Marshall Curry and Judd Apatow on “The New Yorker at 100,” a Documentary

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: Marshall Curry and Judd Apatow on “The New Yorker at 100,” a Documentary

Date: December 9, 2025
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Marshall Curry (Director), Judd Apatow (Executive Producer), Jelani Cobb (Interviewer & New Yorker staff writer/Dean, Columbia Journalism School)

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Overview

This episode offers an in-depth conversation about “The New Yorker at 100,” a documentary marking the centennial of The New Yorker magazine, now streaming on Netflix. Academy Award-winning director Marshall Curry and executive producer Judd Apatow join Jelani Cobb to share insights into the film’s creation, the daunting challenge of encapsulating a century of literary history, and what makes The New Yorker an enduring, culturally significant institution. Touching on the magazine's obsessive editorial process, historical evolution, humor, and its culture of outsider voices, the dialogue is a rich blend of behind-the-scenes storytelling, reflection, and humor.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

The Challenge of Capturing a Century in 90 Minutes

• Scope & Structure
  • Curry compares the challenge to “trying to make a 90-minute film about America.”
  • The team approached it as a “tasting menu” (Curry, 04:02), selecting standout historical events and personal stories that shaped the magazine and culture.
  • Many worthy stories and interviews were left out: “It could have been a 10-part Ken Burns series. And it would not have been boring if we’d had the bandwidth to do that.” (Curry, 04:12)
• Apatow’s Role
  • Apatow shares his trepidation about doing justice to a deeply respected institution and credits Curry’s directorial choices: “For me, I just always think, can every part of it be great?... That’s what Marshall captured.” (Apatow, 04:32)
  • The filmmaking process mirrored the magazine’s tight production cycle, full of tough editorial choices and time constraints, akin to “making an issue of the magazine.” (Apatow, 05:09)

Crafting the Documentary

• Archival Dilemmas
  • The team started with a “greatest hits” list of top New Yorker pieces, narrowing them by story impact and visual potential (Curry, 07:29).
  • Not all filmed interviews and researched stories made the cut: “You have to kill your darlings, and it was incredible. Darling of Darlings.” (Curry, 26:39)
• Editorial Philosophy as Subject
  • The New Yorker’s “obsession” with process and accuracy is depicted through extended editorial meetings and meticulous fact-checking: “...a five hour meeting where they literally go through paragraph by paragraph and argue about whether a word could be a better word…” (Curry, 23:40)
  • Curry likens the magazine’s obsession to the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi—a metaphor for devotion to craft (Curry, 24:35).

Personal Relationships to The New Yorker

• Judd Apatow’s Discovery
  • He candidly admits: “I’m very embarrassed to answer this question... The answer is 42 years old.” (Apatow, 10:46)
  • His entry was social—embarrassed by not being able to discuss The New Yorker with colleagues and friends, he became a fan relatively late.
• Marshall Curry’s Experience
  • Curry grew up with parents who subscribed, started with cartoons, then became a reader, though he notes he wasn’t a “fanatic.”
  • Both guests emphasize the passionate and sometimes obsessive community around the publication and how its staff’s creativity drew them in (Curry, 11:31).

The Magazine’s Outsider Perspective

• Non-Native Editors
  • Curry reflects on how four of five editors-in-chief have not been native New Yorkers, supporting E.B. White’s notion that the magazine is shaped by outsiders seeking the city’s magic (19:19).
  • “If you have an outsider’s view, you can see things that insiders can’t see.” (Curry, 19:19)
  • E.B. White’s “three New Yorks” delineate the city’s energy: stability (natives), churn/money (commuters), and passion (newcomers).

Humor and Editorial Tone

• Centrality of Humor
  • The documentary highlights the publication’s origins as a humor magazine, evolving in tone as the years passed: “We sort of focus on the cartoons near the front and then the politics happens. And then closer to Tina Brown’s era, we discover celebrity profiles…” (Curry, 29:21)

Editorial Process and Fact-Checking

• The Grueling Process
  • Jelani Cobb describes how a submitted piece transforms through editing, copy-editing, and fact-checking: “…it turns into this thing that you wrote but you don’t wholly own. It becomes a part of this entire collective undertaking.” (Cobb, 16:59)
  • Extensive fact-checking compared, half-jokingly, to “getting a colonoscopy while being audited by the IRS.” (Cobb, 17:41)
  • Apatow’s take as a source: “I’ve been on the other side of that... you can’t believe that you have to do it... and then every once in a while you say something really terrible... And they go, ‘Did you say that?’...‘It might be AI.’” (Apatow, 17:42)

Diversity, Race, and Omitted Coverage

• Coverage of Race
  • Curry acknowledges the relatively late inclusion of Black writers and editors: “It was quite a while before they began to explore the Black experience in a serious way…” (Curry, 27:28)
  • References to Charlayne Hunter Gault and Jamaica Kincaid for audiences seeking more on this history (Cobb, 27:52).

The Unseen Stories

• Hopes to eventually release unused interviews and cut material as “DVD extras”—dependent on Netflix (Curry, 23:01).

Final Anecdotes & Notable Moments

• Selection of the Closing Song
  • Curry shares a charming story about securing an unreleased Matt Berninger cover of Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” for the documentary’s finale—secured with Swift’s direct personal approval (Curry, 31:47).
• A Celebration of Journalism
  • Curry closes by emphasizing the documentary as a “celebration of hard, underappreciated work” in journalism, especially inspiring to young viewers (Curry, 30:07).

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Notable Quotes

• On the Film’s Challenge:

  “Trying to make a 90 minute film about the New Yorker is like trying to make a 90 minute film about America.”
  — Marshall Curry (03:10)

• On Editorial Choices:

  “It was gonna be a sampler box of chocolates. We weren’t gonna be able to bring you the whole thing, but it was gonna be enough to just give you a sense of what this magazine’s history was.”
  — Marshall Curry (04:02)

• On Fact Checking:

  “It’s been compared to getting a colonoscopy while being audited by the IRS.”
  — Jelani Cobb (17:41)

• On The New Yorker’s Obsession with Quality:

  “It’s like monks who are copying the books over as the barbarians are destroying the libraries… Are they like the saviors of culture and intellectualism?”
  — Marshall Curry (24:35)

• On Outsider Perspective:

  “If you have an outsider’s view, you can see things that insiders can’t see.”
  — Marshall Curry (19:19)

• On Being Inspired by The New Yorker’s Critics:

  “When I made the 40 Year Old Virgin, there was a review that David Denby had for it…. I felt deeply understood in what I was trying to express in the movie. And it kind of gave me the courage to write Knocked Up.”
  — Judd Apatow (21:15)

• On the Editorial Process:

  “…it turns into this thing that you wrote but you don’t wholly own. It becomes a part of this entire collective undertaking.”
  — Jelani Cobb (16:59)

• On Journalism:

  “Being a fact based journalist is really hard today. And this movie is intended to be a celebration of that hard, underappreciated work.”
  — Marshall Curry (30:07)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [00:44] — David Remnick introduces the documentary and its filming
• [01:55] — Jelani Cobb on the impossible task of compressing 100 years into a film
• [03:05] — Marshall Curry on the “tasting menu” approach
• [04:25] — Apatow on his initial fears and Curry’s direction
• [07:29] — Marshall Curry on how they approached choosing historical content and visual stories
• [09:30] — Apatow and Curry recount their first exposure to The New Yorker
• [13:01] — Cobb’s anecdote about Bruce, the legendary office manager
• [14:30] — Curry on the absence of a story arc and profiling staff who know the tricks
• [16:27] — Cobb on the collective editing and fact-checking process
• [19:01] — Outsider status of New Yorker editors
• [23:40] — Curry’s surprise at the “level of obsession” witnessed
• [27:17] — Discussion of race, Black writers, and what was omitted
• [29:09] — The central place of humor in the magazine’s history and the film’s structure
• [30:05] — Curry’s final reflections on journalism and the film’s inspiration
• [31:47] — Curry on the documentary’s closing song and Taylor Swift’s approval

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Conclusion

This lively roundtable offers an illuminating peek behind the pages of The New Yorker on the eve of its centennial. Through its filmmakers’ eyes, listeners learn not just about a fabled publication, but about the sacrifices, meticulousness, and obsession that go into producing excellence—alongside a reverence for the humor and outsider energy that sustain The New Yorker’s legacy. The episode champions fact-based journalism and leaves the audience both entertained and inspired.

Transcript

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[David Remnick]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and I'm David Remnick.

For months on end, we had a film crew roaming the halls of the New Yorker's offices. They'd sidle in as my colleagues and I pitched ideas, developed stories, picked cartoons, examine facts in excruciating detail.

[Marshall Curry]

The works.

[David Remnick]

They were everywhere. The whole grueling process of putting out a magazine. They were witness to it all. Now the scrutiny, I have to admit, wasn't always comfortable. I'm used to being on the other side of the pencil. But as the New Yorker reached its centennial year, we wanted to open our doors and let readers into what we do every day and in a way that we never had before. The result of all that scrutiny is the documentary film called the New Yorker at 100, which is streaming now on Netflix. The director is Academy Award winner Marshall Curry, and Judd Apatow was an executive producer. We screened the New Yorker at 100 for an audience at the New Yorker Festival not long ago. And afterward, Apatow and Marshall Curry sat down to talk about the process behind the film with staff writer Jelani Cobb, who is also the dean of the Columbia Journalism School.

[Jelani Cobb]

The thing that struck me about this film, you know, among the things that struck me about this film is that having a sense of the history and a sense of the magazine and all of the things that go into.

Would seem to me just an impossible task for a century. It'd be difficult to do this. About one year at the New Yorker and even the kind of joke, the Ted Danson joke about the stack of New Yorkers that like, I'm never going to get through those. And that's just like a year. And so I wonder how you all approached the daunting task of taking this sprawling, incredibly significant, culturally significant publication, this idea that is the New Yorker, and turning it into this very taught, very disciplined frame that we just got to understand a century of its life.

[Marshall Curry]

I mean, that was definitely the challenge of the Film was, you've got this unbelievable magazine. Even the justice, getting a tiny fraction of the current writers was impossible. And that times 100 years. It was kind of an impossible task. Right before I started, Nick Palmgarden told me, trying to make a 90 minute film about the New Yorker is like trying to make a 90 minute film about America. And I thought, there's something to that. There's something to that. And so we sort of decided we're not going to be able to just like have everything. We're going to pick historical events that have a great story that are about a piece that affected culture, that are about a piece that affected the magazine. And we're just going to pick a tiny number of them. And the same was going to happen with the writers and the cartoonists and the COVID editor folks.

And we were just going to make it a tasting menu. It was gonna be a sampler box of chocolates. We weren't gonna be able to bring you the whole thing, but it was gonna be enough to just give you a sense of what this magazine's history was. But somebody said that it should have been a 10 part Ken Burns series. And it could have been. It would not have been boring if we'd had the bandwidth to do that.

[Jelani Cobb]

I don't know. Judd, did you have any trepidation? Did the scope of this give you any trepidation as a producer?

[Judd Apatow]

So, yeah, you're scared because it's something you respect so much and you don't want to do a really terrible version of it. And so I think that, yeah, we knew that encapsulating it was going to be impossible. But, you know, for me, I just always think, can every part of it be great? And so, you know, when David Remnick says they want the magazine to be great and humane, I think that's what Marshall captured in showing the people and how it's crafted each time it comes out. And so my main thing that I did was to say, I'm not going to direct it.

Let's get Marshall to do it. And he just did such a beautiful job because I feel like making this was like trying to make an issue of the magazine. That's what he felt like. He had a limited amount of time. We knew, well, this is when the anniversary is. And there's.

[Marshall Curry]

How many months was it, the whole project? Like 11 months? Yeah, from start to finish.

[Judd Apatow]

But it's like making Saturday Night Live like you have a week of it, a certain amount of time. And I just think he did such a beautiful job making all those really difficult and also heartbreaking decisions, because we all know of other things that we're like, oh, how come they didn't talk about that? But the choices are really great.

[Marshall Curry]

It did feel at sometimes like I was, you know, our team was in this field of fireflies with a jar, and you just sort of run and catch one and then catch one more, and there was just this sort of incredible constellation of fireflies everywhere you looked. You know, one of the things that was new to me to hear articulated was that irreverence has always been part of the New Yorker. And we tried to include that in the making of the film. And I think you brought a lot of that to what we were doing. I think also you were the one who.

Suggested the Carol Burnett. You said, have you ever seen the thing where she pulls the wig off? And so we looked that one up. We're like, that's going in the movie. So, yeah. But we had an amazing team, including some who are here. And I just want to take two seconds to just call out some of the folks who are here, because this was made by a group Zan Parker produced with me. She's amazing. Elizabeth Martin, who's a producer, also my wife. So Peter Yost, Steve Bennett, Lizzie McGlenn, archival producer. Norn Jordan did the unbelievable animation.

Josh Church, Helen Estabrook, Sarah Amos, and of course, everybody at Netflix who's made this whole thing happen, and everybody at the New Yorker. I know there's some New Yorker folks here. You guys were incredibly patient with us in your space and incredibly generous with your. With your time.

[Jelani Cobb]

I'm curious, given the amount of material that there is to work with, how did you approach the archive and, you know, how much stuff did you look at from previous eras and previous, you know, decades of the magazine's life?

[Marshall Curry]

We probably started with, I don't know, 15 or 20 kind of greatest hits stories that, if you ask anybody who knows the New Yorker, what are the stories that are the main stories? The top 20 or so come up frequently. So we kind of started with that. And then, yeah, like I said, we were looking for things that affected the magazine, that affected the history. And of course, we're making a movie, so it also had to be something that had a visual component. I remember the first time I met David when I was sort of pitching myself on the project. I said to him, you know, frequently young filmmakers will ask me for advice about what makes a good documentary. And my stock answer is, there are some stories that are great New Yorker. Stories, but they're not documentaries because the documentary has to be visual. And I said, david, I got to tell you, I feel pretty weird because I'm here pitching my cautionary tale that I tell hundreds of young people not to do. But it just seemed like there were so many brilliant people and so many amazing stories that it was. It was worth figuring it out. But so finding things that were visual was part of what narrowed our list down. And then we edited more of these historical stories than finally made in the film. We shot more writers. I mean, Adam Gotnick and Jill Lepore and these amazing people who I loved. And then as the movie had to get smaller and smaller, we couldn't include it all. And it was reading books, it was watching documentaries. It was doing. Our archival team did an unbelievable job of scrubbing archives and trying to find what. What could you make a little mini film from?

[Jelani Cobb]

Is it okay if I turn your own question back on you and ask both of you how you became aware of the New Yorker or what your earliest kind of consciousness about the New Yorker is?

[Judd Apatow]

I'm very embarrassed to answer this question, but it wasn't. It was like, last week, but it is pretty bad. I'm from Long island, and my magazine of choice, I. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's US Weekly, and.

That was most of what I was reading. TV Guide. I'd read it like a book because there were articles at the front. So I was writing a movie with Owen Wilson, and I went to visit him in Texas, and his parents are very cool people, and his mom, Laura, was Richard Avedon's assistant and did the Old west photo collect and is an amazing photographer. And Owen was talking a lot about the New Yorker. And I had heard of the New Yorker before, but I don't think I had read it. And I just was so embarrassed that it sounded smart. And I couldn't talk to Owen about it, you know, like, I just was embarrassed. And then Wes, you know, obviously was very into the New Yorker, and I just thought, what kind of a Long island idiot am I that I don't know about this? And then I started reading it then. So the answer is 42 years old.

[Jelani Cobb]

And, Marshall, what about you?

[Marshall Curry]

I grew up in New Jersey mostly, and my parents got the New Yorker. It was this thing that I would look at the COVID and flip through the cartoons, and that was sort of it. And then over time, I started looking at reading the Talk of the Town and then maybe a few more articles. And then in my 20s. I got my own subscription.

So I actually have always liked it. I can't say making this film, I realized that there are real fanatics about the New Yorker. I couldn't have named all of the editors, and I couldn't have. There are people who really know the New Yorker. I was not one of those. I was a casual consumer. But I liked it. And I thought.

I knew how smart the people were who worked there and how creative they were and how unusual their obsession was. And so that was kind of what drew me to it.

[Judd Apatow]

I'm sorry. One thing I just wanted to say that I also think Marshall did so well, that we were excited about is just telling the story of the people who work at the New Yorker. Because people are so tough on journalism. And I never understand it when everyone's mad at the media at the level they are. But when you watch something like this, you see how dedicated and honest and amazing everybody is. And I think it's really important to put things like that out in the world.

[David Remnick]

Judd Apatow, along with Marshall Curry at the New Yorker Festival will continue in a moment.

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[Jelani Cobb]

I have to say one thing I really appreciated, I kind of laughed out loud, was the inclusion of Bruce, you know, the office manager. When I first, when I first got to the New Yorker, like, every problem that I had, they sent me to Bruce. And it could be anything, you know, like, I feel like I have. I'm getting a toothache. Go talk to Bruce. You don't know what to do. It was like every single thing. And like at every institution, probably at your job, you know, or at your kid's school or whatever, there's that one person that seemingly makes all of the things, all the engines work. And so it's always like, Bruce, what exactly is in your job description?

I do want to ask if there was anything aside from the scope, which we've talked about, if there was anything else that was a particular challenge in doing this project.

[Marshall Curry]

I mean, the number one challenge was scope. Just how do you get it all down? The other challenge was that there wasn't an obvious arc to it. You know, most of the movies that I make are one or two people who want something and then they have obstacles, and at the end they get it or they don't get it. And so we had to figure out, how do these scenes fit together? How do all of these characters who are connected by this magazine but don't necessarily all work in the same space together, interact with each other?

How do we build something that feels linear, like a movie? But I'll say the other big challenge was that everybody who works at the New Yorker knows how a profile works. And that makes them hard to make profiles about.

[Jelani Cobb]

Right.

[Marshall Curry]

Because I remember there's a trick that you learn as a documentary filmmaker very early when you're interviewing somebody.

You ask a question and then you let the person answer and then you don't speak.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yes, that's right.

[Marshall Curry]

Because your temptation is to jump onto the next question. But if you leave that hole there, then it creates this kind of socially awkward silence. And frequently the person who you're interviewing will fill that silence, be drawn to fill that silence, and they'll say something that's like a perfect summation of the thing that they had just said in a long winded way or that's a surprising twist on the thing. It's like frequently the best stuff. And I was interviewing David and he said something and I waited and he looked at me and he nodded and I looked back at him and he said, I know this trick, too. I was like, ah.

[Jelani Cobb]

So also, I should say Marshall has just ensured that no one from the New Yorker will interview anyone in this room now.

[Marshall Curry]

So, you know, just the sort of awareness of how these stories, how their stories were going to be told is. Is a constant sort of cat and mouse challenge. But, you know, if you spend enough time around somebody, you get. And they're willing. And I think that the people who we profiled were the people who were, you know, were willing to sort of share themselves. Then you can get surprising, delightful insights.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah, I think also the film did a good job of, from my vantage point, seeing how something that I submit, which I think of as just a bunch of words, goes through this process and gradually becomes a New Yorker article. And so you send it to them and they send back edits and they send back. You go back and forth with your editor and then you send it back, and after you've addressed all the edits and they send it back to you, but now it's in New Yorker font.

And that looks different, and you go through copy edits and then they send another galley back and now it has cartoons. And over the course of it, it turns into this thing that you wrote but you don't wholly own it becomes a part of this entire collective undertaking. And especially the fact checking, which I thought was a really great depiction of what that experience is like. I will add an addendum to David's point, however, which is that he said it's been compared to a colonoscop. I think that the entire thing is that it has been compared to getting a colonoscopy while being audited by the irs.

So that's.

[Judd Apatow]

I've been on the other side of that where you get the call, they want to go over all of it with you, and you can't believe that you have to do it. Why do you have to do it? Because you did an interview. You have to talk to someone for an hour and a half on the phone. And so, yeah, I did say all the stuff you're saying, but then every once in a while you say something really terrible to a reporter and then they go, did you say that? And you're like, no. And they're like, it's on the tape. I don't know. It might be AI. I don't know.

[Jelani Cobb]

So.

I do want to talk a little bit about history, which is that you pointed this out. It had never occurred to me prior to you making this point, but four of the five editors in the New Yorker's history have been non native New Yorkers. And I wonder if just kind of in the course of doing this and getting an assessment of who Harold Ross was and who William Shawn was and so on, if that registered. Anyway, if you came up with any kind of armchair theory about, like, what binds these people together or what maybe common themes there are in these figures that have led the publication.

[Marshall Curry]

Yeah, I mean, that was something that surprised me. If you asked me the day before I started this project, who do you think founded the New Yorker? I would say, ah, some Princeton guy from the Upper east side or something. And no, it turned out it was a high school graduate from a Colorado mining town. And.

And that is a big part of what makes the New Yorker the New Yorker, I think. Not to say they don't have any Princeton guys there, but also there is an outsider perspective to New York. And I've heard Susan talk about it too. Just that if you have an outsider's view, you can see things that insiders can't see. There's a famous E.B. white quote that we considered putting at the beginning of the film that Basically talked about the three New Yorks.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah, that's right.

[Marshall Curry]

And there's the first New York, which is the New York of the locals who have been here forever, the natives New Yorkers. Then there's the New York of the commuters, and then there's the New York of the settlers or the pilgrims, the people who come to New York looking for something. And E.B. white says that the first gives it its stability, the second gives it the churn and the money, and the third gives it its passion. And that third group is a surprisingly significant number of people who've run the New Yorker, the people who built the New Yorker, and the people who are there now. I mean, there are lots and lots of folks who work there who are outsiders and bring that kind of love of New York, but outside perspective, I.

[Jelani Cobb]

Mean, it seems like that is like the quintessential New Yorker, you know, which is, you know, I'm a native New Yorker, but my mother came here from Alabama and my father came here from Georgia. And in some ways, I feel like they were more New Yorkers than I am because I've always taken the city kind of for granted in that way. And so, Judd, I wondered, you were attached to this project first, if I understand correctly, what was the draw? You know, what was the appeal? Or was it just, I'll show that? Owen Wilson.

[Judd Apatow]

Well, I mean.

I love the magazine. I love this festival, and so I.

[Jelani Cobb]

Can applaud for that.

[Judd Apatow]

And I also love movies like this. Like, this is the kind of movie and documentary that I want to exist, and that's basically how I decide what to do. But I've also had such a nice relationship with the magazine over the years. I always remember being at this festival in 2007 with Seth Rogen, right after Knocked up and Superbad came out. And it was just one of the most fun nights of my entire life. David Denby interviewed us, and it was so great. And also, this sounds strange, but when I made the 40 year old virgin, there was a review that David Denby had for it. And at the end, he said something that really inspired me in my writing. Afterwards, he was talking about Kathryn Keener's relationship with Steve Carell. And he said something like, you know, that this relationship is going to be really hard, but it's going to be worth it. And I felt deeply understood in what I was trying to express in the movie. And it kind of gave me the courage to write Knocked Up. Like, oh, you could write complicated relationships that are kind of rough at times. And so I've just always felt that connection with the magazine and people like Richard Brody, who's always been very kind to me. And so I was happy to be a part of this in a tiny way so I could pretend I'm part of the New Yorker.

[Jelani Cobb]

Since this is so deeply concerned with history, is there any kind of idea that the materials that you generated that didn't make it into the film, will that ever be available? Will that ever be part of the New Yorker's archive? Will someone be able to, say, a researcher in the future be able to go and look at, you know, three interviews that didn't make it into the.

[Marshall Curry]

That's probably a Netflix question. Really?

[Jelani Cobb]

Okay, people on Netflix. You have some people from Netflix here. Let's make that happen.

[Marshall Curry]

I do. You know, in the old days we would have DVD extras that you would put at the end of the dvd because we do have, you know, scenes that we cut, long interviews that we did, lots of folks, history that we explored.

[Judd Apatow]

So I think Netflix is here tonight.

[Marshall Curry]

Let him know.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah, you should cheer for this.

Ramp up the pressure.

[Judd Apatow]

We'll have to follow up later and see what they think.

[Jelani Cobb]

We have some questions from the audience. What was something about the current magazine or its history that surprised you during your research or the filming?

[Marshall Curry]

To be able to witness the level of obsession was surprising. Like, I'd heard people talk, oh, the New Yorker has this fact checking department and, oh, the New Yorker's, you know, obsessed with their work. But to see, oh yeah, a five hour meeting where they literally go through paragraph by paragraph and argue about whether a word could be a better word. Not even factually, but just like, would this be more precise? Would this be better to see how kind of ridiculous some of the obsession is? Ridiculous in the. Or let's just say inefficient. Like they have 20 something fact checkers on staff. They spend so much time and they're competing with magazines and Internet stuff that's just slopped, it's just pouring out and.

It'S like admirably inefficient. It's like monks who are copying the books over as the barbarians are destroying the libraries. That's what it feels like. And sometimes you're like, are these people Amish or are they. Or is it. Are they like the saviors of culture and intellectualism? So one of the movies that I looked at when I was trying to find models was Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is sort of a weird choice for a movie about a magazine, but it's about Obsession. It's about picking something that you love and being totally obsessed with it. And I started to think that it was kind of a metaphor for what the New Yorker does, which is they're not trying to compete with McDonald's hamburgers. They're going to make carefully crafted sushi from that day's fish, piece by piece, for a very small setting of people who really appreciate it. I frequently have a question that I want to know the answer to. That's what propels me. And in this case, the question was, how does a New Yorker exist when Newsweek and Time and US News Report and Life and Harper's, to some extent, that all of these things have been, you know, either shut down or tiny, you know, shadows of themselves. How did this magazine do it? And I think that the answer is they make a product that you cannot get for free on the Internet and they ask people to pay for it. And it's kind of amazing.

[Jelani Cobb]

So, New Yorker.com, if you'd like to fill out your subscription or renew or give one as a gift, use purchase.

[Marshall Curry]

Code Marshall Curry on I get 10%.

[Dell Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Jelani Cobb]

What stories or sequences in your time filming did you love but had to cut?

[Marshall Curry]

I mean.

A number of things. I mean, Jill Lepore is just a genius and hilarious. And she was working on a piece at the New York Public Library, which has the archives of the magazine. I don't even want to tell you because you're gonna all be thinking, like, what the hell? Why is that not in the movie? But, you know, they say you have to kill your darlings, and it was incredible. Darling of Darlings. But, you know, we had a scene with Adam Gopnik, who also is. Just embodies the history and the knowledge of the magazine that couldn't make it in. So there were a lot of heartbreaks.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah.

Was there more that you would have liked to say about the magazine's coverage of race and the long absence of black writers and editors during its history?

[Marshall Curry]

Yeah, I mean, you could make a movie about that, probably, but it was quite a while before they began to explore the black experience in a serious way and before they started to have black editors and black writers.

[Judd Apatow]

And.

[Marshall Curry]

I mean, each of these three minute historical beats in our film could be their own film.

[Jelani Cobb]

Charlayne Hunter Gault, who was the first black staff writer at the New Yorker, talks a little bit about her entree to the magazine in her new latest collection of essays. If you look that up, she does talk a little bit more. You can get a little bit more of a Kind of full exploration through her viewpoint of entering the magazine and the climate that she came into and so on. And I think Jamaica Kincaid has talked some about that as well.

[Judd Apatow]

But, you know, there could be a sequel to this, don't you think?

Isn't that what we're trying to say to Netflix, who's here somewhere?

[Jelani Cobb]

So when we were backstage, we were talking a little bit about this, about how central humor is in this film, which is when I first sat down to watch it, I was expecting, it's like, oh, okay, we'll just kind of go through the history of the magazine and we'll see. And like, you know, Tina Brown's era brought these changes and so on. But like, the audience, you know, I laughed out loud and I wondered if that was meant to be a kind of reference to the magazine's origins as a satirical publication or how did that editorial tone come about?

[Judd Apatow]

We talked about it from the beginning. There's a version of this that feels very kind of dusty. And then there's a version that's what the magazine is, which is very alive and in the moment of today.

[Marshall Curry]

And it does sort of structurally mirror, as you said, the fact that the magazine was founded as this comic weekly and then over time became more serious. Our profiles that we ordered kind of do that too. We sort of focus on the cartoons near the front and then the politics happens. And then closer to Tina Brown's era, we discover celebrity profiles and things like that. So it has a rough structure that follows the tonal changes of the magazine through history.

[Jelani Cobb]

Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is important for the audience to know?

[Marshall Curry]

I mean.

I guess being a journalist is really hard today. Being a fact based journalist is really hard today. And this movie is intended to be a celebration of that hard, underappreciated work. And I think some of our favorite responses after we've screened the film, I've heard a couple of young people say, you know, I never thought about being a journalist before, but from watching the film, it kind of seems like something I'd want to do. And to me that's like, that's a great. That's a great review for it.

[Jelani Cobb]

Did you tell them to come to Columbia Journalism School?

[Judd Apatow]

No.

[Jelani Cobb]

It's like, I'll give you some cards.

[Marshall Curry]

One other just anecdote is that as we were finishing the film, we needed a song for the final, for the final sequence. And we needed something that was New York themed, but it needed to have like a dynamic range that could both sort of sit underneath David Remnick talking about the importance of the magazine and also under party footage. And then would have, like, a little punch when you go to the credits that would say New York. And we were just trying all these different songs. And I texted Kelefasana, the music brilliant music mind that's featured in the film. And I said, do you have any ideas for a New York song that would work? And he said, what if you got somebody like Matt Berninger from the national, this sort of, like, cool indie rock band to record Taylor Swift's welcome to New York? And he didn't know, but I'm super good friends with Matt Berninger, and Matt's wife was a fiction editor at the New Yorker. And I had been talking to Matt as well. Of, like, can you think of any songs? So I called him and said, hey, I just had this idea. Would you be willing to do this? And he said, well, the problem is we were talking on a Saturday. He said, on the day after tomorrow, I'm going to California to rehearse. I'm about to go on tour. And he said, but tomorrow I could go into the studio and record the song. And he said, but I don't know if Taylor Swift's gonna let you use the song. Like, you know, she's Taylor Swift, like. And so he said, I'll record it. If you can get the rights, then you can use it. If not, then whatever. And so he recorded the song. He sent it to me the next day. We cut it into the film. It was perfect. It had, like, all that fun, dynamic range. It was cool. It was smart. It was poppy. I write Taylor Swift an email two days later. She says, sure, you know, have her email.

[Jelani Cobb]

It's like, Taylor Swift never replies to my emails.

[Marshall Curry]

So that's the song at the end of the. It's an unreleased version of Taylor Swift's welcome to New York. I think it'll be coming out at some point.

[Jelani Cobb]

Ladies and gentlemen, Marshall Curry, Judd Apatow.

Thank you for your work. Thank you for the film.

[David Remnick]

The New Yorker at 100 is on Netflix now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

[Tough Cookie Podcast Host]

Famous Amos. It's a brand synonymous with chocolate chip cookies. It's also the creation of my dad, Wally Amos. When he passed away last year, I set out to understand how he became one of the most famous black men in America and how his life and our family unraveled. From Vanity Fair, this is Tough Cookie, the Wally Famous Amos story, available wherever you get your podcasts.