The Vulture Transcript: ‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz
Hurwitz offers serious advice on creativity and writing, as well as a brief history of how he came to cast actors like Jason Bateman and Michael Cera:
“And Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you please try to track him down.’ Two weeks went by, and we’d seen all these — you know, kid actors in Hollywood, a lot of them come up through that Disney channel, or through — back then it was Barney. So you get really, like, these hammy kids. Precocious, you know. So I’m waiting to hear, and finally the casting director says to me, ‘great news, Michael Cera likes the script.’ And I’m like, ‘who’s Michael Cera?’ ‘The kid that you wanted us to get.’ ‘That was Michael Cera? We’ve been waiting to see whether this 12-year-old likes the material? Good, uh, I’m glad he likes the material.’ And, you know, that’s Michael Cera — you know what I mean? Only Michael Cera would be as a 12-year-old, ‘Yeah, I like this. This is good.’ It’s such an important part — television is so much about continuing to work with people, and I mean, that was just fortune. All of them.”
The War of Rape
A rape allegation helps change laws to aid victims. But what actually happened? The reporter on how the media covers stories:
“In June 2012, I attended the Washington, D.C., premier of Hot Coffee, along with Al Franken. During the event, producer Susan Saladoff informed the audience that the Jones trial was under way. Since I was unable to cover the trial in person, the dates had slipped my mind. But as I walked out of the theater and listened to people fuming about the injustice heaped on Jones and ticking off the damning evidence—the shipping container, the lost rape kit, etc.—I decided to look at the trial records to see what sort of smoking guns Jones’s lawyers had come up with.
“As it turned out, I found smoking guns, but not of the sort I was expecting.”
Are We Puppets in a Wired World?
A look back, and ahead, at how the Internet is evolving to capture our data—and what organizations will do with it next:
“There is no doubt that the Internet—that undistinguished complex of wires and switches—has changed how we think and what we value and how we relate to one another, as it has made the world simultaneously smaller and wider. Online connectivity has spread throughout the world, bringing that world closer together, and with it the promise, if not to level the playing field between rich and poor, corporations and individuals, then to make it less uneven. There is so much that has been good—which is to say useful, entertaining, inspiring, informative, lucrative, fun—about the evolution of the World Wide Web that questions about equity and inequality may seem to be beside the point.”
Keep the Things You Forgot: An Elliott Smith Oral History
Ten years after the singer-songwriter’s death, friends and bandmates tell the story of his life and career:
“I had a copy of the finished cassette on me all the time and I was listening to it all the time. I had a lot of friends at Sub Pop and Matador and Cavity Search and all these record labels, and I was hanging out with them because I was promoting [Heatmiser], and I needed these labels to put their bands on tour with my band, but I didn’t burst into Cavity Search Records like, ‘You have to play this! It’s the best thing you’ve ever heard and you need to release it right now.’ I was probably just like, ‘I’ve got this solo cassette by Elliott.’ ‘What? Elliott does solo stuff?’ I put it on and their jaws dropped. They released it without changing a thing. That’s Roman Candle.”
‘It Is An Opportunity for Great Joy’: The Power of Narration & Medicine
Jalees Rehman, a cell biologist and physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on his grandfather’s surgery, and what he learned about humanity and healing:
“Since that time I spent with my grandfather and the other patients on the eye ward, I have associated medicine with narration. All humans want to be narrators, but many have difficulties finding listeners. Illness is often a time of vulnerability and loneliness. Narrating stories during this time of vulnerability is a way to connect to fellow human beings, which helps overcome the loneliness. The listeners can be family members, friends or even strangers. Unfortunately, many people who are ill do not have access to family members or friends who are willing to listen. This is the reason why healthcare professionals such as nurses or physicians can serve a very important role.”
Syria’s News Smugglers
Who’s really covering Syria—and who’s funding them? Shaer meets the citizen journalists and upstart news organizations reporting on the civil war, and raises questions about what’s motivating their work:
"One of the reporters changed the channel on a nearby television to CNN. ‘Every Western media organization had an agenda,’ said Mohammed. ‘CNN is always talking about ISIS, Al Nusra, Islamists, Al Qaeda. But they never talk about humanitarian aid.’
“Earlier, when I had asked Mohammed what he wished to see in Syria, he had answered quickly: ‘A modern Islamic state.’ But when I pointed out that Nashet also had an agenda, the room grew hushed and tense. ‘CIA,’ a reporter sitting behind me whispered accusingly. Sami motioned me to leave. Outside, he remarked, ‘You can’t have that kind of place if you don’t have a backer with a big agenda.’”
Now We Are Five
David Sedaris and his family gather at a beach house in North Carolina, for the first time since his sister’s suicide:
“Even if you weren’t getting along with Tiffany at the time, you couldn’t deny the show she put on—the dramatic entrances, the non-stop, professional-grade insults, the chaos she’d inevitably leave in her wake. One day she’d throw a dish at you and the next she’d create a stunning mosaic made of the shards. When allegiances with one brother or sister flamed out, she’d take up with someone else. At no time did she get along with everybody, but there was always someone she was in contact with. Toward the end, it was Lisa, but before that we’d all had our turn.”
My Life As a Young Thug
Mike Tyson reflects on a childhood spent on the streets of Brooklyn, being bullied, getting into fights and stealing—and then meeting a man who would change his life:
"We sat down, and Cus told me he couldn’t believe I was only 13 years old. And then he told me what my future would be. ‘If you listen to me, I can make you the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.’
“Fuck, how could he know that shit? I thought he was a pervert. In the world I came from, people do shit like that when they want to perv out on you. I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard anyone say nice things about me before. I wanted to stay around this old guy because I liked the way he made me feel. I’d later realize that this was Cus’s psychology. You give a weak man some strength, and he becomes addicted.”
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
A class of students attending José Urbina López Primary School in Matamoros, Mexico had little access to the internet, broken classroom equipment, and difficult living situations. Their teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa, helped them succeed in extraordinary ways using a radical teaching method:
“In Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions. ‘The volume of a square-based prism is the area of the base times the height. The volume of a square-based pyramid is that formula divided by three,’ he said one morning. ‘Why do you think that is?’
“He walked around the room, saying little. It was fascinating to watch the kids approach the answer. They were working in teams and had models of various shapes to look at and play with. The team led by Usiel Lemus Aquino, a short boy with an ever-present hopeful expression, hit on the idea of drawing the different shapes—prisms and pyramids. By layering the drawings on top of each other, they began to divine the answer. Juárez Correa let the kids talk freely. It was a noisy, slightly chaotic environment—exactly the opposite of the sort of factory-friendly discipline that teachers were expected to impose. But within 20 minutes, they had come up with the answer.
“‘Three pyramids fit in one prism,’ Usiel observed, speaking for the group. ‘So the volume of a pyramid must be the volume of a prism divided by three.'”
The Summer I Tried To Save Memphis
Saeed Jones on a painful memory of visiting his grandmother when he was a teenager—and what then happened at her church:
"My grandmother and I still haven’t spoken about what happened during the summer of 1999, or why it was the last time I visited her by myself, and how it came to be that she watched a pastor put a curse on her youngest daughter.
“Mom, a single parent working two jobs in Lewisville, Texas, sent me to Memphis each year because she couldn’t afford to take care of me when I was out of school. During these summer visits, my grandmother took me to Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday. She introduced me to people as ‘Saeed, my grandbaby visiting from Texas.’ Her friends would lean down with one hand holding up their extravagant church hats and slip me a strawberry hard candy. I didn’t miss those candies or church introductions until they were suddenly replaced with a new introduction the summer I was 13: ‘This is my grandson, Saeed. His mother is Buddhist.’ She said it like she didn’t know a sentence like that could electrify the air in any Southern church.”
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