The Press Box - One Perfect Story: Stephen Rodrick on Writing About Lindsay Lohan

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Bryan is joined by journalist Stephen Rodrick on the 10th anniversary of his New York Times story "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie." They dive into Rodrick’s career writing celebrity profiles and working with creatives, discuss the rare full access he had on the set of the film 'The Canyons,' touch on the writing process alongside director and screenwriter Paul Schrader and actress Lindsay Lohan, and more. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Stephen Rodrick Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about the albums you love with Dissect, a music analysis podcast hosted by me, Cole Kushna, a lifelong musician and composer. Each season of Dissect dives deep into a single album, forensically dissecting the music, lyrics, and meaning of one song per episode. Our newest season is covering Tyler the creator's Igor, a beautifully honest album in which Tyler explores love, communication, masculinity, and truth. Listen to Dissect today only on Spotify, because great art deserves more than a swipe. Happy holidays, media consumers.

Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes, thought it'd use this week to try something a little different at the old press box. It's a new feature called One Perfect Story, sort of like the movie Twitter account One Perfect Shot. Here's my pitch for episode one. Ten years ago next month,

all of us reporter types who were typing away at our stories suddenly stopped. Because this, amazing and envy-producing piece of magazine journalism had just been published on the website of the New York Times Magazine. The author was Stephen Roderick. The story was about Lindsay Lohan, then at a pretty turbulent point in her career, making a movie called The Canyons with the director Paul Schrader, who wrote Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. And what was so envy producing about this story was that Roderick hadn't just been on the set for a day, like you usually get with a celebrity profile.

He'd been on the set for the entire making of the film. He'd seen with his own eyes all the battles between Lohan and Paul Schrader. He had been able to write not just a hell of a piece, but offer a look at movie making you almost never, ever get to see in magazines. So one perfect story, episode one, is about, here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie. Feel free to pause it right here and read the story. If you want to, you can even go watch the canyons.

Wouldn't recommend it. But then unpause and listen to this interview I conducted with Roderick in Los Angeles earlier this month. He will explain how the hell somebody pulls something like this off. You're Stephen Roderick. All right, Stephen. I first knew you as an ESPN magazine writer. Yeah.

Later for pieces in New York. York Magazine, New York Times Magazine. What's your career like in 2012 when you're reporting this story? I was working on contract, I think, at that time for Rolling Stone and Men's Journal with an agreement I could do one or two pieces for a place like the Times Magazine. And one of the interesting kind of facets of this is that Rolling Stone, they'll do like go on the road with a band for a week or two or, you know, I've gone out with Chris Rock for three or four days, but they had little interest in doing a process piece where it's like, okay, I'm going to follow making this movie for three or four months, and then we'll write about it whether or not

the movie's success or not. So I pitched it to the Times Magazine, and, you know, the Rolling Stone really wasn't interested in the first way that I kind of got hooked on the story was a couple years before that. I don't know if it was a publicist or a friend in the business, but I had lunch with Paul Schrader in New York, I think it was about 2009, 2010, and he was trying to raise money

for a Hollywood-slash-Bollywood thriller, which was going to star DiCaprio and whoever at the time was India's biggest action star. And that fell apart, and they weren't able to raise the money. And I, you know, just was following, you know, Schrader's career because it was kind of not going great at the time. And it was the simplest pitch because I read a story that said,

Paul Schrader, Brady Snellis are going to make this micro-budget film. And it's going to star a porn star and Lindsay Lohan. And I think I just emailed my editor. I think it was Hugo Lindgren at the time. Schrader, Ellis, porn star, Lohan. we should do this. And very quickly, he got back to me with a, you know, yes, it may have had an exclamation mark or not.

And that's just kind of how it started from there. And right after that, I wrote Schrader because I had his email. And I said, look, usually in these situations, you don't have a lot of juice, I guess you would say, if you're coming as a journalist. your desire to do the story is probably greater than the producer or the actor of them having the story happen. But this case, because it was a group of characters who were sort of down on their luck, I emailed traders said, I'd love to write a process piece about this as kind of following it through the whole making of it,

but would have to have total access where I could be there any day I went into. It wouldn't be just like two days here, two days there. And he said, oh, thanks for interest, let me think about it. it and he emailed me. And then about two hours later, email me. I think it was a great idea. And that's, that was quick. Yeah, that was just sort of how it started from there. You've done a bunch of magazine pieces that could broadly be called celebrity profiles. What do you like about writing celebrity profiles? You know, I, that's a good question. You know, as someone who's written a fair number of them, I always rankle at the

celebrity profile part of it. I do genuinely enjoy. writing about creative people. And that's just something that I've always enjoyed. And it's also, particularly if you're following someone through the process, there's so much over the years that I've learned and been able to apply to my craft by watching someone try to make an album or try to get a film made or something like that. So, I mean, believe me, I've done a few, sit down with Dakota Johnson at Chateau Marmont for two hours and then try to, you know, weave 3,500 words. But the ones I've enjoyed more is where you get to spend, a fair amount of time with somebody. And, you know, there's still an artifice that you're the

reporter and they're the famous person, but you can break down the artifice in the way you can't over, you know, fries and $37 hamburger at the Chateau Marmander, a place like that. So the appeal of this story is you're going to get full access, a word I hate, but let's just use it because it's the easiest word it is. Full access. Had you had that level or anything like that level of access to a movie set before? I had in a couple other stories. A few years before that I did a story of the Times Magazine on this British director. I really like Michael Winterbottom, where I went over where he was doing an adaptation

of Tristam Shandy with Steve Coogan and arrived in the middle of night, completely jet-lagged, had almost crashed my car, blew out a tire, and got up there, and within an hour or two of being on the set at this castle, he put me in the movie. That was kind of a horrifying experience in the sense where my only line was say, hi, my name is Stephen Roderick from the New York Times. And the first time they filmed it, I froze. I forgot my name. And that night where they watched the, you know, I think still called the rushes back

then. And there was a crusty, old British sound guy who came up to me next day and was like, I've been doing this for 50 years. And that was the most fucking funny thing I've ever seen in any of the dailies. So, and then I did a story a few years after that where I followed Jed Apatow through the whole making of Knocked Up, which, you know, had tension about, had all these young, you know, comic young men that would go on to do, you know, huge things and the question of whether or not you can make kind of a, you know, I don't know if I would call that movie sweet, but, you know, a semi-sweet. comedy with bros and it still have a mass appeal. But that, that everyone, I guess you would say, had their shit together. You know, there was days where things went wrong or you weren't happy with what they filmed,

but you didn't get to sense that it was all going to come crashing down and there may not be a film. And definitely doing the story in Lindsay and Paul, there was a sense almost every day is like, either this could be the last day or I don't see how this is going to get to a point. where they're going to be able to edit a movie out of these different scenes. Did you have a sense of why Schrader was willing to let you run around the set? I think, you know, they're making this film on very little money, and I think he did the calculus that this story will bring more attention to the film,

and we can perhaps sell it for more money, or it'll get a level of prominence and buzz that it'll get into different film vessels or whatever. So I think at that point, you know, his career had been kind of in a, Yeah, if not a free fall, a decline for seven or eight years where he, to the point where he had shot an entire, you know, prequel to the exorcist and then was replaced during the editing by Rennie Harlan, who's not exactly a critically acclaimed director. So I think there's a line in the piece about here he was just kind of scrounging for pennies, you know, where, you know, he'd written taxi driver. he made these other great films, but the 90s and the early, you know, first decade of 2000 had not been kind to him. So you got a sense, okay, this might be his last shot. And if he had that sense, he's like, well, I might as well have it memorialized. This figure of the 70s, who's now just trying

to get a movie made at all. Right. And winds up with this budget of $250,000. Right. You say in the story, 30,000 of which he put up. up himself. Sure. And some of the rest of which was basically raised by auctioning off things like Paul Schrader will look at your script. Right. Right. This is this is the bottom or close to the bottom for a famous filmmaker. This is something that I would do if I was trying to raise $250,000. Although I would not have like Robert De Niro's money clip from taxi driver to auction off. So I don't know what I would have to bring in the cash, but no, it was an early version of go-finding. me. You know, just, just, we're trying to make a movie. We need to hit these figures. And if you give us

$500, I'll look at your script. And I do know as a postscript, you know, for the year after the film came out, that it was a relentless pursuit of Schrader to actually get him to fall through and read the people's scripts and do stuff like that. All right, that's Schrader as you found him. Lindsay Lohan, she has already made the parent trap. She's made mean girls. And then you find her in what state? I think the Greeks would call it she was trying to get her shit together she had just come off a Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton biopic

I think it was for T&T or one of those places which she had left a you know days missed arguments you know bad mouthing the director and producer and that actually one of the in one of the very first scenes were where Paul meets Lindsay. She's just going on and just saying, oh, the people I worked on this film with were idiots. And he just kind of freezes, like, you're going to be saying the same things about me in like three or four weeks. And she's like, oh, no, no, this will be different.

And so, you know, she was, she was fairly coherent, but, which I know is a low bar. She was fairly coherent. But for her, I think that was a better place than some other places as she's been. And Paul just had this idea, which turned out to be sort of true and not true, is like, we don't have to save her. We just have to get three weeks out of her. And I think he underestimated how difficult it would be just to get three weeks of work from her. She's working for $100 a day, which is not a lot of money.

No, no. She has no influence in the movie at all, you're right. And essentially, this is her chance to link up with this. big director or formerly big director and do something perhaps that gets critical attention and then maybe she climbs back into. Right. And it had, you know, the project even without her had notoriety that, you know, Brady Sinellis, former bad boy novelist, wrote the screenplay. And it was starring the male lead was going to be this guy James Dean, I guess you would say a renowned porn star who went on to be exposed as having done some, you know, terrible things to do.

different women and his different films. But I think you're exactly right. She saw it as like, okay, I can ride their cred back to some kind of maybe indie film darling or, you know, just as the first step toward my comeback to, you know, stardom in the mainstream. So that's what this story was about at its base, is desperate people trying to use each other. Right. To get something back of their former status. I think that's, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. It's always interesting me because you've written a bunch of stories about celebrities that you found in this state or thereabouts. I'm thinking of Johnny Depp four years ago. I'm thinking of Dennis Rodman way back when in the New York Times Magazine living out on the beach in California.

Rick Bow, the former heavyweight champ was that? What is interesting to you about finding a famous person in that state? I just think they're more interesting. And it took me, it took a while before I realized in my writing career that had become sort of a genre of mine. But, you know, I say a 26-year-old heavyweight champion just on the way up. I mean, it can be interesting. But Riddick Bo, at the time, had lost everything and, you know, had deputized me to drive owners of BMWs to a dealership to try to sell it for money is in a different place.

And they're just more vulnerable and human than somebody who's just on the rocket ship on the way up. So if the difficulty in a celebrity profile is getting something like a glimpse of a real person rather than a person behind machinery and publicists, then maybe you have a better chance if they're in that state. Yeah, I think they have more to gain in terms of like, oh, here's this person that we used to think so fondly of, and here they are making a comeback. And I think, but they're still at that point where they think someone is going to write completely favorably about them. I think that's something that celebrities, once you've

had that rise, they're convinced that they're going to be able to charm you and that whatever you write is going to be fascinating and endearing to them. And sometimes it's the case. Sometimes it's not. And we as journalists don't want to disabuse them of that notion before. Oh, absolutely not. I mean, you know, I always joke with a friend of mine who's a writer that if we started a publicist firm, it would just be called PR Inc. And all we, I'm sorry, profile ink. And all we would do would be read the clips of the person who's going to do the story, which shockingly does not happen as often as you would think it would. And then our only advice would always be, don't do it. And we could just put it on a stamp or something.

The stamps would say, well, we're respectfully passed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think, also, I think, you know, I'm just thinking of this is that celebrities sort of on the, a little bit on the downwards. slide. They don't have as much of the publicist bureaucracy around them. They may have had to let them go because they're not bringing income or any of that, or they may have somebody who's less adept at this. And then you can get to them easier. Instead of like 10 layers of bureaucracy, they might only be two or three and make your case for it in a way that to try to make your case with, say, you want to, you know, you're profiling Taylor Swift for, you know, New York or Vogue cover

or something like, you know, the months that you would have to take to just cut through the jungle of publicists. To make your case at all. To make your case at all is so great compared to somebody who's, yeah, a little bit down on their luck. So the movie comes to be known as the canyons. It's filmed over three weeks in various locations here in Southern California. How much of those three weeks were you present for?

I think the shoe, you know, probably ended up being 23 days. And I was there, I was living in Eagle Rock here in Los Angeles at the time. I was probably there 20 other 23. There was, I think one day I did my wife at that time was pregnant. We had to go to the doctor. And so that's 20 or 23 days of the shoot. And I was also there for a day too early in the process when they did a table read, which was the first sign that, you know, things were going sideways.

And then at the end, you know, I watched Paul. do some editing, happened to be in Toronto when he was working with Brendan Canning, who was doing the score for it. So, yeah, I mean, I often joke on these kind of stories that I was making probably less per hour in terms of the labor I put into it than somebody working at Starbucks. Which was fine, you know, that I'd love doing these kind of stories. And that's just kind of part of the deal.

And give me a picture of you in 2012. You're standing on the set with a notebook. most days? Yeah, most days are also, you know, the early, or fairly early days of the digital recorder. And let me rephrase that. It was the early days of the digital recorder, but years and years before automated transcribing.

So when I was done, I would have, you know, 50, 60 hours. And I'm not saying I went back and listened to it all, but, you know, there are certain scenes. where I just tape the whole scene and then I'd go, you know, and I'm also taking small notes, but I think if you're taking a ton of notes, it just becomes obtrusive

and everyone starts going, what the hell did I just do wrong? Because he's scribbling a lot right now. And then I could go back and kind of focus on, I'm like, okay, what from the scene kind of struck me and just listen to it? And I know not everyone agrees with this, but I think taping is great

because you actually get people speaking. the way they actually speak. You're not interpreting it through your notes or anything like that. So what's a moment in this story where you had your tape recorder out and you're taping everything? Well, there's a scene. I'm just trying to think of which one. There's a lot. There's a scene where one of the really weird and interesting things that happened on the film was a lot of it was shot in this house up in Malibu by somebody who had seen it, you know, the promos for it and basically donated their house. And there's a scene where Lindsay's checking her phone,

checking her phone laying in bed next to James Dean. And he realizes that she's up to some no good or something. So he reaches out and grabs her hand and kind of throws her against the wall in a very violent way. And the first two or three takes were just, you know, Paul just wasn't getting what he wanted from Dean, who had never made a non-porn film before this, so he's not an experienced dramatic actor. And he's telling him what he wants.

He's still not getting it. So he just turns Lindsay and grabs her and trips her over his leg and throws her down very hard. And everyone just kind of stopped. And there was just silence. And she popped up and said, that was great. And Dean got it from there. And I just remember I was just running tape because there just was another scene where they were just trying to get a few minutes a day.

And everyone was just set at each other's throat. And you just felt like somebody might punch somebody at any minute. And like I said, it's running digital. It's not coughing me anything extra just to have it run. And if something happens, I'll have it on tape. Because there always was in the back of my mind as like, you know, someone saying, oh, this didn't happen. or, you know, you misunderstood this and being able to say, well, here's the conversation as it ran verbatim on my tape recorder. So that's a lot of the reasons why I was doing it.

And when you see something like that, Schrader throwing low hand down as a demonstration, your ears perk up, oh, yeah, that's going to be in the story. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a few things like that. The problem with this story was, it was, you know, an embarrassment of riches. And there were things that I thought was going to be the lead, you know, when it happened. And it was like, oh, shit, that's not even going to make it. the story. And I think the story ran at like 10,000 words or something ridiculous. So it wasn't like it got, you know, but it was just like, couldn't include everything. Did you go home to your house

and Eagle Rock and write up everything you'd seen that day or write down the scene so you wouldn't forget? I tried to do that. I'm not as good as like Joan Didion, who like in many, you know, in a couple of essays, like, got done with my hard day of report and got home and then meticulously typed up everything I could think of. And I did try to do that as much as possible, but I didn't do it every day. But I would write up like a three or four sentence email that's like, you know, day 11. This happened in the bedroom scene. And here are the kind of key moments. And that way, it was easier for me to find, you know, which tape I want it. And then just kind of, I try to listen to them soon enough. So it wouldn't just be where I could listen to it again and literally just kind of put myself,

where I was standing as it's all happening. You mentioned the table read, which is one of the first wheels-off moments in this whole adventure. What was it like to be at that scene? Well, you know, it was, it all seemed very professional, and like some other table reads I came to until it was time for the table read and Lindsay's not there and and and Schrader's going, well, you know, this is what you got to expect from Lindsay. I just texted her and she said she couldn't make it. And I texted her again, so there's an actress in Paris who's just about to get on the plane.

And lo and behold, she'll be here in 20 minutes. And she shows up at 20 or 30 minutes later. And everyone's sitting around, you know, a table. And everyone's being friendly. And I noticed, you know, she was probably sitting, you know, three or four people away from me that she was looking at the script and lining out people's names. Or I can't actually tell at the time that's what she was doing. but she was drawing lines or something. I think at the time,

I thought she was just like, she didn't think this dialogue work or something like that. Later, talking to the producer and having just, like, walked by her seat, you could see she had crossed out this guy, Nolan Funk, who was one of the other co-stars, and started listing actors who, you know, she thought could replace him.

So she clearly was used to having a level of power that she didn't have on this film. You talked to her right after. the read-through. I'll read a little passage here. I've missed this so much, Lohan said, between puffs of a cigarette. Her voice was a nicotine-soaked rasp. I'm in a good place now. I mean, it's Brady-Snellis and Paul Schrader. It's a dream. When it's done, I want to go somewhere far away. Maybe Africa, Uganda? But right now, all I want to do is work, work, dot, dot, dot. A few minutes later, she said goodbye and hobbled in heels toward her rented Porsche,

and then she disappeared for a few days. Yeah, her concept of, uh, uh, and I, I often thought about that talking to her at that point was like, was she trying to snow me because she knew I was a reporter, or did she really believe that she was all about work, work, and then she would disappear for three days and get fired and then get rehired. But she said it either very convincingly as an actress or just completely full of sincerity

and had just no control over her own actions that would make what she just said almost an impossibility. What did Lindsay, lohan make of you and your presence on the set? Well, you know, it's funny. It got to the point where I think she was kind of wary about it, and her publicist tried to, you know, put the kibosh on it, and Schrader said, well, that's totally your choice, but then we're just going to replace her.

So there's an interesting dynamic in a film situation like this where before you start filming, someone like Schrader could fire her or replace her. but once you start putting things on film, the actress now, or the actor or the actress now has the power because unless you're going to go back and start from zero, say you're six days into a 20-day shoot,

you know, someone's being a jackass, you're like, am I going to fire that person to start all over? And I think actors and actresses know this. And you started sensing a, I don't give a fuck attitude from low hand where she would just like, oh, you know, she'd have some clash. And she'd be like, oh, I guess Paul,

you're out to fire me again, knowing that he wasn't going to her, really didn't have the option of firing her unless he wouldn't just to kill the project. But in terms of me, there was a point where, like many days, where she was screaming at Schrader and he was screaming back at her. And she said kind of dramatically, I'm very glad that the New York Times is here to record all this and how badly I'm being treated. And I just had a thought to myself as like,

oh, man, you think this is how that's going to go down? This is going to be an incredibly sympathetic look at how hard you're working and not in the context of you not showing up and not, you know, vanishing for days on end. And then, you know, that's where you realize like, oh, boy, your, your, your, uh, grasp of the reality of the situation that's going on now is probably unlike anybody else who is here. it's an interesting theme of the story. Two people who have very little power in Hollywood compared to others. Sure.

Are now wrestling for power on the set of this film. Right, right. I know I am powerless in the larger entertainment world, but in this moment, I am going to try to get hold of this scene as much as I can. Yeah, I mean, like I think I said earlier, is this, he, you know, Paul was just like, we don't have to save her, just got to get her through three weeks in July. and I think at a certain point he realized how much he miscalculated. And, you know, I mentioned in the story that he'd worked with, you know, George C. Scott

earlier in his career where Scott was, you know, drinking a lot and wouldn't come out of his trailer. And he would only come out of his trailer if Schrader promised to never direct another film because he's like, you were a beautiful screenwriter, but you're one of the worst film directors I've ever seen. So he used to, like, cajoling people. that's what you have to do as a director, but I don't think he'd ever in his, at that time, probably 35-year career run up against a tornado like Lindsay Lohan. We should note he actually fires her before this movie starts shooting. Yes, and he fires her because she goes MIA for a couple days,

and she gets her job back in the way all professionals do. She goes to the hotel where he's staying, doesn't know what room he's staying in, and just wanders the hall, screaming, Paul, I know you're on this floor, where are you? I'm not leaving until you talk to me, Paul, and was able to persuade him to rehire her. And during this process, this is kind of the pre-production, I'm just like, you know, thinking about Schrader, just like, why are you putting yourself up with this? Is this like, she is not a big enough name and your career cannot be so in the land. end of oblivion that you need to do this. But then like two or three days later, they had,

it's not really a screen test because everybody's going to be in the film is there, but they basically do a few minutes on camera in terms of they can get a sense of how to light somebody. And I was standing in the area, I guess you call it Video Village, where you're watching it on monitors with the director. And she did, and she's just there. And I think she literally had like a Diet Sprite can or something. And it just looked like the world's best diet Sprite commercial. and she wasn't even saying that she does have something that just illuminates when she's on film. And I was just like, oh, I get it now. I mean, I don't know if I personally would be able to deal with this, but I understand the kind of, you know, the siren song that image on video can send out.

Watching this movie being filmed day to day, did you think this movie was going to be good? You know, there was parts of it that I thought were good. As I mentioned in the story, they didn't shoot a completely. completely chronologically, but they did shoot the opening scene, which was at the Bar Marmont, and it's like five minutes of dialogue. And I did thinking, this is not good in the sense that the actors and actresses had really no rapport. They might have met each other for a few minutes or at the table read like this. And they're just saying these incredibly weighty lines about, you know, we don't grow up anywhere. We grew up online, you know. Lines that were kind of ridiculous in

2013, but even, you know, saying them now. they're even more, you know, smacking your forehead. And there was a lot of pressure when Braxton Pope, the producer, and Brett, the writer, saw that film and saw the first five or six minutes. They begged him to open with something else or try to get everybody back together, just to shoot it in a more kind of snappy way. So that's a long way of saying is like, at a moment you were like, oh, this scene really is compelling.

But in other scenes, you're just like, oh, this is sort of, disaster and you start thinking you know it's it's funny i start thinking about it in the sense where of me writing a profile where i don't have great access where you're like okay i need five moments and you're kind of mentally making the note okay that's moment number three you know number three i need two more and then you kind of excel when you have the five moments and i think paul was doing it to a certain extent where it's like okay i got a good take on that there uh the continuity is not going to match here but she says her lines clearly and you know i can put to you know,

stitch this together. And I think that's what he was looking for. It's like, what is like the moment where I have critical mass and I can make something. It may not be, you know, you know,

Orson Welles quality, but it'll be something that we can sell to the European dealers or something. This movie's going to culminate if that's the right word in a big sex scene. Yes. And you are welcome on the set that day?

No, that is the one day that I was not welcome. And I had to do the old-fashioned way, which was recreated from talking to everybody, except for Lindsay, within 12 hours of the scene being shot. So this was, for me, at least, the early days of my phone, I guess you would say, blowing up, you know, in that sense. And, you know, I know I got from the,

from producer Braxton Pope kind of gave me a blow to blow about how, you know, and this is, it's a scene. between with Lindsay, James Dean, where they're having a foursome and the other two are porn actresses that James is brought into the process. And that was always like emboldened letters. This is part of the movie. This is not negotiable. You sign up to do this, Lindsay. This scene will be filmed. And she balked and didn't want to do it. And some of the languages almost taken verbatim from Braxton Pope, you know, emailing me. And, you know, Schrader was just desperate to get her to come out.

So what he did was stripped naked. And I can remember, like, Braxton, this is not a direct quote, but he's something like, and there was Paul standing naked, you know, his penis in his bird nest of pubic hair, you know, at the door. That wouldn't have gotten in that time. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And Lindsay, you know, opened the door and screamed.

And they, you know, shortly after that, they filmed the scene. And when I say they did only one or two takes, they only did, you know, she would do a defendant of, like, I'm done and people would be like, oh, maybe she's just going to have a cigarette. But then you would see her in her portion that, you know, in the red lights as you drove, you know, down this, you know, winding Canyon road. And they're like, oh, I guess she's really done, you know, for today, at least.

So you recreated all that by talking to everybody. Yeah, yeah. Which becomes this very big scene in the piece. Yes. very famous scene in the piece when it comes out. Now, Schrader's a smart guy, and he's a writer himself. Right. Is he wondering what your quote-unquote angle is going to be in this story?

I don't think so. I mean, I do think, and we probably only want to use one of my two Joan Diddyan references. Her whole thing, we tell ourselves stories to live or something, whatever that quote is. I think he told himself, this is going to be about me as a tortured autour, and trying to make this film and, you know, just, you know, just trying to make art here. And when the film, when the story came out, I got the classic from his people. Paul hasn't read it. He's traveling in Virginia. And, you know, this is 2013.

He's like, you know, even if he had been traveling in Mozambique, he probably could, you know, this whole, you know, like it's 1942. And, you know, Paul's on the train, you know, going across Russia. He's not going to be able to read this for a few weeks. It was kind of bogus. But he didn't get back to me. What he did, and I want to say it happened twice. It definitely happened once where one of his acolytes, a film studies professor,

I believe this one was at University of Wisconsin, wrote to him and said, I found the way that you were portrayed in the story to be preposterous and was not a revered look at your work and what you were trying to do. and he wouldn't write me back, he would just forward it to me. It's like, and I just felt like, oh, that's about right. You know, he has acolytes, and he's just saying, look, this person thinks you're a jackass rather than engaging with me and saying what he liked or didn't like. That's amazing.

So he doesn't pick up the phone to call you or even send you the angry email about how you've betrayed him or something like that. He just forwards you other people's criticism of the piece. Right. And it only reminded me of one other person, and this guy was a very sweet person. this musician, John Bryan, who's done music for P.T. Anderson films, and I profiled him. And he still plays at this club Largo in Los Angeles. But at the time, which was almost 20 years ago, he was kind of up and coming. He didn't like that in the story I mentioned. And the process on that

was he was producing Fiona Apple's extraordinary machine. And what he didn't like in that story was that part of the story is about how he had these 90 songs of him singing that were beautiful, but he couldn't release them, he couldn't let them go. He never responded to me. I was just banned from Largo, which is this kind of nerdy, you know, hipster comedy club. And the idea that you could be banned from a place like that, I found hilarious.

Although not so hilarious at a year or two later when there was some obscure songwriter I went to see there that I didn't buy like a baseball cap and, you know, wear a hoodie and go undercover so I could see the show. And you got in. And I got in. And I got in. And I got in.

She wasn't at the door or something. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, but it was just kind of a very passive-aggressive way. And, you know, I say this a lot, not just in that story, but other stories is that you're, someone like Schrader is entitled to react the way he wants to react. I've had my, my shot. And if he wants to just forward me emails saying other people think I'm an asshole, I mean, I might think it's kind of bizarre and not the way I would handle it, you know.

I'd be throwing the invective first person. I wouldn't be doing it through another person, but that's his choice. You've got 20 plus days of reporting from the set of the canyons. Now you've got to write the thing. What do you remember about writing this piece? I wrote it.

We were living in Eagle Rock. My wife is a novelist and a creative writing professor, so we were in Los Angeles just for a year for her sabbatical, much like we were in Los Angeles eight years later, or not, you know, like we are here 10 years later, doing another sabbatical. And we lived in this up, up in the hills in Eagle Rock in this kind of faux brutalist, mad scientist architecture house where it was, you know, kind of built in the hill and it was kind of falling apart.

But I had a nice little office that was at the, the house was very long rather than tall. And I had an office down at the far end of the house. And I just wrote, and every once in a while, you do a story where the writing isn't a nightmarish experience. And the writing was not a nightmarish experience. I mean, shaping it, it wasn't, and I worked very hard on it, but the material was just so good that I didn't have a ton of angst about it.

I mean, I had angst during the editing and then when it came out. But at that moment, yeah, like I said, there's sometimes, you have a story, you're like, the material is so good, I'm not getting, you know, feelings like I'm going to vomit because I can't figure out what I'm going to write today. Do you read stuff when you're trying to write? Pick up that Ken Tyneen collection or? I don't know if Ken Tyneon, but Schrader had mentioned to me, and this was actually, I think, the title of the story in the print edition. Remember the print editions of things? It was called The Misfits, which was

after a film that had Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe that had a very troublesome shoot. And Paul said more than one time, oh, this is like the misfits. And look, misfits turned out to be a great movie. And I do remember I had a copy of Lillian Ross who'd written this great piece about John Houston and the making a red badge of courage. Although I didn't note, his daughter, Angelica Houston, wrote, I preface for at least the edition of the book that I had. And she thanked Lillian for knowing, quote, unquote, what to leave in and what not to put in the story. And I'm like, well, no one's going to thank me for that.

I mean, you know, I'm not trying to save anybody's career or worried about, you know, whether or not this is going to seem impolitic or embarrassing. It's interesting. You reference that. That's what I was going to ask you about because that's kind of the magazine story later a book about the making of a disaster. the making of a disastrous movie. Right, right. And, you know, I think at the time, and this may be, you know,

why I never thought about doing this as a book, is that it didn't have the dramatic stakes of Red Badge of Courage or the film version of Bonfire, the Vanities, got turned into Solomon's The Devil's Candy. So all the kind of notoriety came after the people. came out in terms of like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this happened, that happened. So there wasn't a market like, oh, yeah, you've got this access to Paul Schrader, Brett Easton Ellis and Lindsay Lillen? Oh my God, yeah. Let's see if we can set up a book deal, you know, that you can

just build out from this magazine story. That was not the case in this situation. Would you've written the story differently if it had been for Rolling Stone versus the very upright New York Times magazine? That's a good question. I'm not sure if I would have. I think sometimes the up, you know, button-up approach of New York Times Magazine, which I don't think works all the time, worked well in this, in this situation, because you could just be like, here it all is. Take it in, and you don't need any jokes about me doing this or, you know, like making a joke about how I found, you know, on the Johnny Depp story, you know, a giant joint, you know, in the guest bathroom or something like that. Because you kind of just know that's not going to fly. So,

you know, why waste your time trying to craft a scene like that? You just, you know, at least to me, keep the sentences short and just make them as vivid as you can. See, I'm always fascinated by this with celebrity profiles. Because whenever I read one, my mind immediately thinks how much of this is going to be actual reporting and interviewing and how much of this is going to be the author doing jazz hands. Like, I got 40 minutes. Jazz hands, jazz hands. Right. Hit my word length here. This piece must have the highest ratio of reporting to jazz hands. You know, yeah, because I just read a piece that I won't mention. I mean, who wrote it or the piece, and it had nothing to do with the writer, who I think is really great, about a director making

a very interesting film. But there's a preamble to the piece. that I would never have done for this piece because the material was too good. You know, I didn't feel like I needed or wanted to spend 2,000 words putting this, you know, Paul Schrader in the constellations of directors of his time or, you know, what this means to all of us. Or, you know, I just wanted to get into the narrative. And, you know, there's a few kind of connective tissues. This is where everybody was. This is how the film industry is changing. But, and I've been in that situation where you're, you know, you're doing a lot of,

throat clearing. And you know, and you're just like, couldn't you just ran this 2,000 words shorter and just done less, less throat clearing? But, you know, I was very fortunate in this story not to have to do it. The material was so good that I just had to get out of the way of it. And I didn't have to do a ton of what this all means. You mentioned subjects sometimes pushing back during the fact checking process. Did anybody push back on anything in this story? No, not really. I mean, yeah, I mean, just a little. little deviation. When I did the Judd Apato's story, he had worked for Gary Shanling. And there was literally one line in the piece about how the set of the Larry Sanders show was not a happy place. And he got his lawyer involved and threatened the lawsuit about that. Gary did? Gary did. So over what I

thought was a throwaway line, to the point where when the editors cut it out, I didn't even feel like outrage. Oh, we're bending to his will. I'm just like, this is a line talking about something that's peripheral to the periphery of this piece, so I'm willing to do it. But with the Lohan and all the other stuff, nobody contested it. I mean, I can't say for sure, and I will give this to, you know, the fog of war of 10 years. I can't imagine that Lindsay Lohan got on a long call for the fact-checking process. So some of her stuff must have, you know, relied on other people who witnessed it along with me, other people who were at the scene or something like that. So, but there wasn't this huge pushback. You can't publish this or, you know, this isn't how it happened because I think everyone knew I was

there the whole time. You mean, it wasn't like they could say, he was only there a few days. Maybe he wasn't there for that. And so there wasn't really a lot of room to push back. Would you leave out of the piece? Um, you know, there's a delightfully named. actor named Nolan Funk, who was very good-looking, at the time, young Canadian man who played Lindsay's boyfriend, who eventually she leaves for Dean. And there was a scene where they shot where it's a sex scene between him and Lindsay. And it was being filmed at the producer of Braxton Pope's house. And 20 minutes before they were shooting the film or shooting that scene, you just heard the screaming coming from the bathroom because Lindsay had picked up the wrong end of a curling iron that was very hot.

So it looked like the whole day was going to be a washout. But she sucked it up and they did the scene and she did it twice and gets back to her saying what would happen sometimes. She'd go into another room and then she'd go out the back and you'd just hear her car pulling away and you would then hear it's a squealing of paparazzi going after her. So Nolan never thought that the scene was done properly. So a couple weeks later, he came up to me. He was like, I know, I want to bring up to Paul that maybe we should try that scene again. How do you think I should approach him? You spend a lot of time with him.

And I did the kind of classic, I don't know. And so he went up to Schrader and said, you know, I don't think we got this. And he brought it up a couple times and Schroeder kind of kept ignoring him. And finally Schrader lost his patience. and just turn to listen, kid, it's a fuck scene. We could shoot it five more times. It's still going to be a fuck scene. Oh, my God.

And he just kind of like went, you know, tail between his legs and out the door. But the postscript was, you know, he's a professional too because that same day, like entertainment tonight, Canada was following him around. So he could only be down for like 30 seconds. And then he was like, hey, Canada, I miss you all. I'm here on the set of Paul Schrader's next movie.

I'm very excited about it. So there was that. And there was a, you know, every, every movie, obviously, not every movie, but 99% movies have some kind of rap party where everyone's done and everyone gets drunk and, you know, a level of decadence happens because, you know, many times you're not going to see these people again. You know, you may run into a couple of them on a different project in a few years, but it's not like a television series where you're going to see them again in a month or two.

And it was held at this place called, you know what, I'm going to leave it out because I'm not quite positive that was the place that happened. It happened at a kind of a nightclub bar above a hotel in West Hollywood. And, you know, Lindsay's mom was there. And I felt like she was, you know, sort of like, you know, snuggling up against me when I was trying to talk to her daughter in a way that I think, again, people, I guess apparently she thought, well, I would, you know, be so enamored by that that I would go easy on her daughter. But it got to a point where we were trying to.

to set up a we had taken some of the photos but we couldn't get dean or more likely Lindsay to pose for some pictures with Dean and Lindsay came up to me and said look I know you want pictures of me with James and I'll do them and I was like oh great great maybe we'll try to set it up the next couple days while you're still in town just like the only thing that has to happen first is that tonight James in front of all these people has to publicly apologize for the way he treated me during the shoot. And it's like, you go tell that to James. And I went over the James.

Because, you know, it's like a high school dance or something. It's not a big place on there. James is like, what did he, what did she tell you? And I said, told him like, she wants you to apologize. And he just went, ha, that's not going to happen. And it was very, you know, out of a high school dance or something. Unbelievable. Stories published on the Times website on January 10th, 2013.

This is early in the era when every magazine, piece has two headlines. You mentioned it was the misfits in print. And online, it's, here's what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie. Yes. And there was another, you know, bureaucratic thing that happened with the piece that I was reminded of when I went back to reread it recently because we were going to do this podcast, was that the story had been completely fact-checked, copy-edited it. And apparently, you know, I've been signed off. And I had the final galleys. But someone put it through some triple secret extra spell check before sending off

to the printer, which changed the spelling of James Dean's name from D-E-E-N to the more standard D-E-A-N. The other James. Yeah, and exactly. And introduced a couple of other errors. So this kind of shining moment had this, you know, these, what everyone would call it, introduced errors that made me look like I did not know how James Dean had been, you know, how you spelled his stage name. And then what happened, which just kind of also just, you know,

incorporates the online in the print dance, is that it only was in the print edition, but the times felt the need to publish a correction, not at the time, not at the end of the story, saying that in the print edition, this has happened, they published, a correction, an editor's correction on every page that you had to click through. Back in those days, you know, the story didn't open in just one long document. You had to click like 12 times. And every time you got to the bottom of the page, it was due to an editing error, James, and it was not in the version 98% of people were reading, because people were reading it almost exclusively online, but there was a correction. And that took a little bit of the excitement of the first day

of the story coming out. You've had big reality. reactions to your stories landing online. I mentioned Johnny Depp. There was Serena Williams back in 2013. What struck you about the reaction to this story? You know, it's funny. I was at a party at the, I'm trying to remember. You know, it's funny you mentioned that because I was at a party a week or so after that.

And it was a party thrown by a, you know, significantly less famous at the time, Jason Blum, who runs Blumhouse, the horror film empire. And it came up to some, you know, it was a party up in the Hollywood Hill somewhere, and it came up in some conversation that I had written the story on Lindsay Lohan. And a couple people got very excited, and they were actors, and they came over and, you know, got the story up on their phones and started reading scenes from it as if it was a dramatic reading. And, you know, I think it's difficult for the people involved because these are human beings. But, you know, what I want to say is that there was a glee about the story and not like a malicious.

it was like sort of like, oh my God, this is so delicious. You know, this is so, you know, the curtain has been drawn back and this is how it really went down. And that was mostly feedback. It was like, you know, I got a lot of OMFG, OMG emails and texts and stuff like that. And I think, you know, maybe it was just me being in the right place at the right time, but there was just people just like, I can't believe they let you. follow them and get this kind of good stuff.

It's almost impossible to do this. And it is because I've tried to do it with other stories. And the other director shuts it down or will be like, yeah, you can come for one day and then we can talk for two hours. And then you can visit for two hours in the editing bar or whatever. And then you can cobble something together. But the idea that you could follow something from its creation to its editing I sort of think sometimes we shan't pass this way again.

Is that annoying for you? The downside of having a big highlight like this is that I will never, or it's very unlikely I will be able to get the run of the place like that again? Yeah, I mean, I think I had the run of the place, as I mentioned earlier, and on this winter bottom and Jed Apatah story. But those stories had these moments of melodrama, but there wasn't this kind of, you know, the breakdown of society. that there was in the canyons.

So I could send that to people and say, look, here's some other process pieces I've done. And I can't put my finger on it, but, you know, on a specific story. But, like I said, there's a couple stories that I've tried to do like this. And I don't know if they went back and read that story or just became a general, you know, rule among publicists, do not ever grant this access again. Yeah, it's like the profile company. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Canyons comes out in August 2013. It has a 21% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was made for $250,000. It made $265,000 going to Wikipedia in theaters. How did that make you feel when it bombed?

You know, it's interesting. The one bit of, you know, where the film industry stands that I worked in that is Schrader had a feeling back then that a movie like the canyons would be, would do better on date of release pay-per-view in conjunction with theater. And I think it made more money than the box office. But, yeah, it was not a success by any stretch of the imagination. And I don't know if I had a strong opinion on that. I was just like, my job is this report what happened.

Like I said, there was days where you were like, oh, you could see the talent that different people had. And there was days you couldn't see that this would come together at all. So I wasn't either shocked or dismayed that it was a, critical bomb. And I think someone like Paul would say at it, though, is like that I brought so much notoriety to the project that critics did not come to it with an open mind. Fresh. They were thinking about your story rather than a movie. Exactly. Exactly. It is interesting. He talks about video on demand, as it was then called in the piece, this idea that what if there's a world where we

don't go to movie theaters anymore? And we just press a button and cheaply made movies can be served right to the consumer. So he was right about... He was totally right about that. And then I do want to add that one of the things that I was wrong about is, is, you know, anybody who follows independent film. Since the Canyons, you know, Paul Schrader has had a career renaissance in his late 70s, you know, Oscar nominations for First Reformed and other great pictures. So I wish I could sit down with him.

I don't think he would take my call. call and just say like, okay, what clicked from here? Because from there, he made a couple Nick Cage movies that were entertaining, but, you know, just classic B movie fair. But then he got back in his kind of independent groove. And I'm just so happy for him. Here's my last grubby question. What did this story do for your career? You know, I wonder if it did anything from my career. I mean, I think I got a, I think it opened a door or two. I mean, I did a process piece of a year or two later for the New Yorker on a casting director, Allison Jones, who cast a lot of Jedapitoe projects and Paul Feig projects. And I think the Schrader story

kind of helped me knock that door down. At the New Yorker, not in Hollywood, but it's not in It's like, okay, you have credibility. You know, people like to say, oh, I want to do a process piece. I mean, like, it was a nice calling card. This is a process piece I've done this year and, you know, just kind of leave it out there. I think, you know, part of the frustration is that I haven't, not that, you know, it's like trying to recreate, you know, an athlete's great season or something like that. You can try, but you can't always do it because there's all a lot of other factors. I don't think that I'm disappointed.

that it didn't launch me to a different level as a magazine writer. I'm very happy level that I'm at. But I'm just disappointed because whether or not the fallout from that story or working at Rolling Stone, which I mentioned earlier just doesn't do a ton of process pieces like that, that kind of story hasn't come my way more often since the low hand piece. In a combination of either you're on the list of, say, to this guy.

Right. Or there's just not a magazine complex that it wants those kind of stories. Right. I mean, and, you know, and I think another thing is with, you know, a lot of the attention and creativity moving to, you know, limited series or streaming series with a film. It has a beginning and end in terms of the process. You know, it's, you know, maybe the table read and it ends with the day it's released. if you followed

Bo Jack Horseman or something like that and I did kind of sort of follow that through a season they have another season so it doesn't wrap up neatly and there's not a moment where you're going to like everyone kind of goes or separates and we start saying well what did this all mean because it's just going on on an endless or not an endless

but it extended continuum in a way that films you know they're kind of a concise discrete package and you can hook up with them for 60, 90 days, and then you're done. And these limited series, you know, I wouldn't want to follow as much as I enjoy the show, billions for six years. Stephen Roderick, thanks for coming on

the press box. It was fun. Thanks for having me.