“Bill Murray’s character has a bit of the surface of Ross and more of the feeling of Shawn, which is really that he’s so deeply protective of these writers,” Anderson told me.Īccording to David Brendel, who worked closely with Anderson on “ An Editor’s Burial,” an anthology of New Yorker articles and other writing that inspired the film, the director discussed the significance of the movie’s vibrant visual language during post-production. In a note to the writer Lois Long, in 1938, Ross gently advised toning down a bit of her night-life reporting, remarking, “New York isn’t quite as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah and if it is we better keep it quiet.” Shawn, who joined the magazine in 1933 and several years later became its managing editor, brought to his tenure in the editor’s chair a more elegant, muted quality, motivating his writers in subtler ways. He would regularly dash off memos alerting staff to shortcomings in their work (and also highlights), mostly written in a droll but exuberant style. Ross, who created The New Yorker after a stint as an editor for the military newspaper the Stars & Stripes, was similarly blunt and forthright with his writers.
Tossing off crisp lines with deadpan determination, Howitzer artfully guides his writers as they alight upon their stories. Howitzer is a highly nuanced cross between the magazine’s first editor, Harold Ross, who ran The New Yorker from 1925 until his death, in 1951, and its second, William Shawn, who edited the magazine for thirty-five years. For example, when the editor-in-chief, Arthur Howitzer, Jr., played by Murray, orders his staff to remove the masthead in order to make more room for a lengthy piece, I let out a cough The New Yorker, in its ninety-six-year existence, hasn’t published a masthead. There are many things that the filmmaker gets right, as well as a few that slightly miss the mark (perhaps deliberately so).
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With a star-filled cast that includes Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Timothée Chalamet, the film traces the compilation of an issue of the magazine during a series of chapters, four devoted to the creation of individual articles. Next month, Anderson’s latest film, “The French Dispatch,” about a magazine in mid-century France that bears a striking resemblance to The New Yorker, will première in theatres across the country. All of which is to say that Anderson has had, and continues to have, a lifelong interest in The New Yorker, its writers, and its innermost workings. When I reminded Anderson of this incident recently, he replied that he remembered making the attempt-although, he remarked dryly, “I don’t think I had anything close to the money it would have taken.” Instead, he purchased a large set of bound volumes of the magazine from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently the caretaker of the New Yorker collection that belonged to the longtime staff writer Lillian Ross, who died in 2017.
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Buy the archive? (This was a couple of years before the magazine gave subscribers access to every edition online.) I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so I simply told her that our archive wasn’t for sale, and that we were sorry we couldn’t accommodate the filmmaker. “He’s interested in buying your archive.” It took a moment to sink in.
“I’m calling on behalf of the director Wes Anderson,” the woman on the other end of the line said. One day in May of 2003, I answered the phone in The New Yorker’s archive and received a very unusual request.
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