Having captured the mean streets of Little Italy and the 19th-century gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese is currently aiming his cameras at a more high-brow Gotham subculture: the New York Review of Books.
On Monday evening, at a small private party commemorating the magazine’s 50th anniversary held in its Greenwich Village offices, Mr. Scorsese, accompanied by a film crew of about a half dozen, interviewed various current and former writers and dropped boom mikes into clusters of casual cocktail chat. A crew will also be filming an event at Town Hall Tuesday night featuring Joan Didion, Michael Chabon, Daniel Mendelsohn, John Banville and other longtime contributors, as well as the magazine’s editor and co-founder, Robert Silvers.
“The party last night and the event this evening are being documented for possible future use to commemorate our 50th anniversary,†Rea Hederman, the magazine€™s publisher, said in an email. “Martin Scorsese, a longstanding reader and admirer of the Review, is lending his time and energy to the project.†Mr. Scorsese’s publicist did not respond to request for comment.
The Town Hall event is unlikely to offer pyrotechnics in the vein of Keith Richards spitting out a lit cigarette mid-solo, a visual high point of Mr. Scorsese’s documentary about the Rolling Stones, “Shine a Light.†But the story of the magazine, which was famously dreamed up during the 1963 New York newspaper strike by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jason Epstein, and Barbara Epstein (Mr. Silvers’s fellow founding editor, who died in 2006) as they we! re all sitting around Ms. Hardwick and Mr. Lowell’s dining room table, has its own share of smoke-filled drama.
In a reminiscence posted on a special 50th anniversary section of the magazine’s Web site, Janet Coleman, who joined as a 21-year-old editorial assistant a few months after the release of the first issue, recalled the tension surrounding Mary McCarthy’s famous 1966 trip to Saigon to report on the war in Vietnam, which the magazine strongly opposed.
“They had sent her a telegram from the Lowells’ and she agreed to go, and now we were waiting to find out when,†Ms. Coleman wrote. “Barbara: smoking like Bette Davis. Bob: peering at, throwing around, stashing away books. Everyone in the room: lighting up, stubbing out, inhaling, coughing, exhaling. The phone rang. I stopped typing. The excitement was great. Bob and Barbara said, “Mary!€ in a fraction of a beat. Within an hour, McCarthy was booked.â€
McCarthy was also among the contributors to the magazine’s first issue, a facsimile of which will be distributed at Town Hall Tuesday night and included in the magazine’s regular August edition. The inaugural issue â€" hailed by the New Yorker as “the best first issue of any magazine ever†â€" also featured contributions from Norman Mailer, W.H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Adrienne Rich, Gore Vidal, William Styron, Lowell, Hardwick and a dozen other eminent writers, none of whom were paid.
