Confessions of an HBO Original

Sheila Nevins’ father worked for the post office but mostly took bets there--he was a bookie. He also was a gambler himself, and his own bookie showed up at his funeral to deliver a check to his daughter, for a winning wager on the Super Bowl.

Nevins’ mother, meanwhile, had an illness so crippling that it cost her an arm and a leg--literally. Nevins recalls going to a Chock Full O’ Nuts restaurant soon after a piece of her mom’s arm had been amputated, leaving a stump showing below her shirt sleeve. She recalls a woman on the next stool sneering, “That’s disgusting,” and her mother responding by pushing the sleeve higher, “way up so the stump would really show.”

So even if Nevins was a studious girl who danced her way into New York’s High School of the Performing Arts by auditioning to the bouncy “Sleigh Ride” (“Just hear those sleigh bells jin-gl-ing”), she still had a sense, from an early age, that there often is a dark reality behind the whitest picket fence.

That’s certainly the feeling one gets from her documentaries--the odd mix of sensationalistic fare and social crusading that she has been shepherding onto HBO and Cinemax, its offshoot, for 21 years now, these days as the pay channel’s executive vice president for original programming. It may be the crazies confiding their affairs before hidden cameras in taxis (“Taxicab Confessions”) or suburbanites showing off their dungeons (“Real Sex”). It’s in the not-so-pandering stuff, too, such as the documentary on the killing of three 8-year-olds in Arkansas (“Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills”), whose opening shows us the mutilated bodies, with no foliage or soft-focus to obscure the atrocity. Then there are the AIDS victims (“Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt”), mass murderers (“The Iceman”) and a onetime Nazi (“Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth”) found driving a bus in San Diego.

No question, there’s a dark vision running through these “docus” that have won both criticism, for exploitation, and acclaim--a slew of Peabody Awards, Emmys and nine Oscars--and established Nevins as one of the most important figures in documentary filmmaking. This past week, she was awarded a “personal” Peabody for being “one of the true independent spirits in television today” while helping turn HBO into the place to go for many verite filmmakers, ahead of PBS, arguably.

“You know, I’m at the stage where I’m ready to accept a little personal recognition,” says Nevins, who for years has gained such honors for the filmmakers she finances, cajoles and helps edits. “For once, it’s about me. Me, me, me!”

Then she laughs. For the whole thing seems absurd: how HBO got into this line of work and how she came to honcho it all.

Nevins, brought up on the working-class Lower East Side, studied English at Barnard and theater at Yale. Graduating in 1963, she got her first job performing in films created by the U.S. Information Service to teach 2,000 English words to people in other countries. “Today,” she’d announce, “we are going to milk the cow.”

After 130 shows, she moved on to producing jobs in New York, one with the Children’s Television Workshop. Later, she quit ABC’s “20/20” because it wouldn’t allow her to edit her own segments and wound up at Don Hewitt’s “Who’s Who” show on CBS, for which she fed questions to on-air “talent” interviewing, say, Richard Burton.

Nevins swears she had to go to the 42nd Street library to research HBO when a friend told her in 1979 of an opening for a documentary chief. Then on just eight hours a day, HBO was looking to expand to 12 hours and needed programming. The job paid $28,000. Documentaries? “I had no experience at all,” she says. “They told me to make 40. I had to call people and say, ‘Could you make six pieces on WWII?’ ”

Two decades later . . . well, at the Academy Awards this spring, she was sitting next to “King Gimp” himself, Dan Keplinger, the cerebral palsy-afflicted artist who wrote the documentary about his life and fell out of his wheelchair--before a billion TV viewers--when its Oscar was announced. When she returned to New York, she learned she would be honored at the Waldorf at the 59th Peabody Awards along with PBS documentary mainstay Ken Burns and the creators of HBO’s “The Sopranos,” among others. She hoped to see the actor who plays Uncle Junior on the mob soap, for he’s the same guy, she’s been told, who sang at her wedding, 27 years ago.

All that was the white picket fence of her world. But she was still reeling, feeling the darkness, as she discussed her life and career in the Upper East Side condo she uses as an office away from the office. Her dog had recently died, in her arms, the same “docu dog” who “watched every single program with me.” Then she had to go into the hospital herself for an operation that was not life-threatening but unsettling enough.

Nevins e-mailed colleagues, “No flowers. No cards. I’ll be back when I’m ready.” Still, the woman from the Holocaust documentary (“One Survivor Remembers”) stuck a mezuza by Nevins door, for good luck. And some bouquets came anyway from the West Coast office--a waste, she insisted. “They call these places which put it on their charge accounts and send you these dying flowers.”

She also decided that she brought the wrong book to the hospital, one by “that doctor who writes about what it’s like to die.” It probably was a mistake, as well, to look too closely at her surgeon’s wall of diplomas. “All I could see were his fraternity diplomas,” she said. “Fraternity diplomas!”

She was recovering at home when news came that Barry Sherman, director of the Peabody Awards, had died of a heart attack, after a game of basketball. He was 48, a father of two.

So right at the start of four hours of conversation, Nevins says: “I don’t know what the point of anything is. What’s the point?”

Question: What did being in the hospital teach you?

Answer: It doesn’t matter how hard you worked, how good you did in college. You’re in this little gown and you’re cold . . . and when that man cuts your stomach open, you’re the same as everyone else. I also learned that you should bring a lot of “Sopranos” T-shirts to the hospital to keep the staff happy. That’s all they talk about, that and that “Millionaire” show. Which makes me feel pretty badly.

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Q: Everyman types, like doormen, must watch some of your shows.

A: Yeah, “Real Sex,” “Taxicab Confessions,” “Autopsy.” They don’t like to admit it, but they’ll say, “I saw your name on TV last night.” And I know what was on.

They don’t watch “Children in War.” They don’t watch “I Am a Promise.” They watch “Real Sex,” and we have this series now, on strippers, that they’ll watch.

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Q: What’s the point of “Strippers”?

A: There is none. People will watch it and it’s fun and it’s like easy-listening nudity. It’s harmless. It’s nothing I invented. I got this job and there were these R-rated movies on HBO and everybody’s watching these and nobody’s watching my show about FDR. So I thought, “Anyone can do FDR, why don’t I do R-rated documentaries?”

In the beginning it was embarrassing to me because it was totally manipulative. I thought, “that’s what they want.” “Eros America” was a show we did for Cinemax. We didn’t want to put it on HBO.

For the first shows, we had a sex consultant. I told her my son was always playing with himself. She said, “If it bothers you, tell him.” So I told him. Then one day when he was 3, we were watching “The Wizard of Oz” for about the 150th time. He says, “Ma, you have to leave the room.” “Why?” “Because I want to play with myself.” It was my problem, not his.

Now I’m into the freedom of people not being ashamed about sex. We’re into our 25th “Real Sex.” We’re into our eighth “Taxicab Confessions.” Our seventh “Autopsy.” Now 13 shows about the women at a strip club.

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Q: Do you worry that people like that, who agree to lay themselves bare before the camera, are simply acting out, putting on a show for us? Chris Rock, in his stand-up comedy act, had a running gag about your prison documentary with the inmate talking about an unmentionable sex act. Rock makes a living shocking people, but he couldn’t get over this term.

A: “Tossing the salad.” When Chris meets me in the hallway [at HBO], he goes, “Hey, tossed-salad lady!”

When I began in this business, having a camera around was bizarre. People performed strangely. Now everyone has a video camera. They’re used to doing things in front of a camera. So verite has become more verite. And maybe they say what they have to say because someone’s looking. Maybe it’s a greater truth. I don’t know.

Oh, I forgot the whole hookers series. “Hookers at the Point.” “Pimps Up, Ho’s Down.” Now we’ve got “Hookers and Johns.”

The hookers at Hunts Point are making a fortune. People say, “I saw you on HBO.”

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Q: I heard that when that project was first presented to you, two of the women the filmmaker followed had actually escaped the life. But you asked that those rosier stories be taken out, saying, “That’s PBS.”

A: Let’s put it this way: If it wasn’t hot, if it didn’t jump, we didn’t use it. Don Hewitt was my mentor [at CBS]. I heard him yelling at the editor--this was 25 years ago--”This interview isn’t sexy enough!”

I say it all the time. If you could see it on A&E;, if an advertiser would sponsor it, then I don’t want to put it on HBO, because people are paying to see something a little spicier. But if it’s ugly like Playboy, if it’s lowbrow sexuality, then it’s not what I like to call “erotic eros.” I don’t want it.

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Q: There’s often a shocking element to your “serious” documentaries, as well, the ones clearly not done for ratings. There’s a sense that if you pick up a rock, anywhere, you’ll find things crawling.

A: I love to pick up the rock. I believe in the telling of secrets, except when it would hurt someone. We are very dark. Evil is very close to good.

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Q: You must find the “reality” programming on regular TV banal.

A: It looks like they’re lying. Like if I see a piece on date rape in sweeps month, I know that they’ve done it because they want to show sexy women in bathing suits down in Fort Lauderdale. It occurs to me, “Why don’t they just do what they want--a show about sex, which would get an R rating?” Because they can’t.

I can just do it. I wasn’t up to the freedom at first. I thought, “What happens if you keep going, if you show the inside of an Alzheimer’s brain? Or if you show a kid without arms and legs? What happens to the world? Does it all fall apart if you look so deep under the rock?”

I think it falls more apart when you pretend that Alzheimer’s is just a disease of forgetting--and not a brain disease in which your frontal lobe is eaten away. I’m not scared to watch that.

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Q: Is the audience?

A: We had a scene in “Autopsy” in which this torso was washed ashore, and it’s, like, 14 inches. It was ghastly. And the coroner on the basis of this was able to reconstruct everything about this person and eventually find the killer.

Everyone at HBO said “Eeek. Eeek! EEEK!” So I started to think, maybe I have just lost all sensitivity to stuff--and I think I have to some degree. So we went out and tested it. We went to these shopping malls in Connecticut, sat there and ate pizza watching HBO subscribers--men, women, three different nights--watch the whole show, with the torso. Every single one said, “But I expect that from HBO. If I don’t want it, I turn away.”

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Q: It certainly was controversial when you showed the bodies of those second-graders in the documentary on the Arkansas killings attributed to devil worshipers.

A: That was my decision. I felt you would not have a vested interest in that show if you did not know what was at stake. You wouldn’t have empathy for the vindictiveness of the town to blame somebody for this terrible thing. The filmmakers thought it was a little garish, but I wanted to get the police to release the [crime scene footage].

You know the drama of opera and Shakespeare--emotions so distorted, so hysterical, that murder, mayhem and abuse are par for the course. And it becomes art.

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Q: You start the Holocaust survivor piece with bodies, too.

A: I got that show because I went to the Holocaust museum. First you go to the elevator that’s like a boxcar. Then you see everything disgusting. And when you’re just about to leave, there’s a television screen and survivors are talking. Now if it was the other way around, if you came in through a swinging door and you heard this first, I don’t think it would be the same. When you see these atrocities, then you see people who look like you talking, your gut has already been wrenched. You have an investment from the inside. That’s how I view these documentaries.

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Q: But do viewers understand that you have to sift though a lot of “normals” to get the people telling those bizarre tales in taxis?

A: Everybody has a great story--especially when they’ve had a little to drink. I could tell a story that could get on, but I’m not going to tell it! Sometimes they’ll show me the first 20 rides they’ve done and they’re horrible. Then they do the next 20 and there are five great ones. You’ve got to see this mortician. . . .

I can’t tell you how many people tell stories and then call me and I think they’re going to say, “I don’t want to be on that show. I told how I shot my uncle because he raped me when I was 8.” But they’re calling to find out when it’s on.

It’s demented. People are nuts. We’re all crazy. We just have this mask we run around with.

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Q: But a lot of people live successfully on that civilized surface, true?

A: You ever see “Fetishes”?

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Q: You’re making yourself out to be this Times Square sex show promoter--as if you didn’t also turn out some of the most sober work done anywhere.

A: The confusing thing about HBO is that on the one hand we’re doing R-rated documentaries that nobody would touch. But we also do “American Hollow” and shows that have social conscience--not a lot, but carefully selected. The same week we’ve got “Strippers” we may have 2 1/2 hours on cancer.

The cancer got a 3-something rating but won an Academy Award. Those shows have a different sort of meaning. Also, they make you feel good when you come home at night.

PBS [documentary] producers began to be attracted to HBO because it meant show business--and Peabodys and Academy Awards.

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Q: You also can pay someone to spend a year in Appalachia.

A: But docu programming is a bargain for HBO. That’s because you’re adding “Cancer” to “Real Sex.” If you were adding “Cancer” to “One Survivor Remembers,” I might be looking for a job. The balance has to be good--of awards to large numbers.

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Q: Speaking of the Oscars, what’s it meant that many documentaries are winding up on the big screen?

A: The theatrical issue is tricky because docus are so hot. Every producer wants theirs in a theater. But if I totally finance a documentary, I don’t let it go. Part of your heart is with them, but your business is television, and HBO already has enough movies that have been in the movie theater. Take “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” where you put in a third of the financing. It goes to Sundance, where it makes a lot of noise. It has HBO’s name on it, but the producer controls the theatrical release. You’ve basically bought the licensing fee for television. By the time it gets to HBO, it’s going to be all worn out.

We’re either going to have to up the ante--instead of $150,000 we’ll give you $250,000, but you can’t have theatrical. Or for a documentary that’s already had a theatrical release, we’ll pay [only] $25,000.

Now they will not make money--Mr. and Mrs. Middle America are not going to pay to go see a docu [in a theater]. They’ll either be trophies for studios, or one may make money someday. But it’s going to be two or three years before they realize they’re not making money on them. And now producers are fighting over Internet rights, too. Meanwhile, I’ve got another 100 docus to worry about.

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Q: Could you do one with Ken Burns?

A: We could, but I’d worry about the audience. What would I give them that they wouldn’t get for free? I think he’s established a fit in what he does [for PBS], free television for the 1% of the population that’s intellectual. But would my audience pay for “The Civil War” or “Baseball”? If they saw a whole bunch of stills, would they not think they were paying for PBS?

I’m working on something called “Slave Letters,” letters that were done during the [Depression era] WPA by writers who went around to people who had memories of slavery. It looks to me like PBS--I think I made this grievous error. But nobody had done anything with these letters. I was too pure. I should have been a little more sensational. We’re doing “Wisconsin Death Trip,” about Wisconsin in the 1840s, vengeance and retribution in this small town. We did reenactments. We took a picture from the period and we did the scene behind it. A woman kills her child, so we see the mother bring the baby to the funeral parlor. But with slavery, I was afraid to be too hocus-pocus. We have two many cotton fields and black hands picking cotton and not enough gut.

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Q: Is the tone of Burns’ work too optimistic for you?

A: No, I like Ken Burns. I like his work. And I really like his brother’s, Ric’s. Did you see the one set out West? Those people who wound up eating each other?

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Q: The Donner Party?

A: The Donner piece. That was great.

The phone rings in the condo/office. It’s one of the figures from the documentaries who have become part of her life, an extended family of sorts.

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Q: Who was that?

A: There was a little girl in our cancer show and I said to her mother, “You’ll have to come and be my guest in New York.” So they’re coming--seven of them! This girl, they live in Tennessee, she finished her treatment March 20. We gave her a gift certificate for $500 to the Gap. She says, “Sheila? This is Jessica. Well, I don’t have cancer, and I bought jeans with fringes on the bottom, and I don’t have to have any more chemotherapy and I have a hat with a band around it and the blue marks in my arm are going away.” All mixed together. That’s the thing about real people--you couldn’t write that.

Her mother and father are coming, her grandmother and grandfather, her and her brother and sister. They’re staying here, I guess. I’ll get them tickets to “Rosie,” I’ll get them “Lion King,” the Circle Line.

The Empire State Building they can do themselves.