The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman on the “Oscar Wars” and that Jeremy Strong profile
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Amid a roster of top-tier feature writers at The New Yorker, Michael Schulman has cultivated something unique. A Schulman New Yorker feature is an immersive experience — for the subject, the reader and the writer himself.?
He chronicles Hollywood with an ideal mixture of curiosity and industriousness, unpacking some of the most idiosyncratic personalities in the business. Schulman takes us behind the curtain, visiting their homes, observing them on sets and talking to friends and family. But the exchanges rarely feel obligatory or stage-managed — as is common in many celebrity profiles. The pieces themselves are weeks or months in the making.??
“You have to find someone who's willing to have you along for that amount of time and open themselves up to you and, you know, tolerate you being there,” Schulman notes.?
The “Succession” star Jeremy Strong, for instance, was familiar with what was required for a big New Yorker print profile and turned out to be “almost overly zealous in spending time with me,” Schulman says.?
This week, Schulman is heading to the West Coast to cover Sunday night’s Oscars just as the paperback edition of his terrific Academy Awards book “Oscar Wars” hits stores.
The deeply reported and highly readable book scrutinizes the Oscars through the prism of each decade’s overarching narrative, from the Academy’s founding to the disastrous night in 2017 when the presenters announced the wrong Best Picture winner on stage.?
“I find the Oscars ridiculous but also meaningful,” he says. “I root for them because I enjoy watching them and want them to endure, as completely ludicrous as they are.”
Who: Michael Schulman?
Resume: Staff writer, The New Yorker; bestselling author; Contributing writer, The New York Times, Vanity Fair; English language and literature major, Yale University.?
Late to the industry: Schulman directed several plays at Yale and initially planned to attend film school or throw himself into the world of theater after he graduated. “I did not know I wanted to be in journalism until basically I was in it,” he says.?
Lucky to be alive: Schulman survived being whacked on the cheek by the side mirror of a moving bus. “I have a little bit of titanium in my left orbital rim,” he says. “I don't usually think about it except when people bring it up. There was a little bit of nerve damage, but I'm totally fine considering (what happened). It could have been much worse. The year after that, I had a theme party to celebrate that I haven't been hit by a bus for a whole year.”?
Pandemic swing: When Hollywood shut down during the pandemic four years ago, Schulman had to change how he did his job. “Everything about life was so weird... But I had a couple of pieces I was proud of during the lockdown,” he says. One was a well-read interview with Fran Lebowitz . “New York was a real epicenter and I thought to myself one night, I’m tired of hearing from Andrew Cuomo,” he recalls. “I wanted to hear from Fran Lebowitz about the state of the city. She was so cranky, uncompromised and herself. It was a voice people wanted to hear, even if they didn't know it.”
Here in his own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Schulman takes us through the challenge of big name profile pieces, writing a book while juggling his day job, his career rising through the ranks at The New Yorker and where the Oscars sit today.
I take the process of taking on a long profile assignment very seriously. I don't want to write about somebody being famous just because they're famous. I really seek out people who have unconventional careers or trajectories, like Adam Driver who is an incredible actor, but maybe wasn’t destined for movie stardom. He's a weird, very particular dude… I wanted to know more about how his mind worked and what his journey was. That’s much more interesting than the ‘generic hot guy who winds up being in every action movie.’
Usually those who agree to a New Yorker profile understand and respect what that entails. Certain people want to be understood, they enjoy having the opportunity to be listened to and observed over a period of time. On the other hand, I know it’s not easy to be written about in that way. You're really handing the reins over to someone you don't know to tell your story in a very detailed way. And people have various levels of understanding of what I'm after.
A weird thing about this job is that you spend a lot of often intimate time talking with a person. And then when you sit down to write, you have to mentally adjust to the idea that it's no longer for them. It's for the reader and by extension for your editor who is a substitute for the reader and shaping it. And if you start to get too in your head about what the person will think of their own portrayal, that's when it starts getting compromised by too much self censorship. I'm not saying that you have to be mean in a profile, but you have to be true to what you want to tell the reader and if something is standing in the way of that, you have to find a way to put it aside.
Did I have some idea the Jeremy Strong piece would break through to the zeitgeist? I did, because Jeremy is a very unusual person. He's a priest in the religion of acting and the way he talks about acting is extremely philosophical and thoughtful. He takes it to these extremes that I think he feels are signs of his dedication to the craft. But some of the people he has worked with find them kind of nuts, irritating or just mysterious.??
When the profile came out, a lot of people said I must have hated him — that's not true at all. In his presence, I knew that he was such a unique character, I was so fascinated by everything that came out of his mouth. I was thrilled whenever I was with him because I thought, 'I'm getting incredible material'. And in the end, the piece was less a celebrity profile than a sort of character study. He hosted me at his house in Denmark and we flew around Europe together. And it still wasn't as much as he wanted me to be there. He was eager to have me watch him and to explain himself.?
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He also had his most famous friends call me at unexpected times. At the ATM one day, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize and it was Matthew McConaughey. One day I was eating takeout sushi and Robert Downey Jr. Face Timed me. There was a period I had to pick up every single call because it was an Oscar winner who was friends with Jeremy. It was useful for the story, but also revealing in his hyper dedication to this process.
Most of the time I never hear anything from the people I profile again. Which is fine. I have disabused myself of any illusion that I'm becoming friends with the people I write about and that our relationship will continue. And certainly there are times when the one reaction they have is so particular and random. Like Adam Driver apparently was upset with one line about his sister in law's Instagram. So, for me, the solution is don't think too hard about how the person will react.?
That was the same with Jeremy — I haven't heard from him at all since (the article published). He was on the cover of GQ and was photographed in the corner of a boxing ring and it was sort of spun as 'Jeremy Strong is now this wronged person who's fighting back'. In the actual piece, he talks about my profile. It’s odd. I felt like it was a very accurate portrait of a very extreme personality and people reacted to it in various different ways. And I think they're all valid ways. I didn't want to tell people how they should or shouldn't respond to a piece.?
But I was really exhilarated to see this piece become so widely discussed. Every journalist dreams of having one piece in a lifetime that gets that kind of a kind of attention out in the culture, so it was a little like a rollercoaster. Jessica Chastain and Aaron Sorkin released statements about it in defense of Jeremy, too. I didn't think he particularly needed a defense, but I was sitting there at home with my cat going, ‘What's going to happen next?’
I did not foresee working at the same place essentially my whole adult life — it’s now almost 20 years since I started. I got into grad school for film the same week in 2004 that I got an offer from The New Yorker to become an assistant in the special events department. It was a hard decision, but I ended up staying at the events department for nine years. During that time, I was writing as well. My aim was to write for the Talk of the Town column, the magazine’s nonfiction pieces about interesting characters or peculiar goings on in New York City. To me, they were almost more like human playwriting than journalism. These pieces were the same kind of humor and very dialogue driven, except that they’re about real people and are totally factual.?
My first three attempts were total failures that did not run. Then one day in the summer of 2006, I was living near the South Street Seaport Museum and I saw this guy in a tent from colonial Williamsburg, shaving pieces of wood and making a barrel and it turns out he was a cooper — a man who makes buckets and barrels and things out of wood and, like, rings of metal. So I started talking to him and talked him into coming with me the next day to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to compare the two Williamsburgs. That became my first published Talk of the Town piece. I never pitched it. I just did it.
I started doing a few features and at a certain point started branching out to freelancing for The New York Times style section. I eventually quit my job to write a book about Meryl Streep (The New York Times bestseller, “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep” ). I spent 18 months on my own doing that. Vanity Fair ran an excerpt from it on their cover in 2016 and it led to a few more assignments for them.
I took a new job at The New Yorker in 2016, editing the theater listings and writing Talk of the Town. So I had a desk job at The New Yorker again, but it was in editorial this time and it felt very different. I was offered a writing contract and got the staff writer title in 2018. I still feel like I’m adding something, learning new things and going somewhere and the job has evolved into my dream job. I'm very grateful to be here.?
Do I still distinguish between print and digital? I do a lot for both and I have different editors for web and print. A lot of people here just have one editor. I enjoy doing both and I use them for different things. For instance, an 8,000-word print profile is a very different animal than a web piece that you can turn around in half a day to respond to something that's happening in the news. We have certain formats that are more geared toward print or online. You know, Talk of the Towns, which I love and have written almost 200 of, are meant to be read in print in a grouping of four as they've always appeared. But The New Yorker Interview, which is basically a long form Q&A run online, is wonderful and really fun to do.?
The “Oscar Wars” book grew out of a New Yorker piece. I had been covering the Oscars for The New Yorker website and I wrote a long print piece for the magazine about how the Academy was navigating the aftermath of #OscarsSoWhite. I spent some time with the Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs and wrote about the Academy and its history, which I was learning a lot about. And then I went to the Oscars for the first time and sat in the press room and wrote about what it was like to be there. It was the night of the "Moonlight" and "La La Land" envelope mix-up. So, I had a lot to write about. It became this incredible twist ending about how the Oscars reflected the mood of the country and evolution of Hollywood. It was dramatic, funny, surreal and interesting.
Starting the book, I decided to go through what had happened at the Oscars every single year and basically tried to spot years that might tell a larger story about culture. From the start, I knew I wanted to do the best picture races of 1976. It was an incredible lineup: "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "Barry Lyndon", "Nashville", "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Jaws". Four anti-authoritarian, new Hollywood masterpieces by directors of a certain generation. And then the first summer blockbuster directed by this kid Spielberg. To me, that told a story about the countercultural cinema of the seventies and the shift toward the blockbuster movies of the eighties.
I didn't want to get too obscure with the movies or the people that they covered. So the 1940s chapter is about the year “Citizen Kane” lost everything. I also noticed the Oscars were held 2.5 months after Pearl Harbor that year. So you had Hollywood reacting to America entering World War Two, Bette Davis quitting as Academy president and two sisters nominated together who hated each other, Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine. I braided those three storylines together to tell a more interesting tale. And then characters like Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra and Harvey Weinstein, for better or worse, really began to come into focus.?
I knew race had to be a really big theme in the book, too. I wanted to tell the story of people like Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier, who were the first Black winners in their categories, and Halle Berry, of course, who is the first black Best Actress winner. All three won during moments when Hollywood wanted to project its progressive values and they were greeted as historic inspiring moments, but the experience was really isolating for them. All three had difficult moments right after they won where they struggled in their career. They had to bear the burden of representing an entire race in the public eye. And they all faced criticism from within the Black community.
‘The Slap’ also saved me in writing the book. I turned in my manuscript to my editor, but I had written the afterword really fast and I wasn't happy with it. So I wanted a better ending and then 'The Slap' happened. I ended my night covering the event at the Vanity Fair party watching Will Smith on the dance floor, holding up his Oscar to “Gettin’ Jiggy With It.’ It was like the Oscar Gods had given me this perfect ending to the book. The next day, I woke up with severe COVID and was stuck in a hotel for a week. But let me tell you, I would do it all again to be there for Will Smith dancing because I needed that ending.?
I do think that the Oscars are grappling with their relevance — as are the movies in general. The ratings they had 30 years ago are never coming back, partly because network television has changed. It's hard unless you're the Super Bowl to get everyone in America to watch the same thing on ABC on a Sunday night. That said, the Oscars are always the only non-sports thing in the top most-watched broadcasts of the year. So they certainly are not fully down and out.?
This year, I'm looking at how the 'BarbenHeimer' phenomenon might affect issues of relevance. With the snubs of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig for Best Actress and Best Director, you could see how much bigger the discourse was because so many more millions of people had seen that movie than the average Oscar nominee. It was a huge conversation and now you have two gigantic blockbusters together at the center of the Oscar race.
I didn’t take book leave to write the “Oscar Wars.” So how did I find time to do it? My big secret is that I turned in the book 14 months late. The pace of an online and print magazine schedule means there's always a deadline in front of you. It's hard to put that aside and say, 'actually I will focus on a chapter of this book that I don't have to turn in for three years.' It's not just time management, you need your head in a certain place. Writing a book is so immersive, you have to feel like you're living in it. It has to be alive in your mind like some alternate universe and you can't just dip in and dip out. That was very challenging.