Sheila Nevins doesn't do sugar coating and after a lifetime of telling other people's stories as the President of HBO Documentary, she's ready to get personal and tell her own.
She's produced a collection of essays about aging as a woman in an industry obsessed with youth.
Sheila Nevins Photo: Wiki commons/Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe
At 78, she is President of HBO Documentary with a long list of accomplishments including 26 Academy Awards, more than 30 individual Emmy awards and staying power in a male-dominated, youth-worshiping industry.
She's viewed as a pioneer of the modern documentary, she's been the force behind recent successes like Citizenfour, Going Clear and The Jinx.
But after a lifetime of telling other people’s stories she has a few of her own - a collection of 45 essays in her book, You Don't Look Your Age ... and Other Fairy Tales.
It's a blend of memoir and fiction with essays about aging, plastic surgery, frenemies and raising a son with Tourette syndrome.
The audio version of the book is read by 45 superstars including Meryl Streep and Gloria Steinem.
She told Jesse Milligan that with this project she wanted to establish a professional life away from HBO so she could “clear the air” to express herself as an individual, older woman.
Nevins says presenting shows made her very conscious of aging and she felt she had to get plastic surgery to have longevity in her industry.
“It’s not something I’m particularly proud of … but maybe it was a necessary thing for me so that I had the confidence to go on.
Photo: supplied
“There are very few women that are working in their 70s. There are very few women working at the level that I was working," Nevins says.
“So I upholstered myself like a couch that you like and you just don’t want to get rid of because you know they don’t make them as good anymore.”
She says people don’t like taking orders from the older generation.
“You want to feel that there’s a ‘nowness’ to what you do. And if you look like ‘then’ … it’s very hard to convince people that it is okay for now.”
But Nevins says now she is older she feels more comfortable telling the truth and speaking her mind.
“Now I think I almost sometimes embarrass myself with the truth of what I say. I just kind of say it because, what’s to lose?
“I’m not going to be president anymore, I’m not going to take over the company, my ambition is curtailed so really why don’t I just say it all at once rather than a little bit on Monday, a little bit on Tuesday and then all of it by Friday.”
A disastrous abortion experience and first marriage tipped her towards the feminism of Gloria Steinem and the Women’s movement.
“It motivated me to feel that I could fight back… that I deserved an equal playing field.
“And I’m not sure that woman have even earned an equal playing field today. I mean, I guess it’s better, but it’s certainly not there. For some reason we’re a subjugated class of human, certainly here in America.”
