Michael Idov

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“This Was Shaping Up To Be The Most Surreal Year Of My Life”

January 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

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I recall reading and loving Michael Idov’s “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” his strange 2011 GQ journalistic walkabout in which he reported from the insane Ukraine film set of certifiable auteur Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Several unforeseen WTF professional and geopolitical moments later, he found himself one of Russia’s top screenwriters, crafting successful TV shows and films during the chill of the Second Cold War, perhaps an astute social commentator or maybe an unwitting government stooge.

Idov’s written a piece about his unexpected life changes for the New York Times Magazine, which is the first excellent longform article I’ve read this new year (sorry, Sean Penn). A passage about how the magazine editor began to branch out from the news biz to show biz, which offered greater freedom from the Kremlin’s intentionally fuzzy censorship rules:

Russia and the United States had exchanged the first salvos in the new cold war. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, barring certain apparatchiks from entering the United States. In an asymmetric response, the Duma barred all Americans from adopting Russian children — a sudden jolt of direct discrimination, as my wife and I had been considering exactly that.

At work, too, not a week seemed to pass without a new law designed to curb free speech. Hastily adopted legislation basically made it illegal to offend any social group — though as wielded by the authorities, the new laws primarily seemed to protect the strong from the weak. Impugning the Soviet Union’s conduct in World War II was illegal. Disrespecting Russia’s ‘‘territorial integrity’’ was illegal. Mentioning drugs or suicide in a way that could be construed as ‘‘instructional’’ was illegal, and prosecutors could use an agency called Roskomnadzor to shut down any website for so much as an unruly user comment. A vile anti-gay law banned speech that ‘‘creates false equivalence between traditional and nontraditional lifestyle.’’ (This in a country whose pop stars’ wardrobes suggest that Russia’s biggest natural resource is rhinestones.) I had to fight Condé Nast’s in-house counsel for the right to publish a positive review of the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra; he objected to the use of the word ‘‘love’’ to describe a same-sex relationship.

The genius of all these laws was in their purposeful inconsistency, which ensured that almost anyone could be silenced at any time; they were designed to be implemented capriciously, to weed out undesirables. Editing a magazine became hazardous to your health — mental and otherwise. GQ’s political columnist, Andrew Ryvkin, was beaten up on the street by two pro-­Putin writers of some renown, Sergei Minaev and Eduard Bagirov. I myself ended up slapping a Tatler editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theater after he wrote anti-­Semitic diatribes about me. This was shaping up to be the most surreal year of my life.

One night, I called Ryvkin with a spur-­of-­the-­moment idea: ‘‘Let’s write Louie, but about me in Moscow.’’ Ryvkin had a similar background to mine (he spent his formative years in Boston) and similar comedic sensibilities; we both worshiped 30 Rock and Louis C.K. Three weeks, a few joints and several pizzas later, we had a pilot. The main character, a neurotic, blocked, broke Brooklyn novelist, comes to Moscow to promote his book, gets Jew-­baited on live TV by a glib Russian oligarch and reconnects with his childhood friend Roman, now an out-­of-­control photographer modeled on Terry Richardson. The friends spend most of the episode crafting an appropriate response to the slur and finally head over to the oligarch’s club to beat him up. When they get there, however, the offender offers the novelist a plum job in Moscow, forcing him to sell out on the spot.

The script was a mishmash of autobiography and anger, filled with profanity, drug use, gay jokes, Nazi jokes and weird structural hiccups. I was venting every frustration of my day job. In a good measure of how little I cared about the pilot’s suitability for Russian TV, I named its protagonist Matt Rushkin, ‘‘Rashka’’ being an émigré’s derogatory term for Russia itself.•

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12 Great 2011 Nonfiction Pieces Online For Free

December 14, 2011 in Misc. | Permalink

A bunch of great articles from this year that made me rethink assertions, informed me or entertained me. All available for free.

  • “Getting Bin Laden” (Nicholas Schmidle, New Yorker): The best long-form journalism of the new century. Perfect writing and editing. Will be read with equal fascination 50 years from now.
  • “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” (Michael Idov, GQ): Intrepid reporter with a deadpan sensibility ventures onto the most insane movie set ever.
  • “Better, Faster. Stronger“ (Rebecca Mead, New Yorker): Wicked portrait of a Silicon Valley self-help guru. Reading this piece is a good way to learn how to write profiles.
  • ‘”The Elusive Big Idea” (Neal Gabler, New York Times): I don’t agree with most of the assertions of this essay, but it’s deeply intelligent and provocative.
  • “Douglas Rushkoff” (Peggy Nelson, HiLowbrow.com): Deep and probing interview with the media ecologist.
  • “Who Invented The Seven-Game Series?“ (Michael Weinreb, Grantland): Reporter asks simple question others gloss over, finds interesting historical and analytical info.
  • “Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead” (Laurie Winer, L.A. Review of Books): Great writing about Sam Zell and the painful decline of the Los Angeles Times.
  • “Show the Monster” (Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker): Brilliant Guillermo del Toro portrait for fans of film or great writing.
  • “The Man Who Inspired Jobs” (Christopher Bonanos, The New York Times): Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land was oddly omitted from Steve Jobs’ obits, but this lucid, insightful essay remedied that oversight. Better yet: Bonanos is apparently working on a book about Polaroid.
  • “All the Angry People“ (George Packer, The New Yorker): The most revealing reporting yet about the genesis and meaning of Occupy Wall Street.

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My 5 Favorite Non-Fiction Articles So Far In 2011

November 7, 2011 in Urban Studies | Permalink

Limited to pieces that are online for free:

  1. “Getting Bin Laden” (Nicholas Schmidle, New Yorker): The best long-form journalism of the new century. Perfect writing and editing. Will be read with equal fascination 50 years from now.
  2. “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” (Michael Idov, GQ): Intrepid reporter with a deadpan sensibility ventures onto the most insane movie set ever.
  3. “Better, Faster. Stronger“ (Rebecca Mead, New Yorker): Wicked portrait of a Silicon Valley self-help guru. Reading this piece is a good way to learn how to write profiles.
  4. ‘”The Elusive Big Idea” (Neal Gabler, New York Times): I don’t agree with most of the assertions of this essay, but it’s deeply intelligent and provocative.
  5. “Who Invented The Seven-Game Series?” (Michael Weinreb, Grantland): Reporter asks simple question others gloss over, finds interesting historical and analytical info.

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“A Pair Of Twins Order Me Out Of My Clothes And Into A 1950s Three-Piece Suit Complete With Sock Garters”

November 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s 4, one of my favorite films of the aughts, was almost indescribably odd. Stranger still, is the follow-up, or the production of it, which has been filming for five years and counting in a Ukranian town, and resembles more a totalitarian state driven by the type of hubris that Herzog and Coppola brought to the jungle, than a mere movie. The opening of Michael Idov’s great GQ article, “The Movie Set That Ate Itself“:

“The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. A movie, sure, but not just that. If the gossip was to be believed, this was the most expansive, complicated, all-consuming film project ever attempted.

A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, was a madman who forced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Others said the project was a cult and everyone involved worked for free. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. No, no, others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, perhaps filmed surreptitiously by hidden cameras. Film critic Stanislav Zelvensky blogged that he expected ‘heads on spikes’ around the encampment.

I have ample time and incentive to rerun these snatches of gossip in my head as my rickety Saab prop plane makes its jittery approach to Kharkov. Another terrible minute later, it’s rolling down an overgrown airfield between rusting husks of Aeroflot planes grounded by the empire’s fall. The airport isn’t much, but at least it hasn’t been taken over by the film. And while my cab driver knows all about the shoot—the production borrowed his friend’s vintage car, he brags without prompting—he doesn’t seem to be in the director’s thrall or employ.

I’m about to write the rumors off as idle blog chatter when I get to the film’s compound itself and, again, find myself ready to believe anything. The set, seen from the outside, is an enormous wooden box jutting directly out of a three-story brick building that houses the film’s vast offices, workshops, and prop warehouses. The wardrobe department alone takes up the entire basement. Here, a pair of twins order me out of my clothes and into a 1950s three-piece suit complete with sock garters, pants that go up to the navel, a fedora, two bricklike brown shoes, an undershirt, and boxers. Black, itchy, and unspeakably ugly, the underwear is enough to trigger Proustian recall of the worst kind in anyone who’s spent any time in the USSR. (I lived in Latvia through high school.) Seventy years of quotidian misery held with one waistband.

The twins, Olya and Lena, see nothing unusual about this hazing ritual for a reporter who’s not going to appear in a single shot of the film—just like they see nothing unusual in the fact that the cameras haven’t rolled for more than a month. After all, the film, tentatively titled Dau, has been in production since 2006 and won’t wrap until 2012, if ever. But within the walls of the set, for the 300 people working on the project—including the fifty or so who live in costume, in character—there is no difference between ‘on’ and ‘off.'”

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“Sumner Redstone Would Only Be Of Interest To Gawker Readers If He Were To Soil His Adult Diapers—On-Camera”

September 27, 2010 in Excerpts, Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"That image of Murdoch dyeing his hair in the sink is indelible—though the coloring may not be."

Michael Idov of New York magazine has a really insightful, colorful profile of acerbic Gawker Media kingpin Nick Denton. The British-born blog titan has been able to predict the next wave in NYC’s tumultuous media landscape as well as anyone over the last few years. An excerpt:

“Eight years into Gawker Media’s existence, the standard line on Denton is still that he’s an outsider of sorts, a rude alien come to torment—and supplant—media civilization as we know it. If you’re Bill Keller, say, or Tina Brown—whose Daily Beast gets one-tenth of Gawker Media’s readership on a good month—it’s much easier to view Denton as an upstart thug from nowhere, as opposed to an equal who’s kicking your ass. That plays directly into Denton’s strategy: Thuggish is the reputation he wants. ‘If I am a cornerstone of the new Establishment, then there is no new Establishment worth talking about,’ he says. ‘The only interesting people are on the West Coast, ‘he adds, then launches into a series of classic shameless Gawker riffs on the old New York media titans. ‘People used to quake when Barry Diller picked up the phone. Now he’s laughable. That image of Murdoch dyeing his hair in the sink is indelible—though the coloring may not be. Sumner Redstone would only be of interest to Gawker readers if he were to soil his adult diapers—on-camera. But the hard truth is that the golden age of New York media is largely over.’”

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