Exposing 'The New York Review of Books': A Q&A with the HBO Doc's Director
September 24, 2014 · from the Word & Film archive
Half a century of intellectual brawls, dashed off at 3 a.m. and printed in 11-point type: that's the subject of The 50 Year Argument, the HBO documentary Martin Scorsese co-directed with his longtime editor David Tedeschi about The New York Review of Books. Tedeschi spoke with us ahead of the film's premiere.
The film's spine is editor Robert Silvers, who has run the Review since its 1963 founding — born of a newspaper strike and a conviction that book criticism had gone soft. Tedeschi says the directors' rule was to film arguments, not eulogies: Baldwin against the liberals, Mailer against everyone, Joan Didion dismantling the official story of the Central Park Five.
Why does a magazine documentary need Scorsese? Tedeschi laughs: because archives are footage, and nobody cuts footage like Marty's crew. The film treats a half-century of essays the way The Last Waltz treats songs — as performances with tempo and body language.
The result is less a victory lap than a dare to the present: the Review bet that readers would sit still for 8,000 words of disagreement, and won. The argument, the film insists, is the point.
