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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Tom Hanks has been a constant presence on the American movie screen for 40 years.
He's played a mermaid's boyfriend, an astronaut, a soldier on D-Day, an FBI agent, a young man dying of AIDS, a castaway, and a dim-witted innocent who runs clear across America.
He hasn't just won an Oscar for Best Actor. In the mid-90s, he wanted two years running. And in his 60s, he still sells a lot of tickets. Now Hanks has just added another line to the resume. Novelist. His new book is called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. And he's put everything he's learned in the business into an overstuffed, often funny, work of fiction. The story, which seems real enough...
involves an old comic book that's being made into a big-budget superhero movie. I joined Hanks on stage the other night at the Symphony Space in Manhattan. Now, one note, it's kind of interesting. Because of the persona that comes with Tom Hanks, and we'll get to that later for sure, I was expecting a certain kind of laconic, modest presence. Jimmy Stewart in modern dress. But the Tom Hanks I met was more excitable, more performative, edgier.
And though the movies have made him very rich and very famous, he was a lot more conflicted about what it is to be a star. Tom, I want to start with your novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which comes out today. I have a question, and of course it comes in the form of a complaint. It's what we call a Jewish question. In 1952, the New Yorker sent a writer named Lillian Ross...
who got access from start to finish to the making of The Red Badge of Courage, a film by John Huston. Starring Audie Murphy. Yeah. And it wasn't until 1990, almost 40 years later, that another journalist, Julie Salomon, got access to the making of another film, which you were in, Bonfire of the Vanities. Bonfire of the Vanities, yeah. The Devil's Candy. There you go.
Why does the makers of movies make it so mysterious to the rest of us how movies get made, which I suspect is something that's behind this novel? Well, it's not a conspiracy. No one is hiding anything. If anybody who is what we call a noncombatant or a civilian wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they will be bored out of their skull.
At the, everybody is just kind of like waiting for something to happen. There might be, there might, nowadays you'll go on to a sound stage and there'll be a blue screen and there'll be guys up on a cherry picker moving some cables around and you'll think, is, is, is that, is that it?
And the answer is, yeah. Because they have to move those cables around because somewhere somebody is being put into a harness and they're going to be dangled above an air mattress and they're going to have to make out with somebody else in a thing. And you'll wonder what is going on in this movie. And then when you see that moment from the movie, you'll turn out...
It's the most passionate, important beat in the film that you have seen. And you were there. Oh, you were there when you shot that? Yeah. What was it like? I had coffee and these two guys were just up on a thing. And they were doing it. I will tell you this other brief aspect. I was working with a bold-faced name. Let me put it that way because I don't want to tell stories out of it. But you know who this lady is.
She's magically sincere. And if you take M-S, those are her initials. She is magically sincere. And we were doing a very, very, very, very, very long scene together. And in a movie, a very, very, very long scene could be like eight pages of dialogue that was loaded with ups and downs and twists and turns and both very long history between our two characters and also brand new stuff that we had to wrestle to the ground in that scene. So this is Meryl Streep in The Post.
You guys can discern whoever you want it to be. So I was bored and was wondering, what's going on? What's taking so long? And so I walked onto the set. There were two guys over there that were doing something and everybody else was pacing around. And I saw the...
magic sincerity person was in the room that was not being used which means all the furniture has been stacked up in it and all the C stands and all the equipment is over there and I said I came over hey what's going on oh no I'm just I said
Do you want to run the dialogue for the scene? I would love to run the dialogue for the scene. And so while we're sitting there, we just banged it back and forth, you know, different timing, up and down, up and down. But what we were doing was beginning to feel each other out for the intricate game of kickball that we were about to do. You know, the only couple I knew that both Kennedy and LBJ wanted to socialize with was you and your husband and you on the damn paper.
Since the way things worked, politicians and the press, they trusted each other so they could go to the same dinner party and drink cocktails and tell jokes while there was a war raging in Vietnam. I don't know what we're talking about. I'm not protecting Linda. No, you got his former secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, the man who commissioned this study. He's one of about a dozen party guests out on your patio. I'm not protecting any of them. I'm protecting the paper.
If you were a noncombatant and you had come to watch us shoot the film that day, you would have seen a bunch of excitement over here as people pushing gear and lighting lights and moving stuff around. It looks like that's where the pocket... But where the real performances were being...
mapped out where were these two odd people who were just sitting in the side of a room surrounded by a bunch of anvil boxes and C stands. You have this great passage early in the novel, page seven. I really like this. Please make it past page seven, please. Well,
Oh, not to worry. Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday, but with a gun to the head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane. I love this. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians.
supervised by executives fresh out of business school to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an airplane is going to soar? So do you feel in the midst of this kind of weird combination of boredom and chaos and people chattering like you and that person that a movie is going to come out of this? You wouldn't believe it to see it.
There's no logic to it whatsoever. All you can do is go into it with faith somehow that it will work out. That everybody else knows their job well enough. You know that airplane scenario that you're talking about? The director, you know who the director is in that scenario?
The people who load the luggage into the bottom of the plane if they don't lay that out perfectly the center of gravity of the plane will not work and will not fly that's literally the director and the artistic people that do it everybody else is just kind of like hey man I hope I've done job my job enough well so this plane don't go down. I think when we go to the theater we see we see this thing play out in real time you've memorized an entire play us civilians have no idea how you do that
just the sheer memorization of it. You've rehearsed it, you've done it any number of times, blocked out, directed, and then it happens in real time. Two hours later, it's over. Film acting seems like something entirely different, and the way you describe that rehearsal scene with that actress, she's very good, by the way. She's magic. She's magic, and sincere. And sincere.
Do you know when you're doing it well in those little snippets of, you know, 30 seconds? I will tell you this. You don't. You don't. All you can do is have some kind of faith that your instincts have joined you.
Our job is to provide the raw materials. All we can do is open a vein, bleed it out, dig around in the riverbed long enough, say, here's the gold dust, here's a nugget, please do well with this, Mr. Director, Editor, Scorer, Foley Artist, you know, Sound Mixer, Dialogue Mixer, all the stuff that goes along with it. Oftentimes when you go to work as an actor, they can almost ask you this question, what mood are you in today? You say, you know, I feel pretty good.
Had a great night last night. Got slept. The Knicks won. I feel awfully, I'm feeling pretty snazzy. What are we doing today? Oh, that's right. We're doing the scene where I have to have a nervous breakdown and weep copious tears and go to such a deep and dark place emotionally that it's going to take me a day and a half to recover from what my job requires of me today.
Now, here's a famous story from a famous movie. Are you ready for it? You ready for the famous anecdotal story? Here we go. Forrest Gump, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Terrible. We were shooting in Cherokee Square in Savannah, Georgia. We're on the world-famous park bench. We've got various props.
There was so much dialogue and I was so exhausted because we had shot, at one thing, we had shot 27 days straight. 27 days straight without a day off because we would be flying off to places to shoot. Remember Forrest Rand across the country? Well, there's only one way to get those in those days. You had to fly to the goddamn place, put on the costume and run for an hour and a half, then go back, get on the plane, and then fly to New Hampshire and do it all over again. We would do that and so we then, we finally are
done. I'm exhausted. I don't know what's going on. And if you remember the movie Forrest Gump, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. The scenes on the park bench have
oceans of dialogue and we shot them in a day and a half alright so that's an ocean of dialogue and we were there to point it out and I said to Bob Bob my head is fragile frazzled I cannot we're doing all these scenarios with different people and every one of them have a page and have a dialogue I will never be able to keep this in my head I don't worry Tom we'll shoot it like I love Lucy we'll have four cameras we'll put the words up on cards if you need it you can just read them
He said, oh, great, thank you. Let's make this an even more artificial atmosphere. Hello, my name's Forrest, Forrest Gump. Do you want a chocolate? I could eat about a million and a half of these. My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get.
Now, the good news is we got it all down pretty fast and the dialogue all made itself. But at one point, I was sitting there saying, okay, we're going on to the other one? Okay. The lady's coming along. I said, hey, Bob, I got a question for you. What, Tom? Is anybody going to care about this movie?
This guy sitting on a thing in these goofy shoes and this cuckoo suit with a suitcase full of, you know, Curious George books and stuff like that. Are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody? True story. And Bob said, it's a minefield, Tom. It's a goddamn minefield. We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Any footstep we take could be a bouncing Betty that'll blow our nuts right off.
And Bob Zemeckis, God bless him, I've worked with him more than once, has said, landed on the absolute truth of anybody who has gone forward and say, we are going to commit something to film today and eventually we'll cut this into something. You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith. So when you're filming a scene that is eventually becomes, as in the opening sequence of Private Ryan,
Do you know that you're in the midst of something that's special, something great? Do you have any sense of it all? Because you're describing moviemaking as some weird combination of chaos, boredom, anxiety, prolonged days. No, we knew we were. Let me tell you a story about that.
We are in the assault boats, right? We're in the Higgins boats off the coast of Ireland. And we're now going to Steven Spielberg. We invaded Ireland? We shot it in Ireland as a double for Normandy. History could have been different. You know, it was what? It was a gray day. The weather was miserable. Looked like the English Channel to us.
And Stephen does not rehearse a thing. You do not rehearse with Stephen. So I am meeting a guy who is just out of drama school, and this is his first motion picture, and it's with Stephen, and I'm in front of him. And Stephen says, "Okay," and we know what the script is, "All right, when the time comes, you guys go over the side, and we'll pick you up in the water afterwards."
So the special effects go down, which we have not seen. When they squib up these guys, they can only really do it once. So we come up, and we're in the back. The camera's with us, and the front of the Higgins boat goes down, and the stuntmen that have been wired with squibs in front of us all disappear in a haze of simulated flesh, blood, and sinew.
then me and my co-star jump over the side into water that is too deep for us to touch bottom. And then the camera is in the water with us. We kind of pull up. And before we shot that scene, I said, how are you in the water? He said, I can't swim. Well, it's a good thing we didn't rehearse this then, isn't it?
And then, when we finally get up there, the special effects guy comes up and rigs him with an exploding squib on his chest. You know, they're all English. Don't worry about it. He's all going to be fine. Listen, before this goes up, don't look down. Don't look down. Because it is an explosive, and there is going to be projectiles coming out of your chest. And it would be good if you're not looking down with your eyes open. So, don't do that. Now, all of this is happening at a time when total...
tactile chaos is going off on because there's 600 extras there's people in the water there's machine guns going off air mortars are blowing off and it's outside of the fact that we know we're making a movie it's a perilous dangerous thing
And look, I've been preparing for this moment for about eight months by looking at all sorts of research that goes into it. And we had all met each other. We had done boot camp. We had prepared. But we're there in the water. It's freezing cold, freezing cold. And I got up and I looked. I was trying to gather myself together as Captain John Miller. And I looked down this way and a man without an arm is on fire.
You know, you don't fake that. You don't think, whoa, Tom, what were you thinking when you saw the man without an arm on fire? You thought, my God, he has no arm and he's on fire. That's what you think. Now, that all goes into...
unrehearsed moment that Mr. Steven Spielberg says, okay, great, we got that. Let's move up to the Belgian gate and get that sequence there. We knew, I knew, oh, you know, this isn't me falling in love with a dog on this movie. This is actually something that's going to be quite, quite, quite palpable. But the reaction that we had to that was about literally the tactile stuff that we were shooting at that individual moment.
That's Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan from 1998. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We'll continue now with my conversation with the actor Tom Hanks. He's just released a debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The book comes out as Hanks approaches his 40th year as a leading man. His first big movie was 1984's Splash, a mermaid comedy with Daryl Hannah and John Candy, and it's a movie that he's been working on for a long time.
And eventually he made a string of rom-coms, including You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, which were directed by his friend, the late Nora Ephron.
How is it different to work with the director like Nora Ephron for example as opposed to Steven Spielberg? It seems the rehearsal process is Steven Spielberg has been thinking in cinematic terms since he was eight years old and you can look at his films But he was a kid and they literally are you can see his DNA all over them to this day No matter what the film is no matter what the no matter what the theme is that is being involved Nora Ephron was a journalist and
She wrote her screenplays from a journalistic point of view with her sister as well. What does that mean, writing a screenplay from a journalistic point of view? There was a type of authenticity and a crispness to the dialogue that is very, very, very important.
particular, meaning that it scans in a different way. It's not necessarily human behavior. It's actually a give and take between the characters that continually propel along the story. Hello. Hello. Hi. Do you need some money? No, I do not need any money. Thank you very much. Get in another line. Hi. Rose. That is a great name. Rose. This is Kathleen. I'm Joe. And I'm Henry.
Henry, how are you? Happy holidays. This is a credit card machine. Happy Thanksgiving.
She also rehearses her movies as specifically as she writes them. So that we had rehearsals with taped out set and props. And a lot of her scenes go on for 11, 15, 17 pages sometimes. And we rehearse them in real time so that by the time we got to the set, we knew that would be broken up into eight different sort of setups throughout the geography of an apartment or a restaurant or what have you. And you land on the same spot
specificity than when you're shooting them as you did when you rehearsed it. And Nora, she's tough. She was tough. She would say, I know what you want to do with that moment, but I hate it. And so therefore, let's not do it that way. And you...
Look, I was very cranky, particularly when I first met her to do Sleepless in Seattle. Thank you. It works every time. It works every time. Fantastic. Because I was really big, and I had some hits under my belt, and I won some trophies for participating. And when we were working on their rehearsals for it,
I realized that one of the things that was driving me nuts about the project is that Delia, Delia Efron and Nora Efron are sisters are but they also are what? They are mothers. It was a movie about a father and I said you guys are the wrong gender to understand what's going in this scene between me and my son. A remark like that always goes well. Oh and she loved it. Why wouldn't she? Oh Tom tell me more. Laughter
And the argument I had was, you have written a scene in which a father is undone by the fact that his son is upset about him going out with a woman. Oh, no. I said, there is not a father on the planet Earth who is going to give a rat's ass what his son thinks. Because you know what that father wants to do? He wants to get laid. And that's what's missing from your little gender-ish life.
scene that you wrote. And she said, well, then why don't you say that? And that was a very empowering moment because she's, as a journalist, she says, she would often say this, well,
You're right. When you're right, you're right. So she let me go off and do that kind of stuff in the movie. And then later on, I said, you know, it was great that, you know, it was great that you let that happen in the accumulative collaborative process of making a movie. And she said, well, you wrote that. I said, no, no, Nora, I did not write that. I complained at you in rehearsal and you decided to put it into the movie. Complaining is writing. But she said, that's what writing is. It's like...
Are you, I mean, writing is sitting down and complaining on paper and that's what writing is? He says, hmm, hmm, yeah. But you've had an even stronger role in conceiving the idea for a film, Castaway, as something. Yes, yes. How did...
There is a character that is essentially is a biker, an outlaw biker who got out of the Marines right after World War II. And I had read many years ago that the origin of a lot of the outlaw biker gangs came from the Marines that returned from battle in the Pacific, had a lot of combat pay, and were not about to go back to their lives as John Law obeying citizens.
because they had killed and massacred a few too many people in order to do that.
All right. So I had read that and that always stuck in my mind as a great place on which to hang both the character and a character that will examine a theme. I read a million years ago, and I did not realize this, that planes, huge jumbo jets filled with nothing but envelopes and packages flew across the Pacific Ocean twice a day going to Australia and back.
And I said, well, nothing but packages and envelopes. Well, who's flying the plane? Oh, okay, a crew of what, four people fly this plane? That's either the greatest gig in the world or the worst gig you could possibly have as a pilot. Turns out it's a really good gig because they don't have to put up with jerks like us back as passengers. And I thought, what happens if one of those planes goes down and three of the crew die and there's only one left and we don't know where that is? What's that story? And from that came Castaway.
I was looking for the story in which a guy would be reduced down. And I had that idea. Bill Broyles had a lot of the structure. He was a screenwriter. And nothing happened until we got Bob Zemeckis on in order to give us the third act, which is sort of like the redemption and the point of the whole movie. I wanted to reduce a guy down to a guy who was not going to survive unless he had the five elements necessary for human life. Food.
water, fire, shelter, and company. And we never could land on what the company really was until Bob said, I think Wilson's got to come out of your own blood. I think he's got to be a creation of your own flesh and blood.
And I said, well, how would we do? Bob said, Bill said, well, how would we do that? And I said, I know. What if he cuts his hand and in frustration picks up the ball and throws it and then turns that into a little face? Bob said, well, there you go. We worked on Cast Away for eight years before we ended up making the movie. That's how long it takes. We had a screenplay that was loaded with dialogue in which I, as Chuck Nolan, would have lines like this.
Well, I am all alone on this island. Look at me all by myself. Holy cow. There is no one on this island to talk to except me. I better find a source of food and water. Shelter would be nice too. And how in the world am I going to make fire? We had all this dialogue on it. And when we got down there, we shot one scene where I had something like, I said like...
hmm, what am I going to do now? I said something like that to myself. And I turned to Bob and said, Bob, I don't think there should be a word of dialogue out of Chuck. And he said, I don't think so either. I said, the only time I should talk is when I think somebody is there. He said, who's there?
That's the one line of dialogue that I know. Because coconuts drop in the back, you know. Who's there? And the other one is if I think someone is out there. Help, help. Those are the only pieces of dialogue that we have until I make fire and celebrate. And we may actually have Wilson by that point. So I ended up talking to Wilson. I did it. I did it. I did it. Come on. It's time to have the day that's through. Ouch.
And I will tell you this, when you're a selfish actor in a movie and the question you really do want to ask but you don't dare because it shows you to be a Bush League guy who doesn't care about the artistic integrity of the movie but every actor wants to know, how many shots before lunch?
And the other question is, is this all on me? Are you ever going to turn around and get... Yes, we are going to turn around. But when you're the only guy on the island, there's nobody to turn around on except for Wilson. Wilson is on a little stump, and he's loose...
And then he's a little tighter. And that took seven minutes to shoot. And that's how much time I had off on making it. I had seven minutes. I went back to my little hut and, you know, had a sip of water and that was it. So there's a motif in the book, and I think you also believe it in life, in that you take enormous offense at the notion of anybody hating a movie. Oh.
Why is that? Okay. Let's admit this. We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them. What of your movies did you hate? Oh, stop. Stop.
Here are the five points of a Rubicon that are crossed by anybody who makes movies. The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie. The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It's either a double zero or it's a zero one. It's binary. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make or it does not work and it's not the movie you wanted to make. That has to be a rubicon.
has nothing to do with Rubicon number three, which is going to be the critical reaction to it, which is a version of the Vox Populi, how people weigh in. Someone is going to say, I hate it. Other people are going to say, I think it's brilliant. Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is.
The fourth Rubicon is the commercial performance of the film because if it does not make money your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. Simple, that's just the fact, that's the business. The fifth Rubicon is time. Where that movie lands 20 years after the fact. What happens when people look at it perhaps by accident. A great example of this
is It's a Wonderful Life, which was made about 1949 and disappeared for the better part of, I'm going to say 20 years, locked up in a rights issue. And essentially when it came out, it was reviewed as Capricorn. It did not make its money back.
It was not viewed as being a classic. It wasn't even viewed as being a commercial hit. Well, when we all saw It's a Wonderful Life sometime in the 1970s, we actually thought, where has this treasure been? That happens all the time, and personally for me, it happened on a movie that I wrote and directed. Thank you. That thing you do. Thank you. Thank you. There you go. That gets applause now.
And I'm trying to be very, very pragmatic because look, I loved making that movie, I loved writing it, I loved being with it, I love all the people in it. One of my kids was born in between the Mercyhurst College talent show and the performances at Villa Pianos. I was a father of three and I figured it's the movie being a father of four. That's how important the movie was for me. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of Vox Populi. It didn't do great business.
It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd little kind of like quasi ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane. Now, the same exact publications that dismissed it in its initial review called it Tom Hanks' cult classic, That Thing You Do. So now it's a cult classic. Doing that.
What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time. And you could take any film from... any number of film from any number of great filmmakers, and the opposite happens too. A movie that came out was on, like, this version of a cutting edge of this is who we are right now, and 20 years later you think, what was the big deal about this movie? In Keith Richards' autobiography, which he may or may not have read, he says...
He says, it's a good book, though. It's great. No, that guy's lived a life and a half, hasn't he? He says, at a certain point as a public person, you're schlepping, dragging, I'm sure he is, dragging around your own persona like a ball and chain. Yeah, yeah.
And every time there's a kind of fairly lazy feature story about your profile, inevitably Jimmy Stewart is raised as comparing your persona. He and Keith Richards, those are the guys I buy. Keith Richards. The similarity is unbelievable. Those were in my wheelhouse. Unbelievable.
How does a persona work for an actor? Is there one? Are you aware of it? There's nothing you can do about it at all except never, ever, ever, ever talk to the press. No, I...
Honestly, think about it. There are some artists out there, some filmmakers, some actors, you don't know anything about them because they do not go off and promote their movies in a certain way or open themselves up in a matter. And maybe it affects their ability to work, maybe it doesn't. But the truth is, no matter who you are...
You carry your countenance with you into every single job you do. So much so that now, the first two paragraphs of any review of any of my movies are actually about all the other movies I've ever made. You know, if it was... Like, the last movie I did was, like, A Man Called Otto. I'm going to say...
nine reviews out of ten, you know, said, well, giving up his Forrest Gump nice guy persona, not unlike Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, but a little bit more like Sully in Sully. Tom Hanks is auto, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's all like, how did this current persona match up to whatever it is? It's ignored by the audience, I think, because it's part of the contract the audience has with...
With the purchase of going to a movie. Which is what?
that you understand that this is just the latest incarnation of somebody that you are familiar with and you buy that they've seen you in all these other movies. They buy that you're not as young as you were. They buy that you are in these other movies that you're in, but they're willing to suspend the knowledge of that long enough to either be swept up in what you're doing or not. That's what we decide to do. And I don't do it with any other actor or filmmaker. I don't sit there and say, well,
Well, this is not exactly the age of innocence, but it certainly is as good as Goodfellas. You know, I don't think about that when I watch a Marty Scorsese movie or any filmmaker or any actor. It's like, well, you start from square one. You start all over. It's naked at the beginning of that.
and do you buy it or not? And I think that reality is not part of the reportage, if I'm using a word, that comes about in what I call the entertainment industrial complex. People write about the all-encompassing sweep of all knowledge about all movies ever made, but going to the movies is actually an individual relationship that each of us has with what is playing up on the screen.
Tom Hanks, this has been so much fun. This has been fun, guys. Thank you. Thank you. The actor Tom Hanks. His new novel is the making of another major motion picture masterpiece. And our conversation was recorded as part of The New Yorker Live at Symphony Space in Manhattan. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for joining us today and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our
Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ngofen Mputubwele, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decke. ♪
Special thanks this week to Ed Haber, Chase Culpin, Amanda Miller, and Krista Boyd. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherino Endowment Fund. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...
focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.
You know, for us at In the Dark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling. And we felt a real kinship with The New Yorker, like the combination of the deeply reported stories that The New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to The New Yorker, it would be... Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but...
I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker. You know, like you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned like
the other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe. And so to me, it's like I can't imagine not reading these writers.
You can have all the journalism, the fiction, the film, book, and TV reviews, all the cartoons, just by going right now to newyorker.com slash dark. Plus, there's an incredible archive, a century's worth of award-winning work just waiting for you. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And thanks. ♪