Entries associated with the tag "New Yorker":

Last week's New Yorker carried an interesting personal essay by Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University instructor who became a star on the 1950s quiz show Twenty One and then an object of disgrace when the public learned that the show was fixed by the producers. Movie fans probably know that story from Robert Redford's Oscar-winning Quiz Show (1994), but Van Doren's essay also details his life after the scandal, including the genesis of the movie. Redford offered him $50,000, and then $100,000, to serve as a consultant, but Van Doren, acting on the advice of his attorney and the feelings of his family, turned the offer down. According to the piece, that didn't stop actor Ralph Fiennes (pictured) from driving up to Van Doren's house and sneakily asking for directions in order to get a look at him.

A footnote: Redford's movie was adapted from a superb book by Richard Goodwin called Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties. A House subcommittee investigator on the quiz-show case, Goodwin later wrote eloquent speeches for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Senator Robert Kennedy. (He's also the husband of presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.) Goodwin is a tremendously gifted writer, and Remembering America is an essential memoir of the 1960s. I can't recommend it more highly.

This weekend the New York Times reported on the controversy surrounding Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris's new documentary about the Abu Ghraib case. "I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise," Morris said in a statement. He considers the possibility that he should have revealed the payments in the credits, though he says he "didn't feel the necessity."

The story highlights an interesting and little-remarked-upon dichotomy between  journalism and movie documentaries: newspaper, magazine, and Tv interviewers rarely pay subjects, while film producers commonly do. In fact, the dicier issue seems to be whether the New Yorker violated its standards by publishing in its March 24 issue an excellent piece by Morris and Philip Gourevitch that drew from the interviews Morris collected for the film. Especially fascinating is its treatment of Specialist Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company, who began snapping digital photos inside Abu Ghraib as a way of indemnifying herself against what she knew were abuses but wound up incriminating herself instead.

The Times is also hosting a blog by Morris, where he considers in two posts his technique of staging reenactments for the specific purpose of isolating and focusing on key moments in a complex chain of evidence. There's a fair amount of this in Standard Operating Procedure, though the stagings are mostly for emotional effect. The evidentiary burden falls mainly on the prosecution's reconstruction, by synchronizing digital photos from three soldiers' cameras, of the chain of events as prisoners were abused and ritually humiliated. And Morris's interviews with Harman and Lynndie England are chilling--paid or not, they starkly capture the dehumanizing environment inside Abu Ghraib.

David Denby has a fine piece in the New Yorker this week on the future of cinema. I've read a lot of death knells for the medium lately (in a gigantic Film Comment essay last year, Paul Schrader wrote as if it were already history), but Denby's piece is an admirably succinct and balanced overview of the commercial and technological forces changing the industry and the artform.

Some of the developments Denby notes are clearly bad news (a theatrical distribution model geared toward big opening weekends and, therefore, children and teenagers), some are clearly good news (digital distribution, which may level the playing field between the multinational corporations that own the studios and the kid shooting a movie in his basement). But the knottiest problem Denby considers is the advent of digital exhibition—projecting movies not from 35-millimeter prints, which must be physically delivered in cans weighing 50 to 80 pounds, but from a hard drive.

The changeover to digital could revolutionize the beleaguered theater business (which was apparently slightly less beleaguered in 2006), but the aesthetic quality of digital photography is so different from celluloid that one can't really call them the same thing, any more than one could call a digital print a painting. As Denby notes, young people tend to be "platform agnostic"—they don't really care whether they're watching something on a 50-foot screen or on their iPod. So filmmaking in the literal sense, and moviegoing in the communal sense, may already be disappearing into the cultural twilight.

The quesion is, should we really care? Denby writes reverentially about the communal experience of moviegoing, a sentiment I heartily endorse. But for most people in America the communal experience of moviegoing isn't watching Viridiana at the Film Center--it's sitting in an ugly multiplex watching Saw III. Public hangings were a communal experience too, but I'm not sorry people have moved on to other amusements.