There are still three weeks to go before Australians can clap their eyes on You Can See Everything, the one movie that has clogged up everyone’s social feeds this week.
Twenty-one days might seem like yonks away, but if you spin it another way, it’s also ample time to prep for it.
Because Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who is currently serving an 11-year sentence for fraud, is endlessly fascinating which means there are existing TV shows, films, podcasts and books that will be excellent companion pieces that takes the story up to where You Can See Everything picks up.
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The forthcoming film, out in Australia on November 12, is directed by mercurial filmmaker Nathan Fielder, and maybe it takes someone like the hard-to-classify Fielder to match Holmes for weirdness.
Fielder, co-director Lance Oppenheim and a small team filmed with Holmes and her husband, hotel heir Billy Evans, in their San Diego home in the weeks before she reported for her prison sentence in 2023.
It has defied expectations when it came out in the US last week, earning $US15 million in limited release, the highest box office for a non-musical documentary in 20 years, and second overall behind Fahrenheit 9/11.
It’s also now firmly in the Oscar conversation with pundits expecting it to become the first ever documentary to be nominated in the best picture race.
Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything. Credit: A24
That’s a staggering response to a three-hour doc, usually not a film format that elicits this much excitement – people are primed and salivating. There were reports out of the US that as many as 2000 sessions were sold out over the weekend.
The film, produced by cinephile darling A24, will expand to more screens and cities in North America this coming week, and there are some predictions that it could even beat the latest DC movie, Clayface.
So, how did we get here? How did You Can See Everything become the most talked about movie of this moment?
The project was largely a secret until a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival in early September, which was met with a rapturous reaction, immediately generating buzz that it was the movie of the year.
That clever release strategy also included a simultaneously released teaser trailer that was largely just one deeply uncomfortable scene between Holmes and Fielder.
Wide-eyed, unblinking (she was known for almost never blinking) and in close-up, Holmes says, “Why would I deceive you, there’s no reason for me to do that” and “I’m always being real”.
Obviously you would never believe that coming from someone who is literally a convicted fraudster and that’s the tension You Can See Everything promises.
Not long ago, Holmes was a darling of Silicon Valley and the business world. She dropped out of Stanford University at the age of 19 and convinced her parents to invest her tuition money into the company she wanted to start.
Her vision was revolutionary – to change blood-testing so that you would need only one drop from a fingerprick instead of a whole vial, with the flow-on effect to be earlier diagnoses for people which could save lives.
That’s what a lot of prominent people including Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and former statesmen Henry Kissinger and George Shultz bought into, and they bought into her.
There was a philosophy in Silicon Valley that you bought into people as much as if not more than the idea.
Lance Oppenheim and Lance Oppenheim at the Telluride Film Festival. Credit: Vivien Killilea/Getty Images
Holmes was an attractive package for investors. She had a great idea, and was a self-assured young woman who had modelled herself after Steve Jobs, was well-spoken and photogenic on a magazine cover.
Her personal narrative as the uni dropout who was in a hurry to change the world added to that myth. She was at one time, the youngest and richest self-made billionaire after Theranos’ $US9 billion evaluation.
The problem was that the technology didn’t work, and it never worked. Between 2003, when Holmes founded Theranos, and 2018 when it finally collapsed after a damaging Wall Street Journal expose published in 2015, the company never achieved its claim but pretended it had.
That deception actually put people’s lives at risk after receiving inaccurate test results.
At lot of those details are in a slate of Holmesian shows and docos. If you haven’t seen, heard or read much of them before, now is the time.
Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. Credit: Michael Desmond/Hulu
Start with The Dropout (Disney+ and SBS On Demand), a 2022 eight-episode dramatisation starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, which takes the story from a high school-aged Holmes to after the Theranos collapse.
Seyfried won an Emmy for the role thanks to her captivating performance in which she captured not just Holmes’ specific voice, intonation and the way her head seems to vibrate when she’s uncomfortable, but also this unerring faith in her own bullsh-t.
The Dropout was based on a factual podcast of the same name, and that is still available across all audio platforms – and it produced a second season which followed the trial.
There is also a feature documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (HBO Max), from filmmaker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, upcoming Musk doco), and he brings to the story his eye for how power works not just through Holmes but also the culture around her which wanted so badly to believe in her pitch.
If you’re a reader, check out John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood. He’s the WSJ reporter who broke the story, and is a character in The Dropout.
You might also like to check out some of Fielder’s previous work including The Rehearsal (HBO Max) and Nathan For You (Paramount+), because he is someone who has never done anything conventionally. Just like in You Can See Everything, Fielder is usually an on-camera conduit for his subjects.
You Can See Everything is in cinemas on November 12
