September 2008 Archives

Part 27: Wrapping Up

OK, now we are entering the truly insane and hard-to-chronicle stage. We've got the layout done and you've seen how we look at color proofs for the photos and design. You've seen the story editor's and researcher's comments on the proof, both of which were forwarded to the copy desk to input. Bob also sent a couple of changes along as well. The copy desk input all of those changes and produced the final proof, which is -- as the name suggests -- our last chance to weigh in with any changes. Story editor John Birdsall, managing editor Jake Young, and Jason all took one last look at this version and made their final adjustments, and then ran those tweaks past one another before collecting and inputting them. Mostly this was done over the phone on Saturday, but this exchange will give you a sense of the overall tone. … MORE

Part 26: The Final Layout

Now that the back-and-forth with the hed and dek had subsided (settling on The Kaufman Paradox), I looked to making my final moves with the layout. Normally, I'd like more time to consider a design more carefully, but we had to make do with the remaining time we had. I took into consideration the pacing of the November feature well and the positioning of this story at the end of the magazine. It was definitely calling for a more impactful typographic hit since the well lacked a forceful piece of design done with type only, let alone big type. True, it's a cliché with designers, the "just make the type huge" move, but in this case, I felt like it was warranted. So I made the headline larger and the dek a bit smaller, looking for awkwardness in the way I ragged the copy.
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Part 25: Factcheck

From researcher Rachel Swaby:

My job is to guard the facts, to double-check every statement and make sure no mistakes slip through. I started working on this after receiving Bob's edit, feeding the writer and editor a stream of updates and corrections throughout the process.

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Part 24: The Headline

Generally speaking, the task of writing the headline (or "hed") and subhead (or "dek") falls to our display-copy team of executive editor Bob Cohn, managing editor Jake Young, plus story editors Sarah Fallon and Jon Eilenberg. This time, though, a number of us weren't satisfied with "Puzzle Master," the headline that made it into the layout. Nancy and Jason asked Bob and Jake if we could come up with some alternatives. This is the conversation that followed. By the end, everyone was pretty much signed off, although the dek continued to get tweaked on the final proof.
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Part 23: The Scrub

So now we've been through a first edit, a top edit, and a copy edit. Chris Anderson has read it through and given Jason and Nancy the thumbs-up (whew!). But we're not done yet. After the layout is finished and approved, the story editor fits it -- cuts or (rarely) stretches to fit the allotted space--and sends it on to the "scrub" editor, whose job is to continue polishing, look for any logic errors or reporting holes, identify structural issues, and so on. Here's the scrub edit for this story, below; scrub editor John Birdsall's comments are in blue ink, and Nancy's and Jason's responses are in red. … MORE

Part 22: "The Wrong Theory"

After my disastrous presentation to Chris, I slunk back into work on Tuesday and tried a new tact. I figured I would go completely stark, something strange and awkward. I received a new headline: "Charlie Kaufman, The Director's Cut" and started to play. I threw together a secondary spread, just to have something to work backward from. It looked like this:… MORE

Part 21: Showing the Layout

It's been a crazy week.

We're doing a huge (18-page) infographic as our November cover story and that's taken a sizeable bite out of my time these past few days--so apologies for the lack of updates these past few days. But on September 15, I showed this version of the layout to Bob, Nancy, Jason, Anna and Wyatt. This meeting is called "Presentation" on our tracking sheet; it's typically a point when Wyatt and I are reasonably sure of the design direction--we have a working hed and dek--and live photo selects are placed in a layout.
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Part 20: The Self-Portrait

From Anna Alexander:

Sometime around the first day of the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 5), I lost touch with the publicist.  I hate nagging and constantly emailing/calling, but there comes a point where it becomes necessary. I knew that since he is primarily the film's publicist (Kaufman does not have his own) that he would be in Toronto working like a madman, so I hung tight, just waiting for any self-portrait update.  Scott would pass my desk every morning and his expression was like "anything yet?"  I had nothing.
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Part 19: The Copyedit

From Brian Dustrud, copy editor:

This is our first hardcopy stage. Every edit from here on in will be done mostly on paper, with proofs being handed back and forth from copy editors to researchers to editors. The story's main editor, Nancy Miller, is arbiter of which changes get rejected, which get integrated, and which require further study. As you'll see from my notes on the pages, the copy editor does more than check basic spelling and grammar. It's also my job to point out holes in the logic, imprecise turns of phrase, and other weaknesses, both minor and major, as I see them. And overuse of commas. Nancy then goes over these with the writer, if necessary, and gives it all back to me to enter into the electronic file.

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Part 18: Opener Progress

Overnight, I thought about the opener and reread my previous post. I thought about how to make the content a little more front and center, how to make the opening spread a little more interesting and a little more visually dynamic. Typically, it's pretty easy to recognize a profile's subject--there's usually a photo or an illustration of the protagonist. In this case, there isn't a usable main image (by choice, obviously. I could have just commissioned an illustration of Kaufman, but chose not to. That's the easy way out, plus we were hoping to get a self-portrait of the man.)
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Part 17: Designing the Opener

Time for design. But first, a little about the WIRED design department and how we work. It consists of me, design director Wyatt Mitchell, art directors Carl DeTorres and Maili Holiman, associate art director Margaret Swart, senior designer Christy Sheppard, and contributing designers Walter Baumann and Victor Krummenacher.
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Part 16: Starting the Layout

On September 4, I started thinking seriously about the layout and what the design should look like. Given the troubles we had been having securing a photograph of Charlie, I started leaning toward a design that could live independent of a great portrait or a stylish piece of typography. The other thing on my mind was the GEB undercurrent Jason had tapped into and I started to wonder about running the rough draft in the layout. I put together a sketch and sent it to the gang to gauge their opinion and test its feasibility.  … MORE

Part 15: The Acquisition

From Anna Alexander:

While the publicist was waiting to hear back from Kaufman, I thought I'd start bringing in some additional artwork,  "pick-up" in photo edit speak.  You never know if the editors are suddenly going to want a movie time-line or a sidebar, and you don't want to be scrambling at the end.  The Publicist had sent me a ton of screenshots from Sony Pictures Classics of Synecdoche, New York, which I logged into our Art Tracking database (every photo ever is onfile)- each image gets a name so we can keep track of them, like "16.11FF.kaufman.dl.55089."  "16" is for the Wired year, "11" is November, "FF" is feature, "dl" = digital low resolution, and the last sequence of digits are the art tracking number. I know, fascinating.  I then created a contact sheet for Scott and I to go over and make selects.

I also dove into some stock photography sites to see what was out there, just in case we're unable to get exclusive images and we need reference of Kaufman for an illustration.    I started searching our usual suspects: Getty, Corbis, AP, etc. I've included a sample of what a stock search for Charlie Kaufman looks like from Getty Images.

Part 14: The Edited Draft

From Nancy Miller:

Posted are two versions of our Kaufman story: My revise with Jason's comments/changes/challenges and then the clean version I put together for Wired's executive editor, Bob Cohn, to read.

Right now, I see this story as 85% finished. There are still a few TK's (shorthand for "to come") in need of filling but I'm thinking the piece looks pretty good. There are still a lot of steps to go: Bob's version, with his comments and questions (posting tomorrow), copy editing, fact-checking, art's layout, a process we have here called "scrub," but we'll get to that next week. For now, here's Jason's version and my final (for now) take, presented side-by-side for comparison.

Disclaimer: The piece will be fact-checked and copy-edited soon, but for now, this story, like the previous versions, may contain errors. 

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Part 13: Photo Issues II

From deputy photo editor Anna Alexander:

I'm the photo editor on this experiment. I guess I'll fill you in on the juice of what happens next with the photo shoot attempts.  First, I get the contact info for the subject from the editor.  She gets it from the writer, and busts it back to me. My contact was Sony's publicist--he has requested I not reveal his name, so we'll call him The Publicist.

Contacting the subject for a photo shoot usually takes place somewhere between a green-lit pitch and the rough.  I'm a bit late on my post, so it's not quite chronological. There's a reason I have a degree in photography, not literature.

I usually don't call contacts first if email is provided. If I don't hear back for a bit, I attack by phone.  When I first wrote him, I mentioned that I was aware of Kaufman's "no photo shoot" stance, so I inquired about the possibility of doing a self-portrait.

Meanwhile, Scott remembered one of our senior editors, Adam Rogers, spending some time with the director Spike Jonze at a past Wired event.  Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman worked together on Being John Malkovich, and Jonze was a photographer in his early days.

I'm not going to post any emails between The Publicist and I, but I will post my updates to Scott, Nancy, and Jason regarding any info on shooting Charlie.

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Part 12: The Edit

From Senior Editor Nancy Miller:

Jason posted his rough draft yesterday. Now it's my turn to post my edit. This is what I sent back to him for his first revise. Here are a few things you might find interesting before you jump in:

As you can see from our previous posts, Jason and I discussed this story quite a bit before he actually interviewed Charlie Kaufman. After he met with Kaufman in LA, Jason seemed confident in the story he wanted to write. Those two factors have resulted in a solid rough draft. The structure works, most of the reporting is there (with a few holes to fill in from his Toronto Film Festival trip) and the writing is lively and smart, especially the ending--those last two graphs--are terrific.

Most of my comments and questions (all in italic) are up top. No big architectural work for me on this piece, just nitpicky, line-by-line stuff and a few suggestions here and there.  I recognize with any story, some of my edit suggestions will work, others won't. You'll get to see what worked and what didn't the revise Jason kicks back to me and the subsequent polished version I send along to Wired's executive editor. His revise and that version will appear together in an upcoming post. Stay tuned...

DISCLAIMER: Like the rough draft, this edit has not been fact-checked or copy-edited so may/probably contain factual errors, typos, and other mistakes.   

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Part 11: The Rough Draft

Yes, this is the real, unedited rough draft. At WIRED, we call this an 00. A few words about it from Jason Tanz:

Filing a rough draft always makes me a little queasy, and this one was no exception. I always feel the urge to write a note to my editor explaining the choices I made, stuff to look out for, etc., but usually am able to resist -- really, the editor should be coming to this blind, like any reader would. But for the sake of transparency, and if you'll pardon a little (more) self-indulgence, here are a few of the elements that gave me the most trouble as I tried to write this thing:

1. Making Kaufman work for our magazine -- I live in fear of my editors reading this story and asking "What does this guy have to do with Wired?" Early on, I tried to focus on logic, mathematics, and paradoxes in Kaufman's films, as a way of answering that question before it's asked. We'll see if it works.

2. Striking the right balance -- To be honest, I'm an unabashed Kaufman fan. I also quite liked Synecdoche -- perhaps more than the average moviegoer would. (I've spoken to several who weren't as crazy about it, and a few who were.) I didn't want my fanboysihness to override the story; at the same time, there's an equally pernicious impulse to dump on something just to prove that you AREN'T a fanboy, and I didn't want to fall into that trap either. In the end, I decided that my own opinions about the movie didn't matter; the point is that the reception has been mixed, and Kaufman himself is quite openly anxious about the movie's prospects. That's the story, regardless of what I think.

3. Getting just a little clever -- Kaufman writes (sometimes) about the process of writing. So there was a temptation to do the same within the text of this piece. (To see how obnoxious that could have been, check out my pitch, which succumbed completely to this temptation.) Nancy agreed that I should write this fairly straight. But at the same time, circularity and
recursion were themes that I was addressing in the piece, and I tried to subtlely add a few recursive elements in the draft. It's hard to know when you're beating readers over the head, or when you're being so subtle that 99% will miss it entirely. I still have doubts about the "one of these sentences is false" intro, but left it in for now.

OK, enough yammering. Here's the damn draft. DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A FIRST DRAFT. IT HAS NOT BEEN FACT-CHECKED OR COPY-EDITED, SO MAY/PROBABLY DOES CONTAIN FACTUAL ERRORS, TYPOS, AND OTHER MISTAKES.

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Part 10: Pictures from Synecdoche

Whenever we're doing a feature on a new pop culture release-- be it a movie, a record, a TV show, or game release--we always call in photo reference from the work in discussion. Often, these are just publicity stills that are handed out by the studio. Depending on the needs of the story, one or two of these shots will sometimes make their way into the finished magazine layout, sometimes they'll art a sidebar, and sometimes we simply use them as reference and choose not to print them at all. On September 2, deputy photo editor Anna Alexander requested the stills from Synecdoche. Here's what we got from the film's publicist about two hours later (I've left the WIRED photo-naming conventions on these thumbnails; 16 is for the 16th volume, 11 for the November issue, FF for "feature," Kaufman, well, you get the jist):
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Part 9: The Interview, Writing, and So Forth

Jason interviewed Charlie on August 13. The bad news: We were wrong about the edit suite scene; he wasn't actually doing anything for Jason to observe. But he did invite Jason to join him at the Toronto Film Festival in early September. This was after the magazine's story deadline, but the opportunity to get more access to Kaufman was too good to pass up, so Jason started working on a draft, leaving spaces to fill with Toronto reporting after more time with Charlie.
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Part 8: Photo Issues

At WIRED, we assign almost all of our own original photography, as most major American magazines do. We typically start talking about these photo assignments at one of two points in the process:

If a pitch particularly excites us, someone in the photography or design departments will chirp out a style or a name or a loose suggestion as we walk out of the pitch meeting. Schedules get checked, portfolios are called in, access is confirmed, and the wheels start turning.

Or...

We'll wait until the assignment letter gets distributed by the assigning editor. At which point, the design department coordinator usually sets up an informal meeting between me, design director Wyatt Mitchell, the art director on deck and the photo editor whose expertise or interest has landed her on the story.

But in this case, neither of the above scenarios happened because a red flag went up once our subject agreed to sit for the story. Kaufman does not sit for magazine photo shoots. That posed a problem; we take originality--the look and feel of the magazine--very seriously at WIRED, and without a quality portrait, it would be difficult to run this story at any length. Here's our first conversation about it:

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Insert Meta Joke Here

At the risk of really falling down the rabbit hole of self-aggrandizement, indulge us in this one post where we blog about bloggers blogging about this blog and the mirror blog on Wired.com, Storyboard. Sure Jason, Nancy, and I have pitched this experiment here and there to drum up a little publicity, but who knew it would get to this: … MORE

Part 7: Seeing the Movie, Logistics

So now there's a bit of a black hole, paper-trail wise. (We had not yet decided to do this blog, so weren't keeping very careful records.) After we learned that Kaufman would participate -- and the requisite hour of high-fiving -- we got cracking. The film opens Oct 24, which means we had to get it into our November issue (which hits newsstands October 21). That gave Jason only a few weeks to research and write a rough draft.… MORE

Part 6: The Assignment Letter

We found out on August 5 that Kaufman would participate. After any story is confirmed, the editor sends the writer an assignment letter, an official announcement of when the story is due, and in which issue it is expected to run. The letter goes to the writer (to give some editorial direction), the magazine's top editors (to alert them that the story has been assigned), the photography editors (to start pulling photo reference), and to me and the design staff, so we can start coming up with ideas, calling in portfolios, and spitballing. Nancy Miller wrote the assignment letter for this story, below:
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Part 5: More Shaping, More Brainstorming

Ten days after we first talked about how to shape the story, we continued the conversation.

On 8/4/08 12:18 PM, "Jason Tanz" <Jason_Tanz@wired.com> wrote:
OK, I know we're still not clear on whether this Kaufman story is even happening, but I had a thought over the weekend, and wanted to run it by you.

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