Eddie Huang’s TIFF Doc ‘Vice Is Broke’ Takes Shot at Company and How Media Has Evolved: ‘I Really Want To Do the Vice Scripted Show’
The title of Eddie Huang’s new documentary says it all: “Vice Is Broke.” The media company that defined counterculture sensibilities (while accepting investment from mega-corporations, too) filed for bankruptcy in 2023. And Huang — the multitalented author, on-camera personality, and documentarian — began his new film with a grievance.
First, Huang says in an interview, he had a personal falling-out with controversial Vice executive Shane Smith, the face of the brand and the mastermind of the company’s scaling-up beyond what was sustainable. (Huang declines to go into the nature of the offense.) Then, he noticed that he was owed money for his on-camera work for Vice, including the TV series “Huang’s World,” in which he traveled and experienced other cultures in the style of his role model and late friend, Anthony Bourdain.
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“I had been asking for an accounting since 2018,” Huang says. “They kicked the can down the road and never paid me my residuals. The bankruptcy was the moment I was like, ‘I’ve amassed all of this information over the last few years just on personal curiosity.’” Huang, with the leverage of the money owed him, negotiated out of his non-disclosure agreement; this film is his attempt to present what it was like inside the convoluted world of Vice.
The company, as Huang explains, began its life as a style magazine dominated by Gavin McInnes, whose willingness to go anywhere in print led him to far-right provocation; he, later, became the founder of the far-right organization the Proud Boys. Smith, whose scruffy unruliness seemed more manageable, appeared to be the adult who might take Vice to new heights, building out a television network and nightly newscast and attracting funding from Disney and A&E, among others. “The false binary that Vice presented to all of its people,” Huang explains, “was you either get a leader like Gavin or a leader like Shane. It mirrors the two-party system. The doc presents a third option.”
That option is colored by Huang’s own experience: A law-school graduate, Huang’s extraordinary career has included writing a memoir (“Fresh Off the Boat”) and working as a chef and restaurateur as well as on-camera work. But his iconoclastic nature — he didn’t like, and left his role at, the sitcom adaptation of his book, and as a chef became known as, per one magazine headline, “The Bad Boy of Pork Buns” — led him to a place where outsiders were welcomed.
Or so it seemed. But Vice’s obsession with growth, and, in Huang’s telling, its sloppiness in dealing with money and talent stood in its way. Post-Vice, a third way for today’s rising independent voices might look, he says, like David Ellison investing in a new company rather than in trying to save Paramount. “All right, so they’re going to take a failing studio and run it like every other studio that’s also failing. It doesn’t make much sense. I hope somebody with a lot of money who isn’t looking to be a megalomaniac like Shane or Gavin takes this idea and makes it real for the next generation. Because that would be really f—ing cool.”
Huang is as compelling in conversation as he is as a character in his own film, which is up for sale and repped by UTA, and viewers will truly feel for him — as in sequences like the one from “Huang’s World,” where an inexperienced production crew hangs him out to dry in dangerous situations. And he’s not yet done with this story.
“I really want to do the Vice scripted show,” he says. “It would create a different lens on ‘Succession’ that is very relevant to this generation. The voice of it ends up founding the Proud Boys. I think it would be an explosive show.” Vice may be over, but the shockwaves it generates still resonate.
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