BEFORE: I'm trying to wrap up the "scandal" (political and corporate) portion of documentary month, so I can get to the docs about actors and comedians, so that leads me here - but now that I've rearranged the list to end where I need it to, I'll have to circle back to a few more "scandal" docs before it's all over.
Errol Morris is listed as appearing in this film, but that's odd, because he didn't direct it, Alex Gibney did. Perhaps he narrated it, I don't know - that seems odd, too, why would he narrate someone else's documentary? He's my link, carrying over from "The Thin Blue Line", so he'd better be in this movie somewhere.
THE PLOT: The story of Theranos, a multi-billion dollar tech company, its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the youngest self-made female billionaire, and the massive fraud that collapsed the company.
AFTER: What the hell have I been doing for the last few years, why have I never heard anything about Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos before? Oh, right, I've been busy watching horrible romantic comedies and lame horror films. But I try to keep up with the news and with pop culture, but every so often, something like this slips right by me. Maybe I'm not reading the right magazines, because outside of Entertainment Weekly I don't read things like Time and Newsweek, but MAD and Games/World of Puzzles magazines instead. Hey, I need to keep by brain entertained and occupied on long subway trips, don't judge me. And more and more I need to have my news filtered through a comedy lens, by watching The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, plus Colbert's and Meyers' and Conan's monologues. If I didn't laugh at the news, I'd probably cry, or jump off a tall building or something.
So I'm out of the loop with regards to Theranos, and I'm playing catch-up tonight. Do you, like most people, hate going to the doctor and having blood drawn? Are you afraid of needles, the pain involved with taking a blood sample, or being forced to watch blood coming out of your own arm? What if there were a simpler way? What if, instead of a giant needle and parting with three test-tubes worth of blood, the doctor could just prick your finger, draw a tiny amount, and they could just test THAT? That was the pitch behind Elizabeth Holmes' company and the development of the Edison machine, which used complex fluid dynamics to take your blood sample, put it in a box, then magic happens, and you get the wrong test results back. Well, that wasn't the plan but that's what ended up happening for many customers.
The original idea might have seemed solid - but I'm thinking back to that Enron documentary (from the same director) and obviously there's a connection there, in both cases a company got built on an idea (like, umm, trading energy, was it? I still don't know how they did that, or pretended to.) and near the end of the Enron growth curve, they had ideas like, "Hey, let's set up a super-fast internet to stream movies to people," and "Hey, let's trade weather somehow...." The streaming idea was genuinely a good one, but Enron was just a bit early on that, people were still enjoying their family trips to Blockbuster to argue about which movie would disappoint them that night, and they just weren't ready to give that up. Blockbuster, meanwhile, had all these physical stores and was enjoying the fact that people would visit them to pay their late fees on tapes they didn't remember renting, and by the time Blockbuster was ready to get into streaming, it was too late, and their stores had already been converted into Petcos and KFC/Pizza Huts.
So, it remains to be seen whether the idea of making blood testing fast, easy and portable is something that will come to pass, which would make the Theranos company just too early on the market, instead of peddling an insane idea like trading weather. (Again, HOW, Enron? What was the plan?). What we do know is that Holmes's father was a vice-president at Enron (wait, what?) and she studied computer programming in high school and chemical engineering at Stanford. And when she came up with the idea to draw vast amounts of data from just a few drops of blood, she pitched it to her professor at Stanford, was told that her idea was impossible, and then she moved forward with it anyway. For some reason she got stuck on this idea, or maybe she convinced herself that an impossible idea would become possible over time, just like Edison's lightbulb, which took 10,000 or so tries before he found the right filament to make it work. After all, if people said the electric car or the cameraphone were impossible and everyone just believed that, where would we be?
She called her company "Theranos", a combination of "Thanos" and "error" (just kidding, it's "therapy" and "diagnosis") and sold people on her mission, using her dynamic personality - which seems a little hard for me to believe, because there's just something "off" about her, and I can't quite place it. For starters, I don't think she ever blinks, not more than once during all the footage in this movie, not even when she's clearly staring into bright lights that are reflected in her pupils. Then there's this weird voice that some people besides myself also find fake-y, like her voice goes down a couple of octaves when she talks seriously about her product goals. So is this some strange kind of hypnosis, that she was trying to stare people down and lull them into the security of investing in her company? She got one of her college professors to quit his job and join her medical firm, and then it seems she was also in a relationship with her company's COO, they often went on business trips together and arrived at the office together in the mornings. Then she started dressing like Steve Jobs and claimed to have many of the same all-black ensembles hanging in her closet.
Look, I know women haven't had the easiest time in the corporate world. I'd love to snap my fingers and eliminate the glass ceiling, or demand that there be more female executives or whatever, fair is fair. But then this Elizabeth Holmes comes along and gives female entrepeneurs a bad name, like she shouldn't HAVE to sleep with her COO to get along with him, but she did, that's on her. She didn't HAVE to dress like Jobs or pose like him holding a blood vial instead of an iPod, but she did. She shouldn't have had to put on a "business voice" or give people the cold stare, or spend more time agonizing over the NAME of a data storage system then she did checking into whether it, you know, actually worked. To me she comes off as one of those Japanese robots that they program to speak and mimic human emotions that also sort of gives you the willies while you watch it, only you find you just can't look away. Unless the point was to prove that a woman could lie and cheat at business just as well as a man could, so if that's the case, then, umm, congratulations?
But here's the thing, this field of study was sort of wide open - we used to have Quest Diagnostics here in NYC, and everything about them was terrible. You'd go to your doctor, and instead of him or an intern drawing blood, they'd send you to a lab a few blocks away, and so you'd go to this random address, to what looked like a residential brownstone, only you'd climb the stairs to the 2nd floor and, oh, look, it's a dingy blood lab. And then you'd sit in a green vinyl chair while someone you don't know (do they even have any training?) would stick a needle in your arm and drain blood into three test-tubes. Then you'd wait for the results from your doctor, and also you'd get a bill in the mail from Quest for about $300 even though you were told that your insurance would cover it. You could try and fight it, but honestly it was easier just to pay it to make them go away - clearly there was the need for a better system. (Wiki tells me that Quest has settled several suits for fraud and for overcharging Medicaid, so if you want to know how they became a Fortune 500 company, that's probably how.)
So Holmes' vision was that the giant blood testing lab would be replaced by a portable device (about the size of a laser printer) named Edison, and it would only need a few drops of blood, instead of several vials. Sounded great, only it didn't exist and wasn't possible, but still she persisted. Along came Walgreens (which was looking for an alternative to Quest, probably) and they wanted Theranos to handle all the blood testing in their Arizona drug-stores. But since the mobile devices didn't work, they ended up using those big syringes anyway, and shipping all the blood back to Palo Alto, where they used the same testing devices as everyone else. And the tests that WERE performed on the Edison were wildly inaccurate, but hey, where's the harm in providing inaccurate test results to patients, right? It's more important that they FEEL healthy, that's like half the battle, right?
Eventually someone from the Wall Street Journal did a little digging and spoke with a couple of whistle-blower ex-employees, and the whole thing started to unravel. She was the youngest female billionaire in America in 2015, and a year later, her company was worthless. Now's she's been indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges, but the trial until July of next year. This time, I'll be paying more attention.
I hope this film serves as a warning to the fast food industry - whichever company came up with "boneless wings" should be rethinking their business plan right about now. For two or three years after they introduced this product, I convinced myself that some smart entrepreneur had come up with a way to remove the annoying bones out of a chicken wing, in a way that would still allow it to keep its shape. "Good for that inventor," I thought, "I hope he got a bonus from the corporate office, maybe a vacation or something." But then I came to realize that feat is impossible, and what they're actually doing is just calling a chicken tender a "boneless wing", which it most assuredly is not. Someday the vendors of this product will similarly be exposed as the charlatans that they are, and charged with conspiracy to create fake food - that should really be the next scandal exposed by a documentary, in my opinion.
Oh, and Errol Morris is in this film - at the height of Theranos' popularity, he was hired to film testimonial commercials for the company, using his famous interviewing skills. It's a bit odd that he's credited for appearing in this film but Alex Gibney, the director/interviewer (and narrator?) does not. If I had known Gibney was heard here, I might have scheduled this film in a different place, like between two other upcoming docs where you can (probably) also hear his voice. Oh, well.
Also starring Elizabeth Holmes, Dan Ariely, Ken Auletta, Ramesh Balwani, David Boies, John Carreyrou, Erika Cheung, Tim Draper, Cheryl Gafner, Phyllis Gardner, Matt Hernan, Don Lucas, Douglas Matje, Tony Nugent, Patrick O'Neill, Roger Parloff, Dave Philippides, Channing Robertson, Tyler Shultz, the voice of Alex Gibney (last heard in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer") with archive footage of Madeleine Albright (last seen in "12 Strong"), Joe Biden (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Betsy DeVos (ditto), Charlie Rose (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Barack Obama (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Katie Couric (also last seen in "Client 9"), Jim Cramer, Thomas Edison, Dianne Feinstein, Bill Gates, Sanjay Gupta, Steve Jobs, Henry Kissinger, Robert Kraft, Jared Leto (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), James Mattis, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Nixon (last seen in "The Fog of War"), Amy Schumer (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Pattie Sellers, Maria Shriver (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), George Shultz, Serena Williams (last seen in "Ocean's Eight").
RATING: 6 out of 10 nano vials
