Recently on the Arts Beat blog, Dwight Garner recommended three collections of classic celebrity profiles — all of which, he notes, were "written before the celebrity-industrial complex was fully formed, when a journalist could still push past an artist's P.R. phalanx and come back with a story that possessed real feeling and offbeat detail." (The books in question are Rex Reed's "People Are Crazy Here," published 1974; Kenneth Tynan's "The Sound of Two Hands Clapping," published 1975; and Michael Lydon's "Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock 'n' Roll Pantheon," published 1971.)
Garner is right, of course — while there are contemporary examples of great, insightful and intelligent celebrity profiles being written (Garner himself has one in this Sunday's issue, on John le Carré) — the era when a curious writer could tag along with a celebrity for weeks (or even months), "Almost Famous"-style, and count on unhindered access and up-close reportage have long since passed away. Most celebrity profiles now are, for better for for worse (mostly worse), highly stage-managed affairs during which a writer is granted a very limited window with which to interact with the subject during some mildly flattering but mostly anodyne circumstance. (Usually involving food.)
The best obituary for the old-style of profile writing has already been written: Tad Friend's fantastic, must read "Notes on the Death of the Celebrity Profile," published in SPIN magazine in 1998. The opening anecdote says it all. A publicist for Arnold Schwarzenegger asks Friend how much time he'd like to spend with Schwarzenegger — "Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?" And how did the flack respond when Friend plaintively requests "a few days"? " 'Oh, God,' she said disgustedly, 'this wouldn't be one of those profiles where you try to figure him out, would it?' "
(This might be a good time to point out that Friend, too, despite that obit of his, continues to write terrific celebrity profiles himself, including this all-time great on David Lynch and this more recent article on Ben Stiller, both for The New Yorker.)
But reader — I have come not to bury the celebrity profile but to praise it. Or, at least, one of it.
For while the above articles are definitely worth a bookmark on your reading-screen of choice, they all put me in mind of a long, rollicking, insightful, contemporary counter-example. A celebrity profile that's not 10, or 30, years old, but that came out just this year: Alex Pappademas on Dan Harmon in Grantland.
Now, I am not a Dan Harmon acolyte. Harmon, the creator of the cult-favorite-but-ratings-challenged sitcom "Community," has an especially fervent following (this is in part is what the profile is about), but I'm not part of it. I like "Community" fine. And I'm interested in Harmon, sure, but no more so than I'd be in any other self-destructive-TV-showrunner-fired-under-weird-circumstances-who-then-embarks-on-a-cross-country-speaking-tour-in-a-bus-while-frequently-drunk.
That said, the story is fantastic.
The subhead hints at what's to come: "Thirty-six hours on the road — and in the bar — with exiled TV genius Dan Harmon." Thirty-six hours being, of course, roughly thirty-four-and-a-half hours longer than most writers now reasonably expect to spend with their subjects.
Ultimately, it's an affectionate, intelligent, warts-and-more-warts-and-all profile of Harmon — an article that, in the tradition of great profiles, gets past the usual chin-stroking about Harmon and the future of TV and delivers a wrenching, visceral take on a live human being. (One with a fascinating relationship with his wife, for example. And alcohol.)
More than that, it's a journalistic throwback, in the very best sense of the term: a jump-on-the-bus, here-I-am-in-all-my-complictated-glory look at a subject who's both brave enough to grant this much access and interesting enough to deserve it. All delivered by a writer talented enough to, well, deliver it.
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