After nearly four decades of making HBO her home, Sheila Nevins is moving on. The President of HBO Documentary Films revealed the big news in an interview with The New York Times. As an executive producer or producer, she has received 32 Primetime Emmy Awards, 34 News and Documentary Emmys, and 42 George Foster Peabody Awards. During her tenure at HBO, the channel’s documentaries have won 26 Academy Awards. But Nevins’ legacy is about so much more than her many, many honors and accolades.
Nevins revolutionized documentary filmmaking. She recognized that experts and celebrities weren’t the only ones worthy of having a camera put in front of them. As Maureen Dowd writes in the Times profile, Nevins “helped change the image of documentaries from stodgy to provocative.” In Nevins’ own words, “I do have a philosophy about documentaries, which is that I really do believe that almost everybody has a story. I love ordinary people. And they’re often very heroic. And very interesting. I don’t like fame,” she says. “I’m not interested in famous people. I don’t trust the sameness of the story you get from celebrity. The few times I’ve had to deal with celebrity, I’ve read the same thing they say somewhere else.”
Laura Poitras’ “Citizenfour,” Rory Kennedy’s “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” are among the many influential docs Nevins has worked on. In 2005 she won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Emmy Awards, marking the first time the honor has been given to a documentarian.
As for what the future holds, Nevins admits that “there’s something exciting about leaving a job.” She continues, “I can’t explain it. I have deprived my life of a life. All I did was work. I was, like, born at HBO and I don’t have to die there. If I stayed any longer, I probably would have died at my desk. I just regret that there’s so little time left.” So she’s taking several projects with her and continue working with them at home. She’s also considering a radio show with Sirius and potentially penning another book.
The Times’ profile of Nevins is well worth reading in full. She addresses her thoughts on — and experiences of — sexual harassment in the workplace, the lack of mentorship she received, and offers tons of great quotes. (“If women want to parade as pinups, that has nothing to do with harassment. If I look at a delicious ad for ice cream, I don’t have to devour it or slobber it down. If women sell a product by being provocative, that’s not an invitation to be harassed or abused as professionals in a workplace. There are many faces of Eve. No presentation she chooses says, ‘Abuse me.’”)
