Eddie Schmidt is an Academy Award- and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, as well as a showrunner and director of acclaimed nonfiction series. Six of his projects have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, including Chelsea Does, which he also directed; the Emmy-nominated Valentine Road; This Film is Not Yet Rated, which he co-wrote; the Academy Award-nominated Twist of Faith (which he shot); the Emmy-nominated Troubadours; and Chain Camera. Schmidt was also Executive Producer (showrunner) and Director of Ugly Delicious with David Chang, and the reboot of In Search Of, with Zachary Quinto. Before this, he was Executive Producer and Director of The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, and Executive Producer of the films Beauty Is Embarrassing and Gilbert: A Gilbert Gottfried Story, among others.
Caroline Hagood: As I mentioned to you recently, I wanted you to recommend documentaries because I love your mix of thoughtful, quirky, and off-kilter humor in your own work. I’m wondering what documentaries and TV shows you can recommend that have this same basic make-up?
Eddie Schmidt: First of all, thank you! I tend to like things that have a real point of view, which balance dark explorations of provocative topics with comedy. I also like films where the humor emanates naturally from strong, larger-than-life characters. In documentaries, I was inspired early on by things like Roger & Me (as well as Michael Moore’s society-tweaking series TV Nation), Crumb, and then a little later, American Movie and The King of Kong. They’re all either portraits of outsiders or told from the perspective of outsiders trying to get inside, and they’re funny, sometimes shockingly so. King of Kong is about two grown men competing for a Donkey Kong championship, and most fictional films don’t have a character as strong as mulleted, hot-sauce loving Billy Mitchell.
More recently, I’d point to Errol Morris’ Tabloid, where you just can’t believe how the story’s unraveling and it just gets wilder and more delirious as it goes along (excellent graphic treatment, too), Becoming Bond, the personal memoirs of George Lazenby, the unlikeliest (and Australian!) one-time James Bond, which is super fun and filled with incredible visual panache, and then Ben Berman’s forthcoming Untitled Amazing Jonathan Documentary, which was at Sundance earlier this year. Ben takes the very tropes of documentary storytelling and confronts them head-on (as he must, given the tricky trajectory of his subject, a magician – NO SPOILERS!), but then ultimately delivers on them emotionally, too. It’s a real high-wire act, like a Charlie Kaufman type of work in a nonfiction context.
I also think that anyone who loves documentaries will love the meticulously crafted parodies that make up IFC’s Documentary Now.
CH: Chelsea Does, in particular, strikes me as very literary in its format. Each episode unfolds, like my favorite essays, with an ever-expanding look at a given topic explored in ways at once radically personal, zany, thoughtful, humorous, and irreverent. What books or essays do you think operate in this way? What were you reading and watching at the time (or at any time) that fueled this directorial vision? What films/television shows do you think also operate in this way?
ES: So interesting you point that out, and certainly Chelsea Does and Ugly Delicious both deploy my love of chapter headings. I’m a voracious reader, with 3-4 books going at once, and a lot of what pours into my head comes out of the written word: thinking about how to tap into what’s special about books in a visual medium. I had seen Chelsea’s E! show, but before we met I also went and read her books – people forget that her first one, My Horizontal Life, preceded her show – and I found them to be very personal and revealing (BTW, her current one, Life Will Be The Death of Me, is terrific and the most personal and revealing of all). So when we approached the doc series, I wanted to translate those books – the unseen “characters” of her family, and her inner life – into, essentially, a ‘Chelsea Handler cinematic universe.’ To bring out the warmth and intelligence that came out of Chelsea when around the people genuinely close to her.
In terms of other (literary) elements, I’d say my good friend Meghan Daum’s books of personal essays, Unspeakable and her earlier My Misspent Youth, were probably swimming around in my brain. Other books, too, like Chuck Barris’ Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Paul Krassner’s Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, and some observational David Foster Wallace, like A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
On the TV side, I suppose the series Girls, which had such a potent, personal point of view throughout its run, was something I watched a lot at the time. The authorial voice of Heathers has always loomed large for me, too – the way it invented its own language and could be so surreal.
I was really happy we got a snippet of a song by the 80s band The Waitresses (“Girls Gotta Do”) at the end of Chelsea Does Silicon Valley, because another important touchstone for me has always been the TV series Square Pegs, for which The Waitresses did the theme song. Dropping their song into our show felt like honoring my influences.
Interestingly, my wife (Rachel Kamerman) is a very talented production designer, and her current series, Good Trouble, has a really strong, contemporary voice and is alternately playful and serious.
CH: I’m thinking of your work directing Ugly Delicious, the food show that the New York Times described as, “an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.” Can you share some of your favorite food writing? What cooking/food culture shows inspired you?
ES: For sure Ruth Reichl is at the top of that list. I had loved her book Comfort Me With Apples and it was a big thrill to get to interview her (I’m offscreen, but yes – she is talking to me!) in the “Fried Rice’ episode of Ugly Delicious. Certainly Anthony Bourdain’s original Kitchen Confidential and the New Yorker piece that preceded it, waaaaay back at the turn of the millennium, were big eye-openers and so full of flavor. You felt like you were getting inside a world you only glimpsed at through glass. And of course, Lucky Peach magazine was terrific.
Like most people (particularly those enthralled by raw fish), I responded to the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In fact, anyone who liked that film would really enjoy a book that preceded it, entitled The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice. But a lesser-known food film that really stuck with me is Off the Menu: Last Days at Chasen’s, because it was about something more than what they were serving. It’s about people; a time and a place and a changing of the guard. The end of Old Hollywood, really.
Maybe even more than food docs, scenes that use food in fiction films stick in my mind: the chopping of the garlic bulb with a razor blade in prison in Goodfellas; the Timpano in Big Night; the incredible feast of Eat Drink Man Woman; the tiny nouvelle cuisine (how’s that for a ‘90s term!) in LA Story; the Twinkie Wiener Sandwich in UHF. And I guess that’s my approach right there: food is communal, food is celebratory, food is playful and irreverent and fun.
CH: With The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey in mind, what true crime shows, movies, or writing has been foundational for you?
ES: Well, The Staircase is such a strong piece of work, and then Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky did an amazing job across three films with their Paradise Lost trilogy. Most people know The Jinx, of course, and I think that series shows how you never know where a story is going to take you – and also how long that trajectory can take to unfold.
I personally love things with twists and turns, where the bottom drops out. Usually that happens in films with crime in them, even if the crime is not central. You wouldn’t necessarily call Sandi Tan’s Shirkers a true crime film, yet it is about a literal crime (theft) and allegorical crime (stealing and trying to regain lost youth). It’s also visually arresting, with incredible color, imagery, and just an amazing dreamlike quality – I can’t say enough good about it. Stop reading about me and get on Netflix. You’re in for a treat.
Tickled is another documentary where you’re on total a roller-coaster ride – in pursuit of a mystery that turns very dark, weird and unexpected. The Imposter and Author: the JT Leroy Story are also both excellent (and cinematic), as is last year’s Three Identical Strangers.
CH: Along the lines of your work on In Search Of, what TV shows, movies, or writing can you recommend for those interested in these sorts of unsolved mysteries of history—and in some cases the future?
ES: As a kid, I remember reading things like Chariots of the Gods, and then more recently The Sixth Extinction really gave me perspective about the planet and our place in it. But the “unsolved mysteries of history” I find myself responding to in documentaries are often more terrestrial. Merchants of Chaos is a great film by Robert Kenner that really explains the breakdown in facts in culture and media. It’s so worth seeing, and will make you angry. I felt the book All the Truth is Out (which became the film The Front Runner) really explained the current quixotic political situation by tracing Gary Hart’s 1988 Presidential flame-out and pinpointing that as the moment we stopped electing on policy and started to focus on the personal.
On the trippier side of life, Koyannisqatsi and Microcosmos are incredible visual ruminations on the world shifting all around us, both mundane and insane. The unsolved mysteries of…nature.
CH: You also co-wrote the book, The Finger: A Comprehensive Guide to Flipping Off. Who are your top five flippers of the bird and why?
ES: TOP FIVE! Ooh, there are just so many…but I’ll go with: 5) Johnny Cash, because his picture is famous and iconic but it’s only #5 because they wouldn’t let us use it in the book; 4) John Waters, because he’s a huge hero and influence and in posing for the book, his finger beautifully cuts his trademark mustache; 3) Mr. Bean, in the movie Bean, because he thinks it’s a friendly greeting and goes on a three-minute rampage, giving it joyously to everyone he meets; 2) The skeleton on the cover of the Grateful Dead ‘greatest hits’ album, because it takes a few looks before you even really notice it; and 1) legendary bass player Derek Smalls, who also posed for the book, and in true Smallsian fashion, tapped the wrong finger.