Vice Studios had a new hit on its hands with the late May launch of “Bama Rush,” which the studio’s co-founder and chief content officer Danny Gabai says was Max’s most-streamed doc feature debut.
But with that large viewership also came a significant discourse surrounding the extent to which “Bama Rush” director Rachel Fleit is present in her own doc about college students “rushing” to get into the sororities at the University of Alabama. That choice didn’t sit well with people who avidly followed the #BamaRush phenomenon that first swept TikTok in the summer of 2021 and again last “season” and would have preferred more behind-the-scenes content about the rush process, rather than portions devoted to Fleit’s reaction to the situation.
“In making any content, you have to make directorial and authorial choices,” Gabai told PvNew. “And very early on, we saw young women were revealing that they’re dealing with a variety of issues and our take was, do we hide that and give people a version of what they were seeing in the social media posts, or do we actually try to dig a layer deeper and understand all the things these people are wrangling with? It was a directorial choice on Rachel’s part, and we’re always going to back our filmmakers. If you wanted to see what’s happening in season after season of #BamaRush, you could go see that on a variety of social media apps.”
Vice Studios entertainment exec Andrew Freston added: “Obviously #BamaRush was a big, viral phenomenon in August of 2021. But once we got out into the field, we discovered that #BamaRush is really a lightning rod to explore so many issues that young women face: body image, self worth, mental health, racism, classism, ableism, feminism, and just the human desire to feel a part of something, to find community to feel like we belong. So we quickly discovered it’s much more than just the trend.”
The execs say the decision to include Fleit’s own story about living with alopecia, including voiceovers and on-screen testimonials about her emotional experience while making “Bama Rush,” throughout a significant portion of the doc was not one they came to lightly. According to Freston, the idea was first raised by Fleit “a good quarter into the filmmaking process.”
“When she was on the ground filming, she wanted to show maximum empathy towards her subjects,” Freston said. “So by Rachel putting herself in the film, she’s standing shoulder to shoulder with them. And it allows the audience to help identify with that, in wanting to belong.”
Gabai says that there were then “a lot of discussions” about inserting Fleit, as that was “obviously not part of the original creative pitch” for the Max project.
“There were elements that fed into it that came out of early discussion, but it was not part of the creative conception for the project,” Gabai said. “It was something that she brought in about a quarter of the way in. It wasn’t something that she did immediately. And the first time she actually experimented with it, it was probably on a late-stage rough cut after we had already seen rough cuts where she was not in the film at all, and she put herself in a few scenes on camera, just to see what it felt like. And we watched it and we showed it to a bunch of people, and I would say literally 50% of the people we showed it to said, ‘I don’t like seeing her in there, take it out. I just want to want to see the girls,’ and 50% of people said, ‘That feels like the heart of the film, you need to lean into that.’ And it was a moment where we really had to sit down with Rachel and say, how do you feel? And she was not certain at the time, but she said, I think at the very least I want to pursue this and see what it does for the film.”
Vice Studios “really wrangled” with the choice during the film, continuing to show the footage to different audiences to see how they reacted to it. And ultimately, “we felt like going through that process, we had to just go with all of our collective instincts and our director’s, and her instinct was to lean into that,” Gabai said.
Next up for Vice Studios, Gabai says to expect a fall commercial premiere for “Superpower,” a doc film centered on comedic actor-turned-president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman, which Vice debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.
Additionally, the studio chief says Vice just wrapped production on what he calls the “be all end all” Tammy Faye Bakker documentary, directed by “Murderball” filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro.
