A New Film Brings The New York Times Obituary Section to Life
Six
years ago, filmmaker Vanessa Gould wrote to a half-dozen newspapers
around the world with the news that Eric Joisel, the origami artist who
was the subject of her first documentary, Between the Folds,
had died at the age of 53. He had lived in relative obscurity, and had
it not been for a phone call from the most highly regarded of those
papers, he would have died in obscurity too.
“I was amazed that The New York Times
was interested in the life of an unknown French paper artist. After
this hard, impoverished life he’d led, the acclaim he’d never reach in
life, now he’d have in death,” Gould said recently by phone from New
York City, where her new film, Obit,
opens today. She was impressed by the questions the reporter Margalit
Fox asked her, many of which she didn’t have the answers to— details
about Joisel’s early life before she’d met him, contradictory reports
about a possible early marriage, for instance. But the level of interest
and devotion to detail from a fellow storyteller stuck with her.
“It
was a remarkable feeling,” Gould said. “It was like we had a butterfly
net and we were trying to catch the facts of his life before they flew
away and slipped out of our hands.” After Joisel’s obituary
was published, she asked if she could turn the tables, and in 2014 she
was granted permission to film the paper’s obit writers, both as they
worked, and in their homes. Watching a writer write, or research, and
make phone calls, and page through books and scroll through YouTube
links might conjure the voyeuristic appeal of drying paint, but Gould
injects the quotidian reality of deskside death reporting with archival
footage, letting her own natural curiosity guide the story.
The prevailing myth of the Times
obit is that an advance obituary exists for almost every notable public
figure, to be plucked out of a file, affixed with an update, and fed
into the paper. The true picture of a Times obituary writer came first in 1966 via Gay Talese (a detail that will likely one day appear in his own New York Times obituary) with “Mr. Bad News,” an Esquire profile of Alden Whitman, the Times
reporter who filed obituaries in an era when the job was seen as, well,
a dead end and certainly bereft of glory; writers got no bylines and
were expected to stick to the formula. Of all the subjects in Obit,
Jeff Roth, though not an obit writer (for years has has presided over
the paper’s archives—“the morgue”), probably most closely resembles the
idea of the bygone obituarian. Filmed amid rows of wooden file drawers
and manila folders in his classic newspaperman shirt sleeves, he is
somewhere between Sisyphus and Bartleby, the Scrivener when he
cheerfully announces that he is probably about a decade behind on
filing.
The reality of the Times obit today tends instead to be that a writer is often as unprepared for the initial news of death as the reader. Obit
recalls, for instance, the shock of the deaths of Michael Jackson,
Philip Seymour Hoffman, and David Foster Wallace. (“Suicides are the
most difficult to write,” Margalit Fox said recently by phone from her
desk at the Times. “They absolutely rip your
guts out.” Fortunately, she said, she has only had to write a few of
them. “There is no Emily Post for cold-calling a stranger and saying,
‘Tell me the cause of death of your loved one, and then I’m going to put
it in a place where millions of people can see it.’ ”)
“They
have maybe 8 hours, often less, to learn all they can about a person
and to write concisely and authoritatively about their lives,” Gould
said. Death is rarely convenient, and doesn’t always arrive on schedule;
more often than not the entire enterprise, from research to writing has
to happen in just a few hours. “I started to see the deep humanity in
the process. This careful, deliberate act they do every day to put an
account of a life on the record.”
As Obit
discovers, the lives that fascinate most are often the ones whose names
may not have made headlines the first time around. Consider the
obituary Gould captures Bruce Weber (who, like his colleagues Paul
Vitello and Douglas Martin has since retired) writing for William P.
Wilson, an aide to John F. Kennedy in the famous 1960 televised debate
against Richard Nixon. In the morning, Weber is making his first phone
calls, segueing from confirming the cause of death to eliciting
anecdotes from Wilson’s wife about how her husband talked Kennedy into
wearing makeup—and to letting him apply it. By the time he files, Weber
has made the argument that Wilson was one of the first people to
understand that television has, in decades since, “become a tool and a
weapon that no candidate dares ignore.”
Certainly tenets of the obituary form carry over from the days of “Mr. Bad News.” The Times
writers are still working with the built-in narrative arc of a life.
“An obit writer is tasked with taking her subject from the cradle to the
grave,” Fox said by phone. But these days, as the film shows, the
obituary writers (who are no longer anonymous; Fox, for example, has
more than 1,200 bylined obits) approach their job a little more loosely,
with an appreciation for humor and odd detail, likening their job to
that of the profile writer. “Alden Whitman was a good stylist, but we
learn equally from Mark Twain,” said Fox, who cited E. B. White, Tracy
Kidder, John McPhee, and Murray Kempton—all masters of character
profiles— among her other influences.
Her own favorite obituary she’s written is one that came after the making of Obit, about a woman named Janet Wolfe
who, in the course of her 101 years, was sawed in half by Orson Welles,
hit on by Fellini, and brushed up against the lives of Eartha Kitt,
Pavarotti, Max Roach, and Ed Koch, to name a few. “She was a wonderful
New York character, the executive director of the New York City Housing
Authority Symphony Orchestra, so even that on its face is delightful,”
Fox said by phone. “Ms. Wolfe was not so much of New York,” Fox writes in Wolfe’s obit, “as she was
New York: garrulous, generous, whip-smart, endearingly hare-brained,
unflinchingly direct, occasionally lonely, more than a little ribald,
supremely well connected and sometimes down but never out.” The obit for
Janet Wolfe far exceeded the usual 500 to 1,000 words in length; it ran
on page one.
No comments:
Post a Comment