Vice pitched its first MTV video project as 'Jackass meets 60 Minutes'
Suroosh Alvi · VICE: Suroosh Alvi · Oct 10, 2016 · at 27:08
Suroosh Alvi, co-founder of Vice Media, explains how Vice secured its first video production financing from MTV in 2006.
0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We took a meeting with MTV, and they said, if we gave you money to make a DVD, what would you do? And we said it would be, like, Jackass meets 60 Minutes. And that worked.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Suroosh Alvi
Founders faked a Village Voice lawsuit to justify rebranding as Vice
“We told the world that we were being sued by the Village Voice, and that's why we had to change the name to Vice.”
Founders bluffed about an investor's interest to secure a meeting with him
“We said in, in that interview in La Presse that he was interested in buying us, and he then read it, and then had his office contact us a few days later and said he wants to meet you guys.”
Alt-weeklies failed to properly cover underground counterculture
“The depraved underground culture that, that I was obsessed with was not being covered properly in the alt-weeklies.”
Early Vice advertisers were given total freedom over their purchased pages
“Our view towards advertising, if you buy that page of advertising, you own that page, you can do whatever you want with it.”
Shane Smith settled Vice's apparel debts for ten cents on the dollar
“We owed all this money to these Italian, like, fashion companies who were manufacturing our clothes, and Shane went and took meetings with all of them, and figured out how to reduce the debt. So he's like, well, I know you want 200,000. I've got 20. Take it or…”
Vice accidentally exposed fugitive John McAfee's location via unscrubbed photo metadata
“There's the one, the McAfee story, I don't know if you remember that one the guy who did the He was the guy who did the antivirus software, he was, like, on the run from the police a couple years ago? Exactly, where we kind of embedded with him, and released a…”