Late one August afternoon in a Manhattan editing suite, with thunder and lightning raging outside, a storm was also brewing inside. Or at least on the giant screen at the front of the room.
“How’s power feeling, Mr. Musk?” a bystander calls out to Elon Musk onscreen as the beaming tech mogul strides through a post-inauguration Washington building. In the next scene, Musk sits at a roundtable with his army of early 20s DOGE staffers, looking on proudly alongside Fox News’ Jesse Watters. The young men talk with easy, deluded confidence about how they will fix government as Watters jokingly refers to the notoriously anatomical nickname of one of the men.
Illustration by Robert Carter
At the back of the editing room, Alex Gibney, the longtime documentarian and the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward, watches intently.
“Let’s do that ‘power’ quote hotter,” Gibney says to a team of five that includes his frequent producer Erin Edeiken and sound mixer Tony Volante. “Hotter? Yes,” Volante says, adjusting levels on the screen in front of him.
