Back in 2009, documentary filmmaker Andrew Rossi was amazed by how many media watchers were predicting the imminent demise of the print edition of the New York Times, the paper that for more than 150 years had represented the gold standard in daily print journalism.
Using celebrated media reporter David Carr as his entrée, he decided to chronicle the enterprise, with the result being "Page One: Inside the New York Times," a documentary that opened last week in New York and screens on Wednesday night at the Los Angeles Film Festival, just prior to its L.A. opening.
"There were so many smart people at that moment talking about the great digital revolution, and saying, 'There's gonna be a lot of dead bodies, and if the Times is one of them, so be it,'" Rossi said. "And that stuck me as a very strange position for smart people to be taking."
Warnings of the Times' demise proved to be unfounded, though the paper is still struggling with its online strategy.
And while it farmed out its own review of the film to non-staffer Michael Kinsley, who panned the film, Carr has been an enthusiastic supporter, and Rossi insists that most other Times staffers have been similarly positve.
The following are excerpts from separate interviews with Rossi (left) and Carr (below), in which they talked to TheWrap about the beginnings of what Carr thought was a bad idea, the time the filmmaker went too far, and whether the New York Times needs to stay in print in order to remain the New York Times.
GENESIS
Andrew Rossi: I interviewed David for a movie I was doing for HBO, and our conversation, which was ostensibly about new media and social media and all the wonderful things about it, kept circling back to this notion of where is the place for legacy media in that future. And immediately this light bulb went off, and I said to him on the spot, "What if we did a movie about you, and about the New York Times?"
David Carr: I thought it was a terrible idea. And I said, "Great, go ask my bosses," thinking I'm going to get rid of him that way. And they said OK. I've never asked [editor] Bill [Keller] why he did that.
After Andrew was with me for four or five days, I was just losing my marbles. I finally said, "You should broaden out to some of my other colleagues, and you and I should spend a little less quality time together."
Rossi: It ended up being a great thing that he suggested that he didn’t want to be the sole subject of the film. Because the message ultimately is about this journalistic process, about creating stories that are engaged in by editors and writers and this whole panoply of resources.
