NEW YORK - FUCK YOU WIRED, WE WIN

OK, how's this for a burn? Right before all that Wired crap we wrote about earlier started going up on their site, we decided to interview Charlie Kaufman for our October Issue. I know, great minds etc. Anyways, want to know how long it took us? Five days. Start to finish. That is approximately 1/20th of the time it took them to come up with the exact same story (even the lengths are within 100 words of each other) and we will bet you $10 ours turns out a million times better and more interesting than the lukewarm pile of fluff incubating over on their site. Here's a breakdown of the process.

THE PITCH
We'd recreate the whole paper trail between the interviewer and editorial staff for you, but there isn't one. The interviewer, Eddy, walked over to the editor, Jesse,'s desk and said "Hey, do you want me to interview Charlie Kaufman for the mag?" Jesse said "OK," and then the next time they spoke was when Eddy emailed him the finished product.

THE "GET"
Eddy called Spike Jonze and got a number for Kaufman, then called his people and asked for a time. Sometimes this part can drag on for a couple of days while you go back and forth with dates and times but in this case it took no more than 20 minutes.

THE INTERVIEW
To prepare for the interview, Eddy took a shower, then took a cab to the hotel Kaufman was staying at. They talked for a little over an hour while Eddy recorded the conversation on a tape.

PHOTO ISSUES
It’s true that Kaufman refuses to sit for photo shoots, so we decided to get four forensic artists to sketch him based on a description from the interviewer instead. This entailed the following: googling the words "forensic artists," and emailing the ones who came up and seemed good/interesting. Our editorial assistant Rocco sent a form letter to about 20 of them and responses started rolling in within the hour. We picked the four we liked best, set a price, and a day later the first sketch (which was fucking hilarious, by the way) arrived in Rocco's inbox with two more shortly behind it. The hardest part of the whole thing was cornering Eddy and making him select different facial features from an official forensic composite book and that took a little less than an hour. Our design guy had all four sketches within five days, and that's only because the last guy was on vacation. He had the layout ready by the end of the day.

THE WRITING
Eddy came back to the office and gave the tape to Rocco to transcribe. Two hours later Rocco sent Eddy the text, Eddy popped an intro on it, and emailed it to Jesse.

THE EDITING
Jesse spent a little bit of time that night cleaning up the text and trimming a few of the questions and answers down. When he was done he sent it to our design guy who dropped it into the layout with the pictures. And that, lads and ladies, is how you make an article.

Comments

[Eric]

Wired is pretty much the last magazine I want to defend in this situation, but I think you're getting ahead of yourself declaring victory. Having worked with quite a few very talented writers in the past who still needed a guiding editorial hand to focus their work and edit their copy into an acceptable final product, I highly doubt your process (as described here, at least) is any better. So you save a few bucks. Is that really worth it? It's especially hard to believe that you wouldn't even have set some sort of budget on word count.

Despite your half-hearted attempts at theme issues, your magazine is a smorgasbord of random topics. That doesn't work for everyone. Most of the time, injecting a few other opinions into the production of a piece can do wonders.

That said, I'm looking forward to your article.

my eric, you sound like a professional editor for a glossy publication with a demographic of 18-45. or a journalism school professor, which is kind of like an aborted-fetus version of the same thing.

half hearted attempts? i dont know which magazine you're reading, but when vice does a theme they nail it into the fucking ground.

hahaha eric:
"It's especially hard to believe that you wouldn't even have set some sort of budget on word count."

keep toeing that line little man. someone took publishing 101. yawn.

[wired sux]

hmm, i dunno, will vice's interview include florid descriptions of kaufman's hair? because that's when you know you have a quality piece of writing. i personally am so grateful that wired told me that kaufman has a "slight, healthy serving of reddish brown curls" and wears "button-down shirts." it's like i can see him right before my eyes!

[Cam Smith]

It's called painting a word picture, jackass.

[the eye]

I'm sure Eddy's piece will be better than Mr.Fluffy Pretention McMeta over at Wired. Principally because Eddy is a more interesting person that Mr. McMeta and I'm sure they actually conversed about interesting topics which I will be able to read about in the Vice interview. Isn't that great? The Wired "piece" (Hey, is Kaufamn a Wired guy? BWAAHAHAHA) wasn't much more than a collection of facts we all already know about (try www.google.com) peppered with three fucking sentences from Kaufman himself.

[the eye]

UPDATE!

http://blog.wired.com/storyboard/2008/09/ffkaufman-nmedi.html#more

Jesus Christ! Please, please read the editor's mindblowingly detailed "corrected draft".

[bob]

I love Charlies K's Films but have recently been reading lots of Philip K Dick books and think he may have got alot of his idea from PKD.
3 Stigmata = Being John Malkovich

We can remember it for you wholesale = Sunshine of a spotless mind

Adaptation = Valis

Has Charlie ever mentioned being a fan?

HAHAHAHAHAHA here's the opening from the wired thing (the brackets are the editor commenting on what has been written thus far):

We open on Charlie Kaufman, sitting in the corner of an empty room in a French bistro in Los Angeles. He looks nothing like Nicolas Cage, who played Kaufman in the Kaufman-penned Adaptation. Cage was hulkish and balding; Kaufman is slight, beneath a healthy serving of reddish-brown curls [Wonderful writing here. One suggestion about construction: Instead of starting with what he isn't (Nicholas Cage) can we start with what Kaufman is (slight, healthy serving of reddish brown curls, etc.].

wow this jason tanz guy is a fag. him and wired are what's wrong with magazines and all things really - everything is overstaffed. look at the masthead of most magazines. there are 100 fucking people on them. bloated rosters of people trying to justify their liberal arts degrees. want to improve america's economy? put them all to work building houses.

i just googled the guy - he also wrote a book called "Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America"

can we start an angry lynch mob and go find this fucker yet?

http://www.wired.com/services/press/center/bios

that's a lot of chubby, pasty men.

you can even download pictures of them!! (what the fuck for, i have no idea. to post on your fridge to stop you from eating too much?)

agree totally with what the guy said above about the article being more than 2/3rds googleable. profiles in general (with the exception of SOME new yorker profiles) are completely superfluous in the day and age of the internet. just get him/her to talk about something interesting. narratives and fucking "scenes" (sheesh) are better reserved for real feature stories that involve more than having donuts and following a famous person around. oh, and pS: that jason guy looks like someone i'd like to run over. twice. smug fuck.

all this journalisty stuff is boring

Jesse cleans up text? Pity he doesn't know how to spell "lukewarm."

[Vice]

Oops, sorry everybody, there was a typo in a blog post. Please disregard the entire rest of our content.

Vice doesn't know how to spell lukewarm, only how to embody it. Your content disregards itself...yes, the redundancy that is the "entire rest" of it.

that last comment made absolutely no sense. i mean just in terms of syntax and grammar.

anyway saying vice is boring is bullshit. i have never once been bored by an issue. may be some things i skip if they arent for me but that doesnt mean that the whole rest of any given issue isnt awesome. fuck ya's, ya trolls

[Rene]

Does anyone else agree that Kevin Poulsen, Senior Editor, is a hybrid of Ben from Lost and Thom Yorke?

[the eye]

does anyone else think that the whole editorial office of Wired deserves to be wiped out by the bubonic plague after seeing what the fuck they get up to all day?

[here here]

yes, eye. great solution. let's coordinate.

[Troy]

Is it just me, or does the lukewarm guy sound suspiciously like one James T. Goad of getting testy over minor copyediting quibbles lately fame?

http://www.jimgoad.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=news;action=display;num=1213858925

[the boy who reads for fun]

I know you guys are all writers or copy editors and know all about word budgets and philip dick but that stuff goes over my head bit.

But when I read this in Wired,

In his office, Smith recounts a conversation he had with Tom Freston, the MTV cocreator. Naturally, in the retelling, it was the guy with the slicked-back hair — not the veteran executive — who was dispensing the advice. "I said to him, You built the biggest media platform for youth in the world, and what did you push through it?'" Smith says. "My Super Sweet 16? Laguna Beach? We don't want to be guilty of the same thing. You can have poo-poo, ca-ca, bum-bums, and tits, but you've also got to have other things."
"It's all about caring," interjects Eddy Moretti, VBS executive producer. "It sounds stupid," he admits.
"Giving a shit," Smith corrects.
"Giving a shit," Moretti repeats quickly, with a nod. Smith is right: That sounds much cooler.

...I laughed really hard and I like laughing. Funny thing about most of this post, besides the lynching and killing bits, not a lot of laughter. VICE telling MTV it's a piece of shit? Especially brilliant and funny. And the caring quip is so remarkable.

But wait, maybe I overlooked the underlying kicker here cuz if you guys can do to Jason what you did to Tom Freston. Well then, Boo-Yah VICE!

IGNORE THIS UNINFORMED COMMENT I STARTED TYPING BEFORE I HAD MY COFFEE

So you found a quote by Vice's owners funny, but not a vindictive blog post that is not attempting to be funny. I am glad I took the time to read that.