Tales from the New Yorker
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With new anthologies of poetry and fiction, exhibitions of covers and cartoons—and another at the New York Public Library featuring original manuscripts, correspondence, art works, and even typewriters—and with its current issue (the 5,057th!), the New Yorker is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. The party will last all year, and you can track the goings-on at a splashy landing page, which currently features backgrounders on founding editors Harold Ross and Jane Grant, profiles of such immortal contributors as Dorothy Parker and E. B. White, and appreciations of landmark pieces by James Baldwin and Joan Didion.
On February 21, New Yorker editor David Remnick will introduce a screening of Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood (1967) at Film Forum. The evening will launch Tales from the New Yorker, a series of more than thirty films inspired by or adapted from stories that first appeared in the magazine. Serialized in 1965, Truman Capote’s investigative report on the murder of a farmer, his wife, and two of their children on a farm in Kansas was published a year later as what Capote called a “nonfiction novel.”
“Realism on the page and realism on the screen mean different things, and it is fascinating to see these differences play out in the adaptation,” wrote Chris Fujiwara in 2015. Fujiwara found that “steeped as it is in the visuality of the harsh and contradictory American 1960s, the film of In Cold Blood manages to be more disenchanted, more hopeless than the book.”
Before the opening-night film, Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s repertory artistic director, will present a program of shorts written by and starring Robert Benchley, the critic whose wit earned him a seat at the Algonquin Round Table. Benchley’s wry How to Sleep (1935), directed by Nick Grinde, won an Oscar for Best Live-Action Short Subject.
Nearly every film in the series will have one of its screenings introduced by a New Yorker writer or editor. Film critic Richard Brody—who has written for us about Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland (2007), and most recently, Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (1987)—will introduce Bigger Than Life (1956). “In Nicholas Ray’s extravagant, wide-screen, Technicolor melodrama,” wrote Brody in the magazine in 2017, “the horror of middle-class decency is surpassed only by the terror of the abyss that lies beyond it.”
Further pairings of New Yorker luminaries and films include Adam Gopnik and Norman Z. McLeod’s Marx Brothers comedy Monkey Business (1931), Emily Nussbaum and William A. Wellman’s A Star Is Born (1937), Michael Schulman and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), Susan Morrison and John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Naomi Fry and Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968), Calvin Trillin and Stanley Tucci’s Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), Rachel Syme and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002), and Kelefa Sanneh and Lee Daniels’s Precious (2009). Tales from the New Yorker will run through March 6.
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