Jigsaw Productions
Jigsaw Productions is helmed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, considered one of the most prolific and thought-provoking documentary filmmakers of our generation. Founding Jigsaw Educational Productions in 1978, Gibney set out to make the company an incubator for diverse filmmakers, giving each the opportunity as part of the Jigsaw team to explore and refine their talent in the art of producing and directing documentary films. In 2012, Gibney founded Jigsaw Productions and partnered with a global entertainment company allowing Jigsaw to further expand feature film opportunities and into the scripted and unscripted television series arena. In 2020, Imagine Entertainment acquired a majority stake in Jigsaw from its former owners providing an opportunity for Jigsaw to further grow its film, television and podcast series businesses.
Jigsaw has produced some of the most acclaimed documentary films, including Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which won three Emmy awards, a DuPont Columbia Award, and a WGA Award, and was one of the most watched documentaries in HBO’s history; the Oscar®- and Emmy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side; the Oscar®-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; the multiple Emmy Award-winning Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God; Showtime’s Emmy Award-winning History of the Eagles; the controversial We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks; the provocative film about Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace, The Armstrong Lie; and Client 9, the in-depth look at the rapid rise and dramatic fall of former New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer.
Jigsaw releases from the past several years include the Peabody Award-winning and Grammy-nominated Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown; HBO’s two-part special, Sinatra: All or Nothing At All; and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March 2015, and aired on CNN in January 2016 as the number one show in its time slot among the cable news networks. Zero Days, directed by Alex Gibney, was released by Magnolia Pictures after premiering at the 2016 Berlinale; Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, directed by Marina Zenovich, premiered at Sundance in January 2018; Jed Rothstein’s The China Hustle was released in theaters and on demand in March 2018 following a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017.
Most recently Alex Gibney’s No Stone Unturned, following the 1994 massacre, premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2017, and received a WGA nomination. Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge, a two-part feature directed by Alex Gibney and Blair Foster that chronicles the last 50 years of American music, politics and popular culture through the story of the magazine, aired on HBO in November 2017. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, directed by Alexis Bloom, premiered at TIFF in September 2018 before airing on A&E, and Blair Foster’s The Clinton Affair premiered on A&E over three consecutive nights in November 2018. Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley world premiered at Sundance 2019 and aired on HBO in March 2019.
Jigsaw’s active slate of highly visible TV series include Dirty Money, a six-part series on Netflix that delves into corporate corruption and scandal, executive produced by Alex Gibney who also directed the controversial episode, “Hard NOx,” about the Volkswagen emissions scandal; The Looming Tower, a scripted series that premiered on Hulu in February 2018 executive produced by Alex Gibney, Dan Futterman, and Lawrence Wright, based on Wright’s book of the same name; The New Yorker Presents, Amazon’s series which brings to life the award-winning The New Yorker magazine; Netflix’s Cooked, a four part docu-series based on Michael Pollan’s acclaimed book; Death Row Stories, a popular CNN series executive produced by Gibney and Robert Redford; Edge of Eighteen, a groundbreaking series for Al Jazeera America where Jigsaw mentored high school seniors as they filmed their lives on the brink of adulthood; and more recently Parched, a four part investigative docu-series about the water crisis that aired on National Geographic in 2017; and Viceland’s The Last Shot which follows American and Mexican basketball players who now compete in underground, cash-prize Mexican tournaments. Salt Fat Acid Heat, a four-part series based on Samin Nosrat’s book, and directed by Caroline Suh, aired on Netflix in October of 2018, and Enemies: The President, Justice & The FBI, a docu-series based on Tim Weiner’s book aired on Showtime in November 2018.
From geopolitics to sports, finance to music, all of Jigsaw’s work reflects the myriad interests of its founder, who refers to himself as a “filmmaker with journalistic baggage.” Whether the company is creating a documentary or narrative film, a scripted or unscripted series, Jigsaw adheres to a particular ethos: well-told, insightful, scrupulously researched, and visually poignant stories, which ignite and engage our curiosity. Reaching audiences on screens small or large, on platforms digital or traditional, Jigsaw aims to achieve critical and commercial success without sacrificing style or authenticity.