The New Yorker at 100: A Netflix Documentary Dives Inside a Leading Magazine | Documentaries

WWhen young filmmakers ask Marshall Curry what makes an idea for a documentary, he tells them: “There are some stories that make great New Yorker articles, but they’re not movies.” It was only a matter of time before the director found himself putting his wisdom to the test with The New Yorker at 100, a new Netflix film about the magazine. “Someone told me that trying to make a 90-minute movie about New Yorkers was like trying to make a 90-minute movie about America.” Ken Burns does it with… one war.”

The film pulls back the curtain on the mysterious media store. Curry and his crew spent an entire year combing through archives, listening to production meetings, and tracking down famous bylines — and no one was more revered in the industry than editor David Remnick, the magazine’s lifelong leader. Curry had hoped to cook up a meal for staffers pushing to meet a February 2025 publication date, the magazine’s centennial issue, but the scenes he found didn’t quite come close to anything of the boiler-room-centric dramas of cinematic fiction or even a September-issue doc about Anna Wintour’s clannish Vogue operation. “I wanted to see people running around each other and saying, ‘We have to get this thing done before the deadline!'” Curry says. “But they don’t.”

Self-confidence is how The New Yorker has managed to remain a staple in a contract media landscape in which print journalism has been transformed into a niche product. While competitors chased trends in the hope that eyeballs would follow, and faded into irrelevance, The New Yorker doubled down on its curiosity and honed its sophisticated taste, collating satirical cartoons, original art, and cultural observations into authoritative profiles and investigations. Readers show their loyalty every time they lose themselves in a case on the subway, wander around town with New Yorker-branded briefcases, or point out with some embarrassment the stack of cases they haven’t yet figured out.

“My little collection is in here somewhere,” says Curry, who grew up in New Jersey reading his parents’ magazine subscriptions. “I started watching cartoons because I got a little bit intimidated by all those words. Then I started reading the shorter stuff, then the longer stuff – then I got my own subscription and I’ve been subscribing non-stop ever since.”

Carrie’s film is as much a tasting menu as the magazine itself—with Oscar-winner Julianne Moore playing the narrator. Jesse Eisenberg and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are excited about their rare status as New Yorker contributors. Sarah Jessica Parker and Molly Ringwald meet Rose Chast while the famous cartoonist makes food for the parrot from her old New Yorker issues. The film follows Françoise Mouly, a technical editor, as she grapples with what to do for the cover of the Centennial issue between reporting adventures with the New Yorker staff – in a Syrian prison with John Lee Anderson, the war correspondent, alongside Rachel Sim, the biographer, to her interview with Carol Burnett, at home with Ronan Farrow, the investigative reporter, as he scoops a big scoop on the Trump administration’s surveillance tactics.

Curry’s big challenge was turning the tables on these expert reporters and interviewers. “There’s this trick that documentary filmmakers learn quickly, where you ask a question, and the person finishes it, but you don’t jump in with your next question because the person will try to fill the awkward silence that often follows — and will add an extra piece of color that’s even better than the thing they said in their original answer,” he says. “Well, I asked David a question. He answered. I sat quietly. He looked at me. I looked at him. Finally, he said, ‘Marshall, I know this trick too.'”

What the film really shines at is its retracing of the institutional history dating back to the New Yorker’s tumultuous early days as a Mad magazine-style funny paper masterminded by a high school dropout from Colorado.. But while Mad stuck to the comedic bits, The New Yorker took the world-shaking events it had observed over the years as an opportunity to grow its journalism. John Hershey’s seminal article on Hiroshima, his 30,000-word response to the US government banning photographs of the civilian aftermath of its nuclear bombing of Japan, made war coverage a priority for the magazine. James Baldwin’s 1962 essay “Letter from the District of My Mind,” which arrived in the midst of the civil rights movement, opened the magazine to nonwhite viewpoints at a time when the mainstream media was not supportive of black voices — let alone Baldwin, who was merely an aspiring novelist at the time.

“It’s interesting that you use the phrase ‘grow up,’” Carey says. “This is what we see in the magazine doing it. We start with a silly 10-year-old with her silly cartoons, and one day an atom bomb is dropped. When the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, a woman stopped me in the street and said, ‘I feel like I was watching the autobiography of an old friend.’

Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, which effectively launched true crime as a genre, became the reason for building the industry’s most stringent fact-checking department after Capote was found to have taken imaginative liberties with the piece. Carrey’s film makes sure to achieve the requisite fan service and lags behind the New Yorker’s world-class pedantry: its quirky typography, its habit of focusing on the elite, its collaboration and other buzzwords—the delightful reader letters that flow when the magazine boastful The fact-checking department was arrested. (Readers like to hit fact-checkers with that word, apparently.)

However: As much as The New Yorker has grown over the years, to the point of distinguishing itself as a dynamic multimedia brand now, concerns about its future remain ever-present. Remnick, who turned 67 in October, has set the magazine’s direction for the past two decades. Readers and insiders worry that the magazine will become a museum piece after he steps down. Carey’s film only refers to the magazine union’s protracted collective bargaining battle with Condé Nast; Last month, the magazine group fired four New Yorker staffers who were also prominent members of the union after announcing the impending closure of Teen Vogue. Before that, a veteran New Yorker fact-checker left his job amid tensions over the magazine’s coverage of the conflict between Israel and Gaza.

Curry says he saw no signs of a struggle while with the magazine. “My feeling was that there was a lot of diversity of ideas, and that people disagreed,” he says. He added: “I heard writers arguing about whether Trump is actually a racist, and they talked about open debates about a lot of other things. I was kind of surprised, frankly.”

In the days leading up to the film’s debut this week, The New Yorker published a link to a story about photographer Anne Hermes and her work documenting the decline of local newspapers across the United States. It’s the type of post that might be brushed off as self-promotion and The self-awareness of the discerning New Yorker reader. Can the magazine continue for another 100 years? Can she even survive? this economy? “They still have 1.25 million subscribers, and I’m sure they’d like to grow that number,” Curry says. “But they’re not trying to be like McDonald’s and sell billions and billions of hamburgers to everyone in the world,” Carey says. “They make exquisite handmade sushi and seat two people per night in their little restaurant for people who love and care about perfectly made sushi.”