Green

Our guest annotator is Elon Green, who writes for The Awl and contributes to Longform.org. His comments are in blue, Wallace’s in green. He starts us off with a couple of questions for Wallace:

Storyboard: Not long ago, you told us, “A profile seeks to capture the essence—the point—of the person being profiled, and that is done, often, through narrative.” Does the narrative become more important when, as is the case with Peter Bart, the essence seems so elusive?

Amy Wallace: I guess so, though a more important distinction in this story was that the narrative was double-barreled. There were the stories about Bart moving through the world of Hollywood. But there were also the stories that detailed my personal interactions with Bart. As I searched for the essence of Bart, I realized—and this realization came during the writing process, late in the game—that he was a man who wielded enormous power in Hollywood in large part because his essence was elusive. He refused to be pegged. He wore many hats, and never failed to exploit the advantages that came with that shape-shifting ability. And, importantly, I realized that I had a lot of first-person experience with him that had allowed me to witness the way he wielded power—by exerting it on me. This was at a time when it seemed every profile in Vanity Fair started with the writer detailing what they had eaten for lunch during an interview with Meg Ryan, and for that reason I resisted appearing in the piece for a long time. But then I realized that the way Bart was working me was a window into how he worked everyone. And once I realized that, punctuating the piece with our conversations really made sense.

Wallace

This story is now 12 years old. What were you like back then? How do you imagine Bart saw you?

I was 38 then, so I wasn’t a kid. I had a lot of experience as a newspaper reporter. But I think one key thing that defined the way Bart saw me was that I had left newspapers to become a full-time magazine writer. I was shifting gears and trying to excel in a new form. And he already wrote for magazines—he had a regular column in GQ. He knew that, if he wished, he could help me break into national magazines and directly said as much (it’s in the piece). The power dynamic—him established, me striving—was key to the way he interacted with me.

“Hollywood’s Information Man“
By Amy Wallace
Los Angeles magazine
9.1.01

Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.

“I really take umbrage at the gotcha nature of your interrogation,” he says. His voice is taut. I can’t see his knees, but I’m sure at least one is twitching. <This is great. It’s not just vivid description; it lets the reader know you have met Peter. Whatever the story will be, it is not a write-around. Was the Los Angeles magazine name a help or a hindrance in persuading Bart to cooperate? And was access necessary?/eg Access was key to this story, and I explicitly told Bart that I wouldn’t do the piece without it. My original idea for the story was that the world of Hollywood’s trade papers fascinated me and I thought Bart was a great main character through which to tell that story. He was smart, had worked inside and outside the studios, had been a journalist and written books–through him I would pull back the curtain and explain the odd symbiotic role the trades played then in the town they supposedly merely covered. I met with Bart for lunch and told him I wanted to write “a New Yorker-style profile” of him. I said I wanted him to think about it overnight and not tell me until the next day, because if he said yes, I could guarantee he was going to get sick of me. I told him I was going to read every word he’d ever written (not a small task), show up at every public event he headlined, and be a fly on the wall in as many situations as he would allow. The next morning he called and said, “Let’s do it.” As for the twitching knee detail—I ended up spending so much time with Bart in so many circumstances that I felt certain about the knee twitching. This was an important beginning because it not only said that I’d met him/spent time with him, it signaled to readers that I’d spent SO much time with him that I felt that I knew him well. Whatever was coming, it was going to be a deeply reported piece./aw

Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety, the entertainment industry’s dominant newspaper, is accustomed to being in charge. Studio heads woo him; strivers kiss his ass. Everyone wants his insight and his wisdom—or prominent placement in Variety’s big, glossy pages. In his weekly column, “The Back Lot,” he alternately strokes and scolds moguls and movie stars, addressing them by their first names. When Bart telephones the powerful, he is put right through. Now he’s calling me.

“I think to plunk documents out of context,” he says, “on people whose lives are as busy as yours or mine is a little unfair. This is not consistent with the access and cooperation I have afforded you.”

Over several months I have encountered a dizzying variety of Peters. I have spent many hours with Charming Peter, who is smart, funny, fierce. I have gotten to know Judgmental Peter, who loves to size up others. I’ve met Crude Peter, Brilliant Peter, Hypocritical Peter, Loyal Peter.

Bart calls himself “Zelig-like.” A setter of rules who hates to follow them, a lover of labels who resents being characterized, a seeker of the truth who doesn’t always tell it, Bart believes he is immune to the conflicts that derail lesser men. It’s one of the things that place him among the most despised and feared people in Hollywood. I listen to him speaking now. It’s a Peter I’ve never met.

“When you’re in public life, people attack you,” Intimidating Peter tells me. “But I’m taken aback by a bogus document suddenly being slammed on the desk. I’ll send you a note saying I will sue you, which I sure as hell will.” <The opening ends here. You italicized it. Could you tell me about that? It reads like a pre-credit sequence. And did Bart ever send you that note?/eg He never sent me that note, though we did have a phone conversation after the piece appeared. But I’ll get to that later. As I said in response to your opening questions, when I realized that Bart’s interactions with me were relevant and revelatory, I started to look for ways to use them. And it occurred to me that they could become the scaffolding for the piece./aw
IF YOU ARE A DOCTOR OR A GROCER or an airline pilot with no ties to the business that produces America’s number-one export—entertainment—you probably have never heard of Peter Bart. But if you are among the 70,000 people in Los Angeles, New York, and around the world who can’t start the day without knowing which big-name movie director just got a two-picture deal, Bart is an institution. <This is smart. It’s an acknowledgement that you, the reader, most likely have no reason to care about Peter Bart. But I’m going to make you./eg Thanks. Yes, this was key to the piece. Bart was a huge power broker in Hollywood, but most people outside of the entertainment business had never heard of him. I had to make a case for why they should read 13,000 words./aw

Over nearly four decades in Los Angeles he’s been a reporter for The New York Times, an executive at three movie studios, an independent film producer, a screenwriter, and an author of both novels and nonfiction. For the past dozen years he has been the editor of and most influential columnist at Daily Variety and Weekly Variety, the sister publications whose zippy headlines, who’s-in-who’s-out reporting, and largely anonymous sources routinely make and break reputations. In clout-conscious Hollywood, that makes Bart not just an observer but a player.

There are two keys to success in Hollywood: relationships and information. Bart traffics in both. He lunches almost every day with a studio chief, a marketing executive, a top manager or talent agency head, an entertainment lawyer or lobbyist. In the course of just a few weeks earlier this year he dined with screenwriter William Goldman; Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios; Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Warner Bros. president of worldwide production; Michael Ovitz, CEO of Artists Management Group; Mike De Luca, former New Line president of production (and now production chief at DreamWorks SKG); Mike Medavoy, chairman of Phoenix Pictures; Tom Sherak, partner at Revolution Studios; Rob Friedman, vice chairman at Paramount Pictures; John McLean, executive director of the Writers Guild of America; Don Marron, chairman of PaineWebber; and Skip Brittenham, a partner in the entertainment law firm Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca & Fischer. <Did Bart give you this information?/eg Yes./aw

These meals aren’t interviews, according to Bart, but meetings between equals. After all, in his 17 years as an executive, most prominently at Paramount Pictures, Bart was one of them. He likes to think he still is. “Some people say I owe Joe Roth a lot,” Bart says of the former Disney chief who now runs Revolution Studios. “But I don’t. Joe Roth owes me. I gave him his first job. “(While Bart was president of Lorimar Film Company, Roth produced the 1979 dud Americathon, but it was Roth’s fourth film, not his first.) <I counted up the lies. There are at least eight (8) outright lies. This, I believe, is the first. They’re sprinkled throughout the story like Easter eggs. Was this a conscious decision?/eg The decision-making was less about cataloguing untruths and more about exploring Bart’s fundamental belief that he was the expert on his own truth at any given moment. It is often said that Los Angeles is a place people come to reinvent themselves. Bart had embraced that idea with gusto, not only by working in many different capacities in and out of the biz, but also by asserting various identities, whichever one fit best in whatever situation he placed himself in./aw

“The same with John Calley,” Bart says of the head of Sony Pictures. Bart has known Calley since the late 1960s, when Bart says Calley pitched him Catch-22. Bart calls Calley “the country gentleman”—a vaguely catty reference to Calley’s decision to leave the world of moviemaking for 13 years, only to return in 1993 as president of MGM/United Artists. <Was the reference familiar to you, or did Peter explain it? It’s not intuitive./eg I asked Bart to explain it, and he did./aw “I owe John Calley a lot? John Calley owes me,” he says, asserting that a positive column he wrote made Calley a contender for the post. “I think I was very important in getting him his job at MGM.”

In his weekly Variety column and in bimonthly pieces in GQ, Bart speaks as one who knows Hollywood and everyone in it. His vocabulary is a mix of the colloquial (he refers often to “the rules,” “the game,” “the fat cats,” “the old farts,” “the suits”) and the arcane. Rare is the attractive woman whom Bart does not label “lissome.” Most notably, in a town infamous for air kisses and false praise, Bart often writes what he means. DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg is “hyperactive,” while a conversation with Sandy Litvack, a former top executive at Disney, is “akin to poking one’s head in an oven.” Producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard “exude about as much charisma as Wal-Mart managers,” while George Lucas is “simply so rich and mythologized that no one professes to be able to interact with [him] on a normal human level.”

“Perhaps,” Bart wrote last year in a column addressed to Robert Redford, “there’s something in your … head that says ‘I’m a star, I take up a lot of ego space; my movies should, too.’” He’s made the same complaint to Warren Beatty, whom he calls the priapic prince. Bart has written several columns about Beatty’s filmmaking and womanizing—even going so far as to describe the sounds the actor-director-write-producer supposedly makes during “moments of sexual congress.”

“You have to understand, if Peter is criticizing or praising you, the thing that’s solid about it is this is a guy who knows our business,” says Harvey Weinstein, Miramax’s disheveled cofounder, whom Bart has called a slob more than once. “He said my shirt looked like I was a refugee from a food fight. He calls me roly-poly. But this guy put The Godfather into production! It’s my favorite movie of all time. So even if I’m mad at him, I can’t be mad at him.”

Peter Guber, former chairman of Sony Pictures, goes further. “Peter is riding in the general’s car—Variety is the general’s car. And you salute the general’s car even when the general’s not in it,” Guber says. “I say to him, ‘Never let go of this job, because the wolves will attack. People are kept at bay by your power.’ It’s a tremendous platform and weapon, and people view it as such. So he’s feared and respected—or respected and feared—depending on the person.”

Besides, says Sherry Lansing, chair of Paramount Pictures, “Peter has the power to affect the way people think.” <When did you do the interviews with Guber, Weinstein and Lansing? Your preference, you’ve said, is to conduct secondaries “ideally before I sit down with the subject.” And how has your interview style/technique changed since this piece was written? /eg I conducted these interviews during the months I spent talking to Bart. This was a situation in which no one spoke to me until they’d gotten Bart’s permission to do so—and made sure he was participating in the piece. So I couldn’t fish around beforehand. Also, just to clarify my statement (which you quote accurately) that I like to do secondary interviews first—mostly I think that’s important for celebrity interviews, when you are only going to get limited time with the person and are unlikely to be allowed to follow up. In those situations, where you’re only going to get one face-to-face, I find it’s very helpful to have talked to secondary sources first, because 1) those people often give you great insights that help you frame better questions and 2) being able to tell James Franco that you’ve already talked to the director of his next movie makes Franco (or whoever) feel like you’re at least trying hard to get things right/taking him seriously. Anyway, I don’t know that my interview style/technique has changed enormously. My basic technique is: Be prepared. Read/watch/know everything you can before you go in./aw

That power derives in large part from his position at Variety, the Industry’s 96-year-old broadsheet that doesn’t just cover entertainment news but helps make it. It is Hollywood’s prime bulletin board—what one marketing consultant likens to “a high school newspaper that everyone has a tremendous need to see their names in.” It’s not just an ego thing. In a world built on illusions, being mentioned in Variety lends legitimacy. It makes you seem real. In Hollywood, seeming is believing. <This isn’t just a profile of Bart. Weaved in is a commentary on the local film industry, too. Do you make a point of including such context in your stories? /eg Many profiles—the best ones, I think—are a window into a world that the reader has never considered before. I make a point of looking for stories like that. Another example would be my Wired profile of Dr. Paul Offit, which also was a portrait of the anti-vaccine movement that he works so hard to counter./aw

When Variety reports that Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to star in a film, for example, savvy readers know chances are good that someone is merely floating DiCaprio’s name. Why? To turn up the heat on Matt Damon, say, or some other foot-dragging actor the movie studio really wants to sign. Agents and publicists often complain that Variety writes about deals before they’re done. But those same people plant stories in Variety all the time in hopes of clinching a deal or killing someone else’s. <Was this type of manipulation common knowledge at the time? When I read the story for the first time, not long after it was published, I had no idea./eg It was well known in Hollywood, but not outside of Hollywood. In fact, I’d say an interesting thing about the way this piece was received within the entertainment business was that the reaction on many fronts was not, “Wow, I never knew that!” but more, “Wow, we all know that happens/Bart does that/etc…, but nobody ever SAYS so in public!” This story in many ways was hiding in plain sight. Many people around town knew about the “bombshells” I reported. But no one ever had made them public before./aw

Here, pecking order determines more than just who gets a table with an ocean view. The perception of who’s on top determines which projects are produced, who will work on them, and how much money they’ll make. More than any other entity, Variety reflects and informs Hollywood’s collective consciousness. Readers don’t just parse the information on its pages; they dissect what stories are where, who is quoted up high, who is relegated to beyond the jump. With its trademark “slanguage,” Variety helps its subscribers keep score—an essential service in a town obsessed with rank. Whether you’ve “ankled” (quit) or been “upped” (promoted) at a “praisery” (public relations firm), a “diskery” (record company), or a “tenpercentery” (talent agency), if the story runs on Variety’s front, it means you matter. By extension, Bart matters to you.

In 1997 Emilio Estevez, the actor-director, was so distressed by Bart’s dismissal of his film The War at Home that he fired off a two-page letter that was widely distributed around town. The letter was intended to diminish Bart, but its vitriol only confirmed Bart’s central place in the Industry.

“In you, I see a failed movie producer, hiding behind the protective veil of your post… It is sad and pathetic,” Estevez wrote. He urged Bart to “1. Simply not see my films. 2. Drop dead sometime soon. 3. Go fuck yourself.” He signed off with this: “Enjoy life from your bully pulpit, little man.”

Not for nothing did one top executive in town famously dub Bart “the most hated man in Hollywood.” For not only does Bart control the Industry’s bible, but by virtue of his station he always gets something that everyone—in and out of Hollywood—desperately wants: the last word. <A narrative wink? Bart does not, in fact, get the last word with you./eg That’s unintentional. I’ve never thought of that./aw

***

“I have Peter Bart for you.”

The silken voice of Bart’s assistant could not be more different from his own, which is slightly nasal, rapid-fire. His accent is so hard to place <Smart. We soon learn, of course, how cagey Bart is about his family origins./eg and his delivery at times so oddly paced that some have speculated, half seriously, that he modeled it after Al Pacino’s staccato in The Godfather. <Did you ask Bart to confirm/deny?/eg Honestly, I can’t remember. But whether he did or not, it’s telling that people gossip about the possibility that he did./aw

This is Condescending Peter calling, as he often does, to talk trash about other journalists. “Did you read Patrick Goldstein’s column today? What was he talking about? You know who’s running out of ideas? Goldstein,” he’ll say, referring to the Los Angeles Times’s movie columnist. When Charles Fleming, a former Variety reporter, writes an opinion piece in the Times about the ethical dilemmas of the Hollywood press corps, Bart sniffs, “This story epitomizes him. It’s like a blur. A lot of undeveloped ideas.”

Today his target is Variety’s archrival, The Hollywood Reporter. “Poor little George Christy,” Bart says, referring to the Reporter’s gossip columnist. “I’m all for exposes, but George Christy? The level of small-time stuff he does, I mean, who cares?” Christy is being investigated for accepting expensive gifts and movie credits—which qualified him for Screen Actors Guild health benefits—from the people he writes about. When the Reporter’s own labor writer, David Robb, filed a piece on Christy, its publisher refused to run it. Robb and Anita M. Busch, the trade paper’s editor, resigned in protest.

Bart, however, sees the Christy affair as an indictment not so much of a journalist allegedly on the take but of the editor and the reporter who fought to reveal it. Both Robb and Busch once worked at Variety. It’s hard to tell whom he loathes more.

“It’s a fascinating implosion,” Bart says gleefully. “It reminds me of when Robert Altman directed a picture–this was when he was drinking. At a certain point he would turn on his main characters and make them into hideous creatures. That’s what Dave Robb and Anita Busch would have done here, too, but I wouldn’t have it, and I fired them.”

Actually, he did no such thing. Variety’s personnel department confirms Robb’s and Busch’s assertions that they both resigned. <Your story is reminiscent of the classic Fortune profile of Steve Florio, whom Elkind and Florio unmask as a serial fabulist. How concerned were you that readers would eventually dismiss everything that came out of Bart’s mouth?/eg I wasn’t concerned one way or another. First of all, he didn’t dissemble about everything. He just liked to tell the most dramatic story—as we say at one point in the piece, he likes to be at the red-hot center. And if that meant exaggerating, so be it. That was my impression./aw

***

IT’S OSCAR EVE, and Peter Bart has just arrived at his third party in less than 24 hours. “I could use a drink,” he tells his wife, as some of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars preen before him: Julia, Russell, Kevin. <Just a note here that I’ve told journalism classes over the years: This section was, for the longest time, my lede. I loved that it showed Bart in action, working a room, pulling strings, working long-time relationships and, yes, wearing many hats. That was the key to his identity, I’d decided, and so this seemed to be the right lede. Until I realized I had something better in my notebook./aw

Owlish in round spectacles, with tufts of thinning black and gray hair, Bart is five feet nine inches tall <Did you get this from Bart? I assume you didn’t whip out a tape measure./eg I think I asked him. And I’m 5’10”, so I have a pretty good take on whether 5’9” rings true./aw and has the trim, tanned physique of a tennis player. He looks for a moment as if he is standing at the edge of a pool, weighing whether to get wet. Actors tend to bore him, so it’s not the press of famous flesh that’s making him thirsty. Bart, who is 69 years old, has a complicated relationship with the industry. Never are his conflicts more glaring than during Hollywood’s High Holy Days—Academy Awards time—when the movie business celebrates and contemplates itself.

Before Bart can order a vodka martini, however, he is spotted by Bill Maher, who steps up and gives him a nudge. “Well,” the host of TV’s Politically Incorrect says with gusto, “if it isn’t Hollywood’s top fucking information man!”

Having worn many hats during his long career, Bart delights these days in wearing several at once. When he wants to attend a Writers Guild of America meeting that is closed to the press, he dusts off his screenwriter credentials. (He claims to be the only editor who is an active voting member of the WGA. <You stress-test the majority of Bart’s assertions. Were you unable to verify this? I take “claims” to mean you were, at the very least, skeptical./eg It’s been so long that I have to admit that I can’t recall precisely, but: We fact-checked this piece, as we do every piece at Los Angeles, with utmost care. Given that, and given what I know of the magazine’s research editor Eric Mercado, I would guess that this was impossible to prove or disprove.)/aw When he wants to cast a vote for Best Picture, he activates “the part of me that’s an Academy voter.” (His Academy membership is a holdover from his years as a producer.) When he wants to collect a speaking fee, he turns into a paid adviser, giving tips—to cite one recent example—to the film division of cable network HBO.

“I have lived a split-level life in Hollywood,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1999 book, The Gross: The Hits, the Flops–the Summer That Ate Hollywood. But he will commit to neither one. His “dualities,” as he calls them, <I love that you return to this word in the last line of the story. How did you settle on the thru-lines/themes of this piece? And how do you do it more generally?/eg Big question. When it comes to this piece, I think I’ve already shed some light above. But in every piece, there are themes that emerge and must be wrestled with. How do you do that? You gather all your reporting, you read it over, looking for echoes. You spend a lot of time thinking about what seemed to resonate most in the moment. There’s no magic to it. You put in the time and think./aw are not liabilities but the keys to his success. “I enjoy the fact that my relationships with people have so many different colorations,” Bart says. “I’ve never thought of myself as just a whatever-I-was. I always think it’s fun to try and reinvent yourself.”

On the weekend of the Academy Awards ceremony, Bart’s many identities come out to play. Three days of self-congratulatory events unfold like so many garish, pungent flowers. Some on the A-list grumble about the chaos of Oscar-party fever—the long waits for valet parking, the glut of hors d’oeuvres—but those who are not invited are so mortified about what their omission implies that some leave town to save face. <It’s a tart, economical sketch of an insecure industry. Is this still true? Does this piece feel dated to you?/eg The main way that the piece has become utterly dated is that the trades are no longer as powerful as they were then. Variety is trying to reboot at the moment and the Hollywood Reporter is a glossy vehicle for luxury advertising (that actually caters brilliantly to this same insecurity I describe here, by celebrating power-brokers and putting their pictures on high-quality paper). What hasn’t changed at all is the you’re-only-as-good-as-your-last-project mentality. What hasn’t changed is how being perceived as successful is half the battle. And the fear–the fear hasn’t changed. If anything, as new ways of consuming entertainment have threatened the revenue streams of traditional Hollywood, it’s only grown./AW

Variety’s top man doesn’t have to worry. It all begins with Friday night’s annual celebration at the Beverly Hills mansion of agent-to-the-stars Ed Limato. The dinner is a magnet for Oscar nominees as well as Limato’s top-drawer clients. The embossed invitations are hard to come by, and the media are, officially, not welcome. Bart is an exception. This year, as every year, he RSVP’d yes.

Saturday afternoon, literary agent Bob Bookman throws a garden party for screenwriters and agents at his Hancock Park home. Bart makes an appearance. Then he stops home, dons a cobalt blue dress shirt and black blazer—the dark-on-dark uniform of Hollywood’s male elite—and heads back to Beverly Hills for Miramax’s bash at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. <This is clever. We get a sense of Bart’s circle; how, via his wardrobe, he endeavors to present himself; and his schedule. Did you accompany Bart? And how much time did you need to spend with him before you got to sufficiently know him?/eg I was at the Miramax party, but not at Bookman’s beforehand. Bart told me he’d stopped home to change. There’s no substitute for being with your subject. As much as you can be until you feel you’ve figured them out./aw The event is known for skits that spoof the Oscar contenders, and to gain entrance the media must agree to leave all spoofing off the record. For Bart the restriction is moot: He never carries a reporter’s notebook.

He pushes through a ring of admirers who surround the night’s host, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein. Barrel-shaped and garrulous, Weinstein is one of Bart’s favorite sources. He is also a principal in Miramax/Talk Books, and he has bid to publish Bart’s books. Bart and Weinstein shake hands, but there are others waiting, and Bart backs away. “There’s something kind of primitive about him,” Bart says. He means it as a compliment. <As with the Calley remark, you disclose Bart’s interpretation. Had you heard Bart call someone that before?/eg I could just tell by the twinkle in his eyes when he said it. “Primitive” was an Alpha-male quality, and one that he prized. Also, I knew they liked each other./aw

Bart scans the crowd and heads straight for movie producer David Brown, whose many films range from Jaws to last year’s Chocolat. Brown contributed a blurb to the jacket of Bart’s most recent book, calling it “must reading for all who care.” Bart greets Brown warmly, then maneuvers toward producer-director Irwin Winkler. Their friendship dates to the 1970s, when Bart—then vice president of production at Paramount Pictures—set up Winkler’s movie The Gambler. A quick hello, a pat on the shoulder, and Bart keeps moving. Near a buffet table piled with crab cakes and Peking duck, he makes a lunch date with Ted Field, a music and film mogul to whom Bart gave his first break in the movie business. It was the early ’80s, and Bart was senior vice president of production at MGM.

“When I was at MGM I said to Ted, ‘Why don’t you get a picture going? Here’s an idea. If you want it, it’s yours,’” Bart says, explaining how he sold Field a treatment that he had written with his youngest daughter, Dilys. The treatment became the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, and the sale helped pay Dilys’s way through Stanford University.

Completing his first lap around the room, Bart returns to his table, nods fondly at his wife, and finally takes a few sips of vodka. <These paragraphs have the effect of the Steadicam Copa shot in Goodfellas./eg By the time Nigel Sinclair, cochairman of the British film company Intermedia, stops by to pay his respects, Bart is coiled less tightly. So, as he often does, he launches into a ribald tale from one of his past lives. In this one a panicky crew member calls Bart from the set of the 1972 movie The Getaway to say that the film’s two stars are having an affair. What made this report especially juicy at the time: One of them, Ali MacGraw, was married to Bart’s friend and then boss at Paramount, Robert Evans.

“I was the guy who got the phone call: ‘Ali went into Steve McQueen’s trailer 24 hours ago, and they haven’t come out. What should we do?’” Bart says, enjoying the story he has dined out on for 30 years. “I said, ‘Take a hint from this.’ And I hung up.” <This is a marvelous scene. You once said, ”If we had our druthers, we journalists would always want to encounter our celebrity subjects in an environment they would naturally be in.” Is this it, for Bart? And does that philosophy of immersion extend to profiles of noncelebrities?/eg I would argue that Bart—though powerful in his rarefied world—WAS a noncelebrity, which is precisely why I could spend as much time with him as I did. Celebrities rarely let you spend more than a few days at most in their presence. But even when the time is limited, it’s always better to meet your subject in a place where they actually spend time when you’re not there. And when you can see how they interact with people in their world, even better./aw

***

Mentor Peter <Who came up with the idea for the different Peters?/eg I was having a long conversation with my friend J.R. Moehringer about the story, and I was nattering on about all the different scenarios I’d seen him in and I must’ve said something like, “There’s Condescending Peter and Bossy Peter and Flattering Peter and…” We both went silent and then: BAM! He and I have talked about that moment for years as one of the great “Your peanut butter is in my chocolate/your chocolate is in my peanut butter” moments (that’s an archaic Reese’s Cup ad, for those of you who don’t recall it). It was enormously satisfying and fun and underscores another piece of advice about striving for greatness in magazine writing: Develop a great panel of advisers./aw is at Le Dome, telling me what to eat.

He’s invited me to lunch at the frumpy power restaurant on the Sunset Strip. <I have never heard/seen ‘frumpy’ used to describe anything other than a dress or a woman. How many adjectives did you audition before settling on this?/eg If you’d ever been at Le Dome – or at the Plaza Hotel in NYC before they renovated and made condos, for that matter—you would have reached immediately for frumpy. It just fit./aw With a flourish he orders us each a chicken burger with mixed greens—the favorite meal, he says, of his own mentor, Robert Evans. “There’s no bun, so it’s the Atkin’s diet,” he tells me. “Not that you or I are in dire need of diets. You look like a jock.”

Then he offers a career advice. “I’d like to see you do books. You are a disciplined writer, and for someone who can write and be disciplined about it, doing books and magazine articles is a wonderful thing. That’s why I like writing for GQ every other month. I would love to see you do that sort of thing,” he says, taking a bite. “The New Yorker is looking for someone. Everybody is.”

For a moment I find myself basking in Mentor Peter’s regard. Then Withholding Peter takes over, delivering a critique of the magazine for which I actually work. “The last issue—I really liked it, but I wonder if it’s a little overdesigned. Where are the big stories you want to read? Having said that, I liked the energy. But even your last story was just … THERE. I wish you guys nothing but the best,” he says, chewing slowly. “I just hope your magazine succeeds.” <Okay, this seems like a good time to ask: Was Bart at all resistant to participating in this story? He acts is if there is nothing in it for him./eg No, he wasn’t resistant. I was his biographer. I followed up on every story he told, I read not just every column he’d ever written but even his novel about Mormons, I was calling around town asking everyone who mattered to weigh in. I think if that kind of attention matters to you, you might feel you were getting something out of it./aw

***

BART’S 17 YEARS INSIDE THE MOVIEMAKING MACHINE is the foundation on which he’s built the rest of his career. His management style stems from it. His books and columns draw credibility from it. More than anything else, it confirmed his belief in a credo he’d had drummed into him since childhood: Self-invention is the route to power.

“I was raised with one adamant dictum: Don’t allow yourself to be imprisoned in any socioeconomic category, religious category, ethnic category, whatever,” Bart says one afternoon. We are sitting in the peach-colored living room of his home in Fremont Place, the Mid Wilshire enclave that was one of Los Angeles’s first gated communities. The eight-bedroom house used to belong to Harry Cohn, the producer and movie-studio founder whom Bart likes to call “the mean-spirited czar of Columbia.” Bart and his wife <Did you talk to her?/eg Yes, but not in depth. After the story ran, however, I heard from Bart’s ex-wife—the mother of his children. More on this later./aw have refurbished Cohn’s screening room to its original 1920s splendor, and he delights in referring to a separate alcove as “Harry’s phone room.” But there’s another commonality that Bart does not wish to talk about. Cohn, like many of Hollywood’s founding fathers, was Jewish. When I ask Bart about his own ethnicity, he turns elusive. It’s peculiar, to say the least. <This sentence sticks out. You generally keep your opinions to yourself./eg Well, it WAS peculiar, the way he refused to talk about what to most people is just their boilerplate origin-story. He simply refused to do it./aw Of all American industries, Hollywood has historically been a place where Jews have not only achieved acceptance but thrived. But following his parents’ dictum, Bart keeps his ancestry a secret.

Here are a few things Bart would tell me about his upbringing: Peter Benton Bart was born in 1932 and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His only brother is six years older. His parents were public-school teachers who had immigrated to the United States, though their son won’t say from where. (“They were very Americanized,” he says.) The elder Barts were fiercely irreligious and ferociously anticommunist. (“They told me if I was caught playing with a communist, they wouldn’t feed me.”) For reasons he never understood, they served Chinese food “morning, noon, and night.” (“They weren’t the kind of people you sat down with and said, “Tell me the origins of this fetish.’”) <I’ve read this repeatedly and I still don’t know what he means. Explain?/eg Meaning, he never knew why they had a fetish for Chinese food. He was painting the picture of an eccentric upbringing that taught him not to ever do what was expected of you./aw Although not wealthy, the family enjoyed some luxuries: a nanny, private schooling for the kids, and a vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are a few things Bart wouldn’t tell me: Both his parents were born in Austria. His mother, whose maiden name was Clara Ginsberg, arrived at Ellis Island in 1914. Her passenger record includes this notation: “Ethnicity: Austria (Hebrew).” There is no record of a Max S. Bart entering the United States through Ellis Island. Bart’s father may have traveled under another name. But there is a listing for a Moses Bart, which was the name of Bart’s paternal grandfather. Moses came to America in 1913, when he was 57 years old. His ethnicity: “Austria, Hebrew.” <These two paragraphs—wow. You’re speeding down the highway at 85 mph and, out of nowhere, you slam the brakes. It’s a hint of what’s to come in the last section, during which you more or less turn into an interrogator. Is this meant to be a hinge point in the story?/eg I found these documents online, after much searching. What was fascinating to me here was not whether or not he was Jewish—because whatever he was didn’t matter one way or another—but that he would go to such lengths to deny a simple truth. Because, it seems, he was adamant that no one should be able to define him by anything other than the elements he chose to accentuate./aw

Bart has kept even his closest friends confused about his past. “He was brought up a Quaker, wasn’t he?” asks Evans. It’s an honest mistake. You can’t spend more than an hour with Bart without hearing about his attending Friends Seminary and Swarthmore College—both Quaker institutions.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bart says of his religious heritage, as one of his knees begins bouncing up and down. <There’s the twitch./eg Yep./aw “I resent people’s militancy on these issues. Everyone wants to peg everyone else because everyone is predictable. And I’m not.”

Over several months he will volunteer that he has never once dated a Jewish girl, <This was the line in the story that prompted the letter from Duffie Bart, aka Dorothy Callman, Bart’s ex-wife. She wrote: “My name is Dorothy Callman. I am Jewish. We dated for three years, were married for close to twenty.”/aw never attended a seder, and has been inside a synagogue only once, for the bar mitzvah of then-agent Michael Ovitz’s son. (“I wanted to see what one was like.”) “Listen, I got berated by the vice president in charge of business affairs at Paramount,” he says, “because I did not take off Jewish holidays. And I was affronted. I basically told him to mind his own damned business.”

At one point he tries to explain his discomfort by comparing himself to his longtime assistant, a light-skinned black woman: “She struggles with this, too. She feels she’s a black person. But she’s about as black as Felix [Bart's Siamese cat]. I feel she is a bit victimized by, again, that need to identify with some subculture that will help you.

“You talk to a lot of the better-educated, wealthy black people. You know, they’re not very black. The big distinction is between the people they call ‘niggers’—who are the ghetto blacks, who can’t even speak, can’t get a job, and bury themselves in black-itude—and those people who are better looking, better educated, smarter, and who own the world: the black middle class,” he says. “A lot of people in Hollywood—let’s say if they happen to be Jewish people who come from Brooklyn—they are most comfortable with those people. Which is fine. It just doesn’t happen to describe me.”

A few minutes later he asks, “Can you and I make a deal about this whole thing about religion? I would love it if we could dodge it in some way that you don’t think is dishonest.” He will repeat this request more than once. <Interesting that Bart tried to talk you out of mentioning the Jewish remarks, but was apparently just fine with the rest./eg Yes, I agree. I remember, as he was beginning his analysis of black people, looking down at my cassette recorder, with its big red light shining brightly to indicate it was on. And I thought: He knows I’m recording this. This is one of the most formal interviews we’ve done (as opposed to me following him around or sitting in on a meeting). What is he thinking??/aw

***

Pundit Peter is in my living room, on television.

When network news shows need someone to speak for Hollywood—on the impact of possible strikes, for example, or Washington’s campaign against violent entertainment—they often turn to Bart. Tonight the man Bill Maher introduces as a “former big-time studio honcho prexy” is making his second appearance on Politically Incorrect.

The show is an ideal forum for Bart. He loves a good sword fight. Dapper in a black dress shirt and beige suit, Bart fences with Monica Crowley, a political commentator for Fox News, and actors Martin Short and Alec Baldwin, the topic: Richard Nixon. “Nixon was famous for being a self-made man who only admired self-made men,” Maher says. “What do you think Nixon would have thought of George W. Bush?”

“He would have said he was a patrician nothing,” Bart says. Then Bart assesses his fellow panelists and proclaims, “I’m the only Republican here.” <Of all the lies, this my favorite. This is a quadruple lutz. He’s lying about his own registration, as you note, but Crowley—Nixon’s onetime pen pal—is no liberal! It’s audacious./eg Only Bart gets to say what Bart is./aw Bart, too, prides himself on being self-made. He’s also self-made-up. He’s been a registered Democrat since 1994.

***

BART DESCRIBES HIS CHILDHOOD as “annoyingly happy,” except there was a definite imperative to perform. My parents never said, ‘This report card isn’t good enough.’ But you weren’t supposed to fuck up.” Bart attended the academically rigorous Swarthmore, where he succeeded upperclassman Victor Navasky, now the publisher of The Nation, as editor of the college newspaper. Bart majored in politics, did a brief stint as a copyboy at The New York Times, and then had a fellowship at the London School of Economics. He was hired by The Wall Street Journal in 1956. A few years later he returned to The New York Times as a reporter to cover advertising and the media.

He married a publicist named Dorothy Callman in 1961, and their first daughter, Colby, was born a year later. In 1964 Bart was made a national correspondent in Los Angeles. That’s when he first met a former actor named Robert Evans. In 1966, a few months after Bart’s second daughter, Dilys, was born, he wrote a profile of Evans for the Times that portrayed him as a tireless producer, an elegant operator. The very next day, on the basis of the article, Charles Bluhdorn, who had recently bought Paramount Pictures, hired Evans as a vice president; Evans had yet to make his first picture. In 1967, when Evans rose to become Paramount’s youngest-ever production chief, he hired Bart as his number two. Together they decided what movies would get made. <Where did you get this info?/eg I’d written a lengthy profile of Robert Evans for the Los Angeles Times not long before this piece, so I knew Evans. I interviewed him for this piece, too. But this story is something of a legend. It’s been told before./aw

They were an unlikely pair. Movie-star handsome, Evans was a wheeler-dealer with a passion for filmmaking and a seductive personal style. Bart was college educated, East Coast, intense. He trumped others with his command of the facts. Evans understood actors’ fragile, self-absorbed psyches, but he didn’t like to read. Bart read everything and wasn’t afraid to say what he liked. Each man saw in the other something he did not see in himself. <Evans is such a large part of the story. Why did you decide to keep his quotes to a minimum?/eg As I recall, Evans—usually full of bravado and a quote machine—was guarded with me about Bart. He confirmed things I asked about, but didn’t push the story much further./aw

More than three decades later Bart remains loyal to Evans, who has weathered a cocaine conviction, the murder of a business partner, and persistent money troubles. Although still widely considered an invaluable sounding board—for years Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Towne have sought his advice—Evans, now 71, hasn’t produced a hit film in more than 20 years. He spends much of his time rattling around his overgrown French Regency estate that was once Greta Garbo’s Beverly Hills hideaway. Bart, though, still believes in him.

“Turn him loose on somebody and, I’ll tell you, it’s amazing,” Bart will say today, <Not “said” or “says”, but “will say.” It’s wonderfully disorienting, and creates an illusion of reporter-as-psychic./eg The implication is that he says this kind of thing a lot./aw admitting that part of him still longs for when he and Evans worked side by side. Alone neither enjoyed the same success. When Evans signed a new production deal with Paramount in 1991, Bart ran a banner headline on Variety’s front page along with a story about Evans’s “comeback.” But the comeback never materialized. Sometimes, Bart says, “I feel a little bit guilty. I feel like if we became a team again, we could get things done.”

Evans says Bart has not changed at all since Paramount. “He was always frank,” he says. “Always combative. He wasn’t a fence straddler. He was a bit sarcastic. Biting. He always had an inner pleasure in ruffling feathers.” <Did you speak to Evans on the phone or in person?/eg In person. Went to his fantastic/crazy house in Beverly Hills./aw

The film industry was in the toilet when the former actor and his journalist sidekick took over at the studio. They faced enormous pressure to turn things around. Bart knew little about movies, but he was well suited to the job. Whether as a child of demanding parents or as a reporter meeting daily deadlines, he had learned how to thrive under stress: Do your homework and stand your ground.

“The head of distribution comes in one day and sees me watching the dailies of Paper Moon. He says, ‘This movie is in black and white?” Bart recalls of the Depression-era story that would pair the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. Bart had discovered the book on which the movie was based and had approved its being shot in black and white—not the usual recipe for commercial success. “I said, ‘No, no, it’s in color. I’m just watching dailies in black and white. Don’t worry.’ And we finished the movie. These are the lessons of selective deviousness.” <Is this true? It feels like a tall tale./eg This was one of those stories that was difficult to check. But by this point I think readers get the idea: it’s probably mostly true, but Bart likes to tell a great story./aw

Then as now, Bart was exacting. “In the go-go days of the ’70s, when everybody was running around smoking a joint or trying to look like they were, Peter was a little more buttoned down,” remembers Irwin Winkler. “He was thoughtful, well read—almost like a boarding school headmaster.”

One day while driving to work with Evans, Bart championed a project so eccentric that it could have cost them their jobs. “We needed to get some hits going, and Peter was telling me about a script he’d read the previous night,” Evans remembers. “He said, ‘It’s about an 18-year-old boy who falls in love with an 80-year-old woman.’ I said, ‘Stop the car. Are you crazy? He says, ‘When you get to your office, lock yourself in the bathroom and read the script. And if you think I’m wrong, I’m wrong.’” The script became the cult film Harold and Maude.

Evans and Bart (along with chief corporate officer Stanley Jaffe, president Frank Yablans, and others) presided over the resuscitation of Paramount. Marrying an extraordinary generation of young directors—Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Peter Bogdanovich—with commercial topics, they helped change the very notion of the Hollywood film. As Peter Biskind writes in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the ’70s were a golden age for moviemaking, “the last time Hollywood produced a body of risky, high-quality work–as opposed to the errant masterpiece–work that was character- rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions … that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily.” Much of that work came out of Paramount: Rosemary’s Baby; Goodbye, Columbus; Love Story; The Godfather; Don’t Look Now; Chinatown; The Godfather II; The Conversation. <This sort of accomplishment laundry list is a necessary evil, right?/eg Kit Rachlis, who was then the editor-in-chief of Los Angeles and the brilliant man who edited this piece, was a big believer in the power of lists. Here and in the previous accounting of who Bart lunched with over a two week period, the idea was that the sheer weight of the details would make the point better than our characterization of them. It’s an old-school New Yorker-ish technique./aw

Bart had left journalism in his mid thirties because he was weary, he says, “of writing about people who were doing things. I wanted to try doing something myself.” <Great foreshadowing./eg His timing was perfect. In those days a junior production executive could have impact. Evans says it was Bart who acquired The Godfather and who suggested that Coppola direct it; Bart would later convince a reluctant Coppola to make The Godfather II. “In the ’60s and ’70s, studio business was conducted in an offhand, even anarchic, style,” Bart has written. “The mood of that era was to thumb your nose at the rules.” He fit right in.

Bart was building relationships with Hollywood’s future power players. Jeff Berg, now the head of International Creative Management, was a young agent when they met in 1970. Berg used to come over and read Bart’s daughters bedtime stories. That bond has helped make peace on the countless occasions since then when the two have stopped speaking.

“He has a very bitter wit, which is an acquired taste,” says Berg. “He is very quick to call his friends to task as well as his foes. When you get nailed in Variety you try to kiss it off, but it’s part of the fossil record. Still, he never apologizes. What he’ll do is say ‘I haven’t heard from you in a year or so. Why don’t we have a drink?’”

Whether Bart’s rough edges played a part in his departure from Paramount in 1974 is a matter of debate. There has been speculation that he was forced out when Barry Diller was installed as the studio’s new chief. Bart denies this, and Evans also pooh-poohs it, saying Bart left to head up an independent film production company and finally make the kind of big money that had eluded him at Paramount. Whatever the truth, Bart likes to poke at Diller. At dinner parties and in his Variety column, he has told and retold a story (that both Evans and Diller have denied) about Charles Bluhdorn, the owner of Paramount Pictures, trying to marry off Diller so nobody would believe the persistent rumor that he was gay.

“Diller has always had one of the easiest rides with the press,” Bart will say <There’s the writer-as-psychic again./eg I disagree. The hope is to convey not that I’m a psychic but that this is the kind of thing, if you spend hours with Bart, you will hear again and again./aw with a mixture of disdain and awe. “People will go up and ask him something, and he’ll say ‘That’s a stupid question.’ And their reaction is ‘He’s such a smart man.’” Bart has a different assessment: “He treats everyone like shit.”

***

Evasive Peter is ducking the press.

He’s flown to New York City to host “The Front Row,” a business symposium that Variety holds each year to make money and boost its profile. This year’s lineup includes Diller, now CEO of USA Networks; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch; Sony Corp. CEO Howard Stringer; and Viacom president Mel Karmazin, with Bill Clinton delivering the keynote. Bart is both point man and emcee.

“I feel like I’m the producer of some B movie,” he says. So when Credit Suisse First Boston, the investment bank cosponsoring the event, suddenly gets cold feet about being affiliated with Clinton (and removes all signage bearing its name from the conference venue), Bart does damage control. It’s a good story—a prominent bank, active in the entertainment industry, distancing itself from the former president. But the story won’t break in Variety. Bart makes sure of that.

“You feel like a shit, playing hide-and-seek with the press,” Bart says, on the eve of the symposium. He spends the day avoiding the few journalists who have gotten wind of the brouhaha. “It’s hard when you can’t be completely candid. But in this case, I think that’s probably the best course.” <No matter how many times I’ve read this story, these four paragraphs always seem anomalous. What is the narrative purpose?/eg I just found it fascinating that even as he was editor of a trade paper, even as he insisted on calling Variety a newspaper (thus giving it more credibility as a serious journalistic product), he could easily switch gears/hats and evade the press./aw

***

ON A FRIDAY MORNING BART SITS IN HIS WINDOW-lined office on the first floor of the Variety building on Wilshire Boulevard. A French-language poster of Islands in the Stream, a movie he produced in 1977, fills one wall, while another wall displays the grip-and-grin photos you see in the offices of politicians: Bart with director Steven Spielberg, lobbyist Jack Valenti, celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro. On his desk there is no computer, just an electric typewriter. On a bookshelf sits one of those kitschy fake grenades mounted on a plaque. COMPLAINT DEPT., it reads. TAKE A NUMBER.

Bart motions executive editor Elizabeth Guider and managing editor Timothy M. Gray toward a circular table. It’s time to talk headlines. <This is an extraordinary level of access. How far along in the reporting were you? At this point, were you and Bart getting along?/eg I don’t recall exactly how far along I was, but this was one of the things I specifically asked for at the beginning of reporting the piece because, as I’ve said, I thought the piece was really a window into the peculiar animal that was a trade paper, and Bart was just my main character in that piece. Obviously, what my reporting later revealed turned this into a very different story in the end. But this was likely quite early on, as I was getting to know Bart./aw

Variety’s pun-filled headlines are famously deft and often hilarious—“Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” from 1935, is considered the classic—and Bart understands they are central to the paper’s appeal. A few weeks after he arrived at Variety in 1989, he got people talking by topping a story about a feud between playwright David Hare and New York Times theater critic Frank Rich with this bombshell: “Ruffled Hare Airs Rich Bitch.” Nearly 12 years later, while he leaves much of the day-to-day editing of Variety to others, he still weighs in on front-page headlines.

Bart sometimes writes the heads himself, as he did for a recent piece about teen movies’ waning box office receipts: “No Pop in Zit Pix.” But the soft-spoken Tim Gray is Bart’s ace in the headline hole. It was Gray, for example, who wrote “Ovitz No Govitz at MCA” (for a story about the agent not becoming MCA’s chairman). For the grossest of these (“Movies Get a Bad Case of the Runs”) Bart has coined a term: “secretional headlines.”

“We are now in the post-secretional period,” Bart says, grinning. “It ended after we described some relationship as ‘warm and runny.’”
Guider frowns. “It was awful,” she says.

“It’s a Britishism,” protests Bart. “It’s not lewd.”

Today’s challenge is a story about 20th Century Fox’s decision to premiere director Baz Luhrmann’s movie musical Moulin Rouge at the Cannes Film Festival. There are a lot of elements—the studio’s gamble, the festival, the painter Toulouse-Lautrec—and Gray has assembled a list of contenders that seek to hit them all: “The Thin ‘Rouge’ Line,” “Schmooze and ‘Rouge,’” “Cannes: Le Trek for Lautrec,” and “Bed, Baz, and Beyond.”

“Only someone truly demented would write ‘Bed, Baz, and Beyond,’” Bart says approvingly, scanning the list. “But shouldn’t we say something a little more explanatory?”

“Riviera’s Risk with ‘Rouge’?” Gray offers.

“Fox’s Riviera Risk,” Bart counters.

“‘Moulin’ Not Foolin’ Around?” asks Gray.

Bart gets up and goes to his typewriter, pounds the keys, and rips out a page. He hands the sheet to Guider, who reads aloud: “Will Frogs Flog Fox on Riv?” Everybody laughs. By meeting’s end the headline has been reworked ten times. “Fox Takes Risk on the Riviera,” it says. “‘Rouge’ schmooze cues renewed rapport between H’w’d, Cannes.” <Do you think Bart, Guider and Gray were, to some extent, performing for you? It’s so perfect, almost choreographed./eg Absolutely, everybody was on best behavior and being supremely witty. But even still, you got a glimpse into how they interacted and how the decisions got made./aw

In meetings like these and as a public speaker, Bart is irresistible. He takes control of a room, interweaving economic analysis, authoritative opinions, and barbs. At this year’s Festival of Books at UCLA, he appeared on a panel moderated by Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times’s chief movie critic. When Turan asked Bart what he’d most like to change about Hollywood, Bart responded, “I think that film critics should dress better.” Amid hoots of laughter from both the audience and the rumpled Turan, Bart then got serious.

“What the present moment in Hollywood history shows is that the system is not working either artistically or financially,” he said, singling out two films as proof. “Town & Country just opened to a sterling $ 3 million, which is the price of the movie’s catering bill. Driven is so lame, Stallone’s likeness isn’t even featured on the poster. This is corporate Hollywood. And I do have a certain fondness for that epoch when movies were made because of a director’s passion, not because McDonald’s or a toy company or German [financiers] were interested.” <You got a lot of excellent quotes by observing Bart, not simply interacting with him./eg Yes, the great thing was that I had both./aw

Bart gets Hollywood. Even those he’s treated harshly say it’s true. “He’s knowledgeable enough about film to go right to the heart of the matter every time,” says Dan Cox, a longtime Variety reporter whom Bart fired earlier this year. “That’s what Peter is brilliant at.”
As a teenager Bart dreamed of being Somerset Maugham, “traveling the world and writing short stories and novels about extraordinary people and situations.” In many ways, Variety gave him his wish. As its editor—a job that pays him about $500,000 a year including bonuses, plus a green BMW convertible and a lavish expense account—he has become Hollywood’s informal ambassador to the world. He travels frequently: to Australia for a speaking tour; to Italy, in part to research a GQ article about director Martin Scorsese; and almost every May, to France to attend the Cannes Film Festival. He is currently completing a book of short stories, one of which–”Dangerous Company: In Hollywood, Getting Laid Can Be a Career Breaker”—appeared in GQ this summer. His fourth nonfiction book, an anecdotal guide to the movie business written with his good friend, producer Peter Guber, will be published by Putnam in March.

For all Bart’s past lives, this one most suits him. “Peter has the best job he’s ever had, for Peter,” says Variety publisher Charles Koones. <This hilariously condescending./eg

When Variety first came calling, Bart had returned to writing—the lowest rung in Hollywood. In the years since he left Paramount he’d gone back and forth between producing movies, writing novels and screenplays, and serving as an executive at Lorimar and MGM. In 1989 he completed Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM. Lively and caustic, the book skewered many of Bart’s colleagues and would become a best-seller. Around the same time, Reed Elsevier, a Dutch company that had bought Variety, was looking for a new editor. Its headhunter saw in Bart the perfect hybrid, while Bart—then 57, ancient by Hollywood standards—saw a chance to reinvent himself once again.

“They wanted someone with lots of experience in both journalism and the Industry,” he says. “The headhunter gave them a list with only one name on it: mine.” (Actually, there was another name on the list: Caroline Miller, now the editor-in-chief of New York magazine.)

***

Controlling Peter is checking up on me.

“I hear you’re calling all sorts of strange people. I mean, Jerry Weintraub?” he asks. Weintraub, a movie producer and a former colleague at MGM, is not one of Bart’s favorite people. “The last time I saw a movie with Jerry Weintraub,” Bart wrote in a Variety column earlier this year, “he arrived with a bottle of Stolichnaya. ‘How did you like the movie?’ I asked him during final credits. ‘What movie?’ he replied.”

Two months after that column appeared, I left a message for Weintraub. The next morning Weintraub called Bart, and now Bart is on the phone to me. “We have never gotten along,” he says. “If you’re trying to find a non-fan club, I think he would be it.”

Bart predicts that Weintraub will not speak to me. Sure enough, Weintraub’s publicist soon calls to say his client is much too busy to talk. That’s odd, I say, since his client found time to call Bart. <I note that, throughout the story, you do not give your lines quotation marks. It helps maintain a certain dispassionate distance, especially when you’re pushing back like this./eg Also, I was taking notes as we talked, but I was only writing down what he said, so while I remembered what I said, I didn’t have it verbatim./aw

A few hours later Weintraub’s gravelly voice is in my ear. “I didn’t want you to think I wouldn’t call back,” he says, adding that he has nothing to say. What, I ask, is Bart’s reputation in the Industry?

“I have no idea,” he replies. “I’m 63 years old. I’ve been doing this for 43 years. You think you’re going to get me to talk about something I don’t want to talk about?”

Why, then, did he call Bart?

“That’s my business,” he barks.

When told of this exchange, Bart sums up Weintraub this way: “He’s definitely in the life-is-too-short category.”

***

BART WAS HIRED TO RUN Weekly Variety out of New York in 1989. The publication was losing $3 million a year. Circulation had dropped from 52,000 in 1980 to less than 29,000. The Hollywood Reporter was competing both for scoops and for advertising dollars.

Bart’s impact was felt immediately. He upgraded from newsprint to glossy paper, changed the color of the logo, and set about dismantling the old staff and assembling the new. Nearly two years later Bart was put in charge of Daily Variety as well. He merged the staffs and returned to Los Angeles.

Bart absolutely refuses to call Variety a trade paper, even though it gets 90 percent of its ad revenue from the Industry. It is, he asserts, a newspaper—“a vivid chronicle of our pop culture.” Bart has made Variety more global, more sophisticated, more fun to read. Today the paper embraces the flail scope of the entertainment economy, from tech news to broadcasting and cable, from magazines to books, from movies to theater. Its critics—particularly Todd McCarthy, who reviews films—are well respected, and it has Washington correspondents, a London office, and writers stationed around the world. <Strange to read this a decade later, as Variety is much-diminished and McCarthy is gone after 31 years. It’s a different world./eg Indeed. An entirely different world. Except, as I note, for the insecurity. Hollywood remains rife with it./aw

Bart has become one of those people everyone loves to psychoanalyze, partly because he lives to be in the red-hot center and is so willing to offend. You can see it in his frequent, lecturing “Memo To” columns, in which he gives unsolicited advice to the likes of Robin Williams (“Robin—enough of the message stuff”) and Leonardo DiCaprio (“Go to college, Leo”). You can see it, too, in the way he runs Variety.

Staffers praise him for hating all the right things: lawyers, committees, focus groups—anything that obstructs Variety’s (and his own) ability to act quickly, on instinct. But he also brings the imperious manner of a studio exec into Variety’s newsroom. He walks out of meetings in the middle, without explanation. He has nicknames—many of them unflattering—for everyone. Years ago Bart emptied a wastebasket on a reporter’s head. (“That was very calculated,” he says. “I knew it was the only way to get his attention.”) <Did this story come from Bart? He seems quite proud of it./eg I heard it from someone else, then asked Bart about it. That was his response./aw

Max Alexander, a former editor for Weekly Variety in New York, moved to Los Angeles at Bart’s behest, first to be managing editor and then executive editor. Alexander calls Bart “probably the smartest person I’ve ever worked for.” But Bart was always restless. Alexander remembers visiting the Barts at their rented English Tudor house in Benedict Canyon—a low-slung hunting lodge of a place. “It was all furnished in chintz fabric,” says Alexander, “with beautiful wraparound sofas that matched the drapes. There were hunting scenes and tapestries. It had a medieval feel to it.” A year later the Barts moved to another house nearby, “a contemporary, Mies van der Rohe kind of house. Now it was Barcelona chairs, chrome, glass, swatches of color by painters who’d committed suicide. I asked, ‘What happened to the tapestries? Peter waved his hand and laughed and said, ‘It was just time for a change,’ and I realized this is the essence of this man. He likes to suddenly sweep the table clean.” <Interesting. You don’t often see descriptions of locations in a quote./eg I know. I love this guy’s cinematic memory. He painted the scene for me./aw

Stephen West can attest to that. In 1991 Bart hired West away from the Los Angeles Times, where he was assistant business editor. After five years as Daily Variety’s executive editor, West was summoned without warning to Bart’s office and told his job had been eliminated.

“There’s the good Peter and there’s the bad Peter,” <This is so perfect. Until this point in the story, I assumed your use of the different Peters was simply a clever narrative device. Turns out, Bart’s contemporaries use it, too./eg That gets to my earlier point about, when you’re sitting down to write/figure out themes in a piece, re-read all your stuff. Often, if you pay attention, there are clues to be found in what’s repeated./aw says West, now media editor at Bloomberg News in San Francisco. He still admires Bart, despite what he wryly calls his own “public execution.” “Peter really is like Mao Tse-tung, in that he loves perpetual revolution. He’s never satisfied. Even when things are running well, he wants to change it.”

The scenario would be played out again and again. Bart, who is known to address his male staffers with the paternal “my boy,” would eventually turn on nearly all of them. Paying homage to director Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, staffers coined a term for the inevitable moment when Bart would blow: “M’Boy Better Blues.” <Did this come from an unlucky staffer?/eg I talked to so many Variety employees past and present that I ended up keeping a chart of which details each of them could confirm. We used nothing that we didn’t have multiple sources for. The reason: I knew Bart was a firebrand who rubbed some people the wrong way and I didn’t want to just traffic in revenge stories. I wanted to show the real him, and I devised a system by which I needed to hear a particular detail at least two and preferably three times, from separate people, before I used it./aw

“If someone said, ‘Peter would like to see you in his office,’ you’d walk in not knowing if you were going to get your ass kissed, your head handed to you on a plate, or an invitation to dinner,” says one former Variety writer. “It’s a management technique—so when it’s time to crack the whip, everybody is already ready to flinch.”

Bart so relishes flouting political correctness that he lets loose on everyone: the French, Germans, blacks, Jews, lawyers, agents, actors, publicists, feminists, fat people. A gay man says that Bart asked him about his health during a job interview. Another former Variety reporter heard Bart say, “I’m not hiring any more fags, because they get sick and die.” According to more than half a dozen people, he peppers meetings at Variety with derogatory terms: fags, bitches, cunts, Nips. <You allude to fact-checking in the story itself. What was the process like?/eg Meticulous. I’m pretty organized and anal retentive when it comes to research and sourcing, but Eric Mercado was a true collaborator in terms of triple-checking and running down other sources I hadn’t had. He caught a few things, as I recall, before publication. Of course, we also had a lawyer read it (after Bart started making threatening noises). We felt very confident about all our facts before we went to press./aw

Yet Bart, as always, is confounding. In contrast to the comments people attribute to him—which he denies making—staffers say he has treated ailing gay employees well. During his tenure Variety has begun acknowledging longtime companions in obituaries of gay people. Bart has promoted women and tried, with limited success, to diversify Variety’s mostly white staff.

“Is Peter homophobic? Possibly. Racist? Possibly. Misogynistic? Possibly,” says one former Variety employee who knows him well. “But most of the stuff that gets traced to him isn’t about that. It’s about his desperate need to draw fire and rile stuff up. He can’t bear to be ignored even for a minute.”

***

Bart hates to take notes.

“I don’t like to,” he says. “I just find when you take out a notebook, it just changes the atmosphere.” Nevertheless, in his column he frequently quotes conversations he has had with Hollywood figures. The quotes, which he also inserts in reporters’ stories, are nearly always unattributed. He often dictates them off the top of his head, which may explain why some of Variety’s anonymous sources sound a lot like Inventive Peter.

Bart favors the terms fat cats and suits. So do a fair number of people who sound off in his columns. He loves to use damned, as in “You know damned well he intends to deliver for his clients.” When run through Bart’s typewriter, lots of people around town start cussing just like that, from “a senior marketing official at Paramount” to “one major agent” to “one of the town’s top lawyers.”

Read enough of Bart’s work and you begin to hear the echo. <A strength of the piece is your granular familiarity with Bart’s writing. What was your process/timeframe for reading all the books, columns, etc./eg Days, nights, weekends, for months. I immersed./aw In his own voice he will write, “It’s all about those statuettes, stupid,” or “It’s all about the waivers from SAG.” A few months later he’ll quote one “candid” CEO (“It’s all about intimidation”) or “the production chief of one major [studio]” (“It’s all about money”).

“I have,” he says, “an incredible memory.” <The profile is written quite straight; outwardly, you seem neither pro- nor anti-Bart. That’s what makes this sentence—and your decision to break up the quote in this manner—so damning. Isn’t it a subtle form of editorializing?/eg By putting “he says” in the middle as opposed to at the end you’re hearing a judgment? I don’t think that was intended. It was more a rhythm thing—the last line of a section, it wanted to end on him, not me. And it just sounded better./aw

***

IF PETER BART HAS A MOTTO, IT IS this: “I know now there is no one thing that is true. It is all true.” The words are Hemingway’s, from his novel Islands in the Stream. Once Bart quoted them in a column, adding, “Now there’s a manifesto for you.”
<The final stretch is the payoff, where you take the gun off the table and empty the chambers. Did you always envision closing out the story this way?/eg Not always because, as I’ve said, I didn’t set out to write this kind of a piece. When I began, I didn’t know Bart had peddled a script, for example. I didn’t think of this as investigative as much as explanatory—using Bart to explain the role of the trades. But the further I went, the more his personal choices became the story, both because they were brazen but also because they said so much about how Hollywood works./aw Everyone knows that in Hollywood people lie as a matter of course, exaggerating their accomplishments, minimizing their failures. They don’t fret about it. Building up one’s own buzz is part of doing business—a means to an end. <It’s an incredible juggling act. You keep one eye on Bart, the other on the industry that enabled him. It’s a mini-What Makes Sammy Run?./eg Bart is notable, though, because he is editor of the industry’s most important publication, so his fibs, amplifications, and outright lies masquerade as candor./aw

“I have covered … wars,” he recently asserted in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. When pressed, though, he admits he hasn’t. He frequently refers to his time as “a young kid studio executive,” even though he was 35 when he got his first studio job and 53 when he left his last one. One publicist recalls Bart calling her angrily after she asked for a correction to a Variety article. “I ran three studios,” yelled the man who did no such thing, “and I will not be dictated to by a fucking flack!”

One former colleague says Bart had a term for the kind of embellishment he practices: “novelizing.” Another who remains fond of Bart says, “His relationship to the truth is very plastic. I’d go on interviews with him and he’d write something and I’d think, ‘Were we in the same room?’ He’s just a storyteller. The narrative needs are more immediate to his imagination than what actually happened.”
Bart’s philosophy permeates Variety. There’s the way he praises friends, associates, and even his own movies without acknowledging his involvement. He’ll call Richard Heller “a scrupulous New York practitioner” without noting that Heller has been his lawyer for 25 years. Ronda Gomez is “one of the town’s veteran literary agents.” She was also his assistant at Paramount Pictures. Michelle Manning, president of production at Paramount, is “one of the sharper young executives in town.” A year before he wrote that, Manning also bought the movie rights to a Bart project, but he doesn’t mention that. If a reporter or an editor at a major daily newspaper flaunted the basic rules of journalism the way Bart does, they’d be shown the door.

Most people in show business deceive to gain advantage—to downplay their cost overruns, say, or to boost their salaries. Bart, too, misrepresents for strategic advantage, but he also lies for no apparent reason. <You could argue this applies to many of his other lies, too. A guy who helped get The Godfather made doesn’t need to pretend to have been a war correspondent./eg Yes, exactly. It suggests that once you get in the habit, lying becomes second nature./aw Consider what happened when we discussed the infamous Patriot Games incident of 1992, when Variety film critic Joe McBride wrote a blistering review of Paramount Pictures’ Tom Clancy adaptation. The studio, apoplectic over the review’s potential dampening of interest among overseas exhibitors, pulled its advertising from Variety. Bart got mad, but not at the studio. He decreed that McBride would no longer review Paramount films.

The New York Times wrote a story about the McBride dustup that said Variety staffers were aghast that their boss would curry favor with Paramount. The article quoted from a private apology that Bart had sent to Martin S. Davis, the studio’s then chairman and CEO. “Marty Davis and I have known each other for 25 years,” Bart told the Times. “I simply dropped him a friendly note.”
Nine years later, however, when I first ask Bart about the note, he insists it never existed. “I never wrote any,” he says, adding that he disliked Davis intensely, so “the idea that I would contact these people was bizarre.” How to explain the Times story, written by veteran reporter Bernard Weinraub? “It was a reminder to me about the nastiness of journalists toward each other,” Bart says, shaking his head.

A few weeks later I obtained a copy of the letter. Bart’s lie didn’t make sense. Had he forgotten that it was typed by his own secretary on Variety stationery? (Bart’s secretary at the time had a couple of well-known idiosyncrasies—using a double dash in phone numbers, spelling out fax with spaces between the letters—both of which are in evidence.) <This is gorgeous detail. Did you talk to the secretary?/eg For obvious reasons, I can’t say who I did or didn’t talk to in this section./aw Did he really think that he could alter the “fossil record,” to borrow Jeff Berg’s phrase, and rewrite history?

When I presented a copy of the letter to Bart—the first of two occasions that he would later denounce as “gotcha” journalism—he declared it “blatantly bogus.” <What was the second occasion?/eg The one in the lede./aw He disputed the signature. He suggested the letterhead had been faked. “Editorial director, Variety Inc.?” he said, reading the words under his name. “I don’t ever remember having that title.” (Variety’s masthead from that period shows that, in fact, he did.) “I agree with the contents of the letter,” he said after perusing it for a minute, “but I didn’t write it.”

Later he would call me to clarify. Even if he had written the letter, he said, “that incident is not relevant to me, only because it never recurred. I’d think it was interesting if it were a syndrome. But since it’s a stand-alone…” It sounded like an acknowledgment, sort of. His voice trailed off.

What was more striking than Bart’s dissembling, however, was a part of the letter that The New York Times hadn’t seen fit to quote. In one paragraph, it captures how Bart perceives his place in Hollywood: “I know that you and Stanley [Jaffe] feel that Variety has developed an anti-Paramount tilt in its coverage. This distresses me—we go back together many years and I personally feel a keen sense of camaraderie. Clearly you feel, however, that the ‘old comrades’ aren’t taking care of each other. If that’s your feeling, you and Stanley deserve better and I intend to take personal charge of this situation to set it right.”

“Taking care of each other”—that is Bart’s defining editorial principle. That doesn’t mean he rolls over, necessarily. If he thinks a top executive needs a kick in the pants, he’s happy to administer it. But he’s no adversary. He’s more like a teammate, or even a coach. He may be editor-in-chief of Variety, but he is still one of them.

People who have worked with Bart say he would call his favorite sources—Guber, Ovitz, Weinstein, Evans, producer Arnon Milchan—and vet stories that mentioned them, letting them make adjustments. When confronted by the reporters whose bylines topped the altered stories, Bart would say he got better information after deadline. “This is my paper,” one remembers him saying. “I’ll do as I please.”

Bart has internalized Hollywood’s A-list mentality, mistaking the highest-placed source for the best source, even when the higher-up has much to gain by what they’re leaking. When Milchan was negotiating to take his production company from Warner Bros. to 20th Century Fox, for example, the reporters working the story established that Warner Bros. had capped its offer at $ 100 million. Bart added another knowledgeable source, who put the number at $130 million. The source, the reporters were shocked to learn, was Milchan, whose bargaining position was sure to be strengthened by the $30 million boost.

“It might have been,” Bart says, “that I just called him and asked him what the number was.” But didn’t that help Milchan? “People like that, they don’t need my help. They’re doing fine. And let’s be pragmatic. You can’t use a newspaper to help your friends. You’ll end up getting fired.” <I love that you introduce another wrinkle in Bart’s character so late in the story. Delusional Peter? Not-Self-Aware Peter?/eg

In almost the next breath, though, Bart says friendship does guide him. He recalls visiting Guber’s office one day when Guber was chairman of Sony. “The purpose of my mission was to yell at him. You don’t like to see a friend messing up,” Bart says. “I was telling him among other things how badly he was handling the press and how he was not being confrontative enough with the problems at Sony. It had nothing to do with reporting. No notes were taken. It had nothing to do with journalism.” Bart insists, however, that despite offering such counsel, he directed his reporters to grill Guber’s regime as they would any other.

“Is Guber a friend of mine? Certainly. I have never denied that,” Bart says. “Was he an effective president of Sony? No.” Those who attended a gala tribute to Bart at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in 1997, meanwhile, remember that Guber began the roast with this joke: “Will everyone here who owes Peter a favor for having killed a negative story please remain seated?” The room–filled with Hollywood’s heaviest hitters—erupted in laughter. Everybody stayed in their seats. <Did you get the story from Guber and confirm it with other sources?/eg I got the story from people who were in the audience —it was a full house. That’s why we attributed it to them./aw

***

Nervous Peter has questions.

The magazine’s fact checker has just spent the day going over the story with him, and he wants to discuss a few things with me. “When we entered into this thing, I said to you, ‘When I write about people, I don’t write about religious beliefs or sexual orientation,’” he says. “I honestly felt you would respect that.” I remind him that all along I have told him that the profile would take into account his history.

“What concerns me is if you are characterizing me as a runaway Jew,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. I just don’t talk about it. It’s not a part of my life. Isn’t this the equivalent of outing someone?” he asks.

I tell him I don’t equate revealing a person’s homosexuality with saying his parents were Austrian Jews.

He then changes course. “Do me one favor,” he says. “To avoid me being blackballed, quote me saying, ‘I have no problem saying my ethnicity is Jewish.’ Otherwise you’re going to get me into trouble with all these people.”

When I tell him I can do that, but that I’m sure my editor will insist that we put the quote in context, making it clear that it came after a call from a fact checker, he snaps: “Is he some kind of professional Jew, too?” <How did you react to this? For all intents and purposes, the story was done. It was fact-checked. For some reason, Bart chose not to leave well enough alone. How much did it change the tenor of the story?/eg Not much. The story was already mostly done. It was as if he were confirming the emphasis I’d already placed on these themes. Putting this in was like adding a coda./aw

***

IT HAS LONG BEEN RUMORED—but never proved—that the editor of Variety writes scripts on the side. Bart has always denied this, but people still whisper. Earlier this year The Hollywood Reporter’s David Robb, who has never hidden his antipathy for his former boss, wrote an article about it.

In March, after Bart attended a Writers Guild meeting that was closed to the press and then published a report on Variety’s front page, Robb investigated why Bart was still an active guild member. He discovered that to remain active, Bart had to have sold a script within the past four years. Robb thought he’d found what to Bart’s enemies amounts to the Holy Grail: proof that Bart was engaging in journalism’s most serious conflict of interest—profiting from those you cover.

Robb, however, never laid his hands on the offending script. If he had, he might have been disappointed. According to Bart, the script he sold within the last four years was Nobody’s Children, a drama about a gang of gypsy thieves that he wrote in the early ’80s. Bart says the transaction that kept him active in the WGA was merely the extension of a preexisting option—one that was entered into long before he came to Variety.

“Dave has this fascination, trying to prove that I am still writing and selling scripts,” Bart says, adding that these days the mere act of reading a script makes him physically ill. When it comes to screenplays, he says, his “entire oeuvre” was written before he got to Variety. “I’m not writing or selling scripts. I don’t even want to write and sell scripts. But Dave is still trying to find another script.”
For the record, Variety has a policy that prevents its reporters from being seduced by Hollywood while they are covering it. As Bart explained it to me, “You cannot shop a script while you’re writing for us. Obviously it’s different if you write a book or a novel and it sells to a movie studio. I have no problem with that, except I’m not going to write the script. I don’t think the line is that blurry.”
Things were about to get blurrier, though. One night I came home and found that a manila envelope had been forced through my mail slot. Inside was a 108-page script. <You gave this source total anonymity. Was that at the source’s request?/eg Let me put it this way: The script appeared, shoved through my mail slot. My responsibility was to confirm that it was for real. I did that with Bart himself. Bart, then, was my source./aw

By this point I had heard many accounts of how Bart had earned people’s enmity. Even if I took them all at face value, which I didn’t, these stories never implied that Bart was a dimwit. In a town full of blowhards, where money is often a substitute for intelligence, Bart is considered supremely—if sometimes vengefully—bright. But, as I was about to discover, he was not bright enough to compensate for his Achilles’ heel: his loyalty to his friend and mentor, Robert Evans.

In 1998 Variety reported that Michelle Manning at Paramount Pictures had acquired the rights to a novel written by Bart. The novel was called Power Play, and the plan was for Evans to develop it. It was set in Las Vegas and focused on a power struggle between established casino owners and Indian tribes. Bart had used a pseudonym, the article said, “to avoid any potential conflict of interest.”
I’d read all of Bart’s novels but had never heard of Power Play. When I first asked Bart about it, he said, “It’s not a novel. It’s a novella. It needs work. I never finished it.” When I asked to read it, he told me he had no idea where it was. “I did it to try to help Bob out. And Bob never did anything with it,” he said, referring to Evans.

So no script was ever written? “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “In the old days I’d have swung into action, gotten a director assigned, gotten it off the ground. But I don’t do that for a living anymore. And it’s not what I should do.”

Then the script arrived. It was called Crossroaders, but it was the same story as Power Play. Its title page read: “By Leslie Cox”—the maiden name of Bart’s current wife—“Based on the novel by Peter Bart. September, 1996.”

I call Bart and arrange for a final interview. Over several months I had come to know many Peters, but when he welcomes me to his office I don’t know which one to expect. I tell Bart I have a copy of the 1996 script he wrote. “The script I wrote,” he repeats, neither confirming nor denying. I look into the face of the man with the incredible memory. It is blank. But one knee starts jiggling, and he fiddles idly with the band of his watch. <The final nod to the story’s second paragraph, fulfilling your promise to the reader—that you have seen Bart twitch./eg

“Boy, you got me. Did I write a script? Now I’m facing memory loss,” he says, as I pull a copy of Crossroaders out of my bag. He looks it over. “Let’s just say this is a script that has Leslie’s name on it. What does that indicate? Therefore—therefore, what?”

I repeat that I know he wrote it. “I may have written this,” he says. But, I counter, you said you hate writing scripts. “I do. Maybe this taught me never to do it again. I’d love to read this. Is it any good?”

Persuasive Peter, Argumentative Peter, Smooth Peter—they’re all here, and they’re taking turns. “You know something? In all honesty, I do not remember writing this,” he says. “I guess it was written to work out the novel. That would be my answer.”

Bart summons his assistant to look for the novella—the one he told me he couldn’t locate. She beelines for a cabinet behind his chair and retrieves a slim bound volume with a navy blue cover. She hands it to him. The search takes less than 20 seconds. <Did you look at your watch?/eg I had it on tape./aw

“This is an 86-page novel,” he says. “This was what was bought. It was the only thing that was ever submitted to Paramount.” He admits that he probably spent a weekend transforming the Crossroaders script into the wisp of a novel he holds in his hand. I look at the novel’s cover page, which displays not the pseudonym the Variety article had promised but the words “By Peter Bart.” When I tell him the whole thing looks like an elaborate way of circumventing the rules, effectively selling a script by ginning up a novel, he objects.

“I don’t think it looks that way,” he says. “If you’re saying therefore that I wrote and marketed the script, you can say it, but I would deny it. I contend to you that a novel was written of this, and that’s what Bob bought. There’s no rule that says you can’t write a script that no one sees.”

Except, of course, that Evans—the man developing the project—did see the script. “I’m sure Bob has,” he says, but I’ll tell you about Bob.” He laughs. “Bob having it is like the crypt.”

As the interview winds up, Bart is almost playful. He jokes that I’m a “troublemaker” and “mean.” “It’s really scary,” he says, “when you start remembering things about me that I don’t remember.” <Did you record the conversation, or are you a great note-taker?/eg This, like all my face-to-face interviews with him, was recorded./aw

***

The next morning Litigious Peter picks up the phone. He’s still at home. His voice is tight and angry. He accuses me of using material stolen from his files. He feels betrayed that I gave him no warning. The details of why he wrote a screenplay as a warm-up for a novella are coming back to him, he says, though “vaguely.” “I’m glad I did it that way,” he says. “The book sure is lean.

“One thing I’m not is self-destructive,” he says. “To break my own rules is just stupid. I was trying to get Bob’s career going.” He pauses. “I would appreciate it if you could tell me how you’re going to handle this, so I can send to the magazine this legal document that will say I will sue you.”

A week later Conflicted Peter calls.

“I haven’t heard from my nemesis for a while. Have you given up on this project, I hope?” he says, his voice almost warm. “I must say, I’m still a little nettled.”

Despite his better judgment, he has more to say. “It’s always a favor that kills you. No one ever did see that fucking script. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done it. I will guarantee you that I will never do it again.”

***

IN HIS CROSSROADERS SCRIPT, Bart sets a key scene at a press conference in Las Vegas’s most decadent gambling casino. The casino’s owner takes a few questions from the assembled media, then invites them to do some gambling—on him. The offer prompts this ethical debate:

FIRST REPORTER (to a colleague): The son-of-a-bitch has no shame. I mean, he’s prepared to buy out the entire press corps if necessary.

SECOND REPORTER: He’s an asshole. (A pause.) On the other hand, since it’s on the house, I don’t think fifteen minutes at the Money Wheel will compromise my scruples. <Savvy! The script becomes something more than a MacGuffin. You use it to comment on Bart’s character./eg Yes. And now, my memory of the brief phone call Bart placed to me after the story appeared. He said something like, “How could you do this to me?” I said something like, “Do what?” Him (again, I don’t have this on tape, this is from memory): “You made me look like a racist.” Me: “I think that we worked hard to make clear that you like to flaunt political correctness and are an equal opportunity offender.” Then I went on to say that we had worked very hard to triple-check everything in the piece and that if there were an error, all he had to do was tell me and we would correct it. He never asked for a correction./aw

As so often happens with Bart, there is a duality. Both reporters are him.

How do you make peace with stories you wish you’d done differently?

Fielding this one is Esquire legend Tom Junod, who lightly revisited his controversial 2007 Angelina Jolie profile this week after Jolie revealed, in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, news about a preventative double mastectomy. Looking at the hindsight issue more generally, Junod tells Storyboard:

I don’t really go in for self-flagellation. Or, rather: I flagellate myself so enthusiastically while writing my stories that I don’t have the time or the energy to flagellate myself once they’re done. In general, I don’t divide stories into Good and Bad or Perfect and Imperfect—I divide them as Finished and Unfinished.  The Finished stories are just that—stories that seemed to settle into final form before they were shipped to the printer. The Unfinished stories are the stories that were, in some way, taken away from me before they were finalized. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard at them and (Esquire editor) David (Granger) didn’t devote his full attention to them; there’s nothing I’ve published in Esquire that hasn’t been gone over, by everyone, 10 or 20 times.

Unfinished stories are just stories that fall away from some Platonic ideal of what they might have been. In general, however, I’ve written so many more Unfinished stories than Finished ones—which is to say, I’ve written so many more stories that bear the marks of violent struggle, and were delivered by Caesarean rather than naturally. I’m quite aware when stories are coming easily and when they’re not, and when they’re not, I walk around with a rather low opinion of myself. But a writer is like a quarterback or a relief pitcher: You have to be able to put the bad throws behind you, or you can’t do the job.

I don’t flagellate myself because I’m aware that it would be crippling to flagellate myself, and the one thing I know beyond anything else is that I can’t afford to cripple myself. The other thing I know is that an Unfinished story is not necessarily a bad one, and neither is a story that shows itself to be born in struggle (see Leonardo DiCaprio). Hell, even “bad” stories are not necessarily bad ones. I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can’t hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I’m not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can’t enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I’ve lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability—its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of readers—and the first step towards respectability is regret.

Several years ago, I interviewed Gong Show host Chuck Barris and he told me that anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is either a liar or a psychopath. And he’s right—but only about life. Not about journalism. As a journalist, I don’t just (metaphorically) sing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” after I write my stories. I make myself sing it, even though it’s a damned hard song to sing.

For “Work the problem” archives, go here. Got a narrative issue you’d like help resolving? Email us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org and we’ll try to get you an expert answer.

Photo by Linda Davidson, courtesy Washington Post

The story: The activists wanted to make their point with fence cutters, graffiti, protest songs, and the thawed blood of a colleague who died in 2008 but hoped to “join” one last mission. Zak tells their story but also that of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built by the federal government as a bomb-making town. “Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed,” he writes. “It’s still a company town, and the company is the government, and the business is bombs.” The facility housed “enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000 nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over,” material used in warheads renovation programs that could take 25 years and cost $20 billion. The activists, who were convicted last week of injuring the national defense and damaging government property, each took different paths into custody. There’s riveting writing in Zak’s tale—

The lights of the Antichrist flickered through the trees.

The drifter prayed.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating its swords into plowshares.

He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun, clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard.

On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross molded into the top.

And six baby bottles of human blood.

—and the presentation is beautiful, clean and striking. The Post ran the story on its website magazine style. Illustrations depicted the break-in, and still photos and a slideshow worked as secondary art. The 14 chapter titles alone tell a story: “Mission,” “‘…and the Earth Will Shake’” and “Sabotage.” Have a read, and join us back here on Thursday, to talk about how this project came together.

W.125th to 99 Madison Avenue: 30 minutes on the 1 and N trains according to Google, which was five minutes off. Apparently, Google doesn’t account for 4 inch heels in their walking and transfer time estimations. Seat: Yes. Ambiance: 4. Time in transit: 35 minutes. The OpenData NYC meet-up was hosted at ThoughtWorks, one of the many Manhattan tech start-ups indistinguishable from each other with their fridges full of beers and vague mission statements. ThoughtWorks was unusual only in that its offices were in Midtown rather than the downtown corridor of the original “Silicon Alley.” (from “The Little Blue Book: The Worlds of Commuting Obsessives,” by Madeline K.B. Ross)

Sitting on a plastic bed in the in-patient/out-patient wing of the Weinberg Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins with an IV connected to a catheter that had been implanted in my chest, things were looking up. It was 2008 and I was 28 years old, and due to a recent battery of high-dose chemotherapy that had left me with maybe one white blood cell, which I’d named Melvin, I had to wear one of those surgeon’s masks at all times to keep the world’s germs out of my face. Here I was, if you can imagine, bald and eyebrowless with a paper mask over my mouth, a tube coming out of my chest, the picture of cancer, and things were looking up. Scans showed that the cancer (along with just about every other cell in my body) was disappearing. (from “Healing Me Harshly,” by Keith Collins)

Kathryn Denning spends a lot of time studying scientists who think about aliens. Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Canada, is fascinated by the idea of The Other in relation to humans. Her recent research has focused on how scientists think about the evolution of intelligence in relation to hypothetical extraterrestrials, ethical difficulties and the future of the human colonization of Space. A big reason we’re so drawn to space, she told me, is “its importance in traditional culture.” We all share the experience of looking up at the stars and trying to make sense of it all. “It tends to get intertwined with the heavens and Heaven and we think of it as a place of revelations and knowledge and dreams,” Denning said. (from “Cosmic Postcards: The Adventures of an Armchair Astronaut,” by Kamakshi Ayyar)

In the days and months that followed I replayed the incident in my head over and over again. It seemed so unreal that I often questioned whether what I saw actually happened or if I dreamed it all up. What always made it real again was not the image of a man jumping but the memory of the jolt the train made as it ran over his body. I needed to know who this man was. I looked in the newspapers but found very little. I learned that his name was Dwight Brown and that he was 27 years old. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then the trail dried up. It was as if this man’s trace of life vanished. I thought if I could find more about this man, meet his family and friends, I would be able to make sense of that morning. (from “The Witness,” by Mary Ann Georgantopoulos)

Shapiro also gave us a status report on his larger project, The Big Round Table, a Kickstarter-funded web-based publisher of longform narrative that attempts to crowd-curate storytelling by bypassing the “gatekeepers” of publishing and posting what readers say they want to read. Stories get greenlighted by a cooperative of journalists “committed to the future of big narrative ambitious nonfiction” based on the first 1,000 words. Writers earn $1 of every sale. We talked to Shapiro last night by email. Here’s some of the discussion:

Storyboard: You went big with the pitch: “There is a revolution taking place in journalism. With it have come possibilities for writers who despaired of ever finding a way to make a living at their craft. Writers are now freed from the constraints of convention in telling their stories and from the commercial needs of editors and publishers, who determine what tales get told. That, in turn, means a new era of creativity for authors of narrative nonfiction—new writers, new stories, new audiences waiting for a friend to say, Here’s a story you’ll want to read. The Big Roundtable is more than a digital publishing platform; it is a movement, one that we believe can expand the possibilities for writers, and readers.” Where’d this idea come from?

Shapiro: It came from, how best to put it, 35 years of writing for a living—in newspapers, magazines, and books, and seeing how the publishing world felt as it were shrinking, while all around it, the world was expanding. Believe me, I felt the pinch. There was ever more pressure, especially when it came to books, to come up with ideas that were sure to sell. Well, how is anyone supposed to know what will sell, other than genre fiction? At the same time, magazines were feeling ever more predictable, and had been for years. For several years I was a judge at the National Magazine Awards, and found ever more that while the stories I was reading while not bad, seldom lifted off the page. The writing had become so formulaic, so safe—anecdotal lede, nut graf, quote from eminent sociologist. It was ever harder to find a story that you sensed a writer needed to tell. And we all know the difference. We know what it is like writing a story that burns inside of us, and a story that is, well, interesting. The result was a landscape of predictability. Why were journalists, smart and eager journalists, constrained, when writers of creative fiction were freer to experiment and push? What happened to the New Journalism revolution? I cannot believe it peaked a generation ago. Where was the surprise?

You had a $5,000 Kickstarter goal and took in nearly $19,219, from 220 backers. Who gave, and why?

People we know—God bless them. And a lot of people we’d never heard of who contributed generously and who sometimes wrote to say, Hey, cool idea. I have a story. Can I send it along? The answer was, and is, always yes. (Pitches should go to TheBRTable@gmail.com.)

“Now everyone can be a writer and a publisher,” you said in your campaign. Please explain. 

I suspect every writer falls asleep and dreams that come the dawn they will become the next Amanda Hocking, that from the acorn of a few sales via Amazon to friends will spring the mighty oak of best-sellerism. Pretty to think so, no? The problem isn’t one of production or dissemination; no one needs a publisher to print and sell. The problem is audience. How do you find one, and make people feel as if their lives will be lessened if they don’t read your work?

But hold on: There’s still a gatekeeper aspect, because BRT ultimately decides which stories move forward. No?

Shapiro

Yes. But. The gatekeeper is not me. Lord knows if it were me there would be a surfeit of baseball stories. Who is to say that my taste, or any other individual’s tastes, is superior? I may be skilled at seeing where a story slips and can be improved. But I enjoy no monopoly on taste, and nor does anyone else. And so, we’re experimenting, yes experimenting because in a venture like the BRT we are in a permanent state of beta, with the idea that if you ask a small group of readers what they think about a story, you improve the chances of achieving that rarest and most sought after quality in a story: surprise. In an early—call it alpha—version of the experiment, we asked people to read full drafts. Huge mistake. Because presented with a story, writers cannot help but take out their red pens and try to fix things. So, we wondered what would happen if we asked those same people to read, say, the first 1,000 words. Takes five minutes. You can do it on your phone waiting for your tall soy latte. All we asked was: Do you want to read more, or no thanks? Quick response, and much more useful. It told us whether the story had an audience. Why 1,000 words? Because—and here, I am drawing more on experience than data—if you can nail the first 1,000 words of a story, the odds are good that you’re on your way.

Curation is the thing right now—Longreads, Longform.org, etc. You describe the project as a platform “through which writers of nonfiction stories too long for most magazines, and too short for most publishers, can find their readers,” but that also describes, sort of, platforms like Byliner and, to some extent, Kindle Singles, which publishes stories too long for a magazine and too short for a book. How does BRT differ from those?

All our content is original. Byliner does some original work, but mostly curated; they’ve been very kind about curating my stuff. I know David Blum, who edits Kindle Singles, and think he is a very smart editor. But in the end, David, talented as he is, is the gatekeeper. We’re trying something different.

The idea is that a happy reader will (and can) share the story with three friends, which is encouraged through the BRT model. The sharing aspect seems central to this concept. Why the sharing? 

Think about it: When you choose what you read for pleasure is on the basis of a) a review, b) something you heard or read about, or c) because a friend, not a Facebook friend but a living breathing want-to-get-dinner-this-week friend, said, You Have to Read This! I’ve asked this question many times to many different groups of people over the past year and the answer always comes up C. It is all about sharing. The question is, How do you replicate that moment at scale? That, in the end, is what this is all about. Again, it is all about increasing the chances of finding under your nose a story that is surprising.

Writers will make $1 per sale. How will you handle the operational transparency aspect with writers? How will writers know precisely how well their work is doing and whether they’re getting their fair share? 

We will do so contractually—no writer should ever for a moment think, Jeez, these guys aren’t being straight with me. That would be bad on so many levels.

You use the term “nonfiction novella,” the kind of language that makes a lot of people nervous. What does that term mean, from BRT’s perspective?

It means too long for most magazines and too short for a conventional book. Say, 5,000 to 30,000 words. Loosely. There are so many times I wished I had more space—and I have written 17,000-word magazine stories. I also can look at my books and think, you know, I think this would have been perfect at 40,000. If my publisher reads this they will not be pleased. Sorry fellas.

Where does this project live? Looks like you’ve got Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter covered.

It lives on the Internet because we live in a world where it is ever clearer that the Internet—and by this I mean the great amorphous amalgam of feeds and inboxes—decides what shall thrive. There is a terrific book by the sociologist Duncan Watts called Six Degrees—as in, yes, six degrees of separation—that captures as well as anything I’ve read the science of social networks. Watts is a pal of Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and HuffPost fame, and they take different views of network creation. Peretti, a born optimist, believes that it is possible to tweak a budding network into something larger. Duncan takes a less sunny view. I fall someplace in between but veer toward Jonah. The Internet feels to me like a lava lamp, bubbling around, waiting for someone or something to tip it and get all that action flowing a certain way. Does this analogy make me sound like a Dead Head?

Yes. In a good way. The first story runs in August. What’s in the lineup? Can you give us some idea of the first few pieces?

Some great ones, and I will do so as cryptically as I can, so that people might think, “cool:” Inside the Albanian Mob; My Weekend at Adolf’s; How Disco Never Died; The Mother of Creedmoor; Of Inmates, Fire, and Death; The Miracle on Molokai. And those are but a few.

Generally speaking, are BRT stories those that got rejected elsewhere?

Maybe. We look at the stories as stories. We don’t ask them to come with a CV.

It can be hard enough getting phone calls returned when you’re on staff, but when you’re working without an institution attached to your project, how do you represent yourself? How would you advise a prospective BRT author to identify herself?

I am a writer with a story to tell. Here it is. Our promise is that people will read the first 1,000 words.

Will the authors report/write the whole piece on spec and then hope the thing flies with readers? So much of great storytelling depends on the reporting. You need to report enough to write a great top, since readers will green light the piece (or not) based on the first 1,000 words, but that puts writers working without a net. Say you spend three months reporting enough just to get a great opening, but then nobody bites. That’s three months you just spent, for nothing. Or no?

Out there, as I write, I know, just know, that there are all these wonderful writers with stories burning in their notebooks who are thinking, “There is more to this story than 700 words.” Maybe the New Yorker? The Times magazine? Maybe. But the odds aren’t good. I know this because I have been that writer and I wanted to tell that story and yes, I wanted to be paid for it. But I needed to tell it. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’m working on one now for the BRT. I really need to tell this one. No advance.

Who is your envisioned audience?

Ah, that is the $64,000 question. We have an incredible story in which a woman recounts her banker father slowly drinking himself to death. (Trust me, you cannot put this one down.) Is that only for an audience of children of alcoholics? Or will others, for whom this bears no direct connection to their lives, nonetheless see in the story a quality that speaks to them, that surprises them?

Who will edit the stories? Will there be fact checkers? Copyeditors? How will the actual editorial process work?

We have my all time favorite editor working with us, Mike Hoyt, the longtime editor of Columbia Journalism Review. Best hands, as they say, in the business. If we don’t have terrific stories, and yes fact-checked stories, we are nowhere. But it is not Mike’s job to choose. It is his job to lift those stories, with the author.

You have a stated goal of studying “how people find, read, fall in love with a share stories” and becoming “the research lab of the longform revival” by gathering data that “will at long last illuminate what happens when one friend feels compelled to share a story with another.” There’s a longform revival?

Don’t you think so? Look at all these ventures—Atavist, Longform, Longreads, to say nothing of these heretofore impossible to imagine stories in the Times and elsewhere.

We like “longform” without the hyphen. Looks like you do too.

Cleaner, no?

You’ve said a paid staff will produce BRT. Paid how? Who’s on the masthead?

We have some money from Kickstarter and hope to start getting more—grants, we hope. We have a small staff: Mike, me; our product manager is a journalism school grad, Anna Hiatt. We’re being assisted by Rashmi Raman, who is our engineer, Anna Codrea-Rado, who manages the audiences and our designer, Eleonore Hamelin.

You’ll sell directly from the BRT website rather than through a distributor like Amazon. Why?

Because Amazon does not share all its data. And we want, need, to be able to see and test and iterate.

Whom do you envision as your typical writer?

The writer with a story he or she is burning to tell. Really, it is that simple.

The goal is to understand how readers find, read and fall in love with work, and share it. Assuming you figure that out, what next?

Heaven knows. We’re making this up as we go along. I am learning what it means to be involved in a startup.

(*having had some experience with it ourselves) 

“Yeah, hey bro,” Ramsey told the dispatcher. “I’m at 2207 Seymour. West 25th. Check this out—I just came from McDonald’s, right? So I’m on my porch eating my little food, right? This broad is trying to break out the fucking house next door to me, so there’s a bunch of people on the street right now and shit. So we’re like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’ She’s like, ‘This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter…’ She say her name is Linda Berry or some shit. I don’t know who the fuck that is, I just moved over here, bro.”

“Sir, sir,” said the male dispatcher. “…You have to calm down and slow down. Is she still in the street?”

“Seymour Avenue,” Ramsey said.

“Is she still in the street or where did she go?”

“Yeah I’m looking at her right now. She’s calling y’all! She’s on the other phone.”

They went on for a bit, with Ramsey getting frustrated and the dramatic tension (hello, narrative) rising. A short while later the TV news crews arrived, and Ramsey’s story got longer and more detailed, with discrepancies:

I went to McDonald’s and I’m at home and I hear this, ‘Help, let me out!’ This girl screaming. Now we don’t have that on our street because everybody on this street knows each other, so when you hear something like that you come running to see what’s going on. I thought it was a kid got attacked by a pit bull. And I looked at that girl and I said, ‘You look familiar!’ And I’m prying the door open and she’s trying to get out, and she climbed through the bottom of it and soon as she got out she said, ‘My name is Amanda Berry, call the police.’

You heard screaming? the reporter asked.

I heard screaming. I’m eating my McDonald’s. I come outside and I see this girl going nuts, trying to get out of her house, so I go on the porch and she says, ‘Help me get out, I’ve been in here a long time,’ so I figured it was a domestic violence dispute so I opened the door and we can’t get in that way because…a body can’t fit through, only your hand. So we kicked the bottom and she comes out with a little girl and she says, ‘Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry.’ When she told me, it didn’t register until I got to calling 911… I thought this girl was dead, you know what I mean? And she got on the phone and she said, ‘Yes, this is me…’

And when did you see Gina?

About five minutes after the police got here. See, that girl Amanda told the police, ‘I ain’t just the only one, it’s some more girls up in that house.’ So they went up there 30, 40 deep, and when they came out it was just astonishing because I thought they were gonna come up with nothing.

How long you lived here?

I been here a year! I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot, and listen to salsa music.

And you had no indication?

Not a clue that that girl was in that house, or that anybody else was in there against their will. Because how he is, he just comes out to his back yard, plays with the dogs, tinkering with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house. He’s somebody that you look at and look away because he’s not doing nothing but the average stuff. There’s nothing exciting about him. Well, until today.

What was the reaction on the girls’ faces? I can’t imagine…

Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she’s homeless or she got problems. That’s the only reason she’s running to a black man.

[The interview over, Ramsey flashed the thumbs-up.]

Why this is great and people love it: First, true originals mesmerize. Unfiltered, unmanaged, Ramsey was authentically who he is. Second, he told a story. His account of the escape is straight up narrative. The elements are there: a compelling character with an original voice (“Yeah, hey, bro…check this out;” “so they went up there 30, 40 deep;” “We eat ribs and whatnot”); there’s a clear structure (chronological), dialogue (which is key), and the aforementioned dramatic tension; it’s got what Tom Wolfe calls status details—food from McDonald’s, assumptions about a pit bull attack and a domestic violence dispute. And then the underdog hero utters a Hemingway’s-iceberg line of dialogue:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”

So the story becomes transcendent.

If you’re writing the long-ball narrative you wouldn’t want to omit what happened next, which was that Ramsey, inevitably, went viral. Why? Did the public love him for his storytelling skills? His authenticity? His gutsy instincts? Yep. And was that okay? Absolutely. There was nothing, on Day 1, not to love. This was “a wonderfully vibrant interview with a man who helped kick down a door and rescue three women and a child,” said Neely Tucker, a veteran Washington Post reporter and author of Love in the Driest Season, when we informally polled a few journalists on the topic. “It was precise, exciting, emotional, visually telling, and told with great pacing and narrative detail. All in two minutes, live, on camera. Anybody who’s bothered that the narrator is black and probably not rich is saying more about themselves than him.”

*Things got tricky when the inevitable autotune opportunists and meme-weavers bundled Ramsey with the viral videos of other crime-scene witnesses, all of whom happened to be black. The personal you-go-dude! feelings for Ramsey, conflated with images of expressive stylists like Antoine Dodson, morphed into something else. Not ugly, exactly, but ugly adjacent, if you took the view that the meme-drivers were laughing at, not with. Ramsey moved “from bystander and guy on the scene into ‘Internet object of affection,’” as Justin Ellis, an assistant editor of Nieman Journalism Lab, one of Storyboard’s sister publications, puts it. “I don’t know if that’s just the Internet chugging along or if there’s something else to blame. People want to celebrate him, which is great, but it’s hard to ignore the familiar trappings/scenario of ‘black person achieves Internet fame through local TV,’ which can feel exploitive at times and condescending or even casually racist at others.”

A narrative that already contained those trace elements of race/class (“pretty white girl;” “black man’s arms”) now had an overlay of social media influence, triggering confusion (was it not okay to like this guy’s interview?) and raising coverage questions: How will—or should—this aspect of the story be presented in the long view, or even in the short one? We asked other colleagues and here’s what they said:

Greg Moore

I have not watched a lot of the Internet stuff having fun with Charles Ramsey’s manner and I don’t plan to. I am from Cleveland and I know lots of people like Ramsey. On the street, he is likely being lauded for “keeping it real.” And part of the fascination with him is his originality and lack of self-consciousness. That’s partly why he could do what he did in saving those three women. He was on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning talking about the case, grappling for the right word here and there and sometimes clearly not understanding the question. But there was no mistaking his meaning and his grit when he did. Lamenting that he had shared ribs with the alleged perpetrator and even tried to salsa dance to some of his music, he ruefully noted something like this: If I had known what was going on in that house, don’t you think we’d be having a different interview right now? With Ramsey, you darn tootin’. Sometime people have to laugh to keep from crying. That’s a little bit of what is going on. This stuff is so bad and we are so relieved. But we all need to be listening to what this brave man is saying and not how he says it. I don’t think the reaction is so much racist as it reflects the lack of real familiarity with the strata of America. There are lots of people who talk like Ramsey and are damn funny, too. And there are many I grew up with who don’t play; who do the right thing and are fearless. Simple applause for Ramsey should be enough. He is a genuine hero, quirks and all. McDonald’s needs to put him in a commercial and one of those public-minded dental clinics should give him some new choppers for free. That’s the best way to show gratitude for such courage and community mindedness. And it is okay to chuckle at the unvarnished way he puts things? (Because it is really nervous laughter about how little we know about real people living real lives in communities across America). If we really understood his world, we’d know he is just keeping it real. And we are damn lucky he is. — Greg Moore, editor of the Denver Post, and Pulitzer Prize board member

Callie Crossley

First, of course, so glad he did what he did. Having said that, I wondered why a lot of the response to him has been all about the “funny” delivery. Have to say I’ve seen it before in portrayals of black men who happen into the middle of a breaking story—Antoine Dodson a prime example. For a while he was all the rage in pop culture, even garnering a record contract. But in his case and in Charles’ the serious substance of what they were saying got subsumed by their mannerisms and affect. I’m fascinated—not in a good way—by the fact that Charles’ commentary about race in Cleveland has stopped being reported as part of the story. “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty ran into a black man’s arms”—that’s pretty deep, and I think should have inspired journalists to ask him to explain what he meant. I’ve only heard one report focusing on this piece of the story, and I can’t remember if it was a TV or radio story. The piece picked up on his statement and went on to talk about the deep racial divide in Cleveland. But, that is the ONLY report I’ve seen dealing with it. As I see it, this is another example of journalists who are reluctant to pursue a legitimate racial angle to a story, even if it is a part of the main character’s story. And of course there is a class angle here. Reporters are also not so comfortable dealing with that issue. By the way, in the black blogosphere, a lot of folks are referencing In Living Color‘s satirical sketch: Reporters arrive on the scene of a breaking story and there are two witnesses, one a black professional in a suit and tie and another a black woman in what we used to call a housecoat, with curlers in her hair, and not in great command of the King’s English. Of course all of the reporters rushed past the guy and went to her for a “colorful” recitation of the events that had transpired. This is not exactly the same scenario in Charles Ramsey’s case—he was the only witness—but you get my drift. — Callie Crossley, host of the WGBH Radio show “Under the Radar.” Friday night at 7:30, Crossley will lead a Basic Black discussion called “What Can We Learn from Charles Ramsey?” It airs on WGBH-TV, Channel 2 in the Boston area.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland narrative unfolded. When Anderson Cooper spoke to Ramsey about all this, Ramsey said, “It’s about cojones. It’s about cojones, on this planet.” Cooper then asked whether he hoped to receive the FBI reward for helping free the women. “I tell you what you do,” Ramsey said instantly. “Give it to them.”

@GlobeMoskowitz

With Tamerlan driving now, Danny in the passenger seat, and Dzhokhar behind Danny, they stopped in Watertown Center so Dzhokhar could withdraw money from the Bank of America ATM using Danny’s card. Danny, shivering from fear but claiming to be cold, asked for his jacket. Guarded by just one brother, Danny wondered if this was his chance, but he saw around him only locked storefronts. A police car drove by, lights off.

Tamerlan agreed to retrieve Danny’s jacket from the back seat. Danny unbuckled, put on the jacket, then tried to buckle the seat belt behind him to make an escape easier. “Don’t do that,” Tamerlan said, studying him. “Don’t be stupid.”

Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark broke down the story’s strengths beautifully in a recent post. Three highlights:

It begins, like the ancient epics, in medias res—in the middle of things.

“The 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur had just pulled his new Mercedes to the curb on Brighton Avenue to answer a text when an old sedan swerved behind him, slamming on the brakes. A man in dark clothes got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly 11 p.m. last Thursday.” (I can’t help feel a digital-age irony here, that Danny drives into mortal danger by doing the right thing — pulling over to text.)

Clark, speaking at a Nieman Narrative Journalism conference

The construction of narrative journalism depends upon certain strategies associated traditionally with fiction, and we get all of them here: scene, dialogue, character details, point of view. The fact that the events tick-tock in a block of time (about 90 minutes) and inside the confines of an automobile, create what classical critics might call a unity of time, place and action that intensifies the experience of the reader.

This story should remind us of how rarely dialogue appears in breaking news, with reporters depending more often on quotes gathered after the fact. Even though he is using a single source (the bombers being unavailable, one dead, one arrested), the writer chooses to re-create the dialogue in the car based on Danny’s recollection. I count at least 12 paragraphs containing dialogue such as: “Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?” / “No, no, I don’t remember anything,” [Danny] said.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” go here.

Left to right: Swartz, Colloff and fact checker David Moorman at last night’s festivities, courtesy the @TexasMonthly Twitter feed.

Colloff recently annotated “The Innocent Man” for Storyboard, as part of our growing Annotation Tuesday! series. Here’s a snippet from Part 1, with Storyboard’s comments in green and Colloff’s in blue:

A running gag between them involved Michael calling out, “Bitch, get me a beer!”<Interesting details, because this moment (and their history of squabbling) was turned against Morton in court. What was your perception of Michael Morton before you began your reporting, and how and why did your opinion change, if it changed at all?/pw I’m using a detail that later is cast in a very dark light by the prosecution, but I’m presenting it here as Michael and Christine saw it, which was as just a joke. A lot of the media coverage following Michael’s 2011 exoneration made him appear almost saintly, because he did not want revenge and he handled his wrongful incarceration with such grace. But that’s not who he was back in 1986. I wanted people to see his rough edges and his imperfections so that he would be a real person. Also, I wanted to provide some context for the way that investigators in the case saw him. His crudeness was, I think, part of what led investigators to think he was capable of violence. As for where this detail came from, the marigolds came from the trial transcript, and I asked Michael about it in more detail, which is when he explained their placement in the yard./pc —something they had once overheard a friend of a friend shout at his girlfriend. Christine would respond by telling Michael to go screw himself. “He teased her a lot, and he would go right up to the line of what was acceptable, and sometimes he went over it,” Gersky said. Referring to an attractive friend of theirs who stopped by the house one day wearing shorts, he told Christine, “Now, that’s the way you should look.”<Great detail; source?/pw A friend of Christine’s told me this and our tireless fact-checker, David Moorman, ran it past Michael before publication./pc

And from Part 2:

“When I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,” Michael<One thing I meant to ask in Part 1: How did you decide to refer to him as “Michael” and not Morton?/pw Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him “Morton” and her “Christine” seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone’s first name, when it’s appropriate./pc wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. “Try to imagine twenty to forty men,” he continued, “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth<Hey, not bad, the writing./pw I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this./pc and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It’s long, hard, backbreaking work.

A few other Colloff favorites from the Storyboard files:

-Her piece “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 65: David Grann and the death row prisoner.” In our ongoing series, Colloff wrote about Grann’s treatment of the questionable case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for killing his children.

-Her chat with Storyboard about her story on a mother convicted of killing her son with salt.

-Her piece about the innocence of death row inmate Anthony Graves, which we included in a “What we’re reading” post.

Congratulations, Pam, and thank you for your work!

Stillman

Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (AAFES’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as “third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers.

Stillman’s piece won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Public Interest and the Sidney Hillman Foundation prize, for excellence in reporting for the public good. (And her recent story “The Throwaways,” about young informants being used to a deadly degree in the nation’s criminal justice system, is up, tonight, for a National Magazine Award. Our Annotation Tuesday! series will carry a line by line on the piece soon, so check back for that.)

When accepting the Hillman prize, Stillman recounted how she found the “invisible army.” Her acceptance speech comes in at the three-minute mark, but here’s the first of it:

“It began when I was at an Indian restaurant in Oxford, England, a few years ago, oddly enough, and I had a waiter—a young man, Tony, came up to me. He was giving me dinner and he heard my American accent and he said, ‘Oh, you’re an American! I used to work on a U.S. military base, feeding soldiers.’ And he whipped out his cellphone and started showing me these pictures of Jessica Simpson on her U.S.O. tour, like in a tank top. He had these funny, interesting stories but then he began to tell me about some of his friends, also from Goa, India, who had been promised great jobs in Dubai and Jordan and instead were taken to a war zone, to a U.S. military base. Other workers had been hit by rockets and lost eyes or limbs and had been sent home to their countries with no insurance. So this was on my radar when I first went to to Iraq in 2008. I thought I was going to have to work hard to dig up these stories and just find these people. And I arrived on the base and lo and behold one of the first things I saw was a Burger King staffed by Indian workers. One of the second things I saw was a Pizza Hut staffed by Bangladeshis, and a Cinnabon. And then a beauty salon where you could actually get $7 manicures and pedicures from a group of Fiji women who ultimately became the subjects of my story. … I learned that they had been promised lavish jobs and a nice hotel in Dubai, and instead were taken to Iraq. I got to know them over a period of years and was there on the day that one was sexually assaulted by her supervisor. When I called the emergency sexual assault hotline on her behalf I found only a phone that rang and rang, and no answer.”

You can find Stillman’s full talk here:

And for more installments of “How’d you find that story?” go here.

Storyboard: How did you come upon this story and why did you want to tell it?

Saslow: This idea actually came from a very good editor who I work with at the magazine, Paul Kix. When he started explaining the story to me, I knew right away that I wanted to write it. It is surprising and tragic, with loads of tension. So all of that was appealing. Also, it was a chance to write a little bit more of a reconstructed narrative, which I hadn’t done in a while.

You’ve been writing about politics and the economy a good bit lately. What is it like to switch over to sports? Is a narrative a narrative?

I started as a sports writer at The Washington Post, and then I switched to politics/economy/etc., so it is fun to occasionally write about sports again. The truth is, I think it is all pretty much the same. Good narratives are mostly about people, and what they do is pretty secondary. Athletes, politicians, anonymous people—if you can get to a level of intimacy, they are all equally good, worthy topics. I was terrified when I first switched from writing about sports to politics in 2007, but about a year in, I realized the two topics were much of the same: people who were hard to access, and who cared a lot about winning.

What are you reading these days? And what, if anything, do you read to get you in the zone to write?

I’ve been trying to read a lot more fiction lately—a New Year’s resolution, since I’m usually bad at it. My wife reads a ton, so mostly I’m reading whatever she passes my way when she’s done. Lately that’s been The Burgess Boys, the new book by Elizabeth Strout (great characters, so sad); Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (vivid and awesome); Prep (I’m about five years late); and Gone Girl (yes, again, from my wife—and also super entertaining). To get into the mood to write, I go back to some of the same people whose narrative work I admire, and many of whom work or worked at the Washington Post: David Finkel, Anne Hull, Kate Boo, etc. So many great writers to choose from.

What’s the best narrative advice anyone ever gave you?

Stay until you have the story. Good narratives are all about reporting—about observation and detail, and reporting long enough to watch a story play out.

What, if anything, did you learn from doing this story?

I knew this in some ways before, but the court records were a narrative treasure trove for this story. I called down to the court in Iowa, and a few weeks later I had boxes and boxes of transcripts. All of the primary characters in the story had testified, and the details and the dialogue in that box did more to help tell this story than any other method of reporting.

“Bringing Down the House”
August 13, 2012
ESPN The Magazine
By Eli Saslow 

HELEN FORD DRIVES to the house from memory, parks along the curb and idles in her car.<Past or present tense are always a choice for the narrative writer, as are first, second (risky!) and third person. How did you decide to tell this in the present tense?/pw It is weird, and probably stereotypical, but I tend to default to past tense for newspaper stories at the Post and present tense in magazine stories for ESPN. Not sure why, really. A good friend told me recently, though, that present tense can make a story feel a little more alive. I think that’s right. Also, in this story, starting in present tense helped distinguish reporting done in the present moment, versus all the reconstruction to come./es This three-story duplex in Cambridge, Mass., had been her home for 40 years, but now she wonders whether she has the courage to enter. She turns on the radio and takes out a crossword puzzle. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do this,” she says.<You’re with Ford, in the car, right? Her return is key to the whole piece, so it’s huge that you were present. How did you make sure that happened?/pw Yes, I was in the car. I timed my trip around her return to the house. She knew she was going to go see it with the lawyer in a few weeks, so I waited until she was going on her own and went with her then. If she hadn’t been going on her own, I would not have taken her there. I feel pretty strongly that you can’t manufacture scene in a narrative story and pass it off as genuine observation. That’s a lie. It’s a little like narrative plagiarism. So, I waited until she was going on her own, and I planned my trip around that./es

It has been more than two years since she was last here – two years since her famous son betrayed her and the foreclosure specialists arrived with moving trucks. She fixates on the house during the long nights alone in her one-bedroom apartment, dreaming about all the good memories and waking every few hours because of the bad.

“I have to see it,” she says now. Helen turns off the radio and walks to the house. “The only way I’ll ever move on is by getting back in there.” A blue padlock is on the front door that she had once been too trusting to lock.<This sentence says much with little./pw A sign that reads “Danger: No Playing” is planted in the front yard, where she had hosted graduation parties for her children — four of her own, four adopted and at least 30 foster kids. Cigarette butts and half-empty beer cans litter the makeshift basketball court, where one of those children had turned into a star.<You delay identifying the son gone bad. Why? Talk, if you would, about how withholding information can serve narrative./pw I think sometimes holding back on information for a few beats can help build tension, especially by foreshadowing that “one of those children turned into a star.” Now, I hope, a reader is wondering: Who? Why? What happened? And they are making an investment in reading the next paragraph, and then the next./es

Helen’s lawyer, Dennis Benzan, stands on the front steps, waiting to greet her. The house belongs to the bank now, and Helen doesn’t have the authority to enter alone. Benzan punches numbers into the padlock, then turns toward his client.

“Technically, I should tell you that we are going to be trespassing,” he says.<Interesting! What qualms did you have about this?/pw I didn’t, really. We were with the lawyer. It had been her house. It felt like a minor offense, but it was interesting to me because it reinforced how much Helen had lost, and how infuriating that must be for her./es He asks Helen if she’d wear a mask to protect herself from dust and mold, but she waves him off.

“This is my house,” she says. “I can handle it.”

Helen steps through the door. A blast of cold, stale air stops her at the entryway. “Dear god,” she says. The house is dark. The objects take form slowly, and at first they don’t make sense: clothes, furniture and garbage strewn about the living room floor. Tattered mattresses. Broken champagne bottles. A Fisher-Price basketball hoop flipped on its side. Tiles have been stripped from the kitchen. Graffiti covers the walls. Basketball trophies that were once part of her children’s Wall of Fame are piled in a trash can near the door.

“The squatters got to everything,” Benzan says.

“Yes, I see,” Helen responds.

Only one item remains untouched, high on the living room wall: A poster of Rumeal Robinson in his University of Michigan uniform, dribbling. His lips are pursed. His eyes look downcourt confidently. A message scrawled near the top of the picture says, “Our Rumeal.”<Flawless detail. Observation/detail are so important in narrative. Did you know this would be a linchpin when you saw it?/pw I knew right away in the house that the poster would be important, and I knew that this scene would be where I started the story. That inscription on the poster says so much without ME having to say it. My stories tend to work so much better when the reported details tell the story for me, instead of when I’m left to make grand pronouncements or assumptions. I don’t do that too well./es

Our Rumeal: Helen’s greatest pride, the boy she took in off the street at age 10, who later earned a college scholarship, hit the winning free throws in the 1989 NCAA championship game, joked with a president at the White House and bought his mother a Mercedes and a mink coat.<Lovely collapsing of time—a life in a graf./pw His success persuaded Helen to devote her life to helping more children. She once petitioned the city to rename her street in his honor, calling it Rumeal Robinson Way.

Our Rumeal: Helen’s greatest disappointment, the child who burned through his millions, broke the law and executed a series of scams that resulted in his mother’s eviction and homelessness at age 65. His failure has left her riddled with self-doubt. She later petitioned the city to rename the street again, to anything else, so long as “they get his name off of it.”<This bright side/dark side repetition is so effective and does so much work in such a tight space—how did you arrive at it?/pw I knew the story would be about this contrast, so I knew I had to tease both in this first section. Sometimes parallel structure is a way to do that pretty easily. It also allowed me to play on the poster inscription./es

Helen turns away from the living room now and walks out of the house.

“I’ve seen enough,” she says.<Did you automatically know that you had to open the piece with this scene of ruin? Play around with any other openings?/pw I knew this was the opening. It was also probably the easiest part of the story to write, because it was present moment, and I had observed it all. I knew I wanted the piece to start in the present moment and then go backward, and having Helen visit the house allowed me to tease out a lot of the big themes in the first 500 words./es

HE HAD COME to see them as a sign from God.<Interesting. We sense that we’re about to slip into Rumeal’s point of view, but we stay with Helen, and add Lou./pw

It was the fall of 1977. Helen and Lou Ford had recently lost their 2-month-old son to spina bifida when an employee at the local grammar school called to tell them about Rumeal Robinson, a homeless Jamaican boy on the school basketball team. Who better to ask for help than the couple everyone referred to as Ma Ford and Uncle Lou? Lou was a Cambridge letter carrier who also owned a bar, and he knew every adult in town. Helen was a cheerleading coach and a school security guard, and she knew all of the kids. They lived with two sons, ages 11 and 6, and they hosted so many parties at their duplex near Central Square that neighbors referred to the place as the Ford Hotel.

“Maybe you can do something for this boy,” the school employee said.

The next day, Helen drove to the elementary school and met with Robinson after basketball practice. He seemed unusually serious for a 10-year-old, she thought, and he spoke dispassionately about his problems. He told Helen that his mother had moved to the United States when he was a toddler, leaving him in Jamaica with impoverished grandparents who often let him roam unsupervised and sleep on the beach. They had recently put him on a plane for Boston to be reunited with his mother. When he arrived, she had yelled at Rumeal for being in her way; he had chafed at her strictness. “I can get by on my own,” he told Helen. “She doesn’t want me.”<Narrative journalists often talk about how to handle recreated dialogue. What’s your working philosophy? Do you take the interviewee’s word for what was said or use quotation marks only if you’ve double-sourced the content, or does it vary from story to story? Or something else?/pw I only use quotation marks if I have double-sourced the content. Usually, I’m lucky, and I’m writing observed narratives where I am only quoting things that I heard. But in this story I had to use some recruited dialogue. In this case, the dialogue from Rumeal was double-sourced with newspaper stories from earlier in his life, and with Helen./es

He had been sleeping in the halls of the Peabody Terrace apartment complex for the past two weeks, wearing the same sweater and subsisting on leftover school lunches and dry cereal. Winter was approaching, and the hallway was drafty at night. He missed the warm evenings on the beach in Jamaica. “It gets a little cold, but I’m fine,” he told her.

Helen had been a victim of an unstable childhood herself.<Lovely handling of the exposition of Helen’s past, which gives us a deeper sense of her motivation./pw Her mother died during the birth of one of Helen’s younger siblings, and Helen was rotated from one relative to the next. She had embarked on motherhood with the motto “Children need stability.” So on that day, without a moment’s hesitation, she took Rumeal back to her house, made him fried chicken and called the police to explain the situation. She told Rumeal he would share a room with her eldest son, Donald, and that he would stay with them for a little while.

Rumeal was polite and grateful but at first kept mostly to himself. Within a few weeks, though, in his bedroom he began to create whimsical drawings of his new family; the pictures would then appear on the family fridge, where everyone could see and praise them. Soon enough, Rumeal went from calling Helen “ma’am” to “Mrs. Ford” to “Ms. Helen” and finally, just before the holidays, “Mom.”<Another great time collapse—and oddly visual./pw For Christmas, she bought him an entire wardrobe: 6 sweaters, 13 pairs of pants and 3 pairs of basketball shorts. “I’ve never gotten this much before,” he said. A short time later, Helen and Lou decided to adopt Rumeal.

The Fords liked the laughter and energy created by a crowd of children. Soon, they wanted more. Helen registered to become an emergency-placement foster parent. For most of the next decade, she and Lou cared for a dozen foster kids at a time, toddlers and teenagers, some who stayed for a few days and others who never left. Lou bought the other side of the duplex and knocked down the center wall to double their space. He tore out the carpet in the living room so the kids could ride their bikes and skateboards inside the house during the winter. He attached a basketball rim to the old oak tree in the front yard, where dribbling was optional during pickup games because of the uneven dirt. They bought other hoops for inside the house; scuff marks covered the walls. “It’s a house for kids,” Helen would say. “Let them have their fun.”<How did you report this story? You spent how much time with Helen Ford—and what else?/pw I spent a lot of time with Helen, but I also visited with lawyers, many of Rumeal’s friends and several of Helen’s other children—the people who lived in the house during this time. And then, for the second half of the story, the court records were a massive help./es

Lou filled one bedroom with four refrigerators — one for milk, one for juice, one for meat and one for produce — so the kids could always help themselves.<Great detail—did that come naturally in her telling?/pw I don’t remember exactly, but I am sure it came from asking pretty pressing details about that time in their lives. Sometimes, during an interview like this, a subject can be confused as to why you want so much detail, so I tell them: I’m trying to do justice to your story by writing it exactly as it was, and it is the details that make it real to people. Explaining why you want to know something gives you a little more latitude to press again and again for specifics. It can also make a subject feel like a collaborator in a small way in the reporting, and they work hard to remember and recall details. Also, Helen and I spent a lot of time looking at old pictures of that time, which was useful mainly because it jogged her memory, and got her talking about certain stories or moments she would not have recalled otherwise./es Helen cooked for 15 every night, adding water to her soups<Great acute detail./pw and preparing five pounds<Ditto./pw of meat at a time. Guests were given two instructions: Announce yourself when you come in, then make yourself at home.

“If we had a castle and unlimited money,” Helen says, “we probably would have had 100 kids living in there.”

There was Randy, Helen’s son from an earlier marriage, who became a record-setting track star. There was his high school rival, Lazar, who had a falling-out with his parents and needed a place to stay. There was Dawn, a white girl from the neighborhood who showed up at school with bruises on her arm. There was Louis Jr., the state’s player of the year in basketball. There were Tyrone and Ernie, the rambunctious twins from New York.<You may have covered this in the how-reported answer but were you able to use foster care records or other documents?/pw Yes. I was able to get those, and they were a big help. I don’t think I’ve ever written a story that relied this much on records./es

Then there was Rumeal, the budding athlete, the center of the Fords’ orbit, the emergency-placement case that led to all the rest.

EVERYONE NOTICED HIS WORK ETHIC before anything else. On weekday mornings during high school, Robinson would strap on a 40-pound vest and run five miles along the Charles River. His coach at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, Mike Jarvis, challenged him to do 100 pushups and sit-ups each day; he did 500 of each instead. He went to Michigan on a recruiting trip and spent most of his time working out with the track coach, quizzing him about ways to improve a vertical jump.

“He worked as hard as any player I’ve known,” says Jarvis, who went on to become a head coach at four colleges. “I can think of two other guys I coached, Patrick Ewing and Michael Jordan, who were in Robinson’s class as far as work ethic.”

Rumeal already looked like a professional athlete by his sophomore year of high school in 1984, with his broad shoulders and barrel chest. He played with a different style from most other point guards: less calculation and finesse, more brute strength and aggressiveness.<Did you watch tapes?/pw I did watch tapes. I also talked to several of his old coaches—and people who coached against him./es Helen sometimes gave him coaching advice at the dinner table: “Go hard to the hoop and stop shooting from so far away.”

Helen and Lou saved money to send their son to five-star basketball camps. Helen rearranged her schedule to attend his games. Rumeal’s birth mother came to one of them during his senior year. She made such a scene in the stands — Helen remembers her repeatedly yelling, “That’s my son!” — that a security guard removed her from the game. Rumeal sought out Helen at halftime, scoreless and distraught, desperate for counsel. “Don’t worry about her,” Helen told him. “Focus on what you have now, on your family and basketball.”

And so he did. He averaged 18 points as a senior and led Rindge & Latin to a high school state championship. In the spring of 1986, he accepted a basketball scholarship to Michigan.

During the 1988-89 season, with Robinson a top scorer and team leader, the Wolverines made it to the Final Four in Seattle. Lou and Helen couldn’t both afford to go, so Helen traveled to the West Coast alone. The next day, friends started up a collection for Lou, picked him up in the middle of his mail route, took him to the airport in a limo and paid for his ticket to Seattle.<*sniffle*/pw He arrived in time to see Helen onstage at the pep rally before the championship game against Seton Hall, leading 2,500 Michigan fans in a cheer.<*sniffle*/pw

Helen and Lou watched Robinson score 14 of his 21 points in the first half. Then with three seconds left in overtime and his team trailing by one, Robinson drove hard to the basket, just as Helen had always instructed. Seton Hall’s Gerald Greene bumped the point guard’s shoulder, resulting in a two-shot foul. One shot to tie. One more to win.

Seton Hall called a timeout to try to force Robinson to consider the stakes. Robinson had been in a similar situation earlier in the season against Wisconsin and missed both free throws, so he had taken at least 100 foul shots during every practice since. Now he blew the sweat off his fingers<Great detail—how’d you get?/pw CBS showed this in the “One Shining Moment” video that year, so I watched that a bunch, which didn’t really feel like work. Who doesn’t love watching One Shining Moment?/es and stepped to the line. Helen and Lou held hands.<Also great—how’d you get?/pw Helen’s recollection, and news articles from the time of the game./es

Swish. Robinson raised his right fist in triumph. A referee threw him the ball again. The arena was silent now. Robinson lofted his second shot. Swish again.

Seton Hall’s last-second attempt hit the backboard and nothing else, and Helen and Lou jumped from their seats as confetti fell from the ceiling.<Gorgeous sentence./pw They fought through the crowd to hug their son. They listened to his postgame news conference; when a reporter asked what he had been thinking about on the free throw line, he said simply, “I was thinking of my parents a lot.”

A few months later, Cambridge organized a city parade in Robinson’s honor. The mayor declared it Rumeal Robinson Day. The high school hung his jersey from the rafters. Hundreds of people lined the streets, and Robinson and his parents rode the parade route in the mayor’s convertible. They drove to City Hall for a brief ceremony, and the three of them stood next to each other on the steps.

In the year to come, Robinson would re-create his winning free throws in the White House Rose Garden, then toss the ball to President George H.W. Bush and say, “C’mon man, you can take a shot.” He would grace the cover of Sports Illustrated, become the 10th pick in the NBA draft, move to a mansion in Atlanta and buy each of his parents a Rolex and a new Mercedes-Benz.<You’ve got some mojo going on here because at this point we’re thinking back to that opening scene and wondering how this could’ve gone so wrong. Structurally, this is pretty much straight chronology with a present-day opening and a lingering mystery about what’s become of Robinson. Did you play with structures at all?/pw This seemed like the natural structure from the beginning—start in the present moment, and then go with straight chronology. It is definitely simple, but I also think that structure is usually pretty effective./es

But first, on the steps of Cambridge City Hall, Rumeal handed Lou his NCAA championship ring and wrapped his parents in an embrace.

“You guys didn’t give me my second chance,” he told them. “You gave me my only chance.”

ROBINSON LEFT FOR ATLANTA in the summer of 1990, after signing a four-year contract worth $4.3 million, and some friends from Cambridge came along. He agreed to launch a record label with them, just because he had always loved music. He invited a new girlfriend in Georgia to move into his spacious home, then extended the offer to his hairdresser too. He had the same craving as his parents: He wanted a crowded house, bustling with activity.

They went out as a group for $500 dinners at steak houses. He attended a boxing match as the special guest of promoter Don King. He sent gaudy bouquets of roses to Helen on her birthday and fancy chocolates to the house on Easter, but his calls home became increasingly infrequent. “He was never a big talker, and I thought he was just a grown man living his life,” Helen says. “But we heard rumors about him blowing his money.”

Early in Rumeal’s second season with the Hawks, Helen asked her son Randy, the track star, to move in with his brother and bring order to his life. Randy went to Atlanta and discovered a mansion with a guesthouse and a garage filled with two Porsches, two Mercedes and a few motorcycles. Then he opened Robinson’s mail and noticed nobody had been paying the electric bill. The power company wanted $2,400 or it would turn off his lights. Randy ordered his brother to pay it.

Still, there was no slowing Robinson’s spending.<How were you able to source all the financial details?/pw Court records detailed this stuff for hundreds of pages, so in the end it was a matter of choosing which details to include./es He invited people to the house for what he called “business meetings” a few times each week, and he made deals for Atlanta real estate, music equipment and designer dogs. He hired a fashion consultant to build his wardrobe as well as an interior designer to work on his house. Sometimes, Randy says, Robinson handed his employees blank checks, trusting them to pay themselves. One contractor stole his dogs and relocated her business to another state using Robinson’s money.

He had never been a drinker, but he threw parties to show off his house and cars. He paid for friends to fly in and visit for a night. Late one morning during the off-season, three of his guests woke up in Robinson’s house expecting to have breakfast with him. They couldn’t find him anywhere, so Randy called his cellphone.

“Where are you?” he asked Robinson.

“I’m out in Brazil,” he said, explaining that he had bought the ticket on a whim the night before.<As you do. What surprised you most about this story? What was the biggest challenge in reporting/writing it?/pw The biggest challenge was trying to address why Rumeal did this, because nobody really seemed to know. The simple answer was that he got in over his head and became financially desperate. But trying to understand the reason behind the betrayal was the hardest and least satisfying part of reporting./es

Meanwhile, Robinson’s play suffered. He occasionally slept through his morning workouts and started to gain weight. He averaged just 5.6 points and 2.8 assists as a rookie in 1990-91. He improved those numbers to 13 points and 5.5 assists during his second season, but his maddening inconsistency made coaches eager to trade him. Robinson drifted to five teams during four more NBA seasons. He almost never started. He played in the CBA and Europe. In 1997, when he was making nearly $1 million as a benchwarmer for the Lakers, American Express sued him for unpaid debts. In 1998, he filed for bankruptcy, and a court forgave his liabilities to three creditors.

He moved to Miami after his retirement in 2002 and lived in a condo on Williams Island, near the opulent homes of Sammy Sosa, Missy Elliott and Whitney Houston.<Okay this may sound naïve but how on earth, if he’d declared bankruptcy?/pw Good question. Bankruptcy usually limits what you own—your assests, and since he rented the place on Williams Island it wouldn’t have counted against him in a bankruptcy hearing. Still, he is a very different type of bankruptcy case. I spent a few days once in Michigan listening to bankruptcy hearings for a story for The Post, and those people were in tattered shirts and mismatched shoes. Not Rumeal./es He started a real-estate development company with plans to attract investors and build a resort called Harmony Cove on 25,000 acres in his Jamaican hometown. He met a stripper named Stephanie Hodge, who had recently dated former Miami Heat forward Chris Gatling; Robinson hired her as his office manager. She was compensated with a company Mercedes and a salary of $150,000.<We’re in the wrong business, dude./pw Pretty good job. But, then again, she did have to live with Rumeal, who was in the process of fleecing his mom./es Point./pw

Robinson’s real estate business never made any money, he would testify, and he never filed tax returns. But he was accomplished at attracting investors. It was something of an obsession — “Rumeal talks about deals all the time, left and right, all day long,” Hodge would later say — and he borrowed money from anyone he could: businessmen from Michigan who remembered his free throws, relatives in Cambridge, loan sharks, a WNBA player.<Great details—how’d you get?/pw Court records. Many of these people testified./es

Although Robinson and his partners traveled to Jamaica and regularly stayed at five-star hotels, they never made any progress building their own. He focused more on what he bought, turning his life into a constant spending spree. Three family members flew to Florida on separate occasions, witnessed his extravagance and asked him to stop. Each time he turned sullen and defensive, they say. “I have billions coming to me in business deals,” he told them.

Randy blamed stubbornness and stupidity for his brother’s money troubles: “He thought he was like an international deal maker.” Perhaps, but money had also become his identity.<Great insight—how did you decide to make this almost psychological declaration and the one that follows? Is this Helen’s POV or yours, or both?/pw This is Helen’s, but it is more mine than anything else in the story. I tend to prefer subtlety in my writing, sometimes to a fault, and at a few points in this story the ESPN editors pushed me to be a little more forceful in describing what we were seeing./es Money distanced him from the memories of the 10-year-old boy who had wandered the halls of an apartment complex with nothing to eat and nowhere to go. “He had come from nothing, and now he couldn’t get enough,” Helen says.

His monthly credit card bills, according to court records, testified to his wanton excess:

Rodeo of New York: $2,050. Coco Cigar: $794. Bodega: $1,491. Louis Vuitton: $1,990. Biltmore Golf Course: $1,592. Circuit City: $14,257. “Laptops,” Robinson later testified.

Bed Bath & Beyond: $1,449. “That might have been a gift,” he said.

Pottery Barn: $2,920. “Just spent some money,” he said. “I don’t know what Pottery Barn is.”<Love how you did this, the repetition of following the line item with an explainer quote. How’d that come to you?/pw I love short, punchy sentences and paragraphs. Every once in a while, they can be so good for the pacing of the story. And his quotes are just so silly and hilarious. In the trail transcript, this exchange—prosecutor reads charge, Rumeal responds—went on for pages and pages, and I guess I wanted a few beats in the story, to mimic that./es

Robinson developed a habit of spending himself into debt every few months, then seeking a major loan to cover his expenses. He borrowed several thousand dollars as many as 10 times from a Florida foreclosure specialist named Rick Preston, who charged him 14 percent to 18 percent interest.

Sometime in 2002 or 2003, Robinson approached Preston about another deal. Would the foreclosure specialist, he asked, have any interest in acquiring an old house near the heart of Cambridge, at 2 Rumeal Robinson Way?

ROBINSON FLEW HOME and showed his mother a series of drawings that he described as architectural plans for Harmony Cove in Jamaica. Lou had handled the couple’s money, but he had died of dementia the previous year. Helen listened as Rumeal said he needed her help to develop Harmony Cove.

“I’m not a rich woman,” Helen told him.

“But you have this house,” Rumeal said.<Chills. Turning point, subtle but alarming./pw

She owned it outright, but Robinson asked her to take out a new loan against the home’s equity. Robinson said he would take that money and use it to fund the project in Jamaica. He said he’d pay her new mortgage. In return, he promised to make Helen an investor in the project. “This could make you a rich woman,” he said. If all went well, he said, she would make $5 million within a few years.

Helen thought the Harmony Cove design looked nice, with its imaginary trees, hotels and casinos. But she didn’t understand the finances; Lou had bought their house in 1951 for less than $8,000 and made the payments himself. She had never dealt with any of it.

“Okay, sure; I trust you,” she told Rumeal. “You’re my son. I’m your mother. Okay.”

On June 16, 2003, Robinson sent Preston to Cambridge to take care of the paperwork. Helen had never met him, but she insisted that he stay at her home. He took her to the city courthouse, where Helen thought she was agreeing to a loan for her son. Instead, she later testified, she unwittingly sold her home. She signed a deed that gave ownership of the house to Preston. Then she went with Preston to the bank, where she thought that the roughly $250,000 she received was a loan. It was, in fact, her proceeds from the sale.

She unknowingly signed over the money to Preston, she says, thinking it would go to the construction of Harmony Cove. “I really just signed here, do this, that, and I was just going through the motions,” she says now. (In court testimony, Preston said that Ford knew she was selling her home.)

During the next few years, Robinson and his friends flipped the house twice in a scheme that grew to involve bankers and housing appraisers throughout the country. Each time, Robinson and his friends made thousands in profits from the sale — money allegedly intended for Harmony Cove but instead wasted on motorcycles and spent paying off other debts.

Preston first sold the house for more than $600,000 to Jorge Rodriguez, a business associate of Robinson’s, who had also obtained $150,000 for the Jamaican development from his mother-in-law. Rodriguez then sold the house to Stephen Hodge, 19, the brother of Robinson’s girlfriend in Miami. Hodge was an unemployed Iraq veteran who lived in Hawaii, but according to court records he managed to secure a loan to buy the house for $1 million.<In your reporting, did you get into the intricacies of how these deals worked? This seems emblematic of what’s going on in the country right now w/r/t predatory lending and underwater mortgages—or no?/pw Yes, very emblematic, which is one of the reasons the story appealed to me in the first place. And this stuff is SUPER confusing. It is easy to see how Helen could have been hoodwinked. It took me a lot of research and several conversations with lawyers to understand the intricacies of this stuff, and much of it was too in the weeds to include in the story. But, like always in reporting, I had to understand it fully to know which parts to include and leave out./es

Robinson had kept up with the loan payments on the house for a time by borrowing from other investors, still convinced that he could eventually make back the cash in Harmony Cove, but the project never earned him a dollar. “I don’t think Rumeal ever believed Helen would actually lose the house, but he was operating in denial,” says Benzan, Helen’s lawyer. “He couldn’t keep up with those debts. Nobody could. He was running in quicksand.” As the years passed and the house’s ownership changed, nobody took care of the mortgage.

In 2007, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door at 2 Rumeal Robinson Way and served Helen with foreclosure papers. “This must be a mistake,” she said. She went to court to bargain for more time and called Robinson. “What in God’s name happened?” she asked him. Robinson promised to take care of it, made a handful of payments, then stopped answering her calls. A sheriff’s deputy came knocking again in March 2009. This time he brought moving trucks.

The next two days were among the worst of Helen’s life. She was living in the house with three of her children and five grandkids, and the relatives scrambled to find new housing. Her youngest son, Louis Jr., then 22, came from Washington to help her pack. They had a lifetime of belongings to organize in two days. Helen, meanwhile, called Robinson and prayed for him to answer. A part of her still believed in her son, because questioning his actions and motives also meant asking tough questions of herself. Much of her image had been built on his story, on the fact that she ushered him from homelessness to stardom. He was her greatest success. So if Robinson was a failure, what would that make her?<I like that you went there—the story isn’t just the litany of what happened but also what it means. This, to me, is a transcendent quality of the piece. How did you decide to deepen it in this way? Do you look for a transcendent quality in all of your stories?/pw I certainly think you hope for a transcendent quality in every story, and I think this turn was important since it is a story as much about Helen as it is about Rumeal. And really, this is the biggest thing he took from her: not the house, or her money, but a sense that she had accomplished something incredible in her life by raising this great, successful kid. That’s more devastating than any of the rest of it, and it is also more human./es

“My mom had such blind faith and love in Rumeal that she was thinking he was going to do something until the last hour,” Louis Jr. says. “I was sitting there bad-mouthing the hell out of this dude, and she was calling him thinking he might pick up. She thought he was going to save the day.”

Instead, the bank changed the locks on the house, and Louis Jr. loaded a U-Haul truck and moved his mother into a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Somerville. Only then, torn from her home, did Helen’s confusion turn to anger. And her anger build to rage. “He betrayed us,” she would say whenever anyone asked about her sudden move. She hired a lawyer who explained the steps behind Robinson’s deception during half a dozen meetings, and each time she grieved again. She discarded most of his basketball memorabilia, and she asked friends not to mention his name.

In September 2009, Robinson was indicted on charges that went far beyond deceiving his mother: federal wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and issuing false statements to financial institutions. All of his scheming had finally caught up with him. Federal prosecutors held Robinson’s trial in Iowa because a bank he defrauded was based there. Helen flew to his trial to testify as a witness for the prosecution. She had not seen Robinson for several years when she entered the courtroom. He was sitting at the defense table, dressed in one of his sharp suits. He looked handsome, she thought. She tried to make eye contact, but he looked away. She swore under oath and looked at him again.

“Are you related to Rumeal Robinson?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes sir,” she said.

“What’s your relationship to him?”

“I’m his mother.”

She answered questions for about 30 minutes, briefly recounting her son’s successes and his scams. “He wasn’t raised this way,” she said. The judge dismissed her, and after she left the courtroom she began to cry in an elevator. Then she fainted. A courthouse employee helped her to the staff break room, where she lay on the couch, drank water and sobbed. “It was my breaking point,” she says.

A few days later, after Robinson was found guilty on 11 criminal counts and Helen had traveled back to Massachusetts, the judge issued his sentence. He told Robinson he would spend six and a half years in federal prison.

“You could not handle the money once it got in your hands,” the judge said. “It was like a drug to you.”<It’s interesting that you keep the camera wholly on Helen, and that this story works despite Rumeal’s absence—we never really hear his voice. Was that a function of his inaccessibility? Even though the story is really Helen’s, can you talk a bit about writing about a story subject who declines to participate? Did he testify, by the way?/pw It was mostly a function of his inaccessibility. I tried to get Rumeal—wrote him a few letters in prison, and, after my third attempt, he finally wrote back. He sent a letter in legal jargon that said his name was copyrighted, and we were not allowed to print it. It was a very strange letter. He did testify, so that was helpful, and a lot of those details helped me bring his perspective and his voice into the story./es

TWO YEARS LATER, on a gorgeous fall day, Helen leaves her one-bedroom apartment and drives to work. Her eviction defines every hour of her daily routine: She wakes each night at 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. because she still feels uncomfortable in her apartment. She leaves home at 5 to spend an hour walking on the treadmill at a Gold’s Gym in Cambridge because everything in Cambridge feels more familiar. At night she tries to modify her old recipes to make them for one. She watches sports because she’d rather listen to the announcers than deal with the silence. She prefers football because basketball reminds her of Robinson.

At 67, she still works as a security and safety specialist for the Cambridge elementary schools, devoted to helping troubled kids. On this day, she monitors the lunch rush at a local elementary school, doling out meatball subs and chocolate milk while watching the students come and go.

“I used to feel like I knew them all, trusted them, understood them, could tell where they were headed in life,” she says, eyeing the children, shaking her head. “But people change. They disappoint you. Now I’m not so sure.”

She has not talked to Robinson or tried to contact him since the trial. He is incarcerated in South Carolina. He refused to comment for this story unless he was paid, sending a letter from prison filled with legalese, threatening ESPN The Magazine with copyright infringement and going to the trouble of having it notarized. In that letter, he also wrote that he has appealed his sentence, blaming “inadequate” defense attorneys for the guilty verdict.<Was a mental health assessment ever part of the court proceedings? Just curious./pw Surprisingly, no. I think Rumeal was too vain to go in that direction./es

Helen has been working with a lawyer, Benzan, to try to win back the house, even though she has no money for a down payment. Benzan has known her family for ages and has offered to volunteer his time, spending the past two years untangling a real estate mess that involved a series of fraudulent buyers and victimized banks across the country. He has finally reached a tentative agreement about the house, and on this fall day he wants to explain it to Helen in person. She drives to meet him after the children clear out of the cafeteria at school.

“I’m due for some good news,” she tells him.

Benzan explains that a third party has agreed to buy the house, clean it, repair it and divide it into rental condos. Units will go for about $2,000 a month. One will be reserved for Helen, as long as she pays the landlord.

The new buyers have plans to restore the center wall that Lou had taken down so long ago, when his family needed more space.<Whoa, nice metaphor, rebuilding that wall./pw They hope to carpet the living room where the boys had ridden their bikes. They will paint over the basketball scuffs in the halls.

They’ll clean the house of its history, the good and bad.

“I’m sorry,” the lawyer says. “I know it’s quite a change.”

“I’ll be okay,” Helen says, nodding. “What hasn’t changed?”<What’s Helen’s status now? Update?/pw She is getting back into her house, but the house is all rental units, and she rents one of them. It isn’t a happy ending, exactly, but I think it at least puts her in a place where she is comfortable. Her lawyer, who helped her pro bono, is gearing up to run for Congress. Rumeal is still in jail, and will be for another few years. I saw him written about a few times last month, when Michigan made a run to the Final Four. I didn’t see any of those stories mention his mom, or the house. At least in late March, he is still remembered mostly for those free throws./es

Eli Saslow is a staff writer for the Washington Post and a contributor to ESPN The Magazine. His first book, Ten Letters, was published by Doubleday in 2011. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and daughter.

To read more installments of Annotation Tuesday!, go here.