Eye to Eye with Gay Talese: A Q&A with Adam Harrison Levy

http://www.vimeo.com/17605305

Author and New Journalism legend Gay Talese visited the D-Crit department on Monday November 29 for a Q&A with Adam Harrison Levy—a special event for D-Crit students, faculty, graduates and D-Crit guest lecturers. Watch a video of the event, in which Talese discusses the art of the profile, drawing examples from his newest piece in The New Yorker about opera singer Marina Poplavskaya, as well as his classic Esquire essay “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

Gay Talese was a reporter for the New York Times from 1956 to 1965, and since then he has written for the Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other national publications. His groundbreaking article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was named the “best story Esquire ever published,” and he was credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called “The New Journalism.” Among his most recent books, A Writer’s Life, was published by Knopf in 2006, and a collection of his sports writing, The Silent Season of a Hero, was published by Walker & Company in September 2010.

Adam Harrison Levy is a writer and freelance documentary film producer and director. For the past 15 years, he has worked on a wide range of historical and arts films, primarily for the BBC. He was the U.S. producer for Selling the Sixties, a cultural history of the world of advertising in New York in the early 1960s, as well as for the BBC films Close Up, about the artist Chuck Close, and David Ogilvy: Original Mad Man. For the BBC and Channel 4 he has produced and directed countless interviews with a wide range of actors, writers, musicians and film-makers.

For some background reading, try:

One of the most famous magazine articles of all time, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
And a selection of his essays here.