A Film on a Crisis, Powered by Willing Voices – The New York Times

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As a producer and director for our documentary series The New York Times Presents, Im used to pursuing subjects that are difficult to render onscreen. But when we set out to tell the story of the e-cigarette giant Juul Labs in the film Move Fast and Vape Things, which aired on FX last Friday, we faced some unexpected obstacles.

We started the production process armed with an arsenal of reporting from Sheila Kaplan, a reporter for The New York Times who has covered the tobacco industry for decades, and others who have chronicled the rise and eventual troubles of Juul Labs. Reading through the archives, you could see a clear arc of a once-scrappy start-up that found itself a Big Tobacco juggernaut accused of marketing its nicotine product to minors and helping perpetrate one of the nations greatest public health concerns.

But when we started to reach out to some of Sheilas original sources to sit for on-camera interviews, the challenge ahead of us became painfully clear. With thousands of lawsuits pending against the company related to a youth vaping epidemic declared by the Food and Drug Administration, no one wanted to talk.

Juul Labs, which denies that it knowingly sold its products to teenagers, declined to make anyone available for an interview. The company, which announced a reset in 2019, is proceeding with caution as its very existence is debated by regulators at the F.D.A. So instead, we mined hours of news reports, public hearings, conferences and even other documentaries for footage of the founders James Monsees and Adam Bowen, who have said they set out to help smokers quit. Piecing those tidbits together, we were able to reconstruct their narrative in their own words, at least partially.

When it came to interviewing former Juul Labs employees, the task was harder. Working from a database Sheila and her fellow reporter Julie Creswell had created three years ago, we combed LinkedIn, assembling a list of dozens of potential subjects. Then, we started cold-calling. We were ignored. We were hung up on. In some cases, we were granted off-the-record conversations. In two separate instances, we had booked interviews only to have the subjects back out on the eve of the shoot, frustrating our attempts to tell what we thought was a vital story.

So how did we ultimately urge people to go on-camera in the face of so much pressure? In some cases, they were motivated by a desire to clear their names. In others, Sheila and Julie had developed yearslong relationships with sources who came to trust that this would be worth the exposure. But for a few, it was simply a moral imperative. They saw the youth vaping epidemic as a systemic failure. Hiding from it would only ensure that it happened again. The only way to learn from it was to talk about how it had happened in the first place.

We encountered the same challenge when it came to finding teenagers who would share their experience with us. Over the phone, my own nieces and nephews confirmed that vaping was a huge problem in their schools. They talked about students they knew and shared dramatic stories of nicotine addiction. But when they asked those same peers if they were willing to share those stories on-camera, the response was silence. They were embarrassed. They didnt want to deal with the ramifications on social media. Their parents didnt want it to affect their futures.

A public health group connected us with Jackie Franklin and her mother, Janine Browne Franklin. As a high school student, Jackie was vaping three pods a day. Her terrifying experience with nicotine addiction (detailed in the film) led the Franklins to speak out against teen vaping.

Like the great investigations of the 1990s that targeted the tobacco giants, this sort of journalism relies on individuals willing to come forward and share their experiences, often at great personal risk. The decision to do so is less a rational choice than a leap of faith. Feeling the weight of their trust, my colleagues and I agonized throughout the edit, ensuring that nothing was taken out of context or twisted around. I would lie awake at night questioning whether it was OK to cut this part or that, double- and triple-checking that it didnt violate the spirit of what was being shared.

As a journalist, your greatest achievement comes when you can cut through the spin and bring your audience the unvarnished truth. But without the contributions of these individuals, we would never even come close.

Readers can watch Move Fast and Vape Things on Hulu.

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A Film on a Crisis, Powered by Willing Voices - The New York Times