Nevins sets MTV docs agenda

Thom Powers and Sheila Nevins at DOC NYC

MTV Documentary Films head Sheila Nevins has unveiled details of three non-fiction commissions currently in production for the US cablenet’s newest division.

During an in-conversation session at the 10th annual DOC NYC festival in New York yesterday, Nevins revealed she had ordered documentaries on selfie culture, cannabis and suicide among young people, for the first wave of original productions at MTV’s recently launched feature doc division.

The first documentary, America on Selfies (working title), comes from filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi – the daughter of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi – who previously made 12 docs for Nevins at HBO including Journeys with George, Fall to Grace, The Trials of Ted Haggard and Outside the Bubble.

Built around a framing device of selfie-taking, the film will see Pelosi travelling across the US and “taking the temperature of Americans” in the current tumultuous political climate. Selfies, Nevins remarked, contain both an expression of attention-seeking joy, as well as “a sense of despair that runs through the heartland.”

“I love the way she makes films,” Nevins added of Pelosi. “She’s an old-time filmmaker in a young woman’s body.”

Elsewhere, filmmaker Alexandra Shiva (This Is Home: A Refugee Story, How to Dance in Ohio) has been commissioned to direct an as-yet-untitled doc about suicide among young Americans.

Nevins told attendees that suicide attempts among 14- to 22-year-olds has “skyrocketed” and said Shiva’s programme would present “a sort of AA” meeting format, featuring Americans who had survived suicide attempts.

Finally, the cannabis-focused Going to Pot: The Highs and Lows of It (w/t) will be made by doc-makers and World of Wonder co-founders Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Wishful Drinking, Becoming Chaz, RuPaul’s Drag Race), who “I did 15 films with at HBO and who I love dearly,” Nevins said.

The programme “is very much a Q&A show,” she explained, adding that “none of these [commissions] are traditional docus.”

The original commissions follow the acquisitions of three finished docs earlier this summer to launch the MTV Documentary Films banner: David Charles Rodrigues’ Gay Chorus Deep South; Davy Rothbart’s 17 Blocks; and Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan’s St Louis Superman.

Nevins, who serves as exec producer of MTV’s nascent doc division, joined the Viacom-controlled net in May this year, after calling time on a nearly 40-year career at payTV net HBO in late 2017.

Talking onstage with friend and DOC NYC artistic director Thom Powers, Nevins said that despite the on-the-surface amicable parting of ways with HBO, “I think in many ways I was pushed out.”

Having spent a huge portion of her working life at the network, “I really didn’t know how to function at all without HBO,” she reflected, adding that she found it difficult to be “hunting around for a job” in her late 70s.

She credited Liza Burnett Fefferman, the senior VP of communications for MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo, for helping to lure her to MTV. The two had previously worked together on docs such as Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, back when Fefferman was working for Radius.

Nevins indicated she would be looking for documentaries that leant in to “compassion and empathy” at MTV and said that a music angle was not necessary at all. However, she warned that she had been given notably less budget than she’d had previously at HBO.

“I was doing 40 [docs a year] at HBO,” she said. “I’d like the money for 20 [at MTV] – I don’t have the money for 20 – so I’ve got two acquisitions and three originals.” Nevertheless, she added that if those titles performed well, she hoped she would be given a bigger pot for next year’s slate.

Finally, Nevins used her stage time to share fond memories of the late pioneering documentarian DA Pennebaker (“he was just a gentle soul”); and heaped praise on Sundance-winning doc Honeyland (“it’s the best documentary of the year”) and Obama-backed Netflix doc American Factory (“I stood up an applauded in my apartment.”)

She closed her keynote with a final steer for filmmakers approaching her with projects.

“Don’t think of MTV as television,” she said. “Think of it as a brand,” which will push your work to a variety of digital and emerging platforms.