New Yorker, Amazon team up for new series
LOS ANGELES — Long before the world went mad for digital, magazines such as Sports Illustrated, MAD, People and Playboy were adapted into television programs. It was a way to take their product to an audience that might not every stop by a newsstand.
In keeping with that tradition, Amazon has turned to one of the most award-winning magazines for its newest series. “The New Yorker Presents” will bring to the screen documentaries, short narrative films, comedy, poetry, animation and cartoons from the hands of noted filmmakers and artists.
This series is the work of filmmaker Alex Gibney and his production company Jigsaw Productions, along with Kahane Cooperman, a five-time Emmy and two-time Peabody Awardwinning producer.
Gibney says the series will celebrate the eclecticism of the magazine.
Embracing humor, etc.
“So while the focus is nonfiction, nevertheless, we embrace the humor, whether it be in the cartoons or in some of the shorter humor pieces,” he said. “We are transforming some of the fiction pieces into dramatic pieces in video and also doing documentaries that are inspired by, or come directly out of, some of the nonfiction pieces in The New Yorker.”
The fiction pieces that have been in the magazine have been written by the likes of Tom Wolfe, JD Salinger and Haruki Murakami. The directors being brought on to interpret the works include Gibney, Steve James and Jonathan Demme.
While the production team has access to material from the magazine dating back to 1925, the focus has been on more contemporary pieces.
This is the first time the New Yorker has been the inspiration for a TV series.
David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize winner who has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998, sees launching the program as just part of the natural evolution of print journalism.
“When I started as an editor of the magazine 17 years ago, the job was to put out a print magazine once a week, and that was a pretty big job. And if somebody thought it was the greatest magazine in the world, then fantastic, but that’s not easy to do,” Remnick said. “Since that time, we’ve adapted ourselves to, and evolved to be terrific, I hope, as a website for tablets.”
Quality control
When the team was putting together the idea for the program, the main concern was to create a visual product with the same quality as what appears in print. A lot of that work was done by Gibney and Cooperman.
Remnick stresses this agreement with Amazon was not reached merely as a way for The New Yorker to advertise itself.