, we lose our appe-
tite for the experience of trundling down
carpeted hallways, trailing stray popcorn
kernels and cradling giant cups of Coke
Zero, to jostle for an aisle seat and hope all
that soda doesn’t mean we’ll have to run to
the bathroom during the big action se-
quence?
The specter of empty movie houses was
haunting Hollywood (and the press that
covers it) long before the Covid-19 plot
twist. In most recent years, ticket sales
were flat or declining, a malaise masked by
seasonal juggernauts like episodes in the
“Avengers” saga or the chapters of the third
“Star Wars” trilogy — by Disney’s mighty
market share, in other words. And even the
periodic triumphs of non-franchise, or at
least non-Disney, products — “Get Out” and
“Joker”; “Bohemian Rhapsody” and
“American Sniper” — were faint puffs of
wind in the sails of a becalmed schooner, or
teacups of water bailed from the hull of a
listing liner or some other suitably disas-
trous nautical metaphor.
Still, the ultimate catastrophe seemed un-
thinkable, and for good reason. The history
of cinema is in part an anthology of prema-
ture obituaries. Sound, color, television, the
suburbs, the VCR, the internet — they were
all going to kill off moviegoing, and none
succeeded. Cultural forms, and the social
and private rituals that sustain them, have a
way of outlasting their funerals. How many
times have we heard about the death of the
novel? Of poetry? Painting? Broadway the-
ater? Rock ’n’ roll? The arts in modern
times can resemble a parade of exquisite
corpses. The dead don’t die.
Perhaps no art form has remade itself as
frequently and dramatically in so short a
life span as film (which technically speak-
ing isn’t even film anymore). Over the past
hundred-some years, “going to the movies”has encompassed a lot of different ways of
leaving the house, and a corresponding va-
riety of destinations: Curtained-off carnival
booths; grand palaces with gilded ceilings
and velvet seats; Bijoux and Roxys on
small-town main streets; suburban drive-
ins and shopping-mall multiscreens; grind-
houses, arthouses, repertory houses and
porno parlors. Most recently, in response to
the soulless sameness of the megaplexes, a
new kind of gentrified cinema has emerged,
with reserved seating, food service and arti-
sanal cocktails delivered to your seat.
So which one are we mourning? What are
we defending? A frequent answer, offered
both by those who worry that movies will
die and by those who insist that they can’t, is
community, the pleasure of sitting in the
dark among friends and strangers and par-
taking of a collective dream. That picture
strikes me as idealized if not downright
ideological, a fantasy of film democracy that
has rarely been realized.
Did you buy your ticket online, or did the
site reject your credit card? Did you wait in
line only to find out that what you wanted to
see was sold out? Was the person in the seat
in front of you texting through the sad parts,
while the person behind you kicked the
back of your seat? Was the theater full of
crying babies? Talkative senior citizens?
Unruly teenagers? Or — what may be
worse — did you find yourself, on a week-
night a few weeks into the run of a well-re-
viewed almost-hit, all but alone in the dark?
Was the floor sticky? Was the seat torn?
How was the projection? Was there mask-
ing on the edge of the screen, or did the im-
age just bleed onto the curtains? Was the
sound clear?
These were common cinephile com-
plaints in the pre-pandemic era, and we
shouldn’t let them be washed away in the
nostalgia of this moment. Moviegoing was
often as communal as a traffic jam, as trans-
porting as air travel, and the problems went
deeper than lax management or technolog-
ical glitches.
The problem, to return to Chapek’s
memo, was “world-class, franchise-based
entertainment” — not every instance of it,
but the models of creation and consumption
the idea imposed. The big theater chains
were kept alive by Disney, which dominated
the domestic box office by ever greatermargins, and which seemed almost
uniquely able to produce the kind of big-
event movies that could attract the masses
on opening weekend. Those films, parceled
out every other month or so, at once raised
financial expectations among the exhib-
itors and helped break the habit of regular
movie attendance among audiences. There
was less and less room — literally fewer
rooms, but also less collective bandwidth —
for nonfranchise entertainment.
At least at the multiplexes. The movie au-
dience didn’t vanish, it splintered. Some
stayed home, now that genuine cinema —
not prestige TV, but restored classics and
new work by established auteurs — could
be found on streaming. Midlevel art-house
distribution was kept alive by newish com-
panies like A24 and Neon, which distributed
Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Para-
site.”
The pictures were, in several ways, get-
ting smaller: somewhat cheaper to make,
and also less dependent on mass popularity.
But it was also true that some of the most
interesting films of the past half-decade —
especially in languages other than English
— had a hard time finding screens and oxy-
gen.
The shuttering of theaters has acceler-
ated this tendency, at least for the moment.
In the absence of blockbusters, small, auda-
cious movies have popped up like mush-
rooms on a forest floor — signs of life amid
the general decay, but fragile and too easily
overlooked or trampled underfoot.
Will the return of independent theaters,
however many remain, help those little
movies survive? Will a return to normalcy
herald the next stage in an emerging duopo-
ly, with the two dominant companies — Net-
flix and Disney — using big screens to
showcase selected content, treating the-
aters as a kind of loss leader for their lucra-
tive subscription services?
But maybe that’s putting it the wrong
way. Making predictions, in addition to be-
ing foolish, is an expression of passivity, an
acceptance of our diminished role as con-
sumers of culture. Instead of wondering
what might happen, what if we thought
about what we want, and thought of our-
selves not as fans or subscribers, but as
partners and participants?
I’ll see you at the movies.A Regal Cinemas theater in Las Vegas. Regal announced this month that it would
temporarily shut down its more than 500 theaters in the United States.
BRIDGET BENNETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThe Flickering Future of Theaters
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1A.O. SCOTT CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK