After welcoming strangers into her chic Chelsea penthouse, Sheila Nevins (documentary producer extraordinaire) quickly sorted through several topics of current interest and began to hang a coat. She also walked into the kitchen for two water bottles. First up: Men who leave their wives in later life to find other men. (“Can you imagine? He leaves for another woman, OK. You’re old, they’re young, their tits are up, yours are down. But this is a different body part. I think it’s fascinating.”) Second ball up: the recent hostage standoff at a synagogue in a Dallas suburb. (“Wouldn’t you love to do [a story] about the rabbi? Isn’t it incredible to think there’s somebody so smart that he was able to throw a chair at this guy?”3) Third ball up: A Broadway musical that was recently shut down called Flying Over SunsetIt imagines Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce and Cary Grant using LSD together. (“It was about what’s in your head. Things come to them that they had managed to suppress or put away. I thought it was great. Got horrible reviews.”) Nevins is consumed with stories — the drama of them, what they reveal about us — even the one you are reading right now. One point in our conversation, she abruptly interrupts herself. “Wouldn’t it be great if I died tonight?”She looks up, her eyes widen. “Then you could say” — she pauses, stretching out her hand like she’s gesturing to a grand theater marquee — “ ‘The Last Interview.’ ”She lingers on the word “last,”Gazing out at the horizon beyond her apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows, she gazes west over Manhattan into a future where I have just died. Over her face, a happy smile unfolds.
So it goes with Nevins, the 82-year-old superproducer who built HBO’s documentary division from the ground up in the early Eighties, and has done as much as filmmakers like D.A. Errol Morris and Pennebaker helped to develop the format. She has overseen more than 1000 documentaries from the Peeping Tom series, which she greenlit and supervised over her 38-year tenure with the network. Real SexAnd Taxicab confessions to weighty features like Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls about the 1963 bombing of an Alabama church, and Laura Poitras’ Edward Snowden thriller, Citizenfour,Nevins brings a high-low sensibility to a genre that was once seen as dryly educative at best. Talking with Nevins in person, it all makes sense — the sheer range of her interests, the freight-train productivity. Her mind is as active as it is expansive, her talent for the dramatic almost makes her a bloodlust.
We’ve sat down on this gray January day to talk about Nevins’ life and career, for which the word “illustrious”Perhaps she invented it. But despite a body of work so heralded that HBO’s documentary trophy room — loaded with Emmys, Peabodys, Oscars, and more — has been dubbed the Holy Shrine of Sheila, Nevins insists that she is not successful. This isn’t a false humility. (Worth noting: If her 32 individual Emmys — the most won by any one person — are anywhere in her home, they are not on display.) As with all ambitious people, she doesn’t like to be confined to a perch that is her own. “I’m always working,”She said. “Always thinking of something to do next.”
However, there are other factors. Nevins’ 2017 exit from HBO was publicly positioned as a voluntary retirement, but the truth, which still stings, is that she was pushed out, a doyenne whose power came to be questioned and resented by the C-suite suits who signed her checks. She regrets that she didn’t see it — too laser-focused on her work, a little bit in denial. She regrets that she didn’t negotiate for a better package, like some of the men forced out before her reportedly got. Most of all, she regrets that she hasn’t pushed for a better package decades before to run the damn network.
“Why did these businesspeople and PR people run it?”She describes herself as part apoplectic, and part genuinely mystified. “Why didn’t I think I could do it? I’d been a dancer at [New York’s High School of] Performing Arts. I’d studied English at Barnard. Directing at Yale. I had all the fucking credentials that these schlemiels didn’t have. So why the hell didn’t I say ‘What about me’ when I was 45 or 50? There was no reason why I couldn’t have done that.”
This is quite surprising, considering that Nevins has a history of fighting. She was legendary (and dreaded) within HBO’s halls as a fierce advocate for any project under her umbrella, and she is feisty by both nature and nurture. She grew up in New York’s East Village, the daughter of a Russian-immigrant father who ran numbers out of his job at the 33rd Street post office (he was known as “Benny P.O.”) and a card-carrying Communist mother she calls “the most difficult woman you can imagine.”His father was often in jail or out with his girlfriend. Nevins and Vicki, her seven-year-old sister, seldom saw him. Her mother suffered from Raynaud’s disease and scleroderma, autoimmune conditions that caused her to lose her limbs (first an arm, then eventually both legs before her death from complications of those diseases at 57) and turned a teenage Sheila into her primary caretaker.
Nevins was a Jewish girl, who grew up poor. She stood out among the blue bloods at Yale, where her MFA was pursued. She fell in love with a law student there; at her first family dinner at his house, his WASP mother cruelly told her to find one of her own kind, a message that fueled Nevins’ drive throughout her career. (There’s a poem about it in her 2017 memoir, You Don’t Look Your Age and Other Fairy Tales.It says, in part: “Every trophy was for her. Every yes to me was a slap in her face.”)
Through it all, her determination and toughness saved her. “frat house” culture of HBO’s infancy, as it’s described by a former executive in Tinder Box James Andrew Miller’s gossip-filled tome about the network’s explosive rise. However, her workplace was more about out-managing the men than trying to outfox them. She spoke louder when they talked over or interrupted her. She cracked a joke when the room became tense. She also needed money to finance one of her movies. “I would come back until I annoyed people to death at what I wanted,”She said. “I was a lie-in-wait person. I had deals with secretaries, who are always women. ‘When is he free? What mood is he in? What are his appointments? What time is he leaving?’ If you want something, it’s always good to be there 10 minutes before somebody’s leaving, he’s going to want to get out and say yes just to get rid of me. And it doesn’t matter, because their budget is 150 million and you want one. So they’ll say, ‘OK, do it. Yeah, go ahead. Sure.’ ”
“But at some point,”She continues. “I stopped asking. I just did it.”
In an era before that, Nevins wasn’t above the colder calculations made by many women to get, well, not ahead, but anywhere. She’s spoken and written openly about sleeping with the “big boss”At her first TV job to get a spot as a PA. She worked on a movie. That project launched her career. It led to her working with a producer at CBS News and PBS before she was offered a job at HBO. When asked if she regrets that sex was her only way to get the job she desired, she literally howls and twirls back her perfect blonde-gray hair. “No! Had I not gone in on that snow day and had I not fucked him in that chair … It meant nothing to me. Nothing. Zero.”In some ways she was grateful for the clearer boundaries back then. According to her, the moment she realized CBS News would let her stay was when 60 minutesDon Hewitt, the producer, came to her aid, lifted her hair and tickled her neck. “You’re cute.”
“I’m sure today I would feel sad about a lot of things,”She said. “I’d feel sad for being whistled at. I’d feel sad for being attractive. But I didn’t feel it then, no. I didn’t suffer that. I suffered my mother’s disease. I suffered not having money. I suffered people’s poverty and sadness. No man ever made me suffer except the one who broke my heart.”
This is Sheila Nevins, who will take you by surprise. For all of her brass-tacks pragmatism and hard-won wisdom, for every battle she’s weathered and gut-check she’s passed, Nevins’ raw feelings are right on the surface. She doesn’t hold grudges; she nurses open wounds. Her unceremonious departure from HBO — there was no fanfare, no thank-you from the management; she went in on the Friday after Thanksgiving and packed her desk alone — was a crushing blow made all the worse when no one checked in on her after she left. For six months, she says, she didn’t get out of bed, and her phone barely rang: “Everybody that I had worked for, that had sucked up to me on the rooftop of the Peninsula, all the bullshitters, they weren’t there. When you leave a job and you have a lot of power, suddenly you lose a lot of friends. They may not have ever been friends, but they liked you because you could give them something. So I learned a lot in that year about people.”This is the only thing she cares about more that any sexism encountered along the journey, or any amount of money she could have walked away with. “The real hurt in the workplace is an emotional hurt, not a physical hurt,”She said. “You can pinch my ass as much as you want, but if you hurt my gut, I won’t recover it from it.”
It is also what drives that nagging feeling that she’s not truly successful. In her early career, she was encouraged to be on camera.“I was cursed by being good-looking,”She said that she was not interested, but she did not have the time. She didn’t want to be the story’s center, but she wanted to be a puppeteer. She wanted to be recognized by her peers as the one pulling the strings — and not just the purse strings. “It’s knowing that I thought of that ending. Or I thought of that cut there,”She said. “I wanted to get credit for what I had really done.”
It’s nearly 5 p.m., the January sun about to set, when Nevins’ husband of almost 50 years, Sidney Koch, shuffles in with a takeout steak for his bride. Bogie, their Bichon-ish mixed-breed rescue in his umpteenth year of life, has stretched out against my hip on the black leather chair we’ve been sharing, a subtle nudge to please give his seat back. We’re winding down, but Nevins’ day is still going. She will be able to join a Zoom meeting in a matter of minutes.
One year later, she was still healthy. “retirement,”Nevins got a call not from an old friend, but from a new one. Chris McCarthy, president of MTV Entertainment wanted her to head its documentary division. Since signing on, she’s brought in no fewer than four Oscar-hopeful films, two of which (the shorts Coded: J.C. Leyendecker’s Hidden LoveAnd Lynching Postcards) have already been shortlisted.
Nevins was skeptical the day she took McCarthy’s call. She was skeptical that McCarthy wanted her. “I could be your great-grandmother.”He responded, “Your shows helped me be gay.”Her eyes relax as she remembers the moment. “That was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in 50 years of working,”She said. “I’ve not really seen him since then. I thought that he would not be able to leave me and I would not be able to leave him. But, you know, corporate worlds. Nonetheless, we did have an emotional moment. A corporate emotional moment is to be treasured, like winning the lottery. And they hired me.”
She grins Cheshire-style for the second time. Sheila Nevins won’t die tonight, not even close. She’ll keep working as long as there are stories to tell.