![]() Every obituarist in this documentary attests that they live in fear of “missing something,” when they sit down to record a life.Parade of severe storms to bring flood threat to Northeast this weekend The lack of staff in the clip “morgue” is a frightening thing. ![]() no.” These days, the Times is not just a record of events, but of what a newspaper actually is, or supposed to be, anyway. ![]() “It looks chaotic,” Roth says of his paper kingdom, “But. Perhaps it was just all the talk of death that made me fear that this film might be an obituary for the obituary itself. The obituarists dwell a little on their place in the media landscape, which is speeding towards an uncertain future. It walks us around the room where the clips are kept, where Jeff Roth can barely remember where everything is (although his dedication and knowledge are clearly enormous). But Gould’s film shows us that even this is transient. The obituary confers immortality in that it preserves the dead person in the “record,” in the sense that the New York Times is a record. When he sits down to write, the obituarist ponders on “the stilled voice, the fingers that don’t move anymore.” “Artists,” one writer says, “ have a hold on our subconscious.” Art makes a person “immortal,” he thinks. And they themselves have some very poetic takes on their work. She describes how an obituary is a form that captures a person at the precise moment that they “become history,” a sweet and true take on the slang phrase “he’s history.” The obituarists are remarkably versatile writers-my own editor thinks they must be some of the best writers in the world, to do their job. “ It’s ironic, counterintuitive even, that obits have almost nothing to do with death,” Margalit Fox says. All the writers speak about being backed away from at parties, as if they are somehow tainted by death.īut this is a misperception of their craft. But much has changed since the obit desk was stigmatized as “Siberia,” the place where soon-to-be-dead or -fired journos were parked on their way out. Such gallows humor is characteristic of these writers’ speech. “A fortunate death is one you hear about at 9 AM,” one obituarist says. When celebrities are “ailing” (their word), the obituarists start drafting. So, when somebody is very famous and middle-aged-David Bowie, Prince, Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman-that celebrity is “too young to do in advance.” One obituarist rather ironically describes the practice of racing to do advances as “triage,” although it is a death and not a life they are saving. The obituarists tend to write up their pieces about famous people when they reach the end of their careers, when it’s all past them. They had a few hours in which to put together the entire story of arguably the 20th century’s most influential entertainer, to the standard of the Times. But in cases like Michael Jackson’s, say, they have no warning. They dug it out and used it 80 years later. I’d always assumed they had most of the obituaries on file already, and indeed they do have over 1,700 “advances.” The oldest advance they have ever used, Jeff Roth says, was an obituary written in 1931 about a female high school aviatrix whom they figured would die pretty quickly. After finding out who is dead that day, they have seven or so hours to file their pieces before the print deadline. In many cases, the obituarists race the clock. (Ten to 15 people call the obit desk every day, asking to have their unremarkable grandfather written up.) But after checking the “morgue”-the Times archive filled with obituarizable old clips-the paper was delighted to memorialize this remarkable man, who was otherwise slipping into history’s abyss. In a particularly charming story, Kinzler’s family cold-pitched the Times, which initially didn’t believe them. Jack Kinzler, who saved Skylab, a billion-dollar space station, with a makeshift parasol. ![]() David Foster Wallace, whose dad the obituarist had to call on the day his son died. John Fairfax, the record-setting ocean oarsman, who attempted suicide by jaguar. The movie is structured around individual deaths and the obituaries that followed them. Slinky guy is never going to make it above the fold. But, of course, they are measures of newsworthiness: At the Page One meeting each afternoon (which is thrilling to watch), each desk pitches their stories. The writers insist that the word-counts are not about placing a numerical value on the worth of a human life. “Literally, I show up in the morning and say, ‘Who’s dead?’”
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