On Thursday, Frontline producer James Jacoby joined Boston Public Radio for a conversation about his new documentary, "Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos.” The film trackED the corporate trajectory of Amazon.com and its brazen, bald-headed leader.
Jacoby said directing the film "felt like doing the everything story," playing off Amazon’s nickname of “the everything store.”
“We really set out to do as comprehensive a job as possible [in] telling you, A to Z, how this company grew, what its strategies were, how it got involved in all sorts of different businesses from cloud computing to facial recognition, to the online commerce giant that it is.”
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The Frontline documentary portrayed Bezos as a relentless, brilliant, and often ruthless CEO who saw the value in tracking user data before many others.
“Thinking back to the mid-to-late nineties, people were timid about going shopping online," Jacoby said. "So [Bezos] was obsessed with giving the customer an incredible experience– but that also meant doing something else online that you couldn’t do in the physical world, which was essentially to gather huge reams of data about how people behaved there.”
