David Carr, Andrew Rossi Talk ‘Page One,’ Gawker, and the Future of Newspapers

By Andy Mannix City Pages, Minneapolist/St. Paul Last night, the documentary “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times” premiered at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. The movie stars Minneapolis alt-weekly alumnus David Carr, who is now the Times’ brashest media writer. We caught up with Carr and film director Andrew Rossi before the showing.   City Pages: Why do you think this story is best told as a movie rather than, say, a book? Andrew Rossi: I think it’s the ability to see David in the flesh. The incredibly handsome man sitting next to me. David Carr: You replaced me with this old homeless guy! AR: You know, otherwise we’d need to have Hardy-Boy-style illustrations inside of the book…No, I’ve always been attracted to film as a medium that really succeeds in bringing something to life. I think that when you get journalists in an environment and in a period when the stakes are really high, which they were because of the economic conditions affecting newspapers, then you can really get some tremendous cinematic moments. DC: I told Andrew that this is not the stuff of movies. You have middle-aged people typing in cubes with headsets on. And I think he proved me a liar. I think it looks and walks and talks like a movie, and the nice thing is through the magic of editing, all the broken plays, all the quotidian aspects of what I do and what you do, all the non-stories that you have to write anyway, you don’t have to look at them. It’s just like duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, Everything’s going along. It doesn’t show me wandering around having no idea what I was doing, whether my story would work or not. It looks so much more heroic than what we actually do. To view entire article, please click on the following link:http://blogs.citypages.com/dressingroom/2011/04/david_carr_andr.php