Profile captures link from movie director's roots to his latest film

A friend of mine passed along this L.A. Times feature on Adam Shankman, director of the film 'Rock of Ages.' The piece captures the nostalgia that's partly responsible for Shankman, who directed 'Hairspray,' taking on another rock musical.

Excerpt:

Filmmaker Adam Shankman is posing for a photographer on the corner of San Vicente and Sunset at 10 a.m., trying to give his best rock 'n' roll face, though he readily admits his edge is as sharp as a butter knife. "Yeah, I'm so rock 'n' roll," says the man behind populist movies including "Hairspray" and "The Pacifier" but who's perhaps best known as a judge and choreographer on Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance." "I'm a little Jew from Brentwood."

A moment later, a drug-addled homeless man puts his arm around Shankman. He wants to join the photo. Shankman brushes him off as gracefully as possible. "Dead cockroaches and a meth addict," he says. "What a great way to start the day."

Despite the bleak reality of the Strip, Shankman, 47, has a deep fondness for the boulevard. To him, it's not just the place that launched the Doors, made pink-Corvette driving Angelyne the first reality superstar and was home to the famed Tower Records — it's where he came of age in the late '70s and early '80s.

An oil-spill story you may not have seen

Tom Junod in Esquire writes about the 11 men who died in the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion. This is really interesting because I'd had this thought several times: That the oil spill was a massive tragedy for birds, marine life and people who made their living in the Gulf, and when is BP going to stop the damn spill, how can it possibly keep going on for so long ... but wait, didn't a bunch of people die in the explosion? Good lord, it was embarrassingly easy to forget.

I had neither seen nor read a story about those men, until now. Junod starts out writing about the sympathy shown the pelicans, then cuts to the people who are mad that the pelicans (literallly and symbolically) are getting so much attention. Then:

The people who say these things are not lacking in sympathy or pity. They like pelicans. But they loved their husbands and they loved their sons and they loved their fathers and they loved their fiancés and they loved their friends, and they have suffered the experience of having them taken away. They were taken away when the oil rig they were working on fifty miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on the night of April 20, and then they were taken away again when the tragedy of the environmental apocalypse — the environmental judgment — unleashed by the explosion outstripped the tragedy of their loss. They were taken away when our loss, as a nation whose health is dependent on the health of our oceans, was deemed greater than the loss of those whose individual worlds were obliterated. They have been taken away every time the story has been told, and the story has been told endlessly. There were eleven of them who died on the Deepwater Horizon. They died on the black ocean, in the black night, far away from our eyes or our interest, in untrammeled obscurity.

 He's captured it beautifully, I think.

Speaking of profiles ... how about Tiger Woods?

Gangrey.com linked to Charles Pierce's thoughts on Tiger Woods' crash-and-fallout, and that story included a link to a full profile Pierce did on Woods in 1997.

What Pierce reported for that profile led him to say this in his current piece about the crash and everything that's come after:

"I can't say I'm surprised — either by the allegations or by what's ensued since Friday's wreck. Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger's People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he'd been born married."

Given the events of the past week, Pierce's 12-year-old profile of Woods would seem to be timely reading.

On profiles

Notes from yesterday's video session with Jacqui on profiles:

• They bring personality into the newspaper; most readers learn about a subject better if it's attached to a person.
• Profiles demand great interviewing; require journalists to observe (describe people and place, set characters in a place)
• You have to report well around the person so when you characterize or explain motivation, you have it nailed down
• Doing profiles teaches responsibility; you have to have it right

Key types of profiles

• Nano-profiles -- a way to build character into a story even if the story is not all about the person. You bring someone to life in a paragraph or two; tell us about someone's character or values in the moment.
• Cradle-current profiles -- seldom as necessary as we think they are. negatives are that they take too long to do, take up a lot of space and often read like resumes. Strive to do profiles as internal resumes rather than external ones.
  
• Niche profile -- develop who a person is at a key point in time. Pick the defining moments in their life (not their whole life); your profile then gets much more narrow. Many profiles spend too much time on back story; condense the resume stuff to a couple grafs in a story or into a box. Get dialogue, not quotes, to reveal someone's essence.
  

Tips for interviewing for profiles

• Props are helpful. Get people to tell you the stories behind things in their office or their home. Look for things they can tell you about, instead of getting them to answer direct questions.
• Use storyteller questions to put people into the timeline of their own life. Where were you when this huge event happened? Tell me about the day. When did you get up? What did you wear that day? What did you eat for breakfast? And so on. You want to build scenes.
• When you ask those questions -- say, what did you eat for breakfast -- ask more to get greater detail (what kind of cereal? in what kind of bowl? did you drink the milk out of the bowl after you were done? and so on.)
  

Timeline reporting technique

• Build two, maybe three timelines: One, the classic resume of the person; two, the defining moments in that person's life; three, what's going on in culture or society that provides the backdrop to the person you're profiling. Use those to build your story.

A little more later.

Virtual handout on reporting/writing profiles

Hey all, Jacqui sent an edited version of a presentation on profiles that she gave at the Nieman Narrative conference in 2003.

For those who missed our video session with her today, I'll blog on it Tuesday. But the doc she sent along covers a chunk of what she talked about today.

Covering what some consider the 'fringe' demands our best

This story hit home with me. It's not a great narrative, or even a great feature story. It's The Washington Post's ombudsman explaining why he thinks the paper was doing its job when it did a takeout on one of the most visible leaders of the "Birther" movement.

The Post caught flack for story because many people -- readers (and journalists, too, I'm sure) -- think the "Birther" people are wackos, and giving them ink gives them credibility, and giving them credibility is wrong and could even be dangerous.

We caught the same kind of flack a couple weeks ago when we put a Twitter gadget online to pull in tweets from an anti-health-bill rally in D.C.

"why are you covering this like it's a legitimate story?" AdamBeck5 asked. I responded (on behalf of the YDR account): "There were York County voices in a national debate about a huge issue that might be resolved in a couple of days. Seemed timely."

The Twitter widget is its own animal; it's basically just a ticker of opinions and thoughts on a particular topic. But I think it's critical for us to remember that, when we report on controversial issues, people or organizations, we ask questions that need to be asked and answered, and we tell stories about why people are acting in the way they are. If we do those stories well -- if we have context, if the tone is right, if we aim to shed light on the issue and the actors -- we are doing our job.

In fact, in a way, we are doing the best work we can possibly do. People are doing things, trying to accomplish things -- why? what does it mean? who agrees with them? who opposes them? What does this tell us about our society and culture?

Sometimes we assess a policy stance or a line of thought or a course of action -- e.g., the "Birther" movement -- as being so off the charts that to treat it seriously is to undercut ourselves as serious journalists. My argument here is that we do exactly the opposite; we make ourselves indispensable.

The key is to get it right. And to do that, the reporting has to be deep; the writing must tell a true story, keeping spin and lies out; and the piece must not have, as its goal, to discredit its subjects. And to do all that, we have to shed the idea that we're wasting our time on a fringe element that we shouldn't be "legitimizing." We are, in fact, doing good journalism.

Profile of a dying man

Edwin Shneidman was born in York and went on to be a major voice in suicide prevention, and in how our culture thinks about/talks about death.

We're not sure (yet) whether he lived here for any extended period of time, but in doing some rooting around online, I came across this excellent story about Shneidman facing his own death.

It's by Thomas Curwen of the L.A. Times, who you may remember has appeared in this blog before, related to a great story about a grizzly attack. He answered questions for us about what became a Pulitzer finalist.

This time the conflict is much more subtle, and thus more challenging to capture. Look at the way he puts you in the scene for the first several grafs, and then study the language and the pace he uses in the 10th through 13th grafs to tell you what the story's about. Thoughts?

A little bit of Jack Hart

I just started Jack Hart's book on writing, and he mentioned Tom Hallman, the Oregonian's Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. So that's an excuse to link to some Hallman stuff like The Boy Behind the Mask and the classic Life of a Salesman, and to say that you won't be sorry if you read both of those stories right now, and to shed a little light on Hallman via Hart, the Oregonian's writing coach.

Years ago Hart posted drafts of Hallman stories online, as a way of shattering the idea that there's some kind of magic to great writing that allows people like Hallman to instantly write awesome stories while the rest of us stare slack-jawed and drooling and wondering how he did it and knowing we'll never find out.

"Tom's fellow journalists were astounded to see how far the story developed over the last three drafts he produced. They, too, had been victims of the writing mystique, assuming that someone of Tom's accomplishment would spin webs of gold the first time his fingers hit the keyboard. What they saw, instead, was a damned good writer hard at work, applying his method and honing his craft.
"Tom's first draft was just that, an initial run at the story that mixed great promise with plenty of disappointments. The second draft tied up loose ends, tweaked the structure, and sharpened the character development. The third polished the language, refined the imagery, and pushed through to the final level of excellence. Seeing that progression, one editor told me, was the most instructive lesson he'd ever had in newspaper writing."

Pinpoint characterization in 2 grafs

In 79 words -- the first two paragraphs of today's 1a story -- Doreen Carvajal and Caroline Brothers of the New York Times nailed the guy suspected of causing a $7 billion banking loss in France:

"PARIS — Jérôme Kerviel was too middling to be considered a loser. Until he was charged by Société Générale with perpetrating the biggest fraud of its kind in banking history, there was nothing superlative about him.

He failed in a bid for town council in his 20s; he never rose higher than a green belt, a midlevel rank, after years of judo training — because of his bad knees; and he attended an average college where he earned respectable but unremarkable grades."

Is that great or what? As an exercise, deconstruct those two grafs. You know the reporters backgrounded the guy, and what they have seems to come from basic backgrounding. But they made it sing. How? What decisions do you think they made about what details to use, and how to frame those details, that reflected the unusual (and perhaps even stunning) nature of this story?

I wonder if ...

Check out this piece by a Florida Times-Union columnist. It's a tongue-in-cheek column about what a "lifestyle" column by Larry King would be like. (You certainly don't have to read very much of it to get the point).

But it got me wondering ... I wonder if the columnist was doing a profile of King, could the story have been written like King writes his columns (annoying as that is)? And that got me wondering, if you were profiling anyone who had a strong or specific style of writing or speaking, could you write the profile in that way, as a way of having your reader learn about the person you're writing about?

When I worked at the Roanoke Times in Virginia I got to know a Va. Tech football booster named Dave 'Mudcat' Saunders, or just 'Mud' (and for trivia-minded football fans, he would give you his phone number as '989-Bruce Smith/Bruce Smith). Anyway, Mud was a real estate developer who talked loud, all the time. A features reporter did a profile on him and when it came out, all of his dialogue was all uppercase throughout the story.

It made me laugh. That was Mud; she'd captured a distinctive part of his personality.

Just got me wondering about next time one of you is doing a profile, look for something distinctive about the person's style and consider how, in the story, you can bring that out.

Thoughts?

Profiles and a profile

If you enjoy good profiles, you know of Susan Orlean and Mark Singer. Someone posted their comments at the New Yorker Festival on sportsjournalists.com, and I figured I'd pass them along. I was especially interested in Orlean's thoughts on the reporting process. Who needs questions anyway?

Also, the New Yorker ran a profile of David Simon, the author of perhaps the ultimate narrative non-fiction, "Homicide" and co-creator of HBO's "The Wire." You can find that here.

From SJ:

Good friend of mine attended The New Yorker Festival last weekend, and went to the "master class" in profile writing with Mark Singer and Susan Orlean. He took notes and shared them with me. Thought they might be worth sharing with the crowd here.

In chronological order, and without commentary, here's what they said that he deemed worthy enough to write down:

-The most important thing is to be able to see the profile subject doing what it is they do. Just observe, don't ask questions.

-Susan Orlean: "I don't ask questions generally. I don't have any good questions." She said she is more inclined to figure someone out obliquely and to be around them so much that they forget she's there. It sometimes gets to the point that she says so little the subject begins to think Orlean is in over her head. She says they think, "Oh, that poor girl. She has no idea what she's doing." That's a good thing.

-Construct your reporting for a profile exactly the way you would go about making a friend. Get to know them the way you would know a person in your real life.

-Mark Singer: If you can't tell a story out of your head (because you have come to know the person so well), then you're not ready to write.

-Find subcultures, and use individuals as ways to write about these small worlds.

-Singer: "I take an insane amount of notes." He takes his laptop everywhere (including into uranium mines, etc.) and just acts as a stenographer for the conversation. It helps that he's a really good typer.

-Singer: Profiles must have a chronological spine from which things branch off. You better have a damn good reason to break that chronology.

-Orlean: "The lede has to be absolutely seductive. It's a strip-tease and you have to start with your bra."

-Orlean: She said it's surprising that she and Tina Brown are such good friends because they take exactly opposite approaches to profiles. Tina Brown's approach is to find someone interesting (like a celebrity) and tell their story. Susan Orlean prefers to find subjects
that most people would think they would never find interesting, and then make them interesting.

-Orlean said she keeps a copy of Mark Singer's book "Mr. Personality" on her desk, and whenever she's stuck she flips through it and reads passages. She uses it so much that she's on her third copy.

-Singer: "The best way to approach one of those Rolling Stone-style interviews [in which you are given 45 minutes with a celebrity in a hotel room] is to shoot yourself in the head."

-Singer said he has stopped writing celebrity profiles, because he hates them, but he told some funny stories about hanging out with Donald Trump for a profile. Before giving him something juicy, Trump would often say, "This is off the record, but you can use it."

And when Singer asked Trump what he considers ideal company, Trump said, "A total piece of ass." Singer wrote in the piece that Trump is someone who is "unmolested by the rumblings of a soul." Critics thought that was harsh and wondered how Singer could know such a thing. Singer said, "I inferred."

Reading about writing

We just got two new books for our library (thanks, Joan). They are:

"Telling True Stories: A nonfiction writers' guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University" -- edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call. Essay after essay from great writers like Tom Wolfe, Susan Orlean, Tracy Kidder, Lane DeGregory, Jon Franklin and Tom French about everything from structure to ethics to editing.

"Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America" -- narrative nonfiction from Laura Wexler. In 1946, four black people are killed in Georgia, "a murder so brutal it stunned the nation and motivated President Harry Truman to put civil rights at the forefront of his national agenda," according to her Web site.

They join the other books on writing we've gotten for the newsroom this year. Here's a reminder that they're available for you to check out & read:

"On Writing" -- Stephen King
"Ernest Hemingway on writing" -- Larry W. Phillips
"Bird by Bird" -- Anne Lamott