Bonus: “The French Dispatch” Reads The New Yorker

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Wes Anderson’s new film, “The French Dispatch,” is about a magazine, and it was inspired by Anderson’s long-standing love of The New Yorker. In this special episode, introduced by the articles editor Susan Morrison, cast members read excerpts from classic works associated with the magazine. Bill Murray reads a letter from the editor Harold Ross to an angry writer, Steve Park reads James Thurber, and Elisabeth Moss reads E. B. White. Owen Wilson reads Joseph Mitchell’s piece on rats; Frances McDormand reads Mavis Gallant’s record of the 1968 student uprising in Paris; Tilda Swinton reads a Calvin Tomkins art-world profile; and Jeffrey Wright reads James Baldwin’s “Equal in Paris,” a remarkable indictment of French institutions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a bonus episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Susan Morrison, the articles editor at The New Yorker, and I'm going to be your host for this special installment.
0:12.0	Wes Anderson has a new movie out this fall. It's called The French Dispatch, and it concerns the doings of a weekly magazine called the French Dispatch that is uncannily
0:21.9	like the New Yorker.
0:23.3	Over the next 10 years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time
0:28.4	and transformed picnic into the French dispatch, a factual weekly report on the subjects of world
0:36.0	politics, the arts high and low, fashion,
0:39.6	fancy cuisine, fine drink, and diverse stories of human interests set in Faraway Cartieres.
0:47.2	He brought the world to Kansas.
0:50.9	It's an anthology film, presenting four stories from the French dispatch, each of them an homage to a classic piece from the New Yorker's past.
1:00.5	Travelogues, political reportage, food reviews. Anderson has collected some of those stories in a new anthology called An Editor's Burial, which you might think of as a kind of literary soundtrack.
1:13.6	And this week, as a bonus,
1:15.3	we've got the stars of the French dispatch
1:17.3	to read some of the classic New Yorker pieces in that collection.
1:23.2	Shrink the masked head, cut some ads,
1:25.3	and tell the foreman to buy more paper.
1:27.2	I'm not killing anybody.
1:31.3	Bill Murray's character in the movie, Arthur Howitzer Jr.,
1:35.3	the French Dispatch's editor and founder, is sort of one part Harold Ross, who was the New Yorker's founder,
1:42.3	and one part William Sean, who was the New Yorker's
1:45.4	second editor. It's kind of interesting, is that Bill Murray was actually friendly with Sean. He once
1:51.0	cleared an elevator for him, because Sean liked to ride an elevator all by himself.
1:56.4	And Murray also was friendly with Sean's companion and New Yorker writer, Lillian Ross.
	...

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