Eddie Huang on Vice and the End of a Toxic Media Darling
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Hello and greetings from Toronto, where the fall weather is in full swing. Not that I’ll be noticing it much: My current goal is to see 22 films in my week here at the Toronto International Film Festival, so sunlight may be a distant memory by the time I go home next Wednesday.
But boy will it be worth it! On the Prestige Junkie podcast earlier this week, I caught up with Indiewire’s chief film critic David Ehrlich to get the rundown on the buzziest titles from Telluride and Venice, many of which will also be playing here at Toronto. I’ve already re-arranged my schedule to catch Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which earned huge raves in Venice, and I’m anticipating a joyful hometown reception for Jason Reitman and his film Saturday Night (even though, confusingly, it premieres on Tuesday).
I’ve also been able to catch a few titles before the festival got started, and I’m eager to hear how audiences respond to Max Minghella’s Shell, a futuristic Death Becomes Her riff starring Kate Hudson and Elisabeth Moss. I haven’t seen The Substance yet, which plays at a sure-to-be raucous midnight screening tonight in Toronto, but Shell and The Substance seem like an excellent double feature on Hollywood beauty standards and the darkly hilarious lengths people go to reach them.
I’ve gotten a look at a few documentaries, too, programmed as always by friend of The Ankler Thom Powers. My fear of heights barely survived Space Cowboy — about skydiving cinematographer Joe Jennings — and I was thrilled by the behind-the-scenes look at John Lennon’s final onstage performance depicted in Elton John: Never Too Late.
And after I saw Vice Is Broke, the documentary directed by Fresh Off the Boat author and Baohaus chef Eddie Huang, I knew I had to talk to the former Vice host about his effort to capture his former employer’s vast, toxic legacy. We’ve got that conversation for you below.
But first! If you’re in Toronto, I hope you’ll come on Saturday, Sept. 7 to the live edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, where I’ll be joined both by my friend Joe Reid of Vulture and none other than Hugh Grant, whose new film Heretic premieres in Toronto on Sunday. You can hear the conversation on next week’s podcast, but to get a start — and to say hello! — I hope to see you there.
Now back to Huang and what he describes as his “party documentary.”
There’s a moment early in Vice Is Broke in which the former Vice TV star Huang gets into an actual arm-wrestling match with Vice cofounder — now best known as founder of the Proud Boys — Gavin McInnes.
Huang, 42, hosted a show for Vice’s television network years after McInnes, one of Vice’s original three founders, had left the company. But in his documentary Vice Is Broke, reckoning with the spectacular flameout of the media company once valued at $5.7 billion, Huang traces the Vice legacy from beginning to end, and inevitably has to deal with McInnes along the way.
“Talking to Gavin is risky, and you don’t know what he’s going to say,” Huang shared in a recent call from his home in Los Angeles, a few weeks before he prepared to travel to Toronto for Vice Is Broke’s world premiere. “He is the voice of Vice. That is what was sold around the world. And I think it’s important for people to see how something like his voice gets packaged and commodified and turned into a brand, and people are buying it and listening to it, unbeknownst to them that this guy is a Nazi.”
Huang says the arm-wrestling match was a spontaneous moment on set, a way for him to get out his frustrations with McInnes’s awful views without getting sucked into the exact argument McInnes was trying to provoke. And if you think a documentary in which the director arm wrestles one of his subjects sounds a little unusual — well, that’s a pretty good preview of what’s in store in Vice Is Broke.
As he did on his Vice food travel series, Huang’s World, Huang narrates the film, and early on says in voiceover that someday there will be “an Alex Gibney-esque documentary with people sitting on stools” about the downfall of Vice Media. He’s probably right. We’ve been on a run of documentaries and miniseries and features about the dramatic ups and downs of venture capital-backed companies like WeWork, Theranos, BlackBerry, Uber and Pornhub, and Vice’s shuttering has already prompted longform essays and podcasts from former employees picking through the rubble.
Although Vice shares some characteristics with other overfunded startups that over-relied on hype, in many ways Vice was unique, and Vice Is Broke captures Huang and many other Vice alums grappling with a place that meant a lot to a lot of people and also caused a lot of pain, even before fellow cofounder Shane Smith was found to be taking a salary of $8 million while the company was going bankrupt.
Huang traces the start of the documentary to the 2017 New York Times report that found “a top-down ethos of male entitlement at Vice.” The story inspired Huang to talk to his own former colleagues, many of them bound by NDAs, who described even worse behavior than what’s been reported. “There are a lot of things people at Vice did that did not make the New York Times article, that did not make our documentary, but do not get it twisted,” Huang tells me. “This place is worse than you think it was.”
(In response to the Times story, Smith and cofounder Suroosh Alvi released a statement apologizing for Vice’s “detrimental ‘boys-club’ culture.” Smith stepped down as the company’s CEO the following March but stayed on as executive chairman.)
In Vice Is Broke, Huang reveals how he charted his own path within that boys-club culture, and his efforts to push back against what he calls its “Fox News for liberals” approach to seeking out provocative subjects around the world. Even when he’s not physically contending with McInnes, Huang and his grappling with Vice’s legacy gives the film a fascinating tension — it feels as much like an exorcism as a document of recent media history.
“I figured out a way to say what I needed to say about these guys, and there are so many people at Vice that would love to tell their story,” says Huang, who was released from his Vice NDA in exchange for not pursuing payment for residuals he was owed from Huang’s World. “And also there are a lot of brave people who just don’t care. They were like, I’m following Eddie into this and we’re going to do this shit together. They’re not going to sue all of us. We’re telling the truth.”
A Vice Media spokesperson, via a statement, says: “Eddie Huang was never an employee of Vice and has no current knowledge of the company. Like many others, he produced a television show in 2017, but it was not renewed. Any of his reporting on Vice is old news and no longer relevant news. Vice is now well into its next chapter, and the company has strategically reconfigured to meet the challenges and culture of a new media landscape.”
Huang is making his first trip to the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of Vice Is Broke, which is seeking distribution. He claims his main goal is for the film to sell and yield enough money for him to buy a house, but the former restaurateur has some other goals, too.
“I do think this is a party documentary,” Huang says. “I could see people getting hammered, eating Buffalo cauliflower, watching this doc and having a great time.”
