Search Results for: Esquire

25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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Postcard from the (Literal) Edge

Getty / Park Row Books

Erin Khar | Longreads | February 2020 | excerpted from Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me, Park Row Books | 9 minutes (2,436 words)

 

Valentine’s Day 2001

Her mother just looks at her for a long minute, then removes a jade pendant from around her neck and hands it to her daughter. “June, since your baby time, I wear this next to my heart. Now you wear next to yours. It will help you know: I see you. I see you.”

—The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

My mom and I both read The Joy Luck Club when I was seventeen and saw the movie together a few years later. The stories reveal the intricate relationships between mothers and daughters. There was one scene that resonated with us both — one of the mothers finally tells her daughter, “I see you.” Through unspoken words, we understood how this reflected our relationship, or more accurately the hope we had for our relationship. Like the mother in the book, my mother had a jade pendant. It had belonged to her mother. But she didn’t give it to me. Now it was in the pawn shop. She didn’t know it was missing.

What my mom did give me for my twenty-first birthday was a white gold Tiffany ID bracelet that was engraved. It read, I see you. She welled up with tears when she gave it to me and hugged me tighter than she had in years. I loved it but could never bring myself to wear it. I knew she couldn’t see me.

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What If This Is It: Will Huey Lewis Sing Again?

PHOENIX, AZ - OCTOBER 21: Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News performs during Soul Bugs Superjam: The Dap-Kings play The Beatles at Piestewa Stage during day 2 of the 2017 Lost Lake Festival on October 21, 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

Huey Lewis, the polo-shirted, red-suited king of the pop charts during the last throes of pop monoculture in the 1980s, is struggling with hearing problems as his enters his 70s. Will his hearing normalize? As Dave Holmes reveals in this profile at Esquire, it’s anybody’s guess.

Huey was backstage at a News gig in Dallas, and all at once the opening act turned into distortion. “They’re playing, and it sounds like it’s warfare … like there’s an airplane taking off.” He went through with the gig, but even the sound in his in-ear monitors was a jumble. He couldn’t find pitch in his own music. “It was the worst night of my life.” An ear specialist put him on a steroid regimen for twenty-eight days. No change. He saw a rheumatologist, then an immunologist, then an otolaryngologist at Stanford. The best any of them could do was to diagnose it, and barely. “They tell me I have Ménière’s disease, but nobody knows what Ménière’s is. It’s a syndrome based on the symptoms. If you have vertigo, stuffed ears—like it feels like you just got out of a swimming pool—and hearing loss and tinnitus,” all of which Huey has experienced, “then they call it Ménière’s.” He shrugs. “But they don’t know what it is.” They also don’t know what causes it or how to cure it. His doctors have put him on a low-salt diet, but he’s not sure it’s helping. The condition might go away as it came on. It also might not.

Huey wears hearing aids that play a series of five tones when he puts them in each morning—“It’s an F chord,” he tells me—and if he can hear all of them, that’s a level 6 hearing day. Today is his twenty-­fifth level 6 hearing day in a row, a new record. If he racks up another week or two of 6’s, he’ll try to sing along to loud music. “What I got to do is get stabilized for a month, and if this works, then we’ll try a little rehearsal experiment. If that works, then we’ll try a full-blown rehearsal. If that works, then maybe book a gig. But I’m a ways away from that yet.”

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“The Ugliness of Greatness”: A Kobe Bryant Reading List

OAKLAND, CA - JANUARY 14: Kobe Bryant #24 of the Los Angeles Lakers waves to the crowd after being taken out of the game in the fourth quarter against the Golden State Warriors at ORACLE Arena on January 14, 2016 in Oakland, California. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

On the final Sunday in January, Kobe Bryant — a legendary and complex figure within not only basketball and sports but culture writ large — was killed in a helicopter crash on the hills surrounding Calabasas, California. More than three years into his retirement, the ex-Los Angeles Laker was traveling to the Mamba rec center with his teenage daughter, Gianna, for a basketball tournament (seven other individuals were killed as well).

Much has been written about Bryant’s loss, comparing his death to those of Thurman Munson or Roberto Clemente, but with Bryant, the impact — like a fog— is omnipresent. He was drafted by the NBA out of high school, and for certain generational demographics, like millenials and Gen Z, it feels as if there was never a time in which Bryant wasn’t a part of our everyday discourse.

Below is a reading list of articles published in the week-and-a-half since Bryant’s death that address both his sui generis athletic skillset, but also how to talk about a celebrity whose death is more than several paragraphs of any obituary:

1. It Is a Terrible Irony That Kobe Bryant Should Fall From the Sky (Charles P. Pierce, Esquire)

Kobe was the bridge from Michael Jordan to the present generation of NBA superstars, and Pierce explains the brilliance of the Lakers guard, who continually evolved on and off the court.

2. This Is Why Mothers Don’t Sleep (Henry Abbott, True Hoop)

Abbott’s True Hoop was essentially the first true NBA blog, a site you visited at least once a day (and — at maximum — kept open in a tab to continuously refresh), and he ruminates on the toll of Kobe’s death as a father, but also the emotional weight that his wife, Vanessa, must now carry.

3. Two Things Can Be True, But One Is Always Mentioned First (Jeremy Gordon, The Outline)

In 2003, Kobe was accused of raping a 19-year old employee of the Colorado hotel where he was staying. “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me,” she told police. The case was litigated in public for the next year-and-a-half, a period in which the victim’s name was leaked, and ultimately, she chose not to testify at trial. (The Laker settled with his accuser out of court.) Gordon deep-dives into the case, and why it remains relevant — not only in the era of #MeToo, but also in Kobe’s death.

4. How To Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy (Ashley Reese, Jezebel)

More than a decade after the settlement, the accusations became a blip in the life of Kobe Bryant, but the decisions made that night in 2003 need to be remembered, which is why the Washington Post‘s suspension of journalist Felicia Sonmez was so troubling. All Sonmez did was tweet a link to a comprehensive longread about the rape accusation and subsequent media and legal circus, and for that, she was dragged not only on social media but by WaPo’s editorial masthead. Reese manages to weave separate threads — on Kobe, his death, his legacy, and why it’s important to discuss troubling truths — in this compendium on the Lakers star.

5. Kobe Bryant Was Basketball’s Great Storyteller (Louisa Thomas, the New Yorker)

“The ugliness of greatness.” Kobe once mentioned that phrase to Ben McGrath in a 2014 profile for the magazine, and Thomas evaluates Kobe’s life within that context — how the basketball player evolved into the Black Mamba, and how that shift continued into his retirement and, for a moment, looked to alter the rest of his life.

6. What Made Kobe Different (Jonathan Abrams, B/R Mag)

Abrams, who has written extensively about the NBA (and covered Kobe as a cub reporter at the Los Angeles Times), reflects on what the star meant to a generation of not only admirers but also sports writers.

7. More than a number: College players tell their stories about Kobe Bryant inspiring them to wear No. 24 (Matt Norlander, CBS Sports)

During the 2019-2020 men’s college basketball season, there are 181 players who wear a No. 24 jersey. Norlander spoke with dozens of those players to ask how Kobe influenced not only their jersey number and playing styles, but also their lives. According to Vanderbilt’s Aaron Nesmith, a highly-recruited freshman who has worn No. 24 ever since he was in grade school, “One thing I read after Kobe’s passing was that he read the entire NBA rulebook. All of it, like he knew where the refs had to stand and look, so if he needed to get away with a cheap foul, he’d know how to do it. That stuff is admirable. He lived the game because he knew it.”

Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2019. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

The World’s Tallest Dwarf

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 10 minutes (2,750 words)

 
What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.
 
The question at the core of the antihero show has always been what it would take to turn the bad guy — the mobster, the drug kingpin, the Russian spy, the mad and murderous queen — into the hero of the story. And the answer is that our willingness to root for a bad person who does bad things, sometimes to good people, is dependent on a carefully constructed context. Successful antiheroes have all been portrayed in a certain way: as special — particularly skilled at something or somehow different than those around them — and as three-dimensional human beings with unmet desires. They are usually surrounded by even more unsavory antagonists and are invariably trying to survive within an oppressive system they can’t fully understand. Our empathy for them comes in large part from seeing their pain and the forces that oppress them even when they don’t, perhaps especially when they don’t. But our ability to relate to them also hinges on the possibility of redemption, if not its actualization. We see ourselves, however dimly, in antiheroes. Their potential for change is our own. We can stand to watch them do terrible things because we harbor hope that they, and we, can change.    Read more…

Tom Junod Remembers Fred Rogers: “You Were a Child Once, Too”

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At the Atlantic, Tom Junod recalls his friendship with Fred Rogers 16 years after Fred’s death. Junod and Rogers traded 70 emails around the time Junod’s Esquire profile of Rogers, ‘Can You Say…”Hero”?’ was published in 1998. The author considers the movies made about Rogers’ life, as well as how Fred would have responded to today’s routine mass violence and the growing lack of civility in political discourse.

As for Fred: It’s true that he lost, and that the digitization of all human endeavor has devoured his legacy as eagerly as it has devoured everything else. But that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

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I Had a Friend. He Dreamed of Israel.

Illustration by Eléonore Hamelin

Michael Shapiro | Longreads | October 2019 | 28 minutes (7,073 words)

This essay is published in collaboration with The Delacorte Review. You can read a longer, complete version here.

I told people that I was returning to Israel for the first time in thirty-five years to visit a grave and this stopped them, mercifully, from asking why I had been away for so long. This was true; I was going to visit the grave of my best friend, Jonathan Maximon, who had died in 1984 when he was thirty-one. It was also true that I could have gone back in all the years since but for reasons I could not explain to anyone, including myself, I had stayed away.

My wife had twice gone for work, and though we had traveled with our children, we did not take them to Israel, nor send them on Birthright. Then, not long ago, my daughter mentioned that she might be going and while I did not want to intrude on her time, overlapping by a day or so felt like the pretext I needed. Her plans changed but by then I had my ticket.

Jonnie was buried at Yahel, the kibbutz at the southern end of the Negev desert that he had helped found in the late 1970s. I had not been in touch with his wife, Aliza, since his death. I emailed the kibbutz and asked if my message could be passed along. She replied almost immediately. “I am still in Yahel,” she wrote. “Mark my husband, and myself will be happy to meet you.” She and Mark had four grown children. Moriyah, her daughter with Jonnie who had been a year old when he died, now lived in the north and was married with two young sons. He would have been a grandfather.

I was 66 and had not made this trip since Jonnie’s brother called to tell me he was gravely ill. I had just gotten married and was preparing to move to Tokyo. My wife, Susan, told me, “Go.” I had last seen Jonnie seven months earlier. Susan and I were traveling in Egypt and Israel. We took the bus from Jerusalem four hours south to Yahel, which then, like now, felt as if it was in the middle of nowhere. I was so excited to see him that I left my leather jacket on the bus. Hanging over my desk as I write this is a snapshot from that visit. He and I are leaning on a white jeep. He is wearing a San Francisco Fire Department t-shirt that is tight across his broad shoulders. He was always nuts about fire fighters. Together with Aliza and Susan, we went on our only double date to see ”Play it Again, Sam” in the kibbutz cafeteria and as we walked back to their apartment Jonnie told me that I’d be an idiot not to marry Susan because if I didn’t someone else would and quickly. I do not recall his saying this with a smile. Nor was he one to elaborate.

The next time I saw him he was lying in a bed in a dismal ward at Tel HaShomer Hospital near Tel Aviv. A tumor in his spine had paralyzed him from the waist down. His hair was falling out and he was skeletal. Another patient told him, “Get out of this place.” He did, but only to a private room.
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Editor’s Roundtable: Stories About Stories

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On our October 11, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-Checking Matt Giles, and Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads

This week, the editors discuss stories in ProPublica, Wired, and Esquire.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:13 An Unseen Victim of the College Admissions Scandal: The High School Tennis Champion Aced Out by a Billionaire Family. (Daniel Golden and Doris Burke, October 8, 2019, ProPublica/The New Yorker)

14:02 This economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It’s time we all listened. (João Medeiros, October 8, 2019, Wired)

23:00 Signs and Wonders (J.D. Daniels, May 1, 2017, Esquire)

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