Two new documentaries show what it takes to make it to the top of the media industry
– To the top. At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last week, two new documentaries aired that, while wildly different, had something in common. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything and Call Her Alex, the two-part documentary about podcaster Alex Cooper now streaming on Hulu, both showed what it took to get to the top of the male-dominated media business—in two very different eras.
Tell Me Everything traces the story of Barbara Walters, the first woman to co-anchor an evening news program in the U.S. She made her debut in that role on ABC in 1976, breaking the hardest glass ceiling for women in journalism and television. The film by director Jackie Jesko follows the barriers Walters continued to break, from her famous celebrity sitdown interviews to her late-in-life reinvention on The View, alongside her personal struggles. While she married, divorced, and had a child, her personal life often suffered, the documentary observes. 'Her job was the love of her life,' one talking head says on camera.
'She was an incredibly ambitious woman who loved the work, loved being on TV, she loved the thrill of the chase, she loved the competition,' says Jesko. 'She got a lot of joy out of it—and it doesn't always have to be a huge personal life that brings someone joy.' Jane Rosenthal, the cofounder and CEO of the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, adds: 'We grew up with her—and you didn't realize what she was really doing as a woman, that she was the only woman in the room, the kind of fights that she had to have.'
Still, other era-defining women in media, including Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, reflect in the documentary about how seeing Walters' path influenced their own choices. Couric says she knew she didn't want to sacrifice her family life for her career, after seeing Walters.
Which brings us to the next Tribeca documentary. Alex Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy and media mogul behind the Unwell network, has often been called the millennial or Gen Z Oprah. In Tell Me Everything, Winfrey remembers watching Walters to learn how to succeed as an on-air journalist. Without Barbara, there would be no Oprah. And without Oprah, there would be no Alex.
Cooper built Call Her Daddy within Barstool Sports, another overwhelmingly male-dominated media company. Her new documentary traces her upbringing, an experience of sexual harassment in college that she now says motivated her to never be silenced again, and the rise of her podcast.
Several decades after Walters' career, Cooper doesn't have to make the same trade-offs that Walters did. Her husband is her business partner. While Walters struggled with private insecurity about her appearance, another topic of Tell Me Everything, Cooper shares her most personal experiences and challenges with her audience. 'She didn't just build an audience, she built a movement,' Rosenthal said while introducing Call Her Alex. Rather than being beholden to someone else's platform—like a television network—Cooper has been able to build her own.
Despite all these obvious differences, watching the films back-to-back, it's clear Cooper and Walters have a lot in common. 'I'm a competitive mother*******,' Cooper says. 'I'm hard on myself.'
As much as the media industry has changed—the drive it takes to get to the top hasn't.
Emma Hinchliffeemma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune's daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today's edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything' on Hulu, A Documentary Profile Of The Ultimate Celebrity Profiler
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything hits Hulu after its Tribeca Festival premiere this past June. From Ron Howard's Imagine Documentaries (Jim Henson: Idea Man) and ABC News Studios, and directed and produced by Jackie Jesko, Tell Me Everything profiles Walters, who died in 2022 at age 93, as a broadcast journalist who busted open broadcast media's male establishment, single handedly developed the in-depth celebrity interview concept, created and co-hosted The View, and who tried – not always successfully – to balance marriages, family, and her personal life along the way. With access to interviews with Barbara Walters and a ton of archival footage, Tell Me Everything also includes appearances by Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, Andy Cohen, Connie Chung, Cynthia McFadden, Bette Midler, and Monica Lewinsky. The Gist: 'That was part of her process. I think Barbara would be friends with the devil if it would get us the interview.' In Tell Me Everything, the tenacity and approachability of Barbara Walters defines it all, from her rise in the business of TV news to how she carved her own perch as a profiler and interviewer. In 1961, as a junior member of The Today Show on-air staff, Walters was relegated to fluff and women's interest stories, like trying on the costume of a Playboy Bunny. But she also fought for more substantive opportunities, for the right to develop her own interview questions, and to simply be taken seriously as a professional instead of being dismissed as a token or tea pourer. 'I'm a good editor,' Walters says in her Tell Me Everything voiceover. 'That's what I do best.' Tell Me Everything assumes a certain base of knowledge about its subject. The doc doesn't establish a linear timeline, either in Walters' professional life or her personal relationships, but it does connect her biographical info to its sense of her growth. Like: 'a lot of the relationships she developed were career moves' (from her biographer) and 'both are sacrifices' (from Oprah Winfrey, on Walters' attempts to balance a career with motherhood). And in the early 1970s, as Walters leapt from NBC and Today to ABC and a prime spot as the first woman co-anchor of the network's evening news flagship, her bold, piercing interview style – Bette Midler: 'She'd put you at ease, and then go for the zinger' – became not only her calling card, but the standing format of an emerging celebrity profile industry. So what, much of the hard news establishment still said. A woman could never ask the tough questions. But Connie Chung, one of several women journalists interviewed who recognize Walters as a mentor, says differently. Barbara Walters asked tough, personal questions of presidents, foreign dictators, and Hollywood movie stars alike 'to make them human. Because they are.' At times in Tell Me Everything, it can be difficult to figure out if Barbara Walters' quotes came first, or if her thoughts – heard exclusively in the voiceover – were fleshed out with the doc's access to its deep well of archival footage. But this lack of attribution doesn't diminish Walters' opinions. 'It was a mistake,' she says of her five-million-dollar contract to become the first female co-anchor of ABC Evening News, because Harry Reasoner, the incumbent male anchor, was an unabashed hater. And Tell Me Everything contrasts the candor of Walters' recollection with a quote from Katie Couric, who champions the move. 'It was at a time when the women's movement was really gaining steam, and suddenly we had a woman who was going to be delivering the news every single night.' What develops in the doc is a thorough composite picture, both of Walters as an industry trailblazer, and of the broadcast journalism industry itself as it reacted and changed across six decades of media history. What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Hulu also features Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge – fashion designer knew a thing or two about 'living a man's life in a woman's body.' Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold is also of note here. And of course, The View, Barbara Walters' unprecedented concept – a show for 'women who want to listen to other women' – remains an enduring force in daytime television. Performance Worth Watching: The directing and editing in Tell Me Everything, from Jackie Jesko and Andrew Morreale, keeps things moving with the speed of a news report. And it employs a smart visual aesthetic, with footage that appears in consecutive boxes – three different celebrity interviews, say, or converging news events – all connected through the constant of Walters' presence. It's as if the documentary itself was live from a control room where tape was being cut together around its subject. 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It was like that once, when Barbara Walters was putting up numbers with her primetime specials and one-on-one interviews with celebrities, newsmakers, and celebrity newsmakers. You can take this in confidence from Walters herself, who notes with considerable pride in Tell Me Everything that her March 1999 sit-down with Monica Lewinsky 'was the highest-rated news interview of all time, and nothing has surpassed it.' Everything has lots of access to big-name takes, so Lewinsky herself reflects thoughtfully on that interview, her experience with Walters, and how it even came to be. And the latter part is another interesting aspect of this doc – it can get a little inside baseball-y. Like when Oprah Winfrey recounts her side of that interview, part of the biggest American scandal of the late 1990s. The rub? Walters stole it from Winfrey. But Winfrey is also along to emphasize how much of a game-changer Walters' work really was – for women, for journalists, and for American culture. 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