{"id":331166,"date":"2025-12-06T13:02:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T13:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/331166\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T13:02:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T13:02:08","slug":"the-new-yorker-at-100-netflix-documentary-dives-inside-a-groundbreaking-magazine-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/331166\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Yorker at 100: Netflix documentary dives inside a groundbreaking magazine | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

When young film-makers ask Marshall Curry what makes a documentary idea, he tells them: \u201cThere are some stories that make great New Yorker articles, but they\u2019re not movies.\u201d It was only a matter of time before the director found himself testing his own wisdom with The New Yorker<\/a> at 100, a new Netflix film about the magazine. \u201cSomebody said to me that trying to make a 90-minute movie about the New Yorker was like trying to make a 90-minute movie about America. Ken Burns does that with one war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film pulls back the curtain on the mystical media shop. Curry and his crew spent a year rummaging through the archives, listening in on production meetings, shadowing famous bylines \u2013 none more venerated in the industry than editor David Remnick, the magazine\u2019s abiding leader. Curry had hoped to make a meal out of staffers pushing to meet the February 2025 publishing date, the magazine\u2019s centennial anniversary issue, but the scenes he found didn\u2019t quite approximate anything from the boiler room-centered dramas of film fiction or even The September Issue doc on Anna Wintour\u2019s clannish Vogue operation. \u201cI wanted to see people running around each other and saying, \u2018We\u2019ve got to get this thing done before the deadline!\u2019\u201d Curry says. \u201cBut they don\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Supreme self-assuredness is how the New Yorker has managed to remain an essential subscription in a contracting media landscape where paper journalism has been reduced to a niche product. While rivals chased trends in hopes that eyeballs would follow, and faded into irrelevance, the New Yorker doubled down on curiosity and honed its refined palate, collaging wry cartoons, original art and cultural observations around authoritative profiles and investigations. And readers show their loyalty every time they lose themselves in an issue on the subway, troop around town in New Yorker-branded totes or point with some embarrassment to the stack of issues they haven\u2019t gotten all the way through yet.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mini stack is around here somewhere,\u201d says Curry, who grew up in New Jersey reading his parents\u2019 magazine subscription. \u201cI started looking at the cartoons because I was a little intimidated by all those words. Then I started reading the shorter stuff, then the longer stuff \u2013 then I got my own subscription and have had one nonstop since.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curry\u2019s film is as much of a tasting menu as the magazine itself \u2013 one that has Academy Award-winner Julianne Moore playing narrator. Jesse Eisenberg and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie enthuse over their rarefied status as New Yorker contributors. Sarah Jessica Parker and Molly Ringwald nerd out about Roz Chast as the celebrated cartoonist makes parakeet fodder out of her old New Yorker issues. It follows Fran\u00e7oise Mouly, art editor, as she wrestles with what to do for the centennial issue cover in between reporting adventures with New Yorker staffers \u2013 in a Syrian prison with Jon Lee Anderson, war correspondent, alongside Rachel Syme, profile writer, for her interview with Carol Burnett, at home with Ronan Farrow, investigative reporter, as he reels in a big scoop on Trump administration surveillance tactics.<\/p>\n

The big challenge for Curry was turning the tables on these expert reporters and interviewers. \u201cThere\u2019s this trick that documentary film-makers learn quickly where you ask a question, the person finishes it but you don\u2019t jump in with your next question because the person will try to fill the awkward silence that frequently follows \u2013 and they\u2019ll add some additional piece of color that\u2019s even better than the thing they said in their original answer,\u201d he says. \u201cWell, I asked David a question. He answers it. I sit quietly. He looks at me. I look at him. Finally, he says: \u2018Marshall, I know this trick, too.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Where the film really shines is in retracing an institutional history that dates back to the New Yorker\u2019s rowdy early days as a Mad magazine-style funny paper hatched by a high school dropout from Colorado. But where Mad committed to the comedy bits, the New Yorker seized on the world shaking events it observed through the years and took them as opportunities for its journalism to grow up. John Hershey\u2019s seminal piece on Hiroshima, his 30,000-word response to the US government banning photographs of the civilian impacts of their nuclear bombing of Japan, made war coverage a priority for the magazine. James Baldwin\u2019s 1962 essay A Letter from the Region of My Mind, which arrived in the throes of the civil rights movement, opened the magazine to non-white perspectives at a time when the mainstream media wasn\u2019t platforming Black voices \u2013 much less Baldwin, just an aspiring novelist at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting that you use the phrase \u2018grow up,\u2019\u201d Curry says. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of what we get to watch the magazine do, start out as this silly 10-year-old with its silly cartoons, and the one day an atom bomb gets dropped. When the film premiered at Telluride film festival, a woman stopped me on the street and said \u2018I feel like I was watching the biography of an old friend.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

David Remnick and Nicholas Blechman Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n

Truman Capote\u2019s In Cold Blood, which effectively launched true crime as a genre, became a reason to build the industry\u2019s most rigorous fact-checking department after Capote was found to have taken fictional liberties with the piece. Curry\u2019s film makes sure to fulfill the required fan service and tarry over the New Yorker\u2019s world-class pedantry: the quirky typographical style, its habit of accenting \u00e9lite, co\u00f6perate and other common words \u2013 the gleeful reader letters that stream in when the magazine\u2019s vaunted fact-checking department gets caught out. (Readers love smacking fact-checkers around with that word, apparently.)<\/p>\n

And yet: for as much as the New Yorker has grown up through the years, to the point of distinguishing itself as a dynamic multimedia brand now, concerns about its future remain ever-present. Remnick, who turned 67 in October, has defined the magazine\u2019s direction for the past two decades; readers and insiders worry the magazine could become a museum piece after he steps down. Curry\u2019s film only nods at the magazine union\u2019s protracted collective bargaining fight with Cond\u00e9 Nast; last month, the magazine conglomerate fired four New Yorker employees who were also prominent union members after announcing the near shuttering of Teen Vogue. Before that, a veteran New Yorker fact-checker walked off his job amid tensions over the magazine\u2019s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict.<\/p>\n

Curry says he didn\u2019t see any signs of strife while embedded with the magazine. \u201cMy sense was there was a lot of diversity of thought, and people disagreed,\u201d he says. \u201cI heard writers arguing about whether Trump was in fact a racist and open debates about a lot of other things. I was kind of surprised, honestly.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the days leading up to the film\u2019s debut this week, the New Yorker posted a link to a story on photographer Ann Hermes and her work documenting the decline of local newspapers across the US. It\u2019s the sort of post that might scan as self-promotion and self-awareness to a discerning New Yorker reader. Can the magazine endure for another 100 years? Can it even survive this economy? \u201cThey still have 1.25 million subscribers and I\u2019m sure they\u2019d like that number to go up,\u201d Curry says. \u201cBut they\u2019re not trying to be McDonald\u2019s and sell billions and billions of hamburgers to everybody in the world,\u201d Curry says. \u201cThey\u2019re making handmade, exquisitely crafted sushi for two seatings a night at their small restaurant for people who love and care about perfectly made sushi.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When young film-makers ask Marshall Curry what makes a documentary idea, he tells them: \u201cThere are some stories…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-331166","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}