The Press Box - Writer Chris Heath on Tom Hanks, Adventures in the Magazine Trade, and the Art of the Celebrity Profile

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Bryan is joined by Chris Heath to discuss his new Tom Hanks profile for The Atlantic. They dive into Heath’s experience profiling Hanks (3:30), talk through Heath’s career working for magazines such as Smash Hits and GQ (11:52), and then review past profiles on celebrities ranging from Robert De Niro to Donald Trump to Russell Crowe (13:38). 'The Making of Tom Hanks' Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Chris Heath Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Final Edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. I feel the material we have been covering on this podcast over the last few weeks. has been really interesting and also kind of heavy ESPN layoffs, Fox News trial, Tucker Carlson,

et cetera, et cetera. So I thought we'd do something really different today. There is a new piece in the Atlantic, just up today, Wednesday, called The Making of Tom Hanks. And it's by one of my very favorite writers, Chris Heath, who I started reading in GQ back in the early 2000s. Take a moment, if you can, read the piece, and I think you'll see all that is so interesting about Heist's writing. His style, which tends to be, I would say, very modest and very effective because it's modest. His ability to go to an actor like Hank's who's been interviewed a million times and find one or two or three or four or five or six new things to pull out of him. In this case, a new story about how Hank's grandfather was killed back in the

the 1930s, which is really, really interesting. He is such an interesting writer. He knows the celebrity profile as well as anybody. So today we talked about that Hank's story. We talked about his career at magazines like Details and GQ and about many of the interviews he's done, with Prince, with Robert De Niro, with Russell Crow, and also about the non-celebrity profiles, a very interesting part of his career, too. Here's Chris Heath on the art of the celebrity profile. How did you first come to write celebrity profiles? You know, I'm English, as you can probably tell. And I start, the very first things I did, I started writing about pop music out of college.

That's how everything else started. Everything came from that. What do you like about writing those kind of pieces? You know, I've never thought of them as those kind of pieces. and maybe the answer is, part of the answer is there, and certainly a big part of the answer, why I continue to do them is there. You know, I came into a world where a lot,

if not most people think that there's two kinds of pieces, and that's one of them, and let's be honest, that they're somewhat lesser. And so, as you have any success as a writer, quite often you're expected to sort of, move up from writing about people, particularly famous people, to doing other kinds of writing. And I always want to do all those kinds of writing. And also, I never really agreed that they were different. And I really don't, to this day. And I don't think of them as different.

How did you prepare to interview Tom Hanks for the Atlantic? You know, as a general rule, I like to do a fairly huge amount of research with the expectation that I might use absolutely none of it. But particularly when there's someone who's really, really famous like Tom Hanks and has a very long trail behind them. I think people can tend to almost get put off and think, well, there's nothing to. find there's nothing to research because if there was everyone would know it um and quite often that's exactly where if you dig really deep you find all kinds of things you know there's all kinds of tendrils that have been chanced upon just once and they're never picked up on uh so you know i i always get quite excited at the prospect of no let's dive in here there'll be something

when you're reading old profiles of an actor like hanks do you feel competitive with them like i'm going to write something even better than this I don't think that's what I'm thinking when I'm reading. I probably feel plenty competitive as a sort of general demeanor. I think most writers do. But I'm not really thinking about that when I'm just looking for stuff at that point. How did you find Hanks when you sat down with him at a hotel in London? You know, he's, you know, his reputation is of being incredibly affable,

and he's a sort of supercharged version of that. But he's he's also he's incredibly energetic and incredibly kind of switched on and incredibly interested in stuff. So that, you know, that's the first thing that hits you.

How do you get an actor like Hanks who's been asked a million questions to take you someplace new? Well, I mean, hopefully by, you know, hopefully by having, by knowing enough of what they've said a million times that you'll steer away from those things as they come because they still do come.

Someone like Tom Hanks does have a few go-to places to explain himself and, you know, and fair enough. And, you know, some of them are interesting too. But, you know, I'm alert to those and not always trying to move on to something else. Let me steer you away from this anecdote that I've read you say a few dozen times in the past. Well, I try not to declare it or make it obvious, but it's in my mind. one thing I thought was fascinating about your story. You found some information about how Hanks's grandfather was killed back in the 1930s

that Hanks himself did not know. How did that happen? You know, I was just, you know, researching. You know, Hanks has done a lot of podcasts in the last few years. So, you know, that's a lot of listening. You know, so I was going through the hour after hour. after hour of these podcasts, and he did one. I think it was, I might get it wrong,

but I think it was an Australian podcast he did during lockdown a couple of years ago. And he mentioned this thing about his father, sorry, about his grandfather, that his father had, as he told the story, that his father had seen his grandfather be killed when his father was Jan. You know, so obviously that I was surprised not to have known about any other way. And I just started researching. And I, you know, I like, you know, I like noodling around in an archive. You know, so pretty soon I was going pretty deep into a load of 1930s California newspapers. And there was a lot there. There's a lot about the trial.

There were, I think I think I found about 80 stories, you know, a lot of which are paragraph long, just saying the court proceedings have been postponed for another week. But cumulative you know, there was a pretty fascinating, rich, and sad, tragic story. And it was a bit different to the one he seemed to know. And it was weird going into, you know, going into thinking, well, I knew, I know this thing. It felt like an awkward thing to know and to try and discuss. But, you know, nonetheless, I, you know, tried to make that happen. And how did Hanks feel about learning this new information about his family? I think that's a really good question. And, you know, can, you know, have to people all read, read as I'm, as I explain how I, what I, how it all came up

and how I told him in the article. I, I can't really read his reaction to it. I mean, he was very, you know, he's, on the surface, he seemed interested and interested to know, but, but somewhat detached from it. And I don't know whether, you know, again, you feel you could, it's a very unusual situation and you don't know whether you're sort of crossing some kind of line by bringing this up or whether there's some other reason that he's he's got, you know, somewhat detached attitude to it or whether I'm reading it wrong and that that's not what it was anyway. Another thing I enjoyed about the story was Hank's talking about how he feels about being called nice all the time. How does he feel about it? Well, you know, again, I think the term he used is it's

almost like a pejorative at this point. You know, and it's, you know, you can see what he means because, you know, you know, there's certain kind of compliments that can, you know, that can be brandished as kind of insults because they kind of, they, they compliment him but little at the same time. And I think, I think that, you know, it's great, you know, he's, you know, he's, you know, by the way, he does seem really nice, but, so he's nice, but, you know, it's sort of, it's sort of, it's somehow that, I can see how that probably, probably, you know, you work, you know, for years, trying to do the best possible job on some project. and then someone says, you're nice.

It's like, so I think it can, it could, it might, might seem to reduce that somehow. You point out in the article, this is not an adjective. We hung around Tom Hanks's neck during his Forrest Gump, Philadelphia period. This is something that the press hung around his neck in the 80s when he first became. No, it's incredible looking back. I didn't, I wasn't aware of this, but, you know, all these first, in the first few years of his success, people immediately put this on him. That's how he seemed to people.

And, you know, as I mentioned, there's a monologue on Saturday Night Live in, I think, 1988, which is playing off this cliche about him that he's nice. You know, already then it was a cliche. I like to in the piece where he bristles a little bit of being called nice, but he's okay with being called a symbol of rectitude. Like, Tom Hanks will settle for that. Well, you know, what's his choice, you know, or, you know, or he protests too much and, you know, I also say it's become, you know, it's become as much for, almost as much for cliché to look for its dark side. And, you know, I'm not sure there is some, you know, that's a very journalistic thing to do. And I'm not sure there is some incredible dark side there. And so what's he supposed to do? Try and try and pretend a dark side or try and understand how people think. of him and how he and also you know he obviously clearly tries to live in in a in a in a in a way that

has some of these values so why shouldn't people notice it celebrities often become available to profile writers when they have a new movie out or in hanks's case a new novel out how much do you feel compelled to write about their current project in your article generally i i i'm i don't think very hard about that maybe maybe to a follow I don't think very hard about that, except that in this case, it just seemed to me an advantage. It seemed to be really interesting that someone like Tom Hanks could have seriously written a proper novel at a first novel, you know, in his 60s. And it just seemed to offer an interesting way to come at him that, you know, that a new movie might not have offered. and, you know, it seemed nothing but a good opportunity.

Let me ask you a little about your career. How did you come to start writing for details in 1990? The truth, I worked for this pop magazine called Smash Hits in England. It's always hard to explain what a great magazine this was and what great writing it had in it, because people just look at you like you must be deluded. But I learned an incredible amount. There were these incredibly sharp people working there who had this incredibly,

it was a very smart, rye kind of magazine. And there was an American version of it, which maybe wasn't quite, didn't quite fit in the culture in the same way called Star Hits. And there was a guy called David Kipps who edited Star Hits. And he was, when James Truman took up details, he was one of the people who was working with him. And so he knew me through Smash Hits.

So it came through that. I guess I probably have to back up here, too, given what kind of magazine was details for people who don't know. That's a good question. You know, because retrospectively, it became a very different magazine, and it became a sort of more mainstream kind of men's magazine. And before Condonast had bought it, you know, and I don't even know that version, it was a sort of New York downtown magazine, right? That's my memory, yeah.

Yeah, and under James Truman, it became something really, to me, kind of special in between. It was a pop culture magazine, but it was a very inquiring, quite sort of spiky for the climate in those days magazine that, you know, just approached everything and a very smart and very kind of, yeah, I don't know quite how to describe it. I was reading the story you wrote about Prince in details in 1991 when his record Diamonds and Pearls came out. What was it like to interview Prince? Well, obviously mightily weird. You know, I went to, I'd had a weird experience with him in Paris during a story for someone else a couple of years before.

And then I'm allowed to go to Paisley Park. And I was there for a week and he would sort of be in the distance, usually a across a kind of, there's this open plan upstairs, and he'd be on the other side of some walkway, and you'd sort of see him. He didn't even say hello ever in these circumstances, and then you'd see him a few hours later, and he'd be wearing something completely different, some amazing Prince kind of outfit. And it just went on and on with this sort of vague thing of, is he going to talk to me? And I would meet all these other people. And then suddenly I got told Prince is on the phone for you. and so I'm in Minneapolis for a week and he calls me on the phone

and I sit in the Paisley Park board room and have this very Prince-like discussion with him. But, you know, for me, I was, I mean, I remained fascinated by Prince, but I was very, very fascinated by Prince then. So it was a fascinating, it was an amazing experience to be able to get in, think about that in a proper way. And it was a stipulation of this phone call that you could not record it. So you're writing out what Prince is. saying in longhand while he's talking to you on the phone?

Yeah, desperately, desperately scribbling like crazy. I don't have short hand. How did you come to start writing for GQ in the early 2000s? You know, I was at details for a few years. Then I was at Rolling Stone for a few years. And then, you know, then when Jim Nelson took over GQ, we met and, you know, I moved over. What did GQ in that period offer a writer? I was, you know, sort of, I'd been having a great time at Rolling Stone, but it was very

difficult to get them to think of me, not just as a profile writer. Now, it was, you know, not a terrible problem to have. And from a 2023 perspective, very much not a terrible problem to have. But, you know, I was doing as many cover stories as I could possibly want to do. But I had to fight very hard. I'd come there for details, I'd done all kinds of stories, and I'd come there to do all kinds of stories, and I was really struggling to get, to let them think of, to get them to think of me like that. So in the end, I thought, well, let's go somewhere where hopefully that will happen.

And it did happen. I had a, you know, GQ was an amazing kind of, you know, not that I didn't like being at Rolling Stone, but GQ was an amazing kind of opening up of what I was able to do. As you allude to, we now look back at that period as the golden, age of magazines, maybe the end of the golden age of magazines. Did it feel like you were working in a golden age at the time? I think it always does in retrospect, you know, because don't forget, I think people forget, you know, in, you know, in the 90s and in the early 2000s, which are now seen as golden ages, you know, New York's full of people who thought that a square hour in the

1970s was the only golden age of magazines. The golden age is always the thing we just missed. Yes, no, I mean, you know, make, could we stretch it to think someday someone will think now is? Maybe, I don't know. Yeah, in some way or another. A couple of pieces I wanted to ask you about, what do you remember about interviewing Russell Crowe at the top of his fame in 2005? Well, you know, he was a curious character. I liked him, but he, you know, I liked him because he was, you know, he was a very bad celebrity in a way that I, uh, you know, I appreciate. I don't know if this will make sense to people, but I think the key thing he said to me that made me understand in the best was he was explaining that his attitude was basically the attitude

of the New Musical Express, the British Music Magazine, in the late 70s. And it's a sort of punk rock attitude of, you do things for, you know, he was explained in the context of being horrified that Robert De Niro was doing, I guess. Was it American Express ads? That's what it was doing. That's what it was. Yeah. And George Clooney and Harrison Ford doing overseas commercials.

Yeah. And he wasn't, you know, you know, that's, this seemed a very genuine. I mean, obviously the kind of thing that makes you incredibly unpopular in it is very bad politics. But it just seemed a very genuine. You could see a sort of 17-year-old kid having a real attitude and view about how things should be. And, you know, I kind of liked that contrary part of him. Yeah, it almost, speaking of Golden Ages, reads like a Playboy interview from the 70s, where there's this just absolutely unfiltered, interesting quality to it. I was wondering, did you run that Q&A because the answers were so interesting that you didn't need to go around it? Actually, funny enough, my instinctive answer is yes.

And normally even, you know, that's when I, in any kind of piece, when I drop into Q&A is just when the you know, when what's being said is so good that you want to hear it unfiltered. But I actually think, if I'm honest, that I think there was some stipulation that we had to agree to do the piece Q&A. I think it was some control thing. I might be remembering this wrong, but it's coming back to me that. But I certainly didn't mind at all if I'm remembering that right, because what he was saying worked really well in that form.

You get directly involved in the negotiating phases of stories like that? I get as uninvolved as I possibly can be, which may be a mistake, but I'm, yeah, I think it's weird. I think more and more people expected to do that, but I feel it's, you know, I don't think they're, you know, it feels like there's a line that can too easily be crossed between negotiating how the story is done and what the story is. And I don't want to be, you know, I don't think the writer,

if possible, should have any part in negotiating the second. So if you come in fresh after a negotiation that somewhat else is handled, then you feel like you can come in and write the story you want to? I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. You know, it's not even, you know, it's, I just think it's, yeah, it just seems weird to me to, you know, you know, and I come in with the best possible intentions. And, you know, I hope to just make people really interesting.

and it's really important to me to be incredibly honest. But I don't think I should be like making lots of sort of representations about how it's going to turn out before I do it, even though I think it's going to turn out in a way that I really hope it's going to be good for everyone involved. It's not, you know, because, you know, I shouldn't be in the representations business, I don't think. And also I don't want to know what, you know,

I also don't want to know what the story is going to be until I do it. That's the excitement of it. What was it like to profile Gary Oldman in 2009? Well, you know. He says in freighted fashion. Well, I, you know, because I still don't, funny. I was speaking about this with the editor of that piece last week, weirdly, and I think we're still trying to figure some things out.

You know, I'd interviewed Gary Oldman a couple of times in the 1990s and got on tremendously well with him. And so much so that, you know, we'd run in, even then run into each other at other times and spent a little bit of time together. And so then I was doing this piece in, as you say, 2009. And I don't really know what happened, except, you know, he's got a manager called Douglas Obansky, who seems to have done a tremendous faithful job in nurturing Gary Aldwood's career and continues to, to this day, and Gary Oldman clearly, you know, feels very, very, very close to him. But Douglas Sibansky clearly felt something very negative towards me in a way that I really didn't understand. So, you know, I mean, he's been Gary Oldman still was completely fascinating,

but there's this, you know, if you read the story that it's online, there's like, I think, a three or four thousand word prequel to it where I explain. all of the surrounding things, and I don't really understand them. And the piece, the material in the piece is fabulous. It doesn't seem like Gary Oldman was worried about talking to you at all. I didn't think so. And even, you know, in the first half of the interview was done with Douglas Zabanski there. And we seemed, I thought we had a very genial kind of conversation.

But now, you know, I'm still somewhat puzzled. But anyway, I've still got a huge amount of time for Gary Oldman. I think he's fascinating and very talented. On a very different note, how did you find the experience of interviewing Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2015? Well, talk about one that you think about in retrospect. You know, I've never really stopped thinking about that since. But, you know, when I interviewed him, he'd been, you know, he'd been top of the polls for a few months. But really no one took the situation seriously that he certainly in, in, in, in,

I think in most in the media world, although I remember, I remember looking at the Las Vegas odds of him becoming president a couple of days before I interviewed him. I think because I wanted to, to be honest, I wanted to say, well, the odds makers only think you're, I think I was expecting like 20 to 1 or something. And he was six to one against, that was where the money was when I interviewed him. And I thought, well, six to one, that's real. you know, that's not somebody, you know, you know, discounting your chances at all. That's a very real chance.

And I did the interview on the, you know, I went in there thinking, though, you know, I can't pretend that I thought he was going to be the Republican nominee or that I thought he would end up being president. But I went in there thinking, this is how I should do the interview, like totally 100% taking seriously that this person is on a path to be president and to interview them like that. But I found it, you know, I mean, again, in retrospect, this, you know, feels like almost saying nothing. But I was really shocked by how much he just seemed to be making things up in front of me, making up really important policy decisions. I can't remember the exact things, but I know I was asking about his nuclear policy,

you know, nuclear defense policy at one point. And he just seemed to pivot, depending on what I said to him, and make up a new policy in front of me. And it seemed terrifying. But I did remember coming out to get. I don't think I've ever met. I've met very few people, and I've, you know, I've met quite a lot of different kinds of people in doing what I do. He had an incredible force of personality in the room. that really surprised me.

I was not expecting that, and I wasn't aware that that was going to be like that. And he's so, it was demanding that you kind of agreed with his agenda and be on board. But, you know, and I've found myself resisting that, not, you know, just because I was trying to make sense of him. Not, you know, but it was, I wasn't, you know,

but in retrospect, I think that, that says quite a lot. But it, you know, it, it, yeah, I still think about that interview a lot. You know, there's a, you know, I'm not, probably weren't come as a bombshell if I said I'm not politically too aligned with him. And, you know, you sort of think, you know, you have that ridiculous part of yourself where you think, is there a question I could have asked then that would have been really helpful to the world? But I don't know. It's interesting, too. Every two or three questions, he looks at you and says, boy, this is going to be a really negative piece. This is going to turn out really badly for me and GQ. Yeah, but I think that was basically sort of pressuring me to like turn this around.

You know, it was yeah, it was, it was strange. Who was the actor or director you found least interested in cooperating with a profile? No one jumps to mind thinking of that. I think, you know, I think by usually by the time

I'm there, that means that they have some interest in it. And at that point, I sort of think it's up to me. And if they're not responding, then that's my fault, not theirs. My nominee was going to be Robert De Niro. Oh, yeah. You have something of a point there. I think he said he found your questions creepy at one point because you were asking, you know, follow-up questions about some of his earlier movies.

Yeah, I found that really insulting. You know, and it's weird when you suddenly get to that visceral thing where you're, you know, you sort of forget for a moment. It's Robert De Niro, right? Who are, you know, as in his creative life, I have the most incredible respectful. But, you know, it's really annoying and insulting for someone to call you creepy when actually you're working really hard to ask them respectful questions about their life to write something interesting. You know, I went in, you know, as ever, I read a lot of interviews before doing that interview. And I kind of made a vow, whatever I do, I'm not going to write one of those Robert De Niro pieces that's all about how it was a disaster doing this Robert De Nero piece. And of course, hopefully in a different and interesting way, but that's exactly in some way what I ended up having to do.

But, you know, I mean, which culminated in it. And in some ways, he was very gracious. And he was, I don't really understand, you know, because he was trying. He wasn't like, I mean, that was insulting what he said. But a lot of the time, he was in as much pain or more pain. than I was, you know, in his inability or unwillingness to kind of do this. But he was like genuinely trying. And so we kept, you know, and we, we met a couple of times that we met, we met and this, where he was doing the music for his movie, The Good Shepherd. And then he just said his head wasn't

at the right place. And so then we met again. So he said, can you stay in town? So I stayed in town for a week. I had a whole trip for a magazine to go on. on the, um, to take a train from London to, um, Vietnam. I had to rebook the whole trip to wait for Robert De Niro in New York, waited in New York, and I went back to his office, sat down, asked the question that I'd been asking, um, uh, before. Not, not, not anything controversial at all. He looked at me and he terminated the interview after 55 seconds. And then you are left to write the dreaded piece you did not want to write, which is I am trying and not succeeding and interviewing Robert De Niro. Yeah.

And, you know, and I, you know, I mean, he must have some other version of it. But, you know, I found it dispiriting because I really didn't want to write that piece. And, you know, and like I say, I don't think, you know, I think the way he acted cumulatively was weird. and I guess Q's sort of unfriendly in a certain way. But I don't think he wasn't trying or wanting, you know, I think he was doing his version of trying to participate in this. And I think he thought, you know, I think he genuinely felt like I was doing something wrong to stop this work.

On the other side of the coin, who were the actors and directors most interested in the process of profile writing? That's interesting. I think I I think the reason why an answer doesn't jump to mind is that I would, if I got a sign of that, I think I would run from a mile from it

and try and divert from that kind of thought. You know, it's like, you know, one of us thinking too hard about that's too many. Two of us is going to be a disaster. I've developed something I call the Tad Friend Rule, which is named after the New Yorker writer

and it states that the worse a new movie is, the better the profile of the actor or director is likely to be because they will have more incentive to cooperate. Do you ever find that to be true? I had never thought that, but I can see... Yeah, I think that could be true to a degree. Although, you know, there is, of course, you know, you've got the awkward thing sitting in the middle,

of you, which is this movie that doesn't make sense. You know, and whereas if something's genuinely good and interesting, that, you know, that can actually be quite a, you know, can oil other kinds of conversations quite well, too. I always think of Tad Friend because all the time, you're talking about a golden age, since I started writing, you know, and as I say, I do lots of other kinds of writing, but writing these kind of pieces that you're asking me about,

Since I've been doing that, people have been talking about the death of the celebrity profile and that it's over. And Tad Friend wrote a piece declaring that, I'd have to look when, probably 20 years ago, I used to pull out these pieces and I used to have a folder of them whenever they'd come along because I'd always think, well, you know, and yeah, it gets harder and harder probably to get the kind of access and the kind of freedom to do things in a sort of certain way. But I've been being told it's impossible all of the time I've been writing. And again, people are sort of stacking it up against some, I think sometimes mythic, sometimes real, sometimes mythical kind of 70s era. You know, but you know, you know, you can find articles written in the 90s that say every interview done now with a celebrity is done in a hotel room for half an hour. Well, you know, none of these, none of these things we're talking about were done

like that. And, you know, so it always makes me laugh that, you know, people are, you know, and we're not saying it's not hard and harder to get the opportunities to do things like this, but, you know, it's, people have declared it over and gone long, long time ago when it hasn't been. Can you illustrate for me how it's become harder? I think a lot of it I'm insulated from. It's those conversations that I'm, that I try not to have with the intermediaries. but I think there's more and more attempts to delineate exactly what an article is and how it's done. You know, I know in some worlds, you know, people, you know, want to cherry pick who should write an article. There's certainly parts of the media, you know, not parts that I'm involved in,

where people have got copy approval on things they're writing, you know, that are written about them. And I, you know, I think that's probably happening. I'm not an expert on this, but I think that's probably happening in some quite higher profile places way more than people are aware. But, you know, but it's still, you know, I still, you know, I still, you know, I still see plenty of worth in trying to do these things, you know, the way that I think they should be done. And I think, you know, I also think that, you know, that when it, that when it goes, you know, that when it goes, well, for the person being interviewed, there's a real benefit to it. You know, as their attention has been broken up into more and more sort of tiny bite-sized chunks through different technologies and different ways that things are done, I think that,

you know, you can spend a huge amount of your year talking about yourself, but never really saying anything about yourself. And so they, so that's fairly given with someone who's genuinely interested and going to communicate it, the opportunity. to say something about yourself that might actually echo and you might actually recognize yourself in what's written. I think that can be an opportunity. Speaking of the other kinds of stories you've written, one of my favorites is the 2012 story you wrote about the Zanesville, Ohio Zoo Massacre,

for people who haven't read it, what happened in Zanesville, Ohio? Well, there's this guy who was sort of quietly living, Terry Thompson, and outside Zanesville. and as is way more easy to do than I had been aware, and I think that a lot of people were aware, he had collected on his own land a private zoo of 80 animals, including lots of tigers and, you know, all kinds of, you know, all kinds of, you know, and this is something that is legal to do in many states in America.

and then he had died. The exact chain of events isn't completely clear, but he had either killed himself or been killed by one of the animals. But most likely, anyway, he'd let the animals out. The animals were free and he was dead. And these animals were heading out of his property into Zanesville. So, you know, that was the central scenario

which the article was about, but the articles were both trying to understand him, trying to understand what happened on that night, but also then diving much deeper into this world of people keeping animals like this. And, you know, it was, I mean, for me, it was incredible where you would, you know, track people down and arrange to go and see them,

and you'd just come up to a perfectly normal, of sometimes timely house, and you'd go around the back, and there'd be a little cage, not much of one, and there'd be a lion in there. That's something you expect to see every time you walk into somebody's backyard. No, no, no, and it was, anyway, it was, yeah,

that was, that was about as interesting as, you know, one of the greatest delights when you're writing something is to find yourself into a world that you really don't know anything about that just opens up around you that's more fascinating than you could possibly imagine. So you go to Zanesville for GQ, and Esquire, which was the other leading men's magazine, sends the writer Chris Jones to Zanesville to work on a similar story. Did he and his story inhabit your thoughts as you were working on yours? Well, I only found out he was there halfway through, I was in the sheriff's office and talking to a couple of the sheriffs in this boardroom

and another person stuck their head in and said, oh, is this the Esquire guy? And I said, what? And anyway, so then they couldn't remember Chris's name, but they said enough that I immediately suddenly flashed and I realized that we'd been in the same hotel and that he He'd, that I had come down in the lift and he had walked in the lift, because I know what Christian's looked like. You know, I, I, you know, like he was, he was at that time calling my favorite writer at Esquire. So, so I thought, huh, that's weird.

And this is going to be weird. But I, you know, I called the magazine and because I thought they might be worried that we were both doing this story. And my editor spoke to the editor-in-chief, Jim Nelson. and called me back and I said, what did Jim say? And he said, oh, he said, Jim said, oh, it's a zoo-off. Which was great. You know, I thought, you know, I thought that was a great sort of expression of support that, you know, that, you know, and I, you know, I thought, great.

I'll write a story. He'll write a story and we'll see. But I wasn't worried about writing a story. And the results of the zoo-off were published on the web on the same day. in 2012? No, I mean, I presume one magazine realized the other one was coming. There certainly wasn't collusion. You said Jones is one of your favorite writers,

so do you immediately click on his piece and see what he came up with? I did. You know, and his story is good, but it's awkward talking about it because, you know, I sort of sat on my hands and didn't have any public part in this. And Chris was a little ungracious about the whole thing. And I think he would say that now. He's later apologized. But he sort of wage war against me and GQ in my article.

You won a National Magazine Award for that story? I did, yeah. What view do you take of journalism awards? Well, when you win them, you think that are the most amazing things that could exist. You know, it's great to you know, I mean, on one hand, you know, it's, you know, when you feel some kind of external validation that you might be doing things right, that's nice. But I don't think I'd feel particularly different if I never got nominated for anything. You know, I don't think you can, you know, I don't think

you can think about that as a goal or plan how, or go about how you do things based on that. You said earlier, you don't think of a story like Zanesville or the story you wrote about the alleged serial killer Thomas Quick, or known as Thomas Quick, as being different from a story you'd write about Tom Hanks. Why is it not different? Obviously, for the reader, it's probably pretty different. I'm not completely blind to that. But what I mean is that, you know, I'm thinking about the same stuff. I'm thinking about, you know, when you say it, it almost sounds banal, but I'm thinking about why people do what they do, how we do things, and then how you tell a story about them. You know, that, you know,

And, and, you know, I just, I guess it, you know, the way, you know, that probably seems obvious when you're writing about a possible serial killer or, or, you know, someone at the center of an escaped animal situation. Maybe it's less obvious when it's a celebrity, because they, because some people think there's some kind of, you're in some kind of celebrity industrial complex that you're satisfying and you're doing things according to some kind of code or something. I don't know. I just don't think like that. doing the same thing. I'm looking, I'm trying to work out what's interesting about people and, you know, celebrities, there's some disadvantage to into people who are famous, but there's a great advantage and there's a sort of shortcut to people's attention and people tend to know things about them. So you can pivot to interesting things really quickly. You know, so I don't know,

I just, I, in my mind, maybe it's weird to say it out of life, but in my mind, I just, don't feel like I'm doing something different. What's on your list of things you still want to write? When it comes to people, you know, people, I'm often asked, who are the people who still want to interview? And I clam up and I seem like the most useless potential writer. Because I don't think like that. You know, there's whatever it is, 8 billion people out there.

There's probably about a billion and a half of them if I look closely, who I wouldn't think were interesting enough to write about, I guess. But I'm interested in all the others. You know, most people are interesting enough to write about. You know, so I just want to keep finding different people and different ways to write about them. Chris Heath, his news story about Tom Hanks is in the Atlantic and on the Atlantic's website right now.

Chris, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks so much. Thanks, great to talk to you. Thank you. All right, that's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. For my recommendation this week, I'm going to pick a novel.

It's not even a new novel, but it's one I finally read after it had been on my shell for maybe a decade. It's called The Imperfectionists. And it's by Tom Rachman, R-A-C-H-M-A-N. I've been trying to read journalism novels lately. And this is about a newspaper that's a little bit like the International Herald Tribune. and there's a chapter devoted to each of the inhabitants of this newspaper. I'm not going to say much more,

but if you are inclined as I am to read about newspapers and read about journalism and just to read a very, very, very funny, well-observed book, you will love the imperfections. That's my recommendation. In the meantime, read, relax, revise your nut graphs, and let us meet back here Monday, shall we, for more lukewarm takes. about the media. Have a great weekend.