Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything hits Swedish cinemas in November
Partner Billy Evans personally suggested the film's full-frontal shower scene director reveals, A24 production turns convicted Theranos fraudster into prestige subject
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Elizabeth Holmes är föremål för en dokumentär. Arkivbild.Foto: Jeff Chiu/AP/TT
Jeff Chiu/AP/TT
Billy Evans, the partner who stood by convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes through her trial and imprisonment, personally suggested a full-frontal shower scene in the new documentary "You Can See Everything," the film's director has revealed. The documentary, produced by A24 and starring Evans and Holmes themselves, premieres in Swedish cinemas on November 21, according to Moviezine.
The detail is a small window into how the fallen-founder redemption industry now operates. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars after her blood-testing claims collapsed; the sentence made her, for a time, the most famous fraudster in American business. What followed was not obscurity but a procession of magazine profiles, podcast series and now a prestige documentary with one of the most sought-after production houses in independent film attached. Access is the currency: the filmmaker gets the subject, the platform gets the content, and the subject gets to shape the myth — down to, apparently, the framing of the nudity.
That the partner of a convicted fraudster is offering notes on shower scenes rather than answering questions about the hundreds of millions lost is itself the genre's tell. The documentary economy rewards failure more reliably than success: a founder who built a working company attracts no camera crew, while one who falsified test results to win a nine-billion-dollar valuation gets an A24 production and a theatrical release. Everyone in the chain — subject, director, distributor — has an incentive to make the story more sympathetic, not less.
Whether "You Can See Everything" lives up to its title in the sense its audience might hope is a question the film itself will answer in November. The title's more likely meaning, given who suggested the shower scene, is the one Holmes and Evans chose.