52 Icons, plate No. 01 and beyond
The builders. The stubborn. The overlooked. The obsessive. The ones who were told the thing would not work and did it anyway. The self-taught. The quiet operators. The people who kept going after the money ran out and nobody was watching.
These are the founders we film. There are not many of them, and we are hard to satisfy.
We come while the work is still happening. Not the retirement interview, not the victory lap. We want the habit, the ritual, the thing a founder does at six in the morning that nobody has ever pointed a camera at, because that is where the story lives.
Our style is not for everyone. We ask the direct question and then we sit in the silence afterwards. Some founders find that uncomfortable and decide it is not for them. The ones who sit with it end up with a film they are still sending to people in five years.
I am making this because somebody tried to sell me the other version of it. 52 Icons is the version I wanted to buy and could not find.
We stay out of frame. No presenter, no interviewer on camera, no logo on your chest. The narrator observes and never becomes the subject. One voice carries all fifty-two films, so the series holds together and no single film shouts over the others.
Every film states the strongest argument against its subject, fairly, in the subject's own habitat, and leaves it standing. We do not resolve it for you. A film with nothing at risk in it is an advertisement and it is watched like one. This is the part that makes the rest believable, and the reason a founder can send one of these to an investor without wincing.
The collection is fifty-two plates in four chapters of thirteen. The chapters are the habitats: what a founder struggled against and overcame, rather than the sector they did it in. The industry is the plate. Each plate recognises one founder from a distinct industry, and when a plate fills, that industry closes for the life of the series, and it stays closed. We do not announce a subject before their film is commissioned, so the list grows one line at a time rather than being published in advance.
You hold editorial control from the first planning call and you sign off the final cut before anything goes out. We describe the arrangement plainly, in writing, every time: the films are published on Forbes.com under licence and secured under contract. No audience figures we have not measured. No award badges.
We choose our words carefully. Content is banned here, and so are sizzle, brand film, case study and thought leadership. What we make is a documentary about one person, seven to ten minutes long, in the register of natural history.
I am the person you deal with from the first call to the final cut, and the person who tells you when there is no film in it.
A natural history film does not flatter the animal. It watches for long enough to be worth watching. We are doing that fifty-two times.
Jeremy LevittExecutive Producer, Fifty Two Icons