David Brooks once wrote that if you care about what happens inside Conde Nast you’re not like most people. But now it appears that a lot more scrutiny is headed in the direction of the magazine publisher, because it was just revealed that Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter accepted a $100,000 payout from producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer for suggesting the screen adaptation of “A Beautiful Mind.”
I don’t really like Carter or his grandstanding politics, but I concede VF is an excellent magazine, the only place where you can find analysis of, say, the Tarantino/Uma relationship side-by-side with an Iraq dispatch from Christopher Hitchens. And I can’t get too outraged by Carter’s profiteering from the movies he’s supposed to be covering, because it’s not like that’s not what he’s been doing for a decade anyway, by putting Gwyneth on the cover whenever she has a new Miramax movie out. The Howard/Grazer deal was nothing new; Graydon crossed the journalist/publicist threshold years ago.
What I am upset with Carter about is that “A Beautiful Mind”- a mawkish and insulting film that trivialized mental illness and sought to couple it with laughable action-adventure, and is probably the worst movie ever to win the Best Picture Oscar- was his idea.
Posted by Stephen Silver at May 14, 2004 02:07 PMIt also completely ignored Nash's obvious homosexuality. Which I think is just WRONG. They decided that it was going to be a "love story", and God forbid that love stories should have something like THAT involved.
Stupid.
Posted by: red at May 17, 2004 10:32 AM