Joe Berlinger

I was trying to get my guy, Dan Leibarger.

The one? Well, Joe Berlinger is the director, and he's talked to Joe probably 15 times over the years, so I'll probably get him talking to him, too.

Well, it's a great experience, and again, it's in the heart of Hot Springs, and there's always going to be something you want to see, but if for some reason you get a couple hours where there's something you don't want to see, guess what? You can wander around downtown.

One of the great things they started doing about 20 years ago is they stopped programming the big gala against the best movies.

But...

This film dropped in 1996, and the guys who were behind this film, there was a guy named Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sanofsky, and they were both kind of these wannabes.

They came up through the...

There was kind of an American version of the cinema verite movement.

I saw him take it and bring it home.

Joe Berlinger's cut of Blair Witch 2.

His original cut.

And he brought it home.

And he walked over.

And my understanding is that that conversation started.

Joe Berlinger's cut exists.

It's in Lionsgate's vault.

Long story short, in the end Metallica won, Napster eventually went out of business, and the seeds were sown for the Spotify-style streaming era in which we find ourselves today, which I am not so sure could be characterized as a win for the artists.

April 2001, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, filmmakers best known for the Paradise Lost documentary trilogy, great movies, crazy fucking story, began filming for the documentary Metallica, Some Kind of Monster, which would be released in 2004.

This was the movie in which we were shown firsthand how rock stars can be whiny little bitches of the first order.

We got to see James Hetfield enter rehab, Robert Trujillo hired to replace Jason Neustad, and we have front seats as the band, who seem to absolutely hate each other, work to record arguably their very worst album.

And right now I'm releasing this special edition series based on the Netflix true crime show that I was just a part of.

And I'm going to be talking to the director next week, Joe Berger.

And I'm just really, really excited.

So thank you so much for shouting that out, Anna.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, I feel terrible because, um, the director was, is the great Joe Berlinger, who I actually had on Movie Crush-

Hmm

... um, in, in one of my favorite episodes where we kinda just talked about documentary filmmaking.

But this article I'm reading this from The Hollywood Reporter says there's been no shortage of screen takes on the devastating murder of six year old JonBenet Ramsey.

Netflix's most recent doc was Cold Case, Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey from filmmaker Joe Berlinger, which debuted at number one on the streamer less than 24 hours after it was released.

That was released in November of 2024.

And they were pointing the finger towards the Boulder Police Department, if you guys remember that, of why the case remains unsolved.

Um, at least from what I've heard and from what I've seen on Netflix, where there's kind of a difference between the, the documentaries that they acquire versus the documentaries that they produce in-house.

And even the ones they produce in-house, there's, like, a small collective of filmmakers that they seem to go to over and over and over, and one of them is Joe Berlinger, who's somehow been pulled, uh, i- into this Netflix slop, doc slop world.

Uh-

Chris Smith