Amy Wallace

The GQ Cover Story: Justin Theroux

The actor-screenwriter-director on how to write your own destiny, create your own style, and win over America’s sweetheart

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ October 2013

Here’s something you may know about Justin Theroux: He asked Jennifer Aniston to marry him, and she said yes. (Feel free to pretend you only know that because your girlfriend told you.) Here’s something else you may know, but probably don’t: The actor-screenwriter-director, whose skinny-downtown-biker look gets tons of love in the more fashiony corners of the Internet, is one of the best-dressed men in America right now.

The rest of you? You’re forgiven if you’re coming up blank. Despite a career that was singular and varied long before he met Aniston (and is about to get even more multifaceted), Theroux remains easy to be only vaguely aware of. There was his hilarious turn as a bearded hippie scoundrel in Wanderlust, an atrocious comedy that he almost made worth watching; dramatic roles in a pair of David Lynch films (Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire); and even the odd part in a historical epic (he played John Hancock in HBO’s John Adams). In many of these films, though, you see him and yet you don’t. Despite his ridiculous handsomeness, he disappears.

“He’s a Ken doll,” jokes Lost-co-creator Damon Lindelof, who cast Theroux as Click to continue »

Here is the back and forth that I had with Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter.org about the genesis of the #WomenEdsWeLove hashtag on Twitter that I kicked off last week. She wrote about it here, but our entire exchange is below:

Poynter: Can you say a little bit more about why you created it? (I think it was in response to the Port magazine feature, but I want to double check.)

Me: The idea for the hashtag started in an early morning phone call with Mary Melton, the editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine, and one of my many bosses (I’m part time editor-at-large at Los Angeles, a correspondent for GQ and do freelance as well, often for women’s magazines). I’d emailed her the cover of Port and we were talking about the response thus far and whether we should dip a toe in to the conversation. It’s always complicated — as any woman in any profession knows — to raise the subject of gender. If you’re competent, you’re not a whiner. And I’ve worked for (and learned a lot from) so many male editors, some of whom were on that Port cover. That said, it was bugging me that women like Mary, who’s won three ASME’s in short order during her tenure as EIC of Los Angeles (and who recently got promoted to supervising all of Emmis’ titles, which include Texas Monthly, Atlanta, etc…), remain bizarrely invisible in pieces about “dude-itors” (the Port piece is not the first). Arriving at work, Mary and I looped Los Angeles deputy editor Nancy Miller, who is a demon on Twitter, into the conversation. It bugged Nancy that one critical piece in response to the Port cover had gotten its facts wrong, implying that women had been neglected in the big-dog categories at ASME this year (among others, Pam Colloff — the executive editor of Texas Monthly — won for Feature Writing). We wanted to be precise in the wrong we were attempting to right — to simply say: These women are not invisible, they do good work, and, um, they’re not that hard to find. I’d started to mock up a list in my head of women I’d worked with and Nancy and Mary added a bunch more names who we all admired. Nancy counseled that my original tag was too long — #WomenEditorsWeLove — so I shortened it and signed on to Twitter. I’d planned to tweet them out all day, but then it snowballed on its own.

Poynter: What has the reaction to the hashtag been like?

Me: Heartening. First of all, it took off like a wildfire. Clearly, many women — and some men, too — were feeling what we were feeling and were glad for an outlet for those frustrations. I was tweeting, and then retweeting, as fast as I could. People nominated editors all over the world, and not just in magazines, which was the focus I’d kicked off, but newspapers, websites, everything that gets edited. Apparently, there are women editors at all of them. At one point, #WomenEdsWeLove was even trending, whatever that means.

Poynter: Why do you think it’s important to take small steps like this to create greater awareness about female editors and the good work they’re doing?

Me: There is a bigger conversation to be had, and in the wake of the Port cover, and the flurry of response, it’s happening. There was a great piece on the Atlantic website about whether women’s magazines do serious journalism (some of them, notably Elle and More, do so regularly). I particularly loved that the writer, Jessica Grose, ended the piece by rewriting her bio to feature the women’s publications she’s written for first (not the other way around, which many of us – including me — do in an attempt to be taken seriously). I guess what I’d say is that in order to have those conversations, you have to first assert that, indeed, women edit and manage and work at the highest levels of all kinds of pubs — from Foreign Affairs to Cosmopolitan, from Scientific American to Sunset magazine. The Port cover was silly, but it was yet another example of women editors being erased, Soviet-style, from the photograph. At one point on the first day of the hashtag, as the tweets were piling up like firewood, Los Angeles‘ Nancy Miller wisely tweeted, “Other than mass group hug, @msamywallace’s #WomenEdsWeLove proves there are many women editors. Let’s move the convo forward.” Women editors don’t want to be judged or rewarded for their gender, but for their excellence. Now that we have a list as long as your arm of women doing good work, it’s just a little harder to ignore that excellence.

This is the beginning of our story about This Is the End, a hilarious new movie that, like this article, stars James Franco and Seth Rogen and Danny McBride and Jay Baruchel and tons more of our favorite funny people. Here, they talk to Amy Wallace about what it was like to make a film with your friends that takes place on the eve of the apocalypse and includes a fiery pit that swallows people whole, Rihanna slapping the hell out of Michael Cera, the strangest appearance of a Harry Potter star ever, and the low-rent sequel to the most beloved stoner movie of all time

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ, June 2013

The question was simple: What’s the biggest movie they could make with the smallest budget? The answer, once they hit on it, seemed genius: a story about the end of the world, shot mostly in one room. The resulting short, made back in 2006, starred Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel, and it was such a blast to make that soon the idea took hold: Let’s turn it into a feature film! And let’s cast all our friends in it, playing themselves!

Today, the filmmakers admit to ill-advised hubris. “We really thought this was the one time where movie studios were going to be like, ‘We get it! We’re totally in!’ ” recalls writer-director Evan Goldberg. But instead of a bidding war, says Rogen, who co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred in the film, “we were hit with a wave of resistance that was pretty remarkable.” The very conceit that Rogen and Goldberg found so appealing—a bunch of famous people go to a party at James Franco’s house as the world ends—made corporate Hollywood nervous. Would moviegoers get it?

The result is one of our favorite comedies in a long, long time. This Is the End plays on many levels—”part meta-satire,” as Baruchel puts it, “part group therapy.” The cast members were encouraged to Click to continue »

I’m honored to be included among the likes of Evan Ratliff, William Gibson, John Heilemann and Chris Anderson.

From the website:

For two decades, WIRED has chronicled the people, ideas, and technologies that power the digital revolution. To celebrate the magazine’s 20th anniversary, the editors have chosen 20 of the most important and mind-blowing stories from the archives. With an introduction by features editor Mark Robinson and including all-new epilogues that bring the articles up to date, this anthology showcases the award-winning writing and crackling intelligence that has been the magazine’s trademark for 20 years. The future is WIRED.