Podcast
Spinal Tap v. Hollywood with Harry Shearer and me: open.spotify.com
Podcast
GQ's first-ever podcast, featuring Louie Anderson, GQ's editor in chief Jim Nelson, and me: open.spotify.com
In this exclusive excerpt from Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull unveils one of his key management tools--the Pixar Braintrust, which has helped the animation powerhouse score 14 box office hits in a row. Read the excerpt here >
Co-founder, Pixar Animation Studios; President, Pixar and Walt Disney and Animation Studios; and author of CREATIVITY, INC.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (written with Amy Wallace).
7:45am Continental Breakfast
8:15-9:15am Forum
500 South Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Watch the interview on TODAY >
“A very dangerous boy,” by Amy Wallace, GQ, about a California 10-year-old who murdered his neo-Nazi father.
Wallace, who writes for GQ and Los Angeles magazine, among others, line-by-lined one of her most popular pieces and showed that celebrity profiles don’t all have to be fluff and spin. An excerpt:
Shandling looks down at his Pradas. “Here’s what I’m very sensitive about,” he says, pausing for a good thirty seconds before he raises his head. “You’re right.” Then he laughs. “I would only rephrase it this way: I want to take myself seriously as an actor. And to know that I can be free enough and strong enough and courageous enough to express myself in emotional ways that are a little bit harder than standing there telling a joke.”
<Now we’re getting down to the guts of it. All profiles have to mine a little soul but this revelation feels sincere and strong, to me. Was it what you expected? What happened in the two or three beats after he said this? /pw
We were really clicking in this interview. I’d done my homework – watched everything he’d ever done, obviously, but also talked to a lot of people who knew him really well. So that laid the groundwork. But Garry was in a mindset where he wanted to be honest. He wanted to be understood. He wanted me not to get it wrong. And he was willing to help me. It was an intense experience, and this was a moment where the intensity of it was palpable. He’s always funny, even when he’s deep. But there was an intimacy to our conversation. Because he wasn’t just cracking wise. We were talking about some of life’s big shit. /aw
© Disney · Pixar
Random House has acquired Pixar founder Ed Catmull's book about his career at the animation studio.
He will offer a rare first-hand look inside the studio that reinvigorated animation with its pioneering special effects and lyrical storytelling.
Creativity: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration will be published on April 8, 2014.
Along with John Lasseter and Steve Jobs, Catmull helped found the company in 1986 out of Jobs' acquisition of Lucasfilm's digital division, where Catmull worked. He's been at Pixar ever since.
When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, Catmull became the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Creativity will provide an inside account of Pixar's rise "from a small, money-losing hardware company to a movie studio with 1,200 employees and a streak of fourteen No. 1 movies in a row that has garnered 30 Academy Awards and earned more than $7 billion worldwide." Catmull will use the story of Pixar's rise to offer lessons on leadership, management and balancing art and commerce.
"People are inherently creative and able to solve problems," Catmull said in a statement. "Even the best companies, with the best intentions, erect barriers and send messages that inhibit employees and derail creativity, without meaning to -- or even realizing they are doing it. Only by reframing how we think about mistakes and acknowledging how little we see, can we open the door for others to create."
Random House editor Andy Ward added, "Ed has a singular understanding of the unique way Pixar is managed and the ways in which that approach has enabled its continued excellence. All you need to do is look at the movies to know that something different is going on at Pixar."
Ward acquired the book for Random House. Catmull was represented by Christy Fletcher at Fletcher & Company.
Amy Wallace will serve as co-writer.
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.
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.
Had breakfast today with my favorite agent, Robert Newman of William Morris Endeavor. We were talking about the brilliance of Chris Rock and I remembered something Rock said when I interviewed him about D’Angelo for GQ. It was when I asked Rock why he’d been in the studio while D was recording the Voodoo album. His answer was that recording studios for black artists are like the Hall of Justice for superheroes. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a place for it in the story. Herewith, the exchange:
Chris Rock: I’m around recording studios lot. I don’t know how to explain it. You know, I got tons of white friends, but as far as guys my age, artistic — there’s less comedians, especially in New York, especially black ones. So, hey, Mos Def is my age and, hey, I’m hanging out with Kanye in the studio. I ended up on the Kanye album. And they’re people you can talk to about this black fame thing.
Me: Right. I know they would all have something to say about it.
Rock: Everybody’s got an opinion. You know, watch the cartoons. The superheroes hang out in the Hall of Justice with the other superheroes. Superman doesn’t just hang in a bar. He hangs out at the League of Justice. When you get too isolated, you can go crazy. But that’s the cool thing about living in New York or L.A. You can be around artists. You can be in the Hall of Justice. And just by being around a bunch of people that are working on shit makes you work on shit. That’s always the question. “What are you working on? Let me hear it.”
Originally appeared on ReportingOnHealth.org on August 30, 2010
Around 8 p.m. on the evening of Dec. 23, 2009, my 12-year-old son and I were puttering around the house when there was a sudden, loud banging at the front door.
“I have legal papers for Amy Wallace,” a brusque woman’s voice said from the other side of the door when I asked who was there. I was startled. The voice sounded unpleasant. It was dark out. It was the night before Christmas Eve. I didn’t feel like welcoming the voice in. Can you leave the papers outside, I asked? “Are you Amy Wallace?” barked the voice. “Uh,” I said, hesitating, my head muddy. Who was sending me legal papers?
“I’m going to take that as a yes!” the voice said, and not in a friendly way. “I saw you through the window. Consider yourself served!”
A little more than two months before, the November issue of Wired magazine had hit newsstands. The cover story was “An Epidemic of Fear: One Man’s Battle Against the Anti-vaccine Movement,” and I had written it. In part, the story was a profile of Dr. Paul Offit, the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a leading proponent of vaccines for children. But the story also painted a portrait of a passionate movement led by people who believe vaccines injure and kill children. And on Dec. 23, one of those people sued me, Dr. Offit and Conde Nast, the company that publishes Wired, for one million dollars.
We’ll get to the allegations of the suit in a second. But since I’m writing this for journalists, let me say this: getting sued for libel is just as big a bummer as you’ve always feared.
I’ve been a journalist for more than half my life. I have written for newspapers and magazines, I have been a reporter, an editor, a staff writer, an editor-at-large. Never before have I been a defendant. I am careful. I am meticulous. Above all, I work hard to be not just factual, but fair — to put bits of information in their proper context.
But here’s the simple truth: If someone wants to sue you, they can. Easily, too. And Barbara Loe Fisher, the cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Virginia, the largest, oldest, and most influential of the watchdog groups that oppose universal vaccination, wanted to sue me. So she did.
I’ve been asked to offer advice in this essay to those thinking of writing about vaccines. My basic advice is the same as I’d offer to people interested in covering public schools or Congress or the environment. Learn everything you can about the topic. (The resource guide posted on USC’s ReportingonHealth.org website is excellent in this regard). Challenge your own assumptions and be open to all points of view. Talk to lots of people and be willing to ask dumb questions. Then, take care to get every detail — big or small — right in print. And when I say right, I mean it in both the micro and macro sense. Context is everything.
But even as I ask you to bring the same rigor to every topic you choose, it must be acknowledged that writing about an emotionally charged issue like vaccines brings with it special challenges and is something to think carefully about. Like writing about abortion or animal rights, writing about vaccines inevitably raises the ire of certain readers. It is not for the timid. I’m not saying you have to be a fiery advocate. On the contrary. But you should go into the job with eyes open.
Autism’s False Prophets, Dr. Offit’s 2008 book, opened my eyes to the risks of reporting on vaccines. Before I began working on my Wired story I read it, focusing at first on his straightforward description of what being a vaccine advocate had cost him. He’d been vilified on the Internet as a profiteer, a prostitute who serviced Big Pharma, and worse. He’d been physically accosted. His life had been threatened. Once, an anonymous caller had even implied they might go after Offit’s two children.
When I looked him up on Twitter, this is what it told me:
• Shinan is the social columnist for Canada’s National Post, and author of the novel Boldface Names. He is based in Toronto.
I’ve always loved Canada…
