The New Yorker Radio Hour - Marshall Curry and Judd Apatow on “The New Yorker at 100,” a Documentary

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

This year marked a hundred years since the birth of The New Yorker, and a documentary about the magazine’s past and present, “The New Yorker at 100,” is now streaming on Netflix. The director is the Academy Award winner Marshall Curry, and Judd Apatow served as an executive producer. They sat down to talk about the process behind the film with Jelani Cobb, a longtime staff writer for the magazine and the dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The trio discussed how they approached depicting a century of journalism history on film, their own relationships to The New Yorker, and what makes David Remnick so hard to interview. This interview took place at the 2025 New Yorker Festival.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. For months on end, we had a film crew roaming the halls of the New Yorkers' offices. They'd sidle in as my colleagues and I pitched ideas, developed stories, picked cartoons, examined facts in excruciating detail. The works. They were everywhere. The whole grueling process of putting out a magazine, they were witness to it all. Now, the scrutiny, I have to admit, wasn't always comfortable. I'm used to being on the other side of the pencil,

but as the New Yorker reached its centennial year, we wanted to open our doors and let readers into what we do every day, and in a way that we never had before. The result of all that scrutiny is the documentary film called The New Yorker at 100, which is streaming now on Netflix. The director is Academy Award winner, Marshall Curry,

and Judd Apatow was an executive producer. We screened The New Yorker at 100 for an audience the New Yorker Festival not long ago, and afterward Apatow and Marshall Curry sat down to talk about the process behind the film with staff writer Jelani Cobb, who was also the dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The thing that struck me about this film, you know, among the things that struck me about this film, is that having a sense of the history and a sense of the magazine and all of the things that go into it, is that you. It would seem to me just an impossible task for a century.

It'd be difficult to do this about one year at the New Yorker. And even, you know, the kind of joke, the Ted Denson joke about the stack of New Yorkers that, you're like, I'm never going to get through those. And that's just like a year. And so I wonder how you all approached the daunting task of taking. this sprawling, incredibly significant, culturally significant publication, this idea that is the New Yorker, and turning it into this very taught, very disciplined frame that we just got to understand a century of its life. I mean, that was definitely the challenge of the film, was you've got this unbelievable magazine,

even just getting a tiny fraction of the current writers was impossible. And that times 100 years. It was kind of an impossible task. Right before I started, Nick Palm Garden told me, trying to make a 90-minute film about The New Yorker is like trying to make a 90-minute film about America. And I thought, there's something to that. There's something to that.

And so we sort of decided we're not going to be able to just have everything. we're going to pick historical events that have a great story that are about a piece that affected culture, that are about a piece that affected the magazine, and we're just going to pick a tiny number of them, and the same was going to happen with the writers and the cartoonists and the cover editor folks. And we were just going to make it a tasting menu. It was going to be a sampler box of chocolates. weren't going to be able to bring you the whole thing.

But it was going to be enough to just give you a sense of what this magazine's history was. But somebody said that it should have been a 10-part Ken Burns series, and it could have been. Like, it would not have been boring if we'd had the bandwidth to do that. I don't know. Did you have any trepidation? Did the scope of this give you any trepidation as a producer? So, yeah, you're scared because of something you respect so much and you don't want to to a really terrible version of it.

And so I think that, yeah, we knew that encapsulating it was going to be impossible. But, you know, for me, I just always think, can every part of it be great? And so, you know, when David Remnick says they want the magazine to be great and humane, I think that's what Marshall captured in showing the people and how it's crafted each time it comes out. And so my main thing that I did was to say, I'm not going to direct it. Let's get Marshall to do it. And he just did such a beautiful job because I feel like making this was like trying to make an issue of the magazine. Like you, he had a limited amount of time.

We knew, well, this is when the anniversary is. And there's how many months was it the whole project? Like 11 months. Yeah. But it's like making Saturday Night Live. Like you have a week. you have at a certain amount of time. And I just think he did such a beautiful job

making all those really difficult and also heartbreaking decisions because we all know of other things that we're like, oh, how come they didn't talk about that? But the choices are really great. It did feel at sometimes like I was, you know, our team was in this field of fireflies with a jar

and you just sort of run and catch one and then they'd catch one more and there were just this sort of incredible constellation of fireflies. everywhere you looked. You know, one of the things that was new to me to hear articulated was that irreverence has always been part of the New Yorker. And we tried to include that in the making of the film. And I think you brought a lot of that to what we were doing. I think also you were the one who suggested that Carol Burnett. You said, have you ever seen the thing where she pulls the wig off?

And so we looked that one up. We're like, that's going in the movie. So, yeah. But we had an amazing team, including some who are here, and I just want to take two seconds to just call out some of the folks who are here, because this was made by a group. Zan Parker produced with me. She's amazing. Elizabeth Martin, who's

a producer, also my wife. Peter Yost, Steve Bennett, Lizzie McGlynn, archival producer. Norton Jordan did the unbelievable animation. Josh Church, Helen Estherbrook, Sarah Amos,

and of course everybody at Netflix who's made this whole thing happen and everybody at the New Yorker. I know there's some New Yorker folks here. You guys were incredibly patient with us in your space and incredibly generous with your time. I'm curious, given the amount of material that there is to work with, how did you approach the archive? And, you know, how much stuff did you look at from previous eras and previous, you know, decades of the magazine's life? We probably started with, I don't know, 15 or 20 kind of greatest hits stories that if you ask anybody who knows the New Yorker, what are the main stories, the top 20 or so, come up frequently. So we kind of started with that. And then, yeah, like I said, we were looking for things that affected the magazine, that affected the history.

And, of course, we're making a movie. So it also had to be something that had a visual component. I remember the first time I met David when I was sort of pitching myself on the project, I said to him, you know, frequently young filmmakers will ask me for advice about what makes a good documentary. And my stock answer is there are some stories that are great New Yorker stories, but they're not documentaries. Because the documentary has to be visual. And I said, David, I got to tell you, I feel pretty weird because I'm here pitching my cautionary takes. that I tell hundreds of young people not to do.

But it just seemed like there were so many brilliant people and so many amazing stories that it was worth figuring it out. But so finding things that were visual was part of what narrowed our list down. And then, you know, we edited more of these historical stories than finally made in the film. We shot more writers. I mean, you know, Adam Gottnick and Jill Lepore

and these, like, amazing people who I loved. And then as the movie had to get smaller, and smaller. We couldn't include it all. And it was reading books. It was watching documentaries. It was doing, you know, our archival team did an unbelievable job of scrubbing archives and trying to find what could you make a little mini film from. Is it okay, if I turn your own question back on you and ask both of you, how you became aware of the New Yorker or what's your earliest kind of consciousness about the New Yorker is? I'm very embarrassed to answer this question, but it wasn't

that long ago. But it is pretty bad. I'm from Long Island, and my magazine of choice, I know if you've heard of it, it's us weekly. And you know, that was most of what I was reading. TV guide, I'd read it like a book because there were articles at the front. And so I was writing a movie with Owen Wilson, and I went to visit him in Texas, and his parents are very cool people.

And his mom, Laura, was Richard Avedon's assistant and did the Old West photo collection, and is an amazing photographer. And Owen was talking a lot about the New York, and I had heard of the New Yorker before, but I don't think I had read it. And I just was so embarrassed that it sounded so. smart and I couldn't talk to Owen about it. You know, like I just was embarrassed. And then Wes, you know, obviously he was very into the New Yorker.

And I just thought, what kind of a Long Island idiot am I that I don't know about this? And then I started reading it then. So the answer is 42 years old. And Marshall, what about you? I grew up in New Jersey mostly and my parents got the New Yorker. It was this thing that I would look at the cover and flip through the cartoons. And that was sort of it. And then, you know, over time, I started looking at reading the talk of the town.

And then maybe a few more articles. And then, you know, in my 20s, I got my own subscription. But so I actually have always liked it. I can't say, like, making this film, I realize that there are real fanatics about the New Yorker. I couldn't have named all of the editors. And I couldn't have, like, you know, there are people who really know the New Yorker. I was not one of those. I was like a casual consumer.

But I liked it. And I thought, I knew how smart the people were who worked there and how creative they were and how unusual their obsession was. And so that was kind of what drew me to it. One thing I'm sorry, one thing I just wanted to say that I also think Marshall did so well that we were excited about is just telling the story of the people who work at the New Yorker. Because, you know, people are so tough on journalism. And I never understand it when everyone's mad at the media at the, at the, level they are. But when you watch something like this, you see how dedicated and honest and amazing everybody is. And I think it's really important to put things like that out in the world.

Judd Apatow, along with Marshall Curry at the New Yorker Festival. We'll continue in a moment. I have to say one thing I really appreciated. I kind of laughed out loud was the inclusion of Bruce, you know, office manager. When I first, when I first got to the New Yorker, like, every problem that I had, they sent me to Bruce. And it could be anything, you know, like, I feel like I'm getting a toothache. Go talk to Bruce. You don't know what to do. It was like every single thing.

And like at every institution, probably at your job, you know, or at your kid's school or whatever, there's that one person that seemingly makes all of the things, all the engines work. And so it's always like, Bruce, what exactly is in your job description? I do want to ask if there was anything, aside from the scope, which we've talked about, if there was anything else that was a particular challenge in doing this project? I mean, the number one challenge was scope. Just how do you get it all down? The other challenge was that there wasn't an obvious arc to it.

You know, most of the movies that I make are one or two people who want something. and then they have obstacles, and at the end they get it or they don't get it. And so we had to figure out, like, how do these scenes fit together? How do all of these characters who are connected by this magazine but don't necessarily all work in the same space together,

interact with each other? How do we build something that feels linear like a movie? But I'll say the other big challenge was that everybody who works at the New Yorker knows how a profile works. They and that makes them hard to make profiles about right because I remember there's a trick that you learn as a documentary filmmaker very early when you're interviewing somebody you ask a question and then you let the person answer and then you don't speak yes that's right

because your temptation is to jump on to the next question that's right but if you leave that hole there then it creates this kind of socially awkward silence, and frequently the person who you're interviewing will fill that silence, be drawn to fill that silence. And they'll say something that's like a perfect summation of the thing that they had just said in a long-winded way or that's a surprising twist on the thing. It's like frequently the best stuff.

And I was interviewing David, and he said something, and I waited. And he looked at me, and he nodded. And I looked back at him. And he said, I know this trick, too. I was like, ah. So also, I should say, Marshall has just ensured that no one from the New Yorker will interview anyone in this room now.

So, you know, just the sort of awareness of how these stories, how their stories were going to be told is a constant sort of cat and mouse challenge. But, you know, if you spend enough time around some of the story, somebody, you get, and they're willing. And I think that the people who we profiled were the people who were, you know, were willing to sort of share themselves, then you can get surprising, delightful insights. Yeah, I think also the film did a good job of, you know, from my vantage point, seeing how something that I submit, which I think of as just a bunch of words, goes through this process

and gradually becomes a New Yorker article. You know, and so you send it to them, and they send back edits, and you go back and forth with your editor, and then you send it back, and after you've addressed all the edits, and they send it back to you, but now it's in New Yorker font.

And that looks different, and you go through copy edits, and then they send another galley back, and now it has cartoons. And over the course of it, it turns into this thing that you wrote, but you don't wholly own.

Like, it becomes a part of this entire collective undertaking. And, you know, especially the fact-checking, which I thought was a really great depiction of what that experience is like. I will add an addendum to David's point, however, which is that he said it's been compared to a colonoscopy. And I think that the entire thing is that it has been compared to getting a colonoscopy while being audited by the IRS. I've been on the other side of that

where you get the call they want to go over all of it with you and you can't believe that you have to do it like why do you have to do it like because you did an interview you have to talk to someone for an hour and a half on the phone and say yeah I did say all the stuff you're saying

but then every once in while you say something really terrible to a reporter and then they go did you say that and you're like no and it's on the table tape. I don't know. That be AI. I don't know. So, I do want to talk a little bit about

history, which is that you pointed this out. It had never occurred to me prior to you making this point, but four of the five editors in the New Yorkers history have been non-native New Yorkers. And

I wonder, just kind of in the course of doing this, and getting an assessment of who Harold Ross was and who William Sean was and so on, if that registered anyway, if you came up with any kind of armchair theory about like what binds these people together or what maybe common themes there are in these figures that have led the publication. Yeah, I mean, that was something that surprised me if you asked me the day before I started this project, who do you think founded the New Yorker? I would say, ah, some Princeton guy from the Upper East Side or something.

And no, it turned out it was a high school graduate from a Colorado Mining Town. And that is a big part of what makes the New Yorker the New Yorker, I think. Not to say they don't have any Princeton guys there, but also there

is an outsider perspective to New York. And I've heard Susan talk about it too, just that if you have an outsider's view, you can see things that insiders can't see. there's a there's a famous e. B. White quote that we

considered putting at the beginning of the film that basically talked about the three New Yorks. Yeah, that's right. And there's the first New York, which is the New York of the locals who, you know, have been here forever, the native New Yorkers. Then there's the New York of the commuters. And then

there's the New York of the settlers or the pilgrims, the people who come to New York looking for something. And E.B. White says that the first gives it its stability, the second gives it the churn and the money and the third gives it its passion. And that third group is a surprisingly significant number of people who've run the New Yorker, the people who built the New Yorker, and the people who are there now.

I mean, there are lots and lots of folks who work there who are outsiders and bring that kind of love of New York but outside perspective. I mean, it seems like that is like the quintessential New Yorker. You know, which is, you know, I'm a native New Yorker, but my mother came here from Alabama and my father came here from Georgia. And in some ways, I feel like they were more New Yorkers than I am. I've always taken the city kind of for granted in that way. And so, Judd, I wondered, you were attached to this project first, if I understand correctly. What was the draw? You know, what was the appeal?

Or was it just, I'll show that Owen Wilson. Well, I mean, I love the magazine. festival. And so I... You can applaud for that. And I also love movies like this. Like, this is the kind of movie in documentary that I want to exist. And that's basically how I decide what to do. But I've also had such a nice relationship with the magazine over the years.

I always remember being at this festival in 2007 with Seth Rogen right after knocked up and Super Bad came out. And it was just one of the most fun nights of my entire life. David Denby interviewed us. And it was so great. And also, this sounds strange, but when I made the 40-year-old virgin, there was a review that David Denby had for it. And at the end, he said something that really inspired me in my writing afterwards. He was talking about Catherine Keener's relationship with Steve Krell.

And he said something like, you know that this relationship is going to be really hard, but it's going to be worth it. And I felt deeply understood in what I was trying to express in the movie and it kind of gave me the courage to write knocked up like, oh, you could write complicated relationships that are kind of rough at times.

And so I've just always felt that connection with the magazine and people like Richard Brody who's always been very kind to me. And so I was happy to be a part of this in a tiny way so I could pretend I'm part of the New Yorker. Since this is so deeply concerned with history,

is there any kind of idea that the materials that you generated that didn't make it into the film? Will that ever be available? Will that ever be part of the New Yorker's archive? Will someone be able to say a researcher in the future, be able to go and look at, you know, three interviews that didn't make it into the...

That's probably a Netflix question, really. Okay, so people are Netflix. So, you know, you have some people from Netflix here. Let's make that happen. I do, you know, in the old days, we would have DVD extras that you would put at the end of the DVD. Because we do have, you know,

scenes that we cut, long interviews that we did, lots of folks, history that we explored. I think Netflix is here tonight. Let them know. I mean, you should cheer for this. Ramp up the pressure.

We'll have to follow up later and see what they think. We have some questions from the audience. What was something about the current magazine or its history that surprised you during your research or the filming? to be able to witness the level of obsession was surprising. Like, I'd heard people talk, oh, the New Yorker has this fact-checking department,

and, oh, the New Yorker's, you know, obsessed with their work. But to see a five-hour meeting where they literally go through paragraph by paragraph and argue about whether a word could be a better word, not even factually, but just like, would this be more precise, would this be better? to see how kind of ridiculous some of the obsession is. Ridiculous in the, or let's just say, inefficient. Like they have 20-something fact-checkers on staff. They spend so much time,

and they're competing with magazines and Internet stuff that's just sloped, that's just pouring out. And it's like admirably inefficient. It's like monks who are copying the books over as the barbarians are destroying the libraries. That's what it feels like. And sometimes you're like, are these people like Amish? Or are they like the saviors of culture and intellectualism? One of the movies that I looked at when I was trying to find models was Geo Dreams of Sushi,

which is sort of a weird choice for a movie about a, a magazine, but it's about obsession. It's about picking something that you love and being totally obsessed with it. And I started to think that it was kind of a metaphor for what the New Yorker does, which is they're not trying to compete with McDonald's hamburgers. They're going to make carefully crafted sushi from that day's fish piece by piece for a very small setting of people who really appreciate it. I frequently have a question that I want to know the answer to.

That's what propels me. And in this case, the question was, how does the New Yorker exist when Newsweek and time and U.S. News Report and Life and Harper's to some extent, that all of these things have been either shut down or tiny shadows of themselves? How did this magazine do it? And I think that the answer is they make a product. that you cannot get for free on the internet, and they ask people to pay for it. And it's kind of amazing.

So New Yorker.com, if you'd like to fill out your subscription, or renew, or give one as a gift. Use purchase code Marshall Curry on every headway. I get 10%. What stories of sequences in your time filming did you love but had to cut? I mean, a number of things.

I mean, Jellipore is. just a genius and hilarious and she was working on a piece at the New York Public Library, which has the archives of the magazine. I don't even want to tell you because you're going to all be thinking like, what the hell? Why is that not in the movie? But, you know, they say you have to kill your darlings, and it was an incredible darling of darlings. But, you know, we had a scene with Adam Gottnick, who also is just like embodies the history and the knowledge of the magazine that couldn't make it in.

there were a lot of heartbreaks. Yeah. Was there more that you would have liked to say about the magazine's coverage of race and the long absence of black writers and editors during its history? Yeah, I mean, you could make a movie about that, probably, but it was

quite a while before they began to explore the black experience in a serious way and before they started to have black editors and black writers. And I mean, each of these each of these three-minute historical beats in our film could be their own film.

Charlene Hunter Galt, who was the first Black staff writer at The New Yorker, talks a little bit about her entree to the magazine in her latest collection of essays. If you look that up, she does talk a little bit more. You can get a little bit more of a kind of full exploration through her viewpoint of entering the magazine and the climate that she came into and so on. And I think Jamaica Kincaid has talked some about that as well. But, you know, there could be a sequel to this, don't you think? Like, isn't that what we're trying to say to Netflix?

Who's here somewhere? So when we were backstage, we were talking a little bit about this, about how central humor is in this film, which is when I first sat down to watch it, I was expecting, it's like, oh, okay, we'll just kind of go through the history of the magazine, and we'll see. Like, you know, Tina Brown's era, you know, brought these changes and so on. But, you know, like the audience, you know, I laughed out loud.

And I wondered if that was meant to be a kind of reference to the magazine's origins as a satirical publication or how did that editorial tone come about? We talked about it from the beginning. There's a version of this that feels very kind of dusty. And then there's a version that's what the magazine is. is, which is very alive and in the moment of today. And it does sort of structurally mirror, as you said, the fact that the magazine was founded as this comic weekly, and then over time became more serious. Our profiles that we ordered kind of do that too.

We sort of focus on the cartoons near the front, and then the politics happens. And then closer to Tina Brown's era, we discover celebrity profiles. and things like that. So it has a rough structure that follows the tonal changes of the magazine through history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is important for the audience to know? I mean, I guess being a journalist is really hard today.

Being a fact-based journalist is really hard today. And this movie is intended to be a celebration of that hard, underappreciated work. and I think some of our favorite responses after we've screened the film. I've heard a couple of young people say, you know, I never thought about being a journalist before, but from watching the film, it kind of seems like something I'd want to do.

And to me, that's like, that's a great review for it. Did you tell them to come to Columbia Journalism School? No, it's like, I'll give you some cards. One other just anecdote is that, that as we were finishing the film, we needed a song for the final sequence. And we needed something that was New York themed, but it needed to have like a dynamic range

that could both sort of sit underneath David Remnick talking about the importance of the magazine and also under party footage and then would have like a little punch when you go to the credits that would say New York. And we were just trying all these different songs. And I texted Kelifasana. the music, brilliant music mind that's featured in the film.

And I said, do you have any ideas for a New York song that would work? And he said, what if you got somebody like Matt Bermaninger from the National, this sort of like cool indie rock band to record Taylor Swift's Welcome to New York? And he didn't know, but I'm super good friends with Matt Berninger. And Matt's wife was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. And I had been talking to Matt as well. of like, can you think of any song? So I called him and said, hey, I just had this idea.

Would you be willing to do this? And he said, well, the problem is, we were talking on a Saturday. He said, on the day after tomorrow, I'm going to California to rehearse. I'm about to go on tour. And he said, but tomorrow I could go into the studio and record this song. And he said, but I don't know if Taylor Swift's going to let you use the song. Like, you know, she's Taylor Swift. And so he said, I'll record.

record it. If you can get the rights, then you can use it. If not, then whatever. And so, he recorded the song. He sent it to me the next day. We cut it into the film. It was perfect. It had, like, all that fun dynamic range. It was cool. It was smart. It was poppy. I write Taylor Swift an email. Two days later, she says, sure. Wow. You know, how do you have her email? You know, it's like, Taylor Swift never replies to my emails. So that's the song at the end of the, it's an unreleased version of Taylor Swift's. Welcome to New York.

I think it'll be, it'll be coming out at some point. Ladies and gentlemen, Marshall Curry, Judd Apatow. Thank you for your work. Thank you for the film. The New Yorker at 100 is on Netflix now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. See you next time.