By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, March 2012
In late March 2012, Hollywood Reporter writer Scott Feinberg published a nearly two-hour videotaped conversation with Martin Sheen at Sheen’s Malibu home. The interview had originated when Sheen heard, “through the grapevine,” about Feinberg’s fondness for The Way — the 2011 independent drama Sheen had made with and was directed by his son Emilio Estevez. The original FishbowlLA framing, by Richard Horgan, treated the resulting video as a small documented example of what one reporter with a FlipCam could produce when the subject opened the door.
Then
Sheen was 71 at the time and had been promoting The Way across the indie-distribution cycle that had run from late 2011 into 2012. The film, structured around the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, had been a personal project for the father-son collaboration; Estevez had written, directed, and co-starred, and Sheen had been the lead.
Feinberg’s HR piece was one of the more substantive long-form video features published in the trade in 2012. The format — a single static-camera, two-hour-plus conversation in the subject’s home, without the typical Hollywood-junket cutaway shots of the interviewer — was, as the original FishbowlLA piece observed, distinctively raw for the trade-press category. The trade’s broader race-and-awards-cycle coverage had been moving toward more video-heavy formats across the preceding two years, and the Sheen sit-down was a strong example of where the form could land when the subject was willing.
The original FishbowlLA framing was admiringly procedural — a small documented example of what a single reporter with a FlipCam and solid research notes could do without the institutional video-production overhead that the broader trade was trying to scale toward at the time.
Now
Scott Feinberg has continued at The Hollywood Reporter for the entire interval since 2012 and is now one of the publication’s most-cited awards-race writers. His Awards Chatter podcast, which launched in 2015 and has continued across the decade, has been one of the most-listened awards-season interview series in the Hollywood-trade ecosystem. Many of the long-form video features from his early HR years have remained part of the trade’s archive of long-form sit-down interviews.
Martin Sheen has continued in acting across the interval, with a substantial filmography across the post-2012 years including The Amazing Spider-Man franchise, the Anne with an E series, and recurring later-career television work. He continues in selective film and television roles.
Emilio Estevez has continued in writing-and-directing work across the interval, including the The Public (2018) and television projects. The Way itself has had a continuing afterlife as a Camino de Santiago-related cultural artifact; the film has been reissued multiple times across the years, with a 2024 anniversary screening and re-release that brought Sheen and Estevez out together for the first time in years.
The 2012 piece reads now as an early-Feinberg-era HR career moment — a foundational long-form video that helped establish the kind of access-and-format combination that would eventually become Feinberg’s signature contribution to the trade. The procedural framing in the original FishbowlLA piece — admiring of what a single reporter could do — has aged into one of the small documented moments of trade-press evolution toward the long-form audio-and-video conversation that the broader category has substantially adopted in the years since.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.