The hottest ticket in New York this fall is not a sold-out Phoebe Bridgers show or Gustavo Dudamel’s debut as the Philharmonic’s music and artistic director. Forget, too, the season opener for the Knicks, the reigning N.B.A. champions.
The fiercest competition to be inside the room is for a three-hour documentary about a Silicon Valley hopeful’s public fall from grace, attached to a director specializing in absurdist comedy. There are only 1,086 seats in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and tickets for the film’s lone screening at the New York Film Festival sold out within an hour.
The documentary, “You Can See Everything,” follows Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the failed blood-testing start-up Theranos, in the 34 days before her incarceration for wire fraud and conspiracy. (She is currently in prison in Texas.) It was directed by Nathan Fielder, the mastermind behind the cult-favorite TV series “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal,” and Lance Oppenheim, a documentary filmmaker and the director of the narrative feature “Primetime.”
Tessa Senders arrived at a standby line at Lincoln Center at 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday, hoping somebody wouldn’t show up and she could secure a ticket to the 8 p.m. screening. She said the one-night-only aspect made the film feel more in demand than Harry Styles’s residency at Madison Square Garden.
Styles’s shows are “obviously popular,” she said, “but you can get a ticket if you want.”
The buzz for “You Can See Everything” began when the film premiered this month at the Telluride Film Festival in a surprise, no-phones screening. Days later, the New York Film Festival announced the documentary’s second public screening. A teaser and a full-length trailer for the film each earned millions of views and gave fans a taste of the unsettling nature of Fielder’s conversations with Holmes, who sheds a tear seemingly on cue in the trailer.
Standby lines are a familiar sight at the New York Film Festival, but they do not always form well before commuters make their first subway transfers of the day. Senders, in fact, wasn’t the first fan to arrive at Lincoln Center on Wednesday.
Arlo Lachenmeyer showed up at 2:30 a.m., after tucking in around 7 p.m. the night before, with the help of melatonin and a cup of tea. He scored the first spot in the express line, accessible only to people who had paid for priority access to the festival’s standby tickets.
A documentarian and a fan of “The Rehearsal,” Lachenmeyer was curious if “You Can See Everything” would similarly blur the boundaries between documentary and scripted production. He also looked forward to seeing Fielder and Holmes face off.
“His whole thing is that he’s kind of always in character, and you don’t know how much is real,” he said, “which is also her thing.”
By 9 a.m., a few more express pass holders were snacking on doughnuts and drinking coffee sent by another fan. They were joined by a professional line-sitter, who would be there until his client, whom he knew next to nothing about, arrived at 1 p.m.
A few midmorning arrivals to the regular standby line quickly questioned their chances after looking over at the growing express line.
In a statement, the New York Film Festival said, “We understand that it can be disappointing when a particular screening sells out, but ultimately we’re thrilled that so many people want to come together to see films in theaters and support the filmmakers whose work we present.”
Tyler Williams said the wait in the express pass line felt worth it, even though the film will arrive in theaters on Oct. 16. He had heard rumblings that the documentary could even enter the best picture race at the Oscars.
“It’s the opportunity to see this early, see what the buzz is,” Williams said.
Against the odds, a few fans got lucky without having to wait in either line on Wednesday.
Matthew Blihar, a longtime fan of Fielder’s, scoured Reddit, Discord and everything in between looking for tickets after he struck out during presale.
He had planned to hustle to Lincoln Center after work on Wednesday evening even though he suspected it was a “fool’s errand.” But then on Tuesday night, he won a ticket raffle on Discord.
“I’ve been looking for almost three weeks, so I was floored when it happened,” he said.
Brendan Leonard, who sent the doughnuts to the waiting fans, said he hoped the rations would ease the disappointment of anyone who left empty-handed.
Leonard happened to be online when the screening was announced and secured tickets within minutes.
“I don’t think I anticipated just how wild it was going to be,” he said.
One person who is not scrambling to attend the screening is John Carreyrou, who broke the story about Theranos’s issues with its technology in a 2015 article in The Wall Street Journal.
“I imagine I will see it eventually,” said Carreyrou, who is now a reporter at The New York Times. “I’m currently working on another book, so my mind has been far from Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.”
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