“You have to be privy to how your art lives in a global, capitalist world,” explains Eddie Huang from his backyard in Los Angeles. Over the past year, the filmmaker has been thinking a lot about the interplay between artistic endeavors and corporate ambition as he made his documentary debut, Vice Is Broke, about the rise and fall of his onetime employer, Vice Media.
Before his turn as a feature documentarian, Huang was known as a restaurateur and writer, opening Lower East Side favorite BaoHaus and then publishing his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, which would later, of course, become a hit series on ABC. He started working with Vicein 2012, hosting and producing food-focused content, including a YouTube series also titled Fresh Off the Boat, and later a travel show, Huang’s World, that aired on Vice Media’s TV network Viceland.
“[Vice] felt like a family and they would tell you it was a family, so I approached business as if it was family,” says Huang. After working with Vice for over five years and hiring a financial auditor, Huang says he discovered that the company owed him more than $380,000, which included unpaid residuals, but he patiently waited to be paid by his one-time collaborators. (THR reached out to Vice about Huang’s missing payment but received no comment as of press time.) He considered Shane Smith, the co-founder of Vice Media and the person who grew the company into a full-blown media empire, to be a friend. “I waited four years, and I just started to realize that these dudes, they’re not good dudes.”
It was around the time of this realization that Vice filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2023 and, the next month, was acquired by a group of investors led by Fortress Investment Group. “When the bankruptcy happened, I saw it as my moment to say something,” says Huang, who was a lawyer at a corporate firm before he was laid off during the 2008 financial crisis. “I canceled out [the] debt with Fortress, they gave me my show back and then nullified all of my NDAs in agreements with Vice, so it freed me to do this.”
“This” being Vice Is Broke, which tracks how the media company went from a Montreal-based punk magazine to a Williamsburg cornerstone to a conglomerate with a nearly $6 billion valuation and backing from Disney that a few years later was being sold for parts.
In a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter, a spokesperson for Vice Media offered, “Eddie Huang was never an employee of VICE and has no current knowledge of the company. Like many others, he produced a television show in 2017, but it was not renewed.Any of his reporting on VICE is old news and no longer relevant news. VICE is now well into its next chapter, and the company has strategically reconfigured to meet the challenges and culture of a new media landscape.”
Huang, who began shooting the doc less than a year ago, in October 2023, points out that Vice as a subject is ripe for a talking-head-style film that is typical of business boom-and-bust doc narratives. But the focus of Vice Is Broke is not those at the top but the journalists, artists and other creatives whose work and lives were compromised because of what Huang describes as corporate greed.
Huang is onscreen with former Vice employees and contributors, including former editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson and artist David Choe, who share experiences of not being properly compensated or credited for their work. Elsewhere, he digs into the company’s business dealings with everyone from Philip Morris to the Saudi government.
It is fitting, even poetic, that the doc about Vice is told as a Vice-style doc, where old-fashioned news reporting is mixed with the interpersonal.
“We really focus it on the transgressions they committed within a corporate setting,” says Huang, who recalls having to sign a “non-traditional workplace agreement” when he began collaborating with the company, which, in a 2017 New York Times exposé, was accused of fostering an environment where sexual harassment, among other indiscretions, was rampant. (In response, Smith and fellow Vice founder Suroosh Alvi issued the following statement, “We have failed as a company to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.”) Says Huang: “I exercised a lot of self-control in this doc, not making it as personal as it could have been.”
One somewhat surprising interviewee is Gavin McInnes, who, after co-founding Vice magazine and having a public falling-out with Smith, went on to start the right-wing extremist group The Proud Boys. “I want to ask questions and it’s not productive for me to play telephone and ask somebody else about Gavin. I’ll go ask Gavin,” says Huang of the choice to include discussions with McInnes about Vice’s early years and helping establish the voice of the publication. The interview also sees McInnes engage in the kind of lewd behavior and racist remarks he’s become infamous for. “Within the first five minutes of hanging out, he shows me his balls,” says Huang. (A shot of McInnes exposing himself is in the film.)
But the director is adamant that this is not a hit piece. Vice Is Broke offers former employees the opportunity to share memories of a workplace where they could be their authentic selves and do the type of work that no other media company would allow. “We believed in Shane and we believed in this thing. It wasn’t just a job — it was personal,” explains Huang.
It is this idea that lends the doc a universal quality, says producer Ray Mansfield, who counts Vice Is Broke as his first nonfiction feature (his credits include Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman). “Vice was a place Eddie felt he could be himself and they took advantage of not only him but so many others that we have come to realize,” he says. “It’s a smaller and smaller and smaller group of people getting the benefit for a larger and larger and larger group of people’s work.”
Despite the film’s potential for mass appeal, securing distribution remains a question. Vice Is Broke tells a story about a media company that did business with or had investments from some of the very companies that could be potential distributors (see: Disney). Mansfield says it was something they thought about but decided to forge ahead regardless: “We would be like the people we were criticizing if we would allow those things to influence us.”
For Huang, he hopes young artists see Vice Is Broke as a pseudo-cautionary tale. He says, “The tentacles that corporations and big money have in art and culture just disgust me. I hope that we can start to untangle ourselves from those tentacles and incubate artists a little bit more before their work is scaled.”
Even though delving back into his Vice experiences reopens old wounds, Huang says the doc is a celebration of the content creators who put in the work before everything went south. He even calls Vice Is Broke “a party film”: “My ideal would be to watch this at Alamo Drafthouse and eat buffalo cauliflower and get hammered drinking terrible margaritas.”
This story first appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
