The Press Box - Media Movies: ‘The French Dispatch’ With Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

In preparation for the new Wes Anderson film, Bryan is joined by Sean Fennessey to break down the ‘The French Dispatch.’ They discuss all three features portrayed in the film and touch on how it stacks up among journalism movies.  Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Sean Fennessey Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's me, Brian Curtis, host of the press box. And I'm his co-host, David Shoemaker. And we wanted to get together today to tell you about one of our favorite podcasts on the network, the ringer wrestling show. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, David, you can't talk about your own podcast as one of your favorites. Let me do the rest of this. The ringer wrestling show is your guide for all things pro wrestling. And this month, they're talking about all your favorite weekly wrestling shows, plus pay-per-views. You can find the ringer wrestling show on Spotify or where.

ever you get your podcast. I think that's right. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the redesigned Friday press box, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Cervantes. You know, ever since we started the press box, people have asked us about media movies.

What are the best media movies ever made? Can we get a power ranking? The answer is yes, absolutely. On two conditions. One is that we don't just consider the obvious stuff. There's all the president's men and spotlight. But also, if there's a James Bond movie where an evil press baron tries to take over the world,

that counts as a media movie too. And the second condition is that we should revisit all these movies one by one. Today we've got a movie that happens to also be in theaters. It's Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, which is an ode to the old New Yorker of Harold Ross and William Sean. It's a movie that has lookalikes of real-life New Yorkers, Yorker writers, a movie that recreates a world where your expense account is limitless and you don't

have a deadline. Spoiler alert, that world doesn't exist anymore. A movie that says something I think about the New Yorker and the whole lost world of magazines. I can't think of a better guy to talk about it with than my friend, the host of the Big Picture podcast, and the ringer's very own, Mr. Sean. Here's Sean Fennessee on the French Dispatch. All right, Sean. Opening thoughts on the French What a curious film. What an unusual movie. Certainly a movie only Wes Anderson could make. I was just saying to you before we began recording, I can't believe that there's a person in the world that cares more about the history of printed media than you, Brian. And it turns out that Wes Anderson has an abiding affection for certainly the New Yorker. And I think the history of journalists and journalism is obviously a driving

force of this story. And there are so many real life inspirations on the screen. So I don't know. I enjoyed it as I do all Wes Anderson movies. I think there's probably something to be said about the fact that his movies are becoming increasingly dioramic and a little bit less human, but this is a subject that I'm so interested in, and I'm obviously a long time reader and fan of the New Yorker. So there was a lot for me to wrap my arms around. How did you feel about it? Did you like it? Diaramic, I think that's right. I think less human, but done with so much skill that even if this is a fairly slight West Anderson movie, for reasons we'll talk about in a bit, you can enjoy it so much. much second by second. It's a feast. Yeah, it's a feast. I mean, I was at the Fox

screening room out here in L.A. And I just wanted to pause the movie so many times so I could just see what was in the background of the offices of the French dispatch. It's funny. I've been revisiting all of his movies to prepare for this one and to talk about it on the big picture as well. And one thing that you notice is you rewatch and you do the exact thing you just described is there's always something happening in the background of his films. And the life, aquatic, there's a sequence where you can see a side character overlooking a beaker that is bubbling with something inside of it. And there's never any mention of it. There's no talk about a secret formula that he's distilling in the room. That's just action happening in the background while two

other characters are having a conversation. This movie is like that on steroids. There are all of these little bits and pieces. And if you look left, you'll see something fun. If you look right, you'll see something fun. You can look for the inspiration. What New Yorker cartoon is that from? What story is he pulling from here? So it is really fun. It's also really biddy in its way. You know, it's segmentized. It's overloaded with actors that you're going to recognize. So there's just, it's a feast for the senses.

Whether it's like a feast for the feelings is kind of an interesting conversation about Weston General. But I'll say, like, generally speaking, I saw this movie, not at the Fox Lot. I saw it at Telluride, the Telluride Film Festival. And I thought it would have played really well. And, you know, it really didn't play that well, which I was surprised by. I thought, you know, that's a festival where the patrons are a little bit older. and you'd think that they would have some affection for this sort of New Yorker omnibus style storytelling as well.

Response was a bit like, huh, okay, I guess that's a movie that we have here. I'm not really sure what that's about. I wonder if that's maybe a little bit of exhaustion with the West's aesthetic. Personally, I'm not exhausted by the West aesthetic. I still enjoy it. Yeah, it did run me down a little bit

by the end of this movie. I was kind of going, okay, okay, okay. But yeah, so you mentioned Wes is a New Yorker nut. is a journalism nerd like us, started reading the magazine when he was in high school. He now says he tells the New Yorker, I have almost every issue starting in the 1940s. And when he was getting current issues of the New Yorker,

he was having them bound. Amazing. To preserve them. You know, you and I thought we were looking on eBay for cool stuff. He was having his New Yorker issues bound. He's published a book of New Yorker stories that inspired this movie. it is very, very obvious from watching his other movies, at least in retrospect, that he was influenced by the aesthetic of the New Yorker.

Royal Tenenbaum's has a lot of Charles Adams in it, I think. I saw a review this week in the New Republic that says, you know, Wes really is sort of Eustace Tilly looking through the monocle. Yes. It's interesting that you say that because one thing that struck me about this movie is certainly he is reflecting on some of the great New Yorker writers over time. and the film is dedicated to some of those writers and editors. There's a, you know, a Harold Ross figure in this movie. There's a, you know, there's clearly a James Baldwin figure in this movie. But Wes is ultimately like, he's doing two things.

One, he's talked about his affection for the short stories, the fiction that you'd find in The New Yorker. And two, the Monocle, the movie kind of looks like Monaco, the magazine. It doesn't look like the New Yorker, the magazine. And it's much more visual and kind of twee. and kind of like deeply specific in a way that the New Yorker, you know, when I think of the New Yorker, cartoons aside, I think of it as a feast of words. And this is a different art form. It's a different format. And so it's interesting that he's pulling so closely from some of these journalistic heroes when it seems like historically he's been much more interested in like the literary flourishes of the

magazine. Sure. Yeah. I would say the one way it's sort of really like the old New Yorker is that so many of the scenes are in black and white, which makes it feel very tight. typeset and very old and not like a colorful busy magazine of the present, even when he has very busy backgrounds? Well, you know what the other thing that makes me think of? In the New Yorker, when you're reading a piece, obviously there is this style, particularly in the Remnick era where, and you'll find this if you read stories from the Harold Ross era, there is a kind of like a narrative structural style to every story.

Every story kind of feels the same, but it also feels a bit unreal. It doesn't feel like you're reading a piece of ink-stained, wretch, hardwired newspaper journalism. You're reading something different. You're reading something narrative and propulsive, but also meandering. And that is kind of what Wes Anderson movies are like. There's something unreal about his movies. They don't feel like real life. And that kind of fantastical but grounded nature is part of what makes him so compelling. So you can actually, if you think about the Royal Tendonbounds, or you think about the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissu, or you think about the Grand Budapest Hotel, these are kind of like really great New Yorker yarns. So in that way, it's

fitting that he is doing a movie like this. Yeah, something very 10,000 feet and something very formal, right? Like the New Yorker lead. In the summer of 1995, comma. That's a Wes Anderson movie and that's a New Yorker profile. And in the same way that, you know, the New Yorker will sometimes have these old world spellings and stylization of the grammar. Wes kind of has an old world grammar in his storytelling.

You know, there's something like you could see, gosh, what is, you know, theater would be spelled T-H-E-A-T-R-E, not E-R. There's something in that that, you know, Wes seems to be clinging to something from the past in all of his films, and this is very much a movie about the past of media. My favorite story about that is I once wrote a piece from the New Yorker's website about Star Wars, and they changed the spelling of lightsaber to S-A-B-R-E. That is not canon.

Oh, I was like, wait a second. Wait and wait just one minute here. You got New Yorker. Yeah, I really did. Let us attempt some plot summary. I don't know that it's possible to spoil a Wes Anderson movie and especially spoil the French dispatch. But just join in with me here as I try to recount a little bit of what this movie is about. We'll do.

The French dispatch is a New Yorker-esque magazine in France in a little town called Enuit surblaise. Correct my pronunciation if I'm messing up there. It is a Sunday supplement of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. So we're talking about the great days of magazine journalism and also the great days of newspaper journalism when they had international and ambitions not just covering Kansas. Okay. The movie is structured and this was truly mind-blowing like a magazine. I love this. I think this is great.

I wish more movies had this sense of invention and adventure. It starts with a talk story of a sort of talk of the town story, a little brief. then there are three feature stories, and then we end with an obituary at the end. That's it. So it's a movie about a magazine that is also kind of actually a magazine. Yeah, and there are central figures that we return to, specifically Arthur Howitzer Jr., who's played by Bill Murray in the film, and he is definitely the Harold Ross, William Sean, you know, agglomeration.

He's the leader of this Sunday supplement of this Kansas newspaper. it's obviously like an over-extended or an expanded concept of what the New Yorker is, but it's in the tradition of a family-run media business that has a kind of glamour and, I guess like money being no object seems to be a part of this. There's like there's an adoration for a time when you could overspend on something literary, and I think that's also something that Wes is very into. And so he's centering this time in history where, you know, know all that really matters is good story. And obviously Harold Ross is famed for, and Sean as well,

is famed for caring mostly primarily about story. What did you make of Wes's decision to be what the Mandalorian is for Star Wars cameos? This would be for New Yorker Pantheon level writer cameos? Well, on the one hand, I thought it was fun. Some I thought were easier to pick out than others. I think that some of them were a little bit strained. You know, like maybe this is a way to talk about the first segment, this sort of talk segment, which is Owen Wilson plays a character named Herb St. Sazirac, even in the pantheon of Wes Anderson,

extravagant names is way up there. Urb St. Sazirac. And he's supposed to be like a Joe Mitchell type. But I wouldn't say when I was watching that segment, that talks about, I was like, oh, that is Joseph Mitchell clearly. it feels like soft inspirations are kind of flittering throughout the movie. What did you think? Were you playing guessing games as you were watching or did you just let it flow over you?

Well, it's funny because whenever I watch like a Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian, I feel a little sheepish at my advanced age about, you know, screaming when Weequay is on the screen or something like that. You're written on Wedgentillies all day, yeah. Exactly. Here I felt uninhibited, you know. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh.

I mean, this is the first movie in American history to use Ved Meta as an Easter egg. Let's put it that way. VED meta, that's a name that would fit right in in the Mandalorian, too. Oh, yeah, right? That could be, yeah, it could be a season three kind of thing. No, you're right, though. But mostly he's saying, okay, I'm interested in Joe Mitchell. I like Joe Mitchell.

I'm going to do somebody who is kind of writing about the type of characters in this case, Owen Wilson's character that Joe Mitchell would write about, who's very particular about language, as we would imagine, Joe Mitchell certainly was with his very writerly fictionalized literally in metaphorical style, but also that I'm just going to use that as a starting point. It isn't really Joe Mitchell. It's just going to be just a little fizz of Joe Mitchell.

Which is fine by me. I don't need this to be definitionally non-fictional. It shouldn't be. That's no fun in a movie. I don't like getting too hung up on, is this true to the form in any meaningful way? And also, you know, whether or not Joe Mitchell is a fabulous, this is a much discussed historical topic.

I'll bet West doesn't really care. I don't think ethics and journalism is really a top of mind in this movie. No, I don't think, I don't know. This is not about ethics and magazine journalism. This is about flights of fancy. I thought the Owen Wilson story was very slight, kind of funny, mostly visual gags. Did you think any differently on that one? I mean, sounds like a really good talk of the town piece to me.

You know, what was the mission here to kind of give you something that's fewer than a thousand words that gets you entranced with its subject and then vanishes before you know it's even supposed to start? Like, that's kind of what the point of those pieces is, right? You know, as long as the prose is slick and the character is compelling, then you succeeded. I thought it was fine. I think Owen Wilson is a hugely important figure in the Wes Anderson history. He's his co-writer on the first few films.

He has starred in many of these movies. They haven't worked together as frequently of late. So there was just kind of like a dopamine hit of like, ah, yes, Owen in a West movie. I really enjoyed their reunion of sorts. I hope they do more together. I hope Owen writes more movies too, because I think when you talk about that diaramic aspect of some of Wes's movies, I may just be reading too deeply into this, but I think Owen gave a lot of those movies a lot of the heart that they had at the beginning.

I think Rushmore and Tenenbounds and films like that were really imbued with a sentimentality that was not gloopy necessarily. You know, it felt like a little earned and a little damaged. And I do miss some of that in Wes's movies. that's faded away as Owen Wilson sort of faded away as his co-writer. Exactly. That's really interesting. We should note when you talk about familiar faces that Wes Anderson has really entered

the Robert Altman's own where every role must be played by a famous person, even if it lasts five seconds. I mean, it's reputational, right? At a certain point, you cross the threshold of I've made five movies that will live forever. And so all actors are like, you know what? maybe I'll be, I'll have the chance to be in a movie that will live forever. I should just work with Wes. Obviously, Wes is famed for working well with actors. You know, he's a very specific and direct

director in terms of line readings and the setting that he creates. But he also has it like, he creates families. You know, there's a reason that Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton and the Wilson brothers and these people keep coming back to him and back to him. Francis McDormand is working with him again here. Like he, he has a troop, a proper troop now. And that troop just so happens to feature like multiple Oscar winners. It's just funny when you have somebody like that doesn't have any lines. I think Elizabeth Moss is a member of the magazine staff. I'm not sure she says anything in the movie.

Willem Defoe is a face in the movie, but really not much more than a face. We were looking at the publicity stuff and they were like, oh, Henry Winkler's available. What would I ask Henry Winkler? What was your one line like? How did that go? I genuinely, I saw the movie a couple of months ago. I think I'd forgotten Henry Winkler was in this movie. So that's a testament to how he's flexing on us.

I think Elizabeth Moss might be the best living active actress in TV and movies. And she gets one and a half lines of dialogue in this movie. What did you make of the first of the feature stories, which was called the Concrete Masterpiece? I think this was your favorite and it was my favorite too. I thought it was the one that seemed to be most interestingly in dialogue with New Yorker history and one that also felt like Wes operating at his Grand Budapest Hotel best you know building a world

building a kind of artistic landscape um oscillating between visual style you know the black and white into the color this high tone society story and this kind of you know grotty prison story also first time he's ever worked with Benicio del Toro who's just

phenomenal just a terrific actor this is a really funny part and um I mean there's a whole murderous road people just in this tiny little story, Adrian Brody, Oscar Winner, Leisadou, the Bond Girl of the moment, you know, Javier Bardem, like, there's a ton of really gifted people in this little segment. Yes, Benicio del Toro is an imprisoned murderer named Moses Rosenthaler. I'm not going to

pause for every very Wes Andersony name here. Leisadu is the prison guard and his muse. And it starts kind of wonderfully because we know that Del Toro is a sculptor and we see he, him and he's approaching Leis Adu and she's posing for him. And there's this sort of long thing. But then the sort of camera draws back and a few scenes happen and we realize, oh, wait, he is a prisoner and she is his guard. And my first thought when I saw that was great lead. I mean, really, you did the classic lead of you think it's one thing, but it's really another thing. Yeah, he's really gifted at the opening moments of movies. And he gets a chance to basically do five of them in this film because he's always resetting the story. And we've got Tilda Swinton here who's playing

a sort of a version of S.N. Berman who profiled art dealers in the New Yorker and did a number of other things in the magazine. So you have this sort of like story within a story where you have a New Yorker writer slash art lecturer delivering this story about a prisoner and his relationship with his prison guard who is creating what may or may not be masterpieces and are being desired by scheming art dealers played by Adrian Brody it's a very complex kind of serpentine

Wes Anderson story it also does feel truly like a New Yorker story within a story kind of it's sort of like something David Grand would write you know it doesn't feel that far field no until this when giving a lecture

which is the device that Anderson uses to sort of unveil this I feel like it's somebody who lived in New York was like oh I've been to lectures like this yes absolutely I have seen a journalist or a figure the art world, stand on a stage at the 92nd Street Y and talk like this. It just felt like a very familiar setting. It's also a film that feels like the right length. Like I think some of these, like you said, kind of drag on a little bit or you kind of get the point of it. When this one ended,

I was like, this is, this was ready to end. It was perfectly, perfectly segmented. And that's not, that's not to be overlooked in an omnibus film. You know, anthologies are hard to do. And the ones that work best are when they feel like they're all kind of perfectly timed to the, worthiness of their story. The second feature is called revisions to a manifesto. And it has a character named Lucinda Kremens, played by Francis McDormand, whom you mentioned, who is covering student protesters in France based on a New Yorker writer and novelist Mavis Galant, who wrote a story called The Events in May, a Paris notebook, which I read a little bit of this morning. What did you think of the second feature? Amusing, probably not my favorite

of the bunch. I thought it was the most aspirationaly hip. It seemed to be a film that tried to be, even though it's set in Paris in 68 and reflecting on real world events, seem to be trying to speak to our times. Maybe I'm holding the casting of Timothy Shalome against it in that respect. He is very much the actor of this time.

Also appearing in Dune this weekend, so quite a weekend for Timothy Shalameh. Love Francis McDormand felt like she was almost parodying like a Francis McDormand style direct, cranky but brilliant. woman role that she has come to specialize in, especially in recent years. I don't know that it's so much a story about a New Yorker story as it is a story about a New Yorker writer trying to figure out if there's a New Yorker story in the story.

And so watching her trail these young revolutionaries or would be revolutionaries in Paris, I felt like Wes couldn't figure out if he wanted to make a Moonrise Kingdom sequel or he wanted to make a movie for the French dispatch. And so it gets a little bit stuck in a gear at a certain point. So that is a real interesting tension in this movie, which is I, you know, I think of this as a media movie, a journalism movie. But Wes is very interested in telling the story of the thing rather than the story of the person covering the thing. Yes. A lot of times. And so there's this interesting tension of, am I supposed to care about the student revolutionaries or am I supposed to care about Francis McDormann

writing about the student revolutionaries here? I genuinely don't know. I mean, one thing that I learned in reading some conversations with Wes who also, we should say, published a collection of his favorite stories from the New Yorker ahead of the release of this film, which is an extraordinarily Wes Anderson thing to do. He noted that the origins of the Paris 68 protests

and this movement that was happening were a bit kind of, of slight and silly and almost adolescent. And you can see that. He's interested in that in the Shalama character and Lena Kudry who plays kind of his oppositional female counterpart in the

revolution. And I just kind of wish he told that story. And that could have been a film unto itself. You know, the way that that entire kind of like quasi uprising and social movement came to pass. And because it has almost like comic roots,

West seems well suited to it. But instead it's a little bit too interested in the Lucinda Cremant's character who I don't really totally understand at the end of the short. Yeah. And spoiler alert for anybody who wants to remain pure here, she gets involved romantically with the Timothy Shalameh character, which one sort of walks across a couple of tripwires in terms of journalism and in terms of the way we, you know, the way we see women in journalism that Wes is not interested at all in exploring.

And two is sort of like the movie absence of malice. from the early 80s. This just came up on a rewatchables podcast because we were talking about 80s Paul Newman and some of the complications of absence of malice in the 21st century. It's a much more, that's not a movie that would get made today, I don't think.

No. One thing I did that perk my ears up during this segment was at the end, the McDormon character is sharing some of her writing that she did about the student protesters. She has to think the touching narcissism of the young And I'm sitting there in the theater and I'm listening to it. I'm like, wow, Wes Anderson has really captured the way a New Yorker writer or quasi-Di-Durker writer would write about these protests.

And then later I learned that he actually just took lines from Mavis Galant. Wouldn't you if you could? Yeah. I mean, you cut. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say, if you, Brian, could republish Mavis's work under your own byline, wouldn't you do it? Well, it would kind of make me the bad art friend.

Yeah, the bad film friend, Wes Anderson. The bad screenplay friend. I thought that was very funny. All right, the third feature is the private dining room of the police commissioner, which stars Jeffrey Wright as Roebuck Wright, a very interesting and kind of surprising combination of James Baldwin and A.J. Liebling, two very, very different writers. Two great tastes.

did they go together? I'm not sure if they go together. It felt way more Baldwin to me, but I guess some of the writing style and the interests that the Roebuck Great Character has, I guess, would fit into what Liebling liked to do. But this felt very much like an opportunity to riff on Baldwin. Anderson talked about seeing Baldwin speak in some of those 1960s debates that he participated in,

and feeling like just so overwhelmed by his, you know, intelligence, eloquence, point of view on the world. And I guess he also watched the Ravel Peck documentary from a few years back, which is, you know, if anyone listening to this show has not seen that film is extraordinary, like one of the best docs the last 10 years. So this was pretty cool. The thing I liked about this one was the framing device of this was really great. This kind of like Dick Cavett-esque TV set where Leah F. Schreiber is interviewing Roebuck Wright and asking him to use his typographic memory to basically read aloud one of his

stories on television. It made me long for a period in TV when this was normal and even popular. When they were like, let's just have a public intellectual who's also a brilliant writer come out and talk about what his life and career and point of view is. That's not TV in the 21st century. No, no. It's kind of a podcast sometimes, especially on the press box. But yes, and Roebuck Wright could recall New Yorker or French dispatch stories sentence by sentence. Which you can do as well, Brian. And do you want to read one of yours right now? No, no. I've known journalists like that.

You mean people who are in love with their own stories and their own prose and their own voice? Sometimes they just break into self-quotation to you. Yeah, I do that. I thought this one was really interesting. I liked, I think, the Jeffrey Wright character more than I like the story he gets into. Agree. Which is this very, very typically Anderson-y and goofy kidnapping story about the police commissioners' son being kidnapped. But then it is also incidentally about the chef of the police commissioner, the private chef who makes these wonderful meals and his renown.

And that's where Robocrite is a little bit like A.J. Lieblum because he's interested in food as well. That got a little much for me. I don't know if it was just because it was the third in line and I was kind of wearing out by that point. But I didn't find that all that compelling, at least in terms of the story. It's a real Russian nesting doll of a movie inside of a Russian nesting doll. you know, it's got obviously this framing device that I talked about and then it's got this story that you're describing and then at a certain point the film transforms into an animated film and then we move to black and white and then we move back to color and there is a lot of flourish and maybe not as much meat in the story. And I wonder if, again, similarly, if he had decided to expand this and say like, I want to be inside of this world for 90 minutes, it might have actually served him a little bit better. but I think we're also kind of just like picking on something that you could probably do about every anthology film from, you know, Paris-Jetem to to creep show to New York stories.

Like all of these is like, well, there's the one I like and the one that I thought was okay and the one that I thought was bad. You know, like that's kind of how all of these movies tend to go because it almost forces you to choose which part you liked the most, which is different really from most of Anderson's films, which. are these, you know, they're all accordions, right? And they have all these various parts, but they have to fit together. This one, you know, and maybe that's a way to talk about the final piece of the puzzle and whether it actually does fit together. I'm not totally sure that it does, but I'm curious what you think of how it closes. The final chapter is called declines and deaths. It is about the death of Arthur Howitzer Jr., the editor of the French dispatch. In fact, we see him laid out on his desk with a shroud over him. They say, why hasn't he

gone to the morgue and somebody says because everybody there's on strike, which is a very, very good French joke, by the way. Do, I mean, I looked at that and I thought, oh, here is a symbol. It's a symbol of the death of the old New Yorker. It's a symbol of the death of the world of magazines. It's maybe a symbol of the death of print in general. How did you interpret it? Yeah, I think that's right. I think this whole thing is a love letter to a bygone era in a bygarn format. You know, I think this as a the New Yorker now is still obviously very powerful in publishing some of its best work ever

but the New Yorker for me is a website and I don't mean that in a in an insulting way it's just it's how I receive and consume most of the work that they do and physical media and physical objects are arguably the most important thing to Wes Anderson even when Wes Anderson makes an animated movie it is used

it is made with clay it is you know it is it's tactile and And he's bidding farewell to, I think, a tactile history of media that I just don't think we really have anymore. Yeah, the New Yorker you could hold in your hand. I mean, I think that's right. And it just strikes me when I think of you and I in our careers. When we first started out, this old New Yorker was, was, you know, an object of nostalgia, though I think pretty far removed when we get into the business. But there was this whole sense of, oh, my God, can you imagine there was a time when there were long,

deadlines and bottomless expense accounts and bottomless word counts. And there was a magazine that did all that. You didn't even need a peg to write an article. And now the nostalgia has turned into, can you believe there was a magazine? Yeah. When I went to, when I went to J school 20 years ago, my intro to journalism class, the first book on the reading list that I had to go by was Life Stories profiles from the Modern New Yorker, which is really one of the best compendium journalism.

books of all time. And, you know, it features Joe Mitchell and it features Calvin Trillan and McPhee and Calvin Tompkins and Lillian Ross and, you know, all of the great Truman Capote, Kenneth Tynin, like all of the giants who spent time with their figures. And this movie feels like an attempt to almost like visualize that period. And I don't, I think in 2001 when I was reading that book and kind of like dog earing it to death, I, did not imagine that it would become like true artifact. Like it is now a remembrance. It's not a reflection.

There's no like, you could update that book and add stories even just from the last five years. You know, you could just say Ronan Farrow and Giotolentino and, you know, Nicholas Schmiddle and all the people who have written great stories over the last 10 years that the New Yorker would get pieces in there. But they almost don't feel worth.

It's not that they're not worthy of a book. It feels like a book is not the right way to deliver them, nor is a movie really the right way to deliver them. We need some new form of modern media compendium. And I don't know what that is. God, I love that book, by the way. I read that Calvin Trillen story on Ed and Buchanan whenever I'm stuck on a media column. It's so dynamite.

Tone and feel and sentence by sentence craftsmanship. It's just so, it's so good. I think one thing that's interesting about this, and if we agree that Wes is not trying to deliver the real New Yorker to us, he's delivering an imaginary New Yorker. One thing about the New Yorker is it didn't die. when Harold Ross died. It didn't die when William Sean left and then died or Robert Gowley,

Bertina Brown or David Remnick, right? The whole, it is a miracle in a way that it is still going on in the age of Gila Tolentino. And I think that was one thing I thought about this movie. It was, and I totally understand that print is a thing and that that world does feel like a very different world. And we can think about that as a very specific time and place in media. But when we think about the New Yorker, it's actually defied that in a way that Sports Illustrated and other places haven't. It has sailed on.

It is still really good. And in a way, an essential part of the New Yorker story is that it outlasted that era. And it was not dependent on a particular editor to keep it alive. I think one thing that it has retained and maybe even seized more aggressively in the last five or ten years is exactly what the Howitzer character wants, which is this. menagerie of interesting brains. You know, like, if you look at the New Yorker right now, Gnomey Fry or Dorian St. Felix, or there's this like vast number of people

who I just want to know what they think about things. You know, there's still, it's still a place where they're collecting some of the most propulsive, compelling writers on the planet. And so like that, the fact that that persists is definitely a miracle. I mean, that's so you guys are talking about this on the press box weekly at this point,

just how strange things. are in our business at this moment and how difficult it is to keep a business afloat. So it does feel a little bit weird that this movie is almost like an elegy for that time because it's not that it's gone. It's just changed so radically. And it's harder than ever to position yourself without slipping into like just like the dregs of the internet. I mean, we deal with this every day at the ringer. It's like, how can you be smart and good, but also give people what they want to consume? It's a real challenge. Wes, I don't, I wonder if Wes gives it to him about anything that, like any of those concerns.

You know, do you think he's a press box listener? I don't think so. I don't think that's his first podcast. Maybe a big picture, but definitely not the press box. I don't know. I'm not so sure. We do a lot of top fives, you know? But I would add a concern to what you're talking about,

about slipping into some, you know, internet void of non-journalism, which is fetishizing the past too much. Because, you know, this idea of the old New Yorker has been, been powerful for so long. I think it's mostly been in memoirs about the New Yorker, of which they're about 19 just going through the Ross years and the Sean years. I thought of Mrs. Parker in the vicious circle if we're thinking of a movie that sort of dramatize the same kind of thing. But there's this problem with journalism is that all of us, and I am absolutely part of this problem, we fetishize things that happen in the past. And sometimes we don't look at the present and be like, you know what,

it's actually a lot better now because the New Yorker doesn't just arrive in somebody's mailbox once a week. We have tons of good journalism every day. We have tons of tweets to read every day. We have tons of stuff to access and read so easily. So it's funny to me, it's always a tension between those two things. And I always feel like you should land somewhere in the middle. I think the challenge of that is there's also more crap now. And so sifting is a big part of the job, a big part of the work. And I think also, you know, the New Yorker, like so many other legacy publications has been forced to grapple with its history and its privilege time and time again over the last 25 years. And so it puts it in this complicated like, is it okay to like this?

Is it okay to like this conversation that we're constantly having with ourselves right now? And that being said, I mean, I agree with you. There's tons of great work. You know, journalism, I don't think that this is a farewell to journalism movie. I think it's a farewell to a a refined impossible period. Like I think every West Andrews, movie is kind of like a like a you know his hero jd salinger's stories where they feel like a memory but they're actually a distorted reflection and that's really the the trickiness of doing something that feels like such a like a full-hearted ode you know it's like this never existed you know with a way that the new yorker exists in those memoirs from those writers that's not exactly what happened that's

what happened through the eyes of one person who didn't have all the information even though they were a great new yorker writer yeah and i would say anderson's coming at it even from a different perspective. He's obviously read a lot of those memoirs, but to me, this movie is from a reader of the New Yorker, especially a young reader who is imagining the glamorous way

in which those stories were written. I think that's true. I think that's a really good reading on it. And by the way, I was that reader, not of the New Yorker, because that wasn't coming to the Kirkland coach old

when I was a kid, but of Sports Illustrated, of Newsweek, magazines like that. And I just remember as a kid who wanted to be a journalist reading that and just imagining the swashbuckling and possibly cool person who wrote this

and thinking, what's that person like? Oh my gosh, what it must have been to go interview this football player. And I feel that's exactly what he's doing here. Do you think of a movie version like this for Sports Illustrated would work? You know, could you do this with any other publication? Andre Laguerre in the Glory Days of SI with Frank DeFord, Dan Jenkins banging around the office. That's kind of a fun. I don't know. That's a fun movie. Those are real characters. It is. It is. I'm putting together my treatment right now for my... So you know how to get to Fox. Yeah, that's true. I think a little less twee maybe than the French dispatch.

What style would you use? Who would be the right filmmaker? David O. Russell, you know, you want like a kind of energetic, intense, chatty series of stories about sports. I can see that. Yeah, somebody who would know how to write a movie with lots of alcohol and cigarettes in it. Yeah. For sure. Maybe we could do Quentin Tarantino's Guns and Ammo. You know, what other filmmakers could we have training their eyes onto certain magazines? I want to ask you a little bit about journalism movies. Something I'm interested in. A lot of our listeners have asked me about it various times. Where do we put this in the pantheon of journalism movies, if not to rank it?

But just how do we think of it among other ones you've seen? Boy, there are a lot of them, aren't there? Yes. This is a crowded subgenre. Maybe more than I had realized before you asked me to do this. I would say it is firmly outside of the top 10. I think it's a literary journalism movie, which is a sub-sub-genre.

And in that case, it is pretty high on the list. But, I mean, the Pantheon is filled with all-time classics. And this movie is probably not even going to go down as one of Wes's most-liked, best-liked movies. So I think it's kind of minor in the grand scheme of things. But I still like it. recommend it. What about you? Do you think it sits high? It's an interesting one because as I mentioned earlier, there's not much journalism in it.

And maybe it's just me speaking as a hopeless nerd, but I sort of wanted more stuff in the office of the French dispatch with Bill Murray as the editor. There's a very funny scene we didn't talk about where Jeffrey Wright turns in his piece and Howitzer comes in and says, don't you have any other quotes from the central subject? And he says he unveils this fantastic thing. By the way, you've had this experience as an editor where the writer is telling you something really good, but not actually putting. With you, Brian, I've had this experience with you. Did I do that? You turn stories in and then I'm like, what about the anecdote you told me about when you first pitched the story? And I'm like, why is that not in the piece? Oh, was like, oh,

was that supposed to be the lead? It happens. I mean, it happens. And that's like, there's something obviously really smart here because Wes is a writer and the psychology of a writer is part of what makes the movie work. Whether it's the psychology of a journalist, I think, is debatable. I don't feel like Wes necessarily is compelled by that. So for that reason. And you talked about the Kremens character, maybe having some, crossing some ethical boundaries.

Like, he's not really too worried about the J part of the story. He's more interested in the L part of the story. No, but he does get some little moments like that, you know, and then the right and the, and the right character comes back and says, I'm totally uninterested in that quote. And Murray says, we'll just put it in the story. Yes. Am I as direct and harsh as howitzer? Oh, no, no, no. First of all, you're speaking to me

and track changes most of the time. The delivery is a little different, I think. Well, I would love for you to come to my apartment in Paris, but unfortunately, I don't have one and we can't see each other. So it is what it is. Also, a very funny scene in this when the Tilda Swinton character is filing her expense report. And she has all these things where she went back to a house years later that she had shared with the painter or had visited the painter in.

I can't remember exactly what it is. These ridiculous old world expenses. Well, I had to do it for the story. Yeah, and now when you send an expense account, it's for like a snickers, a cup of coffee, and a tank of gas, you know? Things have changed. Exactly. I did want to ask you about journalism movies for a second because I think there are two reasons

or a couple of reasons why there are a lot of journalism movies. One is journalists become screenwriters. Exactly. And they write about what they know. But do you think it makes a good view? for a movie? Do you think journalists make good characters in movies? That's an interesting question.

I think that it's about setting, not about character. So, I would say Spotlight is a compelling story. But the characters in Spotlight are kind of wrote in a way.

You know, the craggy editor, the hard-charging journalist, the kind of surrounding figures who are supporting this hard charging journalists. These are archetypes. You know, they're not, it's not about, certainly there's something heroic in some of the work that has done in that movie or a movie like all the president's men or something inverted about that, about a movie like shattered glass where there's something like corrosive and

rotting inside of a person and they don't know how to get out of their own failures. So that's, or almost famous, which is like a kind of coming of age story and a person learning about themselves by applying their craft. So I think that it's more about, are we on a bus with rock stars? Are we taking down the president of the United States? Are we examining in the insider the kind of corrupt nature of the cigarette industry? It's like how do we build out a universe in which a person who basically almost always has a kind of moral and ethical approach to the world is rising to the top?

And so in that way, it's the same as a story about a knight or a noble pirate or a, a, someone who goes to space in order to save a trapped satellite. Like there's a hero. Journalists make for good heroes because they have good intentions and they have to uncover the truth or something righteous about that. But the figures themselves can be a little bland, honestly. Because, you know, all due respect, like, we, we're a little bland as guys. You know, I think we're pretty smart and we do a good job.

We work hard. But like, I'm no Brad Pitt and I know that about myself. You're right, though. You're right. There is a heroic journalist mold, and I think filmmakers often run into the brick wall because they have heroism, but the moment by moment nature of the reporter's life really isn't that interesting, especially now. I mean, if you're on the tour bus with a band, that's cool. If you're digging through library slips like Woodward and Bernstein, that's cool. But it becomes hard to dramatize. And by the way, writing is really hard to dramatize. And if you can point to any of these movies, we're actually sitting at a keyboard and coming up with a story has been effectively turned into something. Like language has been turned into something. I'd love to know it because I can't, none come to mind for me. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the, the upshots of the West movie, right, is the fact that he cares about the writing and he cares about the act of writing. And most journalism movies are about

pursuing the story, not about publishing the story or crafting the story. You don't, you don't really, we don't spend a lot of time on that because that's a, that's an act of solitude. You know, there's not there's not something anything cinematic per se about doing that. But let me ask you a question about this. I've said this many times on the rewatchables in the past when we do movies with cops. My dad was a cop. I grew up in a house with a cop who when he would watch a cop movie or a cop TV shows like, that ain't how it is. And he would check out. He would become disinterested in the story. And I wonder when you're watching a journalism movie, if something fantastical or wrong happens, do you lose interest? I think you rear up a little bit.

because you realize that's not the way it is. But you know what? And I know if your dad was like this, journalists I have found are suckers for heroic journalist stories that go to the ends of the truth and a bit beyond it and put a big halo on those journalists as much as anybody is. Yes, I think that's true. As much as anybody is.

Whenever I see a press story or an interview that really gussies up a journalist, what's the first thing you see on Twitter, all those other journalists diving in there and saying, oh, the fantastic so-and-so finally gets her due or his due. I mean, I think we're suckers just like anybody else to see us given that hero treatment, that noble treatment. I think you're right. I think it flatters our life choice.

There's something special about being told you have, you are a compatriot alongside the globe team that did that work in Spotlight. When, you know, I know myself. I know the work that I've done over the years. I never sought to aspire to doing that kind of work. My interests were different. And yet, we can tell ourselves that we are in the brotherhood or in the family of the people who do this work. That's right.

I'm like Woodward and Bernstein. I'm like Jeffrey Wright and Roebuck Wright. That's right. We're all one big family. All in here, Sean. The credits to the French dispatch role. And then we see this cavalcade of covers of the fictional magazine that are very, very much like New York New Yorker covers. And I don't know about you, but I was sitting in the screening and nobody in the

screening got up. Everybody was locked in until the credits ended. And I thought that was just really funny. I mean, I don't know if I don't know why. I don't know. It struck me as like, oh my gosh, we all finally finished an issue of the New Yorker. You know, we finally, we finally read the whole thing and got it off the nightstand. Well, it's funny too because one thing that does persist in in the magazine culture is the New Yorker cover. I mean, this was certainly very true, I think, during Donald Trump's administration, but what is going to be on the cover? How is that illustrated cover going to reflect our time still has some cultural currency? And maybe there's just, there's something connected about that in a way that like the stories of Joe Mitchell may not be resonating in

our culture as much. The New Yorker cover still has, it still has some power. So that might be part of it. Yeah, I think West, though, is more interested in the 50s New Yorker cover where it'd be like a horrible day in the Korean war and it'd be a field of wildflowers. Right, right. The monocle man petting a cat. Sean Fennacy, listened to him on the big picture,

the rewatchables, and everywhere else. Thanks for coming on the press box. Brian, it's an honor. This is one of my favorite podcast on our network, so I'm happy to be here. Oh, shucks. Thanks again to Sean Fennacy. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. Monday on the press box. David Shoemaker and I are back to Chew on the news of the week,

and the next Friday, sports writer Ivan Maisel stops by to talk about his career, fatherhood, and his new book, I keep trying to catch his eye. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great weekend.