How I ended up in Devil Wears Prada
The New Yorker's Style Issue this fall doesn't do much for me, not compared to the ones from previous years. The high points for me come in the front of the book. There's profane band name that I think some friends will like, and the "Tables for Two" review has a good quote from Brancusi, a website-leading favorite of the chef's. "Simplicity is complexity resolved."
Reading the issue, I realize I like the creation of style much more than the consumption of style. The Food Issue is next on my coffee table, and maybe I'm preparing myself. Thinking about reading this week, in evening traffic and dreaming of more, the Meryl Streep instructional monologue from Devil Wears Prada is something I like. The nods to form, creation, interaction, and spread. It also occurs to me that I've never written here about the rest of a story I began.
In December, I watched Devil on DVD. The movie wasn't bad, but I was totally biased by the beginning. Fighting for the job, the girl boasted how she wrote for The Daily Northwestern about the janitors' union. As I blogged here at the time, I nearly fell off the couch. There was only one person in recent years who'd written about the janitors' union for The Daily Northwestern.
And now the rest of the story. I looked back at the very beginning of the movie, when the girl was assembling her clips, and there was a janitors' union headline atop a clip. The clip had the girl's name on it. Zooming into the DVD and searching the Web, the story body was from a California story about a different janitors' union situation. Searching more, the book version of Devil was different — obvious to anyone who'd read it, I guess — and had no Northwestern appearance. But early scripts for the movie did mention the union stories. Mysterious.
So, I e-mailed The Daily. Apparently, the moviemakers called on the paper to come up with the clips. They pulled a few bound volumes off the shelves for ideas, and they assembled the headlines with the girl's byline and related but legally unconnected bodies. If a clip or story idea had shown up in the film, it had come straight from the paper.
The connection was fun, but I wondered about the pick. That story, for me, was a big one. Two weeks of front-page coverage, dozens of interviews, thousands of words that made me better as I went along. The story got me the TN internship at the St. Pete Times — it came up in the interview — which got me the fellowship at CNN, which got me the job at USAT. But the story also came at a time when I was unhappier than I'd ever been in my life, for lots of reasons, and could't find the words to tell anyone. By the end of the story, I was toast. There were angles in my work and my life that I could have explored and just didn't. I shut down. It was another year before I got back to being me. Even then, that hold took a couple years more to firm up.
That story, for the movie, was the moviemakers' first definition of their main character. The Daily folks had just picked big stories from volumes to fulfil Hollywood's request. But some people subsequently must have added some thought to put the story where it was. I wondered what they thought, how they saw it defining the character.
February 6th, 2012 at 10:12 PM
[...] history, apparently. My junior year, I wrote a series of stories about university janitors that, through unexpected circumstances years later, put NU in the [...]