Just under a month ago, around 600 people handed over their phones before taking their seats in the Werner Herzog Theatre.
The Werner Herzog Theatre is a temporary cinema set up inside an ice rink at the town park in Telluride, Colorado – a fact that will quickly become one of the least strange aspects of the event.
The attendees had no advance knowledge of what would be shown at the Telluride Film Festival’s surprise screening. They ended up seeing the global premiere of a movie that few people in the world even knew existed.
The film in question – ‘You Can See Everything’ – is a documentary focusing on ex-entrepreneur and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, made by comedian and filmmaker Nathan Fielder and documentary-maker Lance Oppenheim.
It turned out that Fielder and Oppenheim had been invited to live with Holmes and her family in the month leading up to her imprisonment in 2023, with full access to film what happened while they were there.
In the years that have followed, they continued to work on the documentary, and are now ready for the world to know it exists.
Many would have assumed that there is little more to say in the Elizabeth Holmes story – the woman who falsely claimed her start-up – Theranos – had developed a revolutionary medical device that could detect a multitude of diseases and conditions from a few drops of blood.
There is already an Alex Gibney documentary – ‘The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley’. There is also a 30-episode podcast series – ‘The Dropout’ – and an eight-episode dramatisation of the same name, starring Amanda Seyfried. Not to mention ‘Bad Blood’, a book by journalist John Carreyrou, who first shone a spotlight on the doubts around Holmes’ company.
But despite this seeming like a well-trodden path, all accounts are that Fielder and Oppenheim have uncovered something new.
Judging by the recently-released trailer, it’s as much a psychological thriller as it is a biographical story. Those that have actually seen the near three-hour documentary talk about crazy twists, a blurring of the lines between what’s true and what’s fake, and a mind-blowing third act.
There even a huge amount of Oscar buzz around the film ahead of its release, with some suggesting it could be in line for a Best Picture nomination.
If that were to happen, it would be the first time in the Oscars’ 99 year history that a documentary got shortlisted for the top prize.
Nathan For You
As curious a subject as Holmes is, a big part of what’s contributing to much of that buzz are the people making the documentary.
Lance Oppenheim has already made a number of critically-acclaimed and off-kilter documentaries including ‘Ren Faire’, about the organiser of a Renaissance Fair who is choosing a successor, and ‘Some Kind of Heaven’, about the strange goings-on at the world’s largest retirement community in Florida.
Few would question his pedigree in making compelling documentaries.
But alongside him is Nathan Fielder – probably best known as a somewhat surrealist comedian.
He first gained a name for himself with ‘Nathan For You’, which spoofed the 2000s-era TV show genre where an expert would come and help a struggling business (think Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares or At Your Service).
In the case of ‘Nathan For You’, Fielder played a version of himself who would create bizarre schemes to help different companies, companies which were not in on the joke, initially at least.
One involved getting a café to rebrand as ‘Dumb Starbucks’ as a publicity stunt, something he claimed would be legal under fair use parody rules. Another scheme saw him convincing a pet shop to buy a large gravestone at a pet cemetery, which it could then use as ad space.
From that show he developed a reputation for a deadpan approach to even the most bizarre and uncomfortable of situations. Over the years he has shown a Louis Theroux-level comfort with the awkward and strange.
Since ‘Nathan For You’, he has been involved in a number of other shows, most recently ‘The Rehearsal’, where he helps real people to rehearse things they’re nervous or unsure about.
That included building a scale replica of a New York bar so a man could practice making a confession to his pub quiz partner, or hiring an army of child actors so a woman could sample the experience of being a mother.
All of this is all to say that Fielder’s career has been built around not only playing an off-beat version of himself, but also toying with formats, audience expectations and people’s perception of what’s real.
That has made people wonder if he has approached this situation with comedy in mind, or if he is once again playing with expectations by doing this with the upmost sincerity.
Early reports indicate that he has done something very different with the documentary form, which has already sparked debate around authenticity and trust.
Meanwhile, many are simply wondering if his skills in dealing with bizarre situations are strong enough to go toe-to-toe with someone as curious and confounding as Elizabeth Holmes.
Holmes Truths
Elizabeth Holmes was born in Washington DC. Her mother was a Congressional staffer and her father at one stage worked for a subsidiary of Enron.
They were a well-off family, though was an even bigger fortune in her lineage, as one of her great-great-great grandfathers was behind Fleischmann’s Yeast, which was a massive company for a time.
In 2002, Holmes went to Stanford University, studying chemical engineering. But, like any self-respecting Silicon Valley entrepreneur, she dropped out after a year, using the rest of her tuition to fund her new company.
It was initially called Real-Time Cures, before eventually being rebranded as Theranos – a portmanteau of ‘therapy’ and ‘diagnosis’.
And it was built on an incredible idea.
Initially Holmes’ idea was to develop a wearable device that could deliver medicine to a patient and adjust the dosage in response to changes in their body. But that quickly morphed into an even more revolutionary idea to make blood tests easier, cheaper and more comprehensive.
Rather than having to take vials and vials of blood through a syringe for tests, Holmes promised that a patient would be able to give tiny drop of blood from their finger tip – like the pinprick test someone with diabetes might use to check their blood sugar levels.
From this tiny sample, Holmes said its machine – the Edison – would be able to run 1,000 different blood tests.
She brought her idea to a number of medical experts at Stanford, including Phyliss Gardner, who told her what she was suggesting was impossible. But she refused to be swayed.
A year later she had $6m in funding for her idea. By 2010 the amount of investment received had passed $90m.
By 2013, having secured multi-million dollar deals with massive American chains like Safeway and Walgreens, which would see their cutting edge-devices installed in hundreds of locations around the US, the company was being valued at $9 billion.
The only problem was that almost none of what the company was claiming its technology could do was true.
Its machine could, at best, conduct a handful of blood tests, not 1,000.
In many cases patients who went to the likes of Walgreens would end up giving conventional blood samples, which would be tested in existing industry machines. Those patients would be told there was a temporary problem with the Edison, which was why they had to do a regular blood sample.
The partnerships Theranos told Walgreens it had – with the likes of GSK and Pfizer – turned out to be fictional.
Even the lab Holmes brought then vice-president Joe Biden on a tour of was a fabrication, because the real, hidden-from-view lab would have made it clear that the company wasn’t nearly as advanced as it claimed to be.
Bleeding Edge
Despite being built on sand, Theranos managed to deceive authorities, investors, partners and patients for years.
Part of the reason for this was likely timing.
By 2004, the market had emerged from the dotcom crash and there was hunger for innovative investment opportunities.
Dotcom survivors were now generating significant profits, while the new wave of Web 2.0 companies were creating all kinds of new products and services.
Investors of the time would have been seeing the kind of money firms like Google and Amazon were starting to pull in – and looking at new start-ups like Facebook – and trying to find the next opportunity that would give them a similar return.
In the year after Theranos was founded, for example, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion, and NewsCorp bought Myspace for $580m. They would have been seen as good deals at the time, but in hindsight they represent panicked and over-priced investments by companies desperate to stay at the cutting edge.
But aside from timing, Elizabeth Holmes was also a major draw for would-be investors.
She was clearly driven, passionate and convincing about what she was doing. Investors, journalists and employees talk about her uncanny ability to draw people in.
She was also striking, not least because of her notably deep voice, another thing that turned out to be fake. The fact that she always wore a black turtleneck – Steve Jobs-style – and regularly appeared in the likes of Forbes and Fortune also added to her appeal.
Even the fact that she was a woman would have made her stand from the crowd, too, given how male dominated Silicon Valley was (and still is).
All of that clearly led some to be slightly less diligent than they might otherwise have been.
However, Holmes was also very clever in the kind of backers she attracted to the company.
Channing Robertson was the dean of engineering at Stanford – he became the company’s first board member. Others that joined him included former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, retired general Jim Mattis, and former Wells Fargo CEO Richard Kovacevich.
All of these were big names, they gave the company significant credibility and opened a lot of doors in financial and political spheres.
But none of them had the kind of medical expertise that would have allowed them to do what a board member is supposed to do, which is to cast a critical eye on the running of the company.
Fake Blood
But while board members and investors – including media tycoon Rupert Murdoch – were convinced by Holmes, some remained sceptical. That was particularly true in academia, where the scientific basis of her claims were met with well-founded doubt.
That scepticism began to move into the mainstream in 2015.
Towards the end of that year journalist John Carreyrou published an article in the Wall Street Journal revealing that Theranos’ Edison machines were not accurate, and the company was relying on traditional equipment to do its tests.
Theranos did push back on this. Holmes went onto CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer and uttered the immortal words, “this is what happens when you work to change things, first they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world”.
But ultimately this turned out to be the beginning of the company’s unravelling.
Increasingly its claims and technologies began to attract scrutiny from US government agencies, including the FDA.
It was found that it had put patients at risk because results recommended the wrong dosages of some medicines. In 2016, Holmes was banned from owning or operating a blood testing service for two years. Then Walgreens ended its partnership with Theranos, before suing them.
Eventually, the company came under investigation by the FBI, while two class action lawsuits were launched against it.
In 2018 Holmes and other senior figures were charged with fraud, because they had raised more than $700m from investors despite knowing its product could not do what it was claiming to do.
You Can See Everything
After multiple delays in the trial – in part due to the Covid-19 pandemic – but also due to Holmes’ first pregnancy, she was found guilty of multiple counts of fraud in early 2022.
Holmes was sentenced to 11-and-a-half years in prison in late 2022. But the start of her sentence was delayed until May 2023 as she was pregnant with her second child. (She was accused in court of having that child in order to avoid prison – something she denied.)
She is currently serving her sentence in a federal prison in Texas, but is reportedly set to be moved to a halfway house in August 2027.
That’s because the length of her sentence has been shortened numerous times. Having started in mid-2023, as things stand, Holmes is due to be released in February 2030.
Clearly, though, she hopes to be freed much sooner.
Despite all of the evidence and multiple trials, she still contends that she did nothing wrong. She claims that she had thought all along that what she was saying about the technology was true, because she had been misled by others in the company.
The Los Angeles Times last year claimed that she had been lobbying US President Donald Trump for a presidential pardon.
In fact, the Fielder and Oppenheim movie also came about because the pair had heard Holmes was looking for someone to document her pre-prison life. After its initial teaser was released, Holmes shared it on her X account (though she hasn’t yet shared a link to the full trailer).
It’s not clear if she’s seen the documentary yet, but there’s little doubt she hopes it will help her in her campaign to regain her freedom, and rehabilitate her image.
Pinned at the top of her account is a post made just a few days ago at the end of which she quotes Chapter 8, Verse 32 of the Gospel of John.
“…The truth will set you free.”
