On March 20, as Americans were huddled in their homes with little else to do, Tiger King appeared in their Netflix queue.

On March 30, 34.3 million of them watched it. By the end of April, 64 million people around the world joined them. It was one of Netflix’s most successful releases to date.

“The pandemic definitely broadened the audience,” admits Abel, one of seven editors who worked on the project.“It helped reach people who otherwise would never have considered watching it.”

Abel’s credits ranges from films like The Fog of War and Fahrenheit 11/9, to TV shows like The Dana Carvey Show, Louie and 30 Rock, but Tiger King would be one of his most challenging assignments. He would be the first to board.

BIG CAT PEOPLE
For those who don’t know, Tiger King focuses on the small but deeply interconnected society of big cat conservationists such
as Carole Baskin (owner of Big Cat Rescue in Florida), and collectors such as Joe Exotic, a zookeeper in Oklahoma, whom Baskin accuses of abusing and exploiting wild animals.

Filming for the show actually began as far back as 2014 when the project was called “Big Cat People.” The original concept came from Eric V. Goode, an animal activist and filmmaker known primarily as the creator of the popular 1980s art nightclub Area. His vision was to produce a series about how wild animals are used and abused.

In 2016, Goode asked Abel to cut a sizzle reel of the material he had shot so far, but it was more like a fizzle reel. There was little interest. A subsequent feature-length rough cut of the early material also failed to impress.

In Spring 2017, CNN even hired Goode to do a pilot – but it didn’t go forward. Abel’s theory was that Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory was already filling the airwaves with enough daily drama.

Despite not having any real interest yet, more crazy things kept happening, so they kept filming – Joe had just brought in another business partner; Joe got arrested. It was too good to justify shutting off the cameras. They were bleeding money – Goode’s own money – but they all knew that they were on to something.

“Working on Tiger King was like flying the plane as we were building it,” Abel explains.

In early Summer 2019, Team King received meeting invites from Netflix, as the project’s focus shifted from an expose of big cat treatment toward a true crime miniseries about the life of Joe Exotic.

During this time, Joe’s trial kept getting pushed back.

“It ended up being nine months where we were waiting to film the outcome of that trial,” Abel explains. “It turns out that that stretch was a blessing. The footage we got during that time was crucial to the series.”

One of the things Abel discovered while thrown into the weird world they found themselves in, is that random, inexplicable things somehow worked, such as interviews in the bathtub and gratuitous jet ski scenes.

“Co-editor Camilla Hayman was the brainchild behind this scene,” Abel explains. “It lands right after a character named James Garretson hints that his same undercover informant operations that put Joe Exotic in jail would be continuing against other tiger abusers. At first, I resisted the cliche of using the ‘Eye of the Tiger’ song, but seeing James trying to look slick on the jet ski was so silly and captured his inflated sense of self-importance so perfectly, it stayed. Many people say it’s their favorite sequence.”

Another challenge of the multi-part doc series was achieving a cliffhanger at the end of each episode.

“We had fantastic cliffhangers that we had to abandon because of a structural re-order,” Abel says. “Episode one’s cliffhanger, in particular, was difficult to discover. We needed to paint Joe as dangerous but it was too early to make him unlikable. We settled on seeing Joe buy ammunition and explosives and blow up a dummy representing his archenemy [Carole Baskin]. It showed him as potentially unhinged but not quite a psychopath, and hinted at crazy events to come.”

Abel admits that not a whole lot actually happens in the series. “There was a lawsuit, and Joe hired someone to kill Carole Baskin. In terms of plot points it’s not a whole lot to hang your hat on. But it was a character study. We did deep dives into each character, interviewing them about the most minute details of their lives, so that we had the building blocks to craft a story people were drawn to.”

Abel and the core editing team – Hayman, Pedro Alvarez Gales, Nicholas Biagetti, Dylan Hansen-Fliedner – greatly benefited by using the messaging app Slack. With Abel in Louisville and everyone else in New York, it was the best way to stay on the same page.

“I could ask something of our first assistant Stephen Walker – who had been there the longest of anyone – as detailed as ‘is there anything where Joe looks sad but isn’t talking and is wearing this shirt?’ and Stephen would know exactly where it was.”

With such a large and fluid project, the editors would tackle whatever fire needed putting out at any given moment, and as such, most of them worked at least a bit on every episode. Daniel Koehler and Geoffrey Richman, ACE, joined for a few months between their projects as extra eyes to help sharpen the narrative.

In early 2019, during the last year of filming and editing, a filmmaker named Chris Smith, who had directed the documentary Fyre (edited by Koehler and Biagetti) on Netflix, linked up with Team Tiger. Having worked with Netflix on numerous projects, Smith helped Goode and his co-director Rebecca Chaiklin get their series in tip-top shape.

Tiger King proved a tough nut to crack in regard to test screenings – the series was too long for audiences to want to sit through and give feedback.

“Every documentary I’ve worked on we’ve done lots of rough cut screenings, sometimes spread out over years but we didn’t have that luxury with Tiger King,” Abel explains.

“We had to trust our own judgment and maintain objectivity about how the material played the first time we saw it.”

Former boxer Mike Tyson admitted on Instagram that after watching the show it was “foolish” and “wrong” for him to have kept two tigers in his home in the 1990s.

The story continues. At press time it was reported that Nicolas Cage and Rob Lowe were in talks to play Joe Exotic in two separate projects. Joe’s legal team was preparing to send his case to President Trump in an attempt to get the convicted zookeeper pardoned.

As a result of the series, long-stagnant legislation to protect big cats is suddenly in play in the mainstream.

While the show evolved away from animal cruelty as its main focus, Abel says that it was “important for people to learn that this is happening and come away with the idea that breeding tigers for life in captivity is bad and we need to do something about it. I think we’ve ultimately pulled back a curtain to a world that people didn’t know existed.”