A Hundred Years of The New Yorker

Speaker 1 WNYC Studios is supported by USA for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Families fleeing war often arrive in camps hungry, cold, and exhausted.

Speaker 1 UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, provides emergency relief like hygiene kits with soap, clean water, and shelter materials to displaced families worldwide.

Speaker 1 For more information, visit UNrefugees.org slash WNYC. WNYC Studios is supported by ATT.
Hearing Hearing a voice can change everything.

Speaker 1 So AT ⁇ T wants everyone to gift their voice to loved ones this holiday season, because that convo is a chance to say something you'll hear forever. AT ⁇ T, Connecting Changes Everything.

Speaker 2 This is the On the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
The New Yorker magazine turned 100 this year, and marking the occasion is a new documentary film on Netflix.

Speaker 2 But with some 5,000 print issues and 10 decades worth of reporting, illustrations, illustrations, editing. Where does one even begin?

Speaker 2 That's a question staff writer Jelani Cobb brought to the film's director Marshall Curry and executive producer Judd Apatow on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 all of the things that go into it,

Speaker 3 it would seem to me just

Speaker 3 an impossible task.

Speaker 3 For a century, it'd be difficult to do this about one year at the New Yorker.

Speaker 3 And even the kind of joke, the Ted Danson joke about the stack of New Yorkers that you're like, I'm never going to get through those.

Speaker 3 And that's just like a year.

Speaker 3 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 taut,

Speaker 3 very disciplined

Speaker 3 frame that we just got to understand a century of its life?

Speaker 3 I mean, that was definitely the challenge of the film was you've got this unbelievable magazine. Even just getting a tiny fraction of the current writers was impossible.

Speaker 3 And that times 100 years.

Speaker 3 It was kind of an impossible task.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I thought, heck, 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.

Speaker 3 We're going to pick historical events that have

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And the same was going to happen with

Speaker 3 the writers and the cartoonists and the cover editor folks.

Speaker 3 And we were just going to make it a tasting menu. It was going to be, you know, a sampler box of chocolates.

Speaker 3 We weren't going to be able to bring you the whole thing, but it was going to be enough to just give you a sense of what this magazine's history was.

Speaker 3 But somebody said that it should have been a 10-part Ken Burns series, and it could have been.

Speaker 3 It would not have been boring if we'd had the bandwidth to do that. I don't know.
Judd, did you have any trepidation? Did the scope of this give you any trepidation as a producer?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 I think that, yeah, we knew 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?

Speaker 3 And so 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

Speaker 3 my main thing that I did was to say, I'm not going to direct it.

Speaker 3 Let's get Marshall to do it.

Speaker 3 And he just did such a beautiful job because I feel like making this was like trying to make an issue of the magazine. Like

Speaker 3 he had a limited amount of time. We knew, well, this is when the anniversary is.
And there's how many months was it? The whole project?

Speaker 3 Like 11 months, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But it's like making Saturday Night Live. Like you have a week of a certain amount of time.

Speaker 3 And I just think he did such a beautiful job making all those really difficult and also heartbreaking decisions because we all know

Speaker 3 of other things that we're like, oh, how come they didn't talk about that?

Speaker 3 But the choices are really great.

Speaker 3 It did feel at sometimes like I was, you know, our team was in this field of fireflies with a jar and you'd just sort of run and catch one and then there you'd catch one more and there were just this sort of incredible constellation of fireflies everywhere you looked.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I think you brought a lot of that to what we were doing. I think also you're the one who

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 this was made by a group.

Speaker 3 Zan Parker produced with me. She's amazing.

Speaker 3 Elizabeth Martin, who was a producer, also my wife.

Speaker 3 Peter Yost, Steve Bennett, Lizzie McGlenn, archival producer. Norton Jordan did the unbelievable animation.

Speaker 3 Josh Church, Helen Estbrook, Sarah Amos.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You guys were incredibly patient with us in your space and and incredibly generous with your time.

Speaker 3 I'm curious, given the amount of material that there is to work with, how did you approach the archive?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 how much stuff did you look at from previous eras and previous

Speaker 3 decades of the magazine's life?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So we kind of started with that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 you know, frequently young filmmakers will ask me for advice about what makes a good documentary.

Speaker 3 And my stock answer is: there are some stories that are great New Yorker stories, but they're not documentaries because a documentary has to be visual.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But it just seemed like there were so many brilliant people and so many amazing stories that it was worth figuring out. But so finding things that were visual was part of what narrowed our list down.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, we edited more of these historical stories than finally made in the film. We shot more writers.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, Adam Gottnick and Jill Lapore and these amazing people who I loved. And then as the movie had to get smaller and smaller, we couldn't include it all.

Speaker 3 And it was reading books, it was watching documentaries, it was doing, you know, our archival team did an unbelievable job of scrubbing archives and trying to find what you could make a little mini film from.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 consciousness about the New Yorker is?

Speaker 3 I'm very embarrassed to answer this question, but it wasn't. It was like last week, right?

Speaker 3 But it is pretty bad. I'm from Long Island and my magazine of choice, I don't know if you've heard of it, it's Us Weekly.
And

Speaker 3 that was most of what I was reading. TV guide, I'd read it like a book because there were articles at the front.
And so I was writing a movie with Owen Wilson, and I went to visit him in Texas. And

Speaker 3 his parents are very...

Speaker 3 cool people and his his mom Laura was Richard Avedon's assistant and did the Old West

Speaker 3 photo collection and is an amazing photographer

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I just was so embarrassed that it sounded smart and I couldn't talk to Owen about it.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 And then I started reading it then. So the answer is 42 years old.

Speaker 3 And Marcia, what about you?

Speaker 3 I grew up in New Jersey mostly, and my parents got the New Yorker. It was this thing that I would look at the cover and flip through the cartoons, and that was sort of it.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, over time, I started looking at reading the talk of the town, and then maybe a few more articles. And then, you know, in my 20s, I got my own subscription.
But

Speaker 3 so I actually have always liked it. I can't say, like making this film, I realized that there are real fanatics about the New Yorker.

Speaker 3 I couldn't have named all of the editors and I couldn't have like, you know, there are people who really know the New Yorker. I was not one of those.

Speaker 3 I was like a casual consumer, but I liked it and I thought

Speaker 3 I knew how smart the people were who worked there and how creative they were and how unusual.

Speaker 3 their obsession was. And so that was kind of what drew me to it.
One thing, oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 people are so tough on journalism, and

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I think it's really important to put things like that out in the world.

Speaker 2 Jadapatow and Marshall Curry at the New Yorker Radio Hour will continue in a minute.

Speaker 4 In a region as complex as the Bay Area, the headlines don't always tell the full story. That's where KQED's podcast, The Bay, comes in.

Speaker 4 Hosted by me, Erica Cruz-Guevara, The Bay brings you local stories with curiosity and care. Understand what's shaping life in the Bay Area.

Speaker 4 Listen to new episodes of The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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'm getting a toothache. Go talk to Bruce.

Speaker 3 You don't know what to do. It was like every single thing.

Speaker 3 And like at every institution, probably at your job, you know, or at your kids' school or whatever, there's that one person that seemingly makes all of the things, all the engines work.

Speaker 3 And so it's always like, Bruce, what exactly is in your job description?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 the number one challenge was scope.

Speaker 3 How do you get it all down? The other challenge was that there wasn't an obvious arc to it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so we had to figure out like, 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,

Speaker 3 interact with each other? How do they

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that makes them hard to make profiles about. Right.

Speaker 3 Because I remember there's a trick that you learn as a documentary filmmaker very early. When you're interviewing somebody,

Speaker 3 you ask a question and then you let the person answer and then you don't speak. Yes, that's right.

Speaker 3 Because your temptation is to jump on to the next question.

Speaker 3 But if you leave that hole there, then it creates this kind of socially awkward silence.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It's like frequently the best stuff.

Speaker 3 And I was interviewing David, and he said something, and I waited.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So also I should say, Marshall has just ensured that no one from the New Yorker will interview anyone in this room now.

Speaker 3 So, you know, just the sort of awareness of how these stories, how their stories were going to be told is a constant sort of cat and mouse challenge.

Speaker 3 But, you know, if you spend enough time around somebody,

Speaker 3 you get,

Speaker 3 and they're willing. And I think that the people who we profiled were the people who

Speaker 3 were willing to sort of share themselves,

Speaker 3 then you can get surprising, delightful insights.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think also the film did a good job of, you know, 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.

Speaker 3 You know, 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.

Speaker 3 And that looks different. And you go through copy edits and then they send another galley back and now it has cartoons.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And, you know, especially the fact-checking, which I thought was a really great depiction of what that experience is like.

Speaker 3 Although I will add an addendum to David's point, however, which is that he said it's been compared to a colonoscopy.

Speaker 3 And I think that the entire thing is that it has been compared to getting a colonoscopy while being audited by the IRS.

Speaker 3 So that's the. I've been on the other side of that where you get the call, they want to go over all of it with you,

Speaker 3 and you can't believe that you have to do it.

Speaker 3 Like, why do you have to do it? Like, because you did an interview, you have to talk to someone for an hour and a half on the phone and say, yeah, I did say all the stuff you're saying.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And they're like it's on the tape i don't know might be ai i don't know

Speaker 3 um

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 i do want to um to talk a little bit about about history um which is that you pointed this out i it had never occurred to me prior to you making this point but four of the five editors in the New Yorkers history have been non-native New Yorkers.

Speaker 3 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 Sean was and so on,

Speaker 3 if that registered in any way, if you came up with any kind of armchair theory about

Speaker 3 like what binds these people together or what maybe common themes there are in these figures that have led the publication?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, that was something that surprised me.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 and that is a big part of what makes the New Yorker the New Yorker I think not not to say they don't have any Princeton guys there but 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.

Speaker 3 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.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 And there's the first New York, which is the New York of the locals who

Speaker 3 have been here forever, the natives, New Yorkers. Then there's the New York of...

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And E.B. White says that the first gives it its stability, the second gives it the churn and the money,

Speaker 3 and the third gives it its passion. And

Speaker 3 that third group is a surprisingly significant number of

Speaker 3 people who've run the New Yorker, the people who built the New Yorker, and the people who are there now.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I 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.

Speaker 3 And in some ways, I feel like they were more New Yorkers than I am. I've always taken the city kind of for granted in that way.

Speaker 3 And so, Judd, I wondered, you were attached to this project first, if I understand correctly.

Speaker 3 What was the draw? You know, what was the appeal? Or was it just I'll show that Owen Wilson?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I mean, I uh

Speaker 3 I love the magazine. I love this festival.

Speaker 3 And so I... You're going to pull up on that.

Speaker 3 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...

Speaker 3 nice relationship with the magazine over the years. I always remember being at this festival in 2007 with Seth Rogan right after Knocked Up and Super Bad came out.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Afterwards, he was talking about Catherine Keener's relationship with Steve Currell.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Will that ever be part of the New Yorkers archive? Will someone be able to say a researcher in the future be able to go and look at

Speaker 3 three interviews that didn't make it into the...

Speaker 3 That's probably a Netflix question, really.

Speaker 3 If there are people on Netflix, you have some people from Netflix here. Let's

Speaker 3 make that happen. I do, you know, in the old days, we would have DVD extras that you would put at the end of the DVD.

Speaker 3 Because we do have scenes that we cut, long interviews that we did, lots of folks' history that we explored. I think Netflix is here tonight.
Let them know.

Speaker 3 You should cheer for this.

Speaker 3 Let's ramp up the pressure. We'll have to follow up later and see what they think.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 To be able to witness the level of obsession was surprising.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 a five-hour meeting where they literally go through paragraph by paragraph and argue about whether a word could be a better word.

Speaker 3 Not even factually, but just like, would this be more precise? Would this be better?

Speaker 3 To see how kind of ridiculous some of the obsession is, ridiculous in the,

Speaker 3 or let's just say

Speaker 3 inefficient. Like,

Speaker 3 they have 20-something fact-checkers on staff. They spend so much time,

Speaker 3 and they're competing with magazines and internet stuff that's just slop, that's just pouring out.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's like admirably inefficient. It's like it's like monks who are copying the books over as the barbarians are destroying

Speaker 3 the libraries. That's what it feels like.
And sometimes you're like, are these people like Amish or

Speaker 3 are they like the saviors of culture and intellectualism?

Speaker 3 So one of the movies that I looked at when I was trying to find models was Gio Dreams of Sushi, which is sort of a weird choice for a movie about a magazine, but it's about obsession.

Speaker 3 It's about picking something that you love and being totally obsessed with it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They're going to make carefully crafted sushi from that day's fish.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And in this case, the question was: how does the New Yorker exist when Newsweek and Time and U.S. News Report and Life and Harper's to some extent, that all of these things have been

Speaker 3 either shut down or tiny

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it's kind of amazing.

Speaker 3 So New Yorker.com, if you'd like to fill out your subscription, or renew, or give one as a gift.

Speaker 3 Use purchase code Marshall Curry on every webinar. I get 10%.

Speaker 3 What stories or sequences in your time filming did you love but had to cut?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 a number of things. I mean, Jellapore 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.

Speaker 3 I don't even want to tell you, because you're going to all be thinking, like, what the hell? Why is that not in the movie? But,

Speaker 3 you know, they say you have to kill your darlings,

Speaker 3 and it was incredible darling of darlings. But, you know, we had a scene with Adam Gottnick, who also is just like embodies the history and the knowledge of the magazine that couldn't make it in.
So

Speaker 3 there were a lot of heartbreaks. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 each of these three-minute historical beats in our film could be their own film.

Speaker 3 Charlene Hunter-Galt, 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I think Jamaica Kincaid has talked some about that as well. But you know, there could be a sequel to this, don't you think? Like,

Speaker 3 isn't that what we're trying to say to Netflix, who's here somewhere?

Speaker 3 So when we were backstage, we were talking a little bit about this, about

Speaker 3 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 you know brought these changes and so on but you know 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it does sort of

Speaker 3 structurally mirror, as you said, the fact that the magazine was founded as this comic weekly and then over time

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is important for the audience to know?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 I guess

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 I think some of our favorite responses after we've screened the film, and 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.

Speaker 3 And to me, that's like, that's a great,

Speaker 3 that's a great review for it. Did you tell them to come to Columbia Journalism School? No.

Speaker 3 It's like, I'll give you some cards.

Speaker 3 One other just anecdote is that as we were finishing the film, we needed a song for

Speaker 3 the final sequence. And we needed something that was New York themed, but it needed to have like a...

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And we were just trying all these different songs. And I texted Kellefasana,

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I had been talking to Matt as well: of like, can you think of any song? So I called him and said, hey, I just had this idea. Would you be willing to do this?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And he said, but tomorrow, tomorrow I could go into the studio and record the song. And he said, but I don't know if Taylor Swift's going to let you use the song.
Like, you know, she's Taylor Swift.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I write Taylor Swift an email. Two days later, she says, sure.

Speaker 3 Wow. You know,

Speaker 3 Taylor Swift never replies to my emails.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Ladies and gentlemen, Marshall Curry, Judd Apato.

Speaker 3 Thank you for your work. Thank you for the film.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker at 100 is on Netflix. Thanks for listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast.

Speaker 3 Tune into the big show on Friday for a look at the wild ride we had in 2025.

Speaker 2 Happy holidays!

Speaker 1 NYC Now delivers breaking news, top headlines, and in-depth coverage from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday, and evening.

Speaker 1 By sponsoring our programming, you'll reach a community of passionate listeners in an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to learn more.