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

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 Yorkers' offices. They'd sidle in as my colleagues and I pitched ideas, developed stories, picked cartoons, examined facts in excruciating detail. The works, 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 a Hundred, which is streaming now on Netflix. is Academy Award winner Marshall Curry and Judd Apatau was an executive producer. We screened the New Yorker at 100 for an audience at the New Yorker Festival not long ago, and afterward Apatau 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.

The thing that 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 and all of the things that go into it, it would seem to me uh just an impossible task, you know, for a century, it'd be difficult to do this about one year at the New Yorker. And even, you know, 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.

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