Epstein Talks NYRB @ HT2FF
“The 50 Year Argument” by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, screened at the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, offers proof not just of the vitality of the documentary medium, but of the growing importance of the festival itself.
This year’s program included a gala honoring Barbara Kopple, the award-winning director of films such as “Harlan County USA,” a film by Michael Apted, as well as “The 50 Year Argument,” an examination of The New York Review of Books. The screening was followed by a discussion with Jason Epstein, one of the publication’s founders.
The title refers to a toast at the beginning of the film, given at the celebration of the journal’s 50th year in 2013. Mr. Epstein is one of the first of several people involved with the publication who is interviewed for the documentary. He has had a house in Sag Harbor since the 1970s.
In the film, he recalls that the magazine came out of a perfect storm of events. He and his wife at the time, Barbara Epstein, were having dinner with their neighbors Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Ms. Hardwick had just launched an attack on The New York Times Book Review, calling it a “provincial literary journal” in Harper’s, where Robert Silvers was an editor. The 1963 newspaper strike was depriving the city of both news outlets and a place to advertise books. Mr. Epstein, an editor at Random House, sensed an opportunity, realizing it would be the only time a publication that competed with The Times Book Review could be launched. Among the city’s and even the world’s intelligentsia, it was a hit from the beginning.
Ms. Epstein and Mr. Silvers agreed to be co-editors. Mr. Lowell and Ms. Hardwick were contributors. They realized it was a chance to “do what we wanted, any way” they wanted, as Mr. Silvers says in the film.
This mission included being firebrands for original and rigorous intellectual thought, and adopting positions and viewpoints outside of the mainstream that more often than not proved themselves to be correct. The New York Review published early critiques of American involvement in Vietnam and Iraq, and was among the first to criticize the arrest and the scapegoating of a group of young African-American and Latino males for the brutal attack on the Central Park jogger in 1989.
Those arrested that night for the crime were exonerated in 2002 when the actual rapist came forward and DNA testing backed up his admission of guilt. They had already served their sentences. In September, they were awarded a $41 million civil rights settlement. Joan Didion understood early on that the case against them was not supported by the evidence. She saw it as a hysterical reaction about crime in the city and the deepest fears of its residents, which resulted in a need to put someone, anyone away. In the film she is interviewed about the article she wrote about the miscarriage of justice as well as her close but unconventional editorial relationship with Mr. Silvers.
After the screening, Mr. Epstein, who is now in his 80s and hard of hearing, leaned close to Andrew Botsford, one of the hosts of the festival, and told him that he liked the film over all. After seeing it for the third time, however, he was even more critical of the fact that it failed to accurately portray his late ex-wife’s contribution to the publication. Ms. Epstein died in 2006. There is some discussion of her in the film, but in the end the viewer walks away with the strong impression that the journal is and always was Mr. Silvers’s baby.
In the early days, Ms. Epstein would work until the school day ended, come home to be with her children, and then return to the office after 7 p.m. and work some more. The documentary, according to Mr. Epstein, made it seem as if Mr. Silvers did much of the work on his own, when in fact he did it jointly with Ms. Epstein for almost all of the 50 years covered by the film. The problem was that there was no footage of her doing so and no stills, because she was naturally camera shy.
The footage of Mr. Silvers was taken in the year surrounding the anniversary and shows a man from an analog time adapting, in his way, to the contemporary workplace. It captures an office buried in paper and bound volumes. No e-books here. When Mr. Silvers communicates digitally, he dictates, as he likely always did, to an assistant who types up the email for him. The younger staffers who run the publication’s blog say in the film that many of the writers who have adapted to the blog form still send their submissions in by fax for others to typeset.
Asked what will happen when Mr. Silvers, who is a spry 84, is no longer at the helm, Mr. Epstein was dismissive. “Bob is immortal. He will always be there,” he said with a smile.
Most of the film consists of present-day interviews or of footage of writers reading from their stories, but the archival footage the directors have selected is a treat. Norman Mailer, a longtime writer for the journal before his death in 2007, is shown boxing, introducing Mr. Lowell as if he were at a prize fight, and tangling with Susan Sontag at a forum on feminism. The film also utilizes clips from the famous literary smackdown between Gore Vidal and Mailer on Dick Cavett’s show that started with a head butt Mailer gave Vidal in the green room. It should be noted that all of those mentioned wrote for The New York Review.
Other early writers were W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Lilian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. The website states that the circulation is 135,000, but Mr. Silvers adds about 10,000 to that figure in the film, stating that at one point Ms. Epstein decided that was the ideal number to sustain it. Her position was that striving for any more growth would never justify itself in advertising revenues.
In the end, if the film is about, as Colm Toibin puts it, capturing “the sensuality of ideas” that The New York Review has offered over the years, it does a respectable job of seduction.