Stars used to call me to plant their own romances

What the Elizabeth Holmes film taught me about every celebrity story I’ve ever told

Elizabeth Holmes fooled everyone. So do celebrities. I know, because they used to call me to plant their own romances. I’ll get to that. But first, look closely at one small word in the title of the hit movie You Can See Everything. “Can.” . Elizabeth Holmes spent a decade telling investors her little machine can run hundreds of blood tests. It couldn’t. A jury convicted her of fraud, she reported to a Texas prison in May 2023, and now Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have made a nearly three-hour film whose title makes exactly the same promise... and then basically breaks it.

I went into my local Long Island theater expecting to find out whether she’s still lying while I am lying in my lay flat seat. (Spoiler: I still can’t tell you. More on that later.) I came out thoroughly enthralled but also thinking about my own career and how we tell stories.

After leaving the theater I fell down a rabbit hole. A thread on Reddit’s A24 forum, upvoted thousands of times, argued that the film’s real subject is the impossibility of telling a true story about another person, because the storyteller is always in the frame. (Hat tip to whoever u/sybillicandsalt is for starting it.) Hundreds of people argued back. I read every reply, on a Sunday, like a lunatic, while watching Murder In A Small Town on Netflix (an easy second screen watch). Between the film and that thread, I found the idea I’ve been circling at Celebrity Intelligence since day one: what the public believes about a famous person is set by a market, and the truth is only one of the things on sale.