Greater than even his abiding love of film was Chris Kelly's passion for writing about it and reflecting on culture more broadly.But he didn't see the ready path for making that a life's work until doors kept opening and luck struck. Find out how staying attuned to the tastes of the audience and being open to change can help you navigate the critical junctures.
Guest Christopher Kelly spent many a night during his college career in a film screening, honing a knowledge and love of cinema. But even more than his abiding love of film was his passion for writing about it and reflecting on culture more broadly. It wasn’t immediately obvious, however, how to make a life’s work of that. After a few placements at magazines and a freelance career that could keep ends meet, he applied on a whim to an open film critic position at a newspaper in Fort Worth, Texas, and he got it. That remained the dream job for a few years and then he was ready for new opportunities, just as the two worlds on which his career was built—the film industry and print journalism—were undergoing complete transformation.
In this episode,find out from Chris how staying attuned to the tastes of the audience and being open to change can help you navigate the critical junctures…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Christopher Kelly is Vice President of Content of NJ Advance Media, overseeing all content for NJ.com and the Newark Star-Ledger. He is also a novelist, who won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction in 2008 for his combination “coming-of-age and revenge story” A Push and a Shove. His second novel, The Pink Bus, was published in 2016, just before he found other ways to spend his free time with his husband and two kids.
For another story featuring a writer about culture and film, listen to ourepisode with Suzanne Leonard.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Christopher Kelly: And I was talking to the then college photographer, Joe Mehling, I think he’s since retired. And Joe said something to me that I have repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times in my life, which is, “Eh, you can make money doing anything. You just gotta figure it out.” And it was weirdly liberating, you know? It was just like, oh, there's a pathway for everything.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Greater than even his abiding love of film was Christopher Kelly's passion for writing about it and reflecting on culture more broadly. But he didn't see the ready path for making that a life's work until doors kept opening and luck struck. Find out how staying attuned to the taste of the audience and being open to change can help you navigate the critical junctures on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Christopher Kelly and we are going to talk about stories that can make it to the big screen and stories that are much more personal and how life leads you in funny places. So Chris, lovely to have you here. Thanks so much for being with us.
CK: Oh, thanks for asking me, Leslie. This is great.
LJR: So when I begin this, I begin with the same two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
CK: So when we were in college, I was heavily involved in the Film Society. I was a total movie nerd. I would go to the Spalding, to the Lowe 3, 4, 5 times a week with my dear friend Michael Ellenberg. Started our film journal where we'd have a quarterly film journal and write essays and do interviews. But I was also interested in writing. [I had] a column for the Dartmouth. At that time I was an English major, a senior fellow. My senior fellow project was actually on film festivals. I went to, if memory serves, I went to five film festivals that year and kind of wrote a book length narrative about that experience, a kind of nonfiction, journalistic account of those experiences. And so where I was at college was, you know, how do you combine these two passions for words for writing, for journalism and movies? Cuz I loved movies and I loved, you know, all the arts, all pop culture, but especially movies were my passion. And had some vague notion that maybe there was a way to marry that to start, but I really didn't have any idea like what that job could or would look like.
There was in spring of senior year, some thoughts about, well, maybe I'll apply to some jobs at film production companies, at distribution companies. That was the era where indie movies were burgeoning. And so there were all these companies popping up like Fine Line and Miramax and Paramount Classics. And so I applied to some jobs in that direction, but I kind of kept getting, you know, my head kept kind of returning to journalism and words and writing about movies, writing about culture, and trying to figure out what that might look like. But I don't know if I had any idea if that was like just a complete naive fantasy on my part to think that was even some possible career. But I do remember, I remember this so vividly in my spring of my senior year, like a lot of us, I was, you know, participating in college recruiting with jobs that I had no real interest in and really anxious about what was going to happen the day I drove back home after graduation. And I was talking to the then college photographer, Joe Mehling, I think he’s since retired. I had an internship in the college news office, so I got to know him a little bit. And Joe said something to me that I have repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times in my life, which is, eh, you can make money doing anything. You just gotta figure it out. And it was weirdly liberating, you know? It was just like, oh, there's a pathway for everything, you know? And yeah, you might have to adjust your expectations of what the money is or what the actual job is, but anything you can sort of conjure up is a possibility. And that's what I took from Joe.
LJR: Yeah, that's great. Well, and at the time, I mean gosh, it's 25 years ago, but it, or 30 when we were starting, and the film industry's so different and distribution's so different, but you know, Siskel and Ebert were like the voice and it probably was hard to even think Well, are there others? Like, because that was such a, that's the go-to, right? And there weren't that many models of how you even incorporate the arts into a business world in general. So how did you think about that? Or did you take Joe at his word and be like, okay, I'm just gonna do anything and then try to weave that in later, or just see where it goes?
CK: It was a little bit of both, you know? You're exactly right. Like, you know, there were things like, oh, I could be a film critic, or I could be a culture reporter. But when you look out, there's not a lot of models, there's not a lot of models in journalism. Then there's even, you know, there's—it's been decimated—there's even fewer now. But you just kind of look out and you're like, I don't even know where to kind of start. And so it was a little bit of mix of like, you know, stubbornness and then complete blind luck, you know. So I knew that Entertainment Weekly magazine had an internship and applied. This was after I graduated. I actually had another job lined up that I had accepted at a publishing house. It was a much more conventional kind of editorial assistant job. And it was, you know, the best job I'd sort of gotten through the recruiting process. But I decided to, you know, see if this Entertainment Weekly internship made sense. And I got it. And it was that sort of doors opening moment where you realize, oh, there actually is a world that looks like what I've kind of conjured up in my head. And that was the real peak of that magazine. I mean, it barely exists now. It's largely an online entity, but that was the era where, you know, the magazine was really thick, selling a ton of ads, hugely staffed, hugely respected, and you'd walk in there, and—I remember this so well—the weekend after The First Wives Club opened in September of 1996, and I walked in there and literally the entire office had gone to see it that weekend and everybody was talking about it. I'm like, I have found my place. I found my people.
LJR: I have found my people. Right.
CK: What I want to do, you know. I want to just thrive off that energy and that excitement of talking about culture and, and figuring it out. So, you know, that was the realization that there is a possible path here. Getting sort of to the path is a whole ‘nother challenge cuz it's, you know, competitive. There aren't a lot of places to go and things to figure out. So, after that, they kind of followed a couple of, you know, very circuitous years where, you know, I had a couple of different jobs. I worked for a magazine called Cigar Aficionado, which is like a luxury men's magazine, which is not my world. Did that for a year. As a press secretary for a politician for a year. And I was trying to just kind of build up some freelance clips and started writing for a magazine called Premiere, which no longer exists, unfortunately. It’s was wonderful magazine about movies that was edited by Jim Megs, who's class of 81. And Jim read my clips. I mean, this is really the old days. I sound so old when I say I sent him a package of clips, you know. [LJR: Right.] No email. And four weeks later I get a phone call and he says, would you be interested in trying to do some freelancing for us? And that really kind of started the ball rolling in terms of writing about culture and entertainment journalism, you know, movie reviewing, things like that.
There still seemed no kind of professional path. And so, I was mostly just freelancing, kind of scraping by. You know, I was, you know, whatever, 23 years old, 24 years old, and you can scrape by pretty easily, you know, on not a lot of money. But when you're a freelancer you get long stretches where you have nothing to do. And one day—and this was right when I was 25—I saw a job listing for a film critic in Fort Worth, and in 99 cases out of a hundred, I would've just rushed right by that, cuz it's like I'd never been to Texas and Fort Worth, you know, sounded like you know, the Wild West to me. I didn't know what it even was, you know? And the only reason I lingered over is because their previous critic, Elvis Mitchell, had been hired away to the New York Times, and I thought, oh, that must be a place that's like actually really good and, you know, a good place to, you know, sort of learn your chops and on a total lark I just sent an application. Did not even send a resume ‘cause I didn't think my resume had enough like traditional journalism on it. I just sent a cover letter and some clips in the mail and you know, this was spring of 2000.
Four weeks later, a woman named Julia Heaberlin called me and said, would you fly down for an interview? And we clicked, as I've never clicked before since with a boss, which is the most amazing boss and mentor and editor that I've ever had. And she offered me the job on the spot and it completely, you know, reordered my life. You know, I moved from New York to Texas. I became a movie critic, which again, at that point was the coolest job on the planet.
It was so much fun and I was able to suddenly call myself like a professional writer, you know, which I think was something in college that I thought was like something people only can fantasize about. Or maybe if they have a trust fund they can do that. But like suddenly I was like, I make my living writing and from words, and it was like such a source of pride for me. So yeah, it's just that kind of mixture of sort of gumption and stupidity. You don't even know what you're doing. You know? I think about it now and I'm like, what was I doing? I was just freelancing, hoping something might come together. But sometimes that's just how it works, especially when you're that age, I think.
LJR: Yeah. And I remember learning that you were doing that not so long after you got that job and thinking, of course he is. That is so great. I'm so glad that worked out. And not knowing of course, that it was like the blood, sweat and tears and the wondering and the, is this even a thing? But like that just seemed like, well, you were gonna go do that and to find yourself in that kind of inevitable place, or at least dream job place, did it feel that way for a long time? Or was it, oh, because I couldn't envision this, I couldn't envision all the stuff and, you know, what's that balance of dream job reality and dream job it really is?
CK: For the first three or four years, it was exactly what you said. Like this is neat. You know, like, yeah. Like this is like, people make their living doing this? And again, it's hard to think about now when movies have largely been kind of shifted to the sidelines of the culture and the energy’s around tv and who even knows what theatrical looks like in the future. But, you know, 20 years ago, like it was still really at the center of the culture and the big movie that was coming out. Like there was conversation around it, there was news coverage, there was writing, and you have these moments that were really kind of electric. I remember Minority Report, which was probably the first time I'd interviewed Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. I interviewed them once more after that, but that was the first time. And you know, you just feel really like I'm getting paid for this. You know, I'm getting paid to see Minority Report a month before it comes out. And then sit in a room for, you know, an hour with Tom Cruise and with Steven Spielberg and have a really interesting and thoughtful conversation with them. And then go home and do the thing that I really love, which is figure out how to put the words together and make it flow and make it interesting and engaging. So there was a long stretch where it was just pure delight, like, I get to go to Sundance, I get to do this, I get to do that, and I get people to pay attention to what I write, which is, if you're a writer, the thing you are probably most… is the most elusive thing. And you know, I remember The Passion of the Christ was in that era and the, you know, sort of seismic conversation that was happening around that in early 2004. And they published my review on the front page of the paper. This is the era of print papers and it was published on the front page of the paper. And that day I must have seen, you know, walking into Starbucks, people reading it, you know, just walking around town, like people reading the review. And that's really awe—it's just great, you know, but like everything else, it's like you start to do it for a while and you're like, this is kinda getting, you know, rote and the movies were probably getting a little bit less interesting to me. They've gotten a lot less interesting to me over the last couple of years. I mean, there are exceptions, but it was already starting to go into like superhero stuff and horror stuff, and even the good stuff, you start to feel like, man, do I really have to have another opinion, you know? [LJR: Yeah.] It's like anything else, like every dream job gets a little bit tiring after a while, and I tend to be a fairly restless person who wants a new set of challenges. So that started to happen, I would say around 2006, 2007, after I'd been in the job.
And that coincided with the larger tectonic shifts that were happening in the world of journalism at that point. And a lot of local news organizations were starting to have to lay off people, have to reorder their business to figure out how to become digital. A lot of features departments, a lot of arts departments, were getting cut. And so, you know, that was when I started to realize, okay, if I'm gonna keep doing journalism, if I'm gonna keep writing, what do the next steps look like? And that's where, you know, things kind of went off in another direction.
LJR: Okay. Well, we definitely wanna talk about the demise of film and print and how interesting that time of the world is, but how do you start thinking about your place in that? I mean, I know life takes you, as you said earlier, in the places you don't expect sometimes and it all works out. But like, were you thinking of yourself as writer first or cultural analyzer?
CK: I always fundamentally thought of myself as a writer, you know, writer-journalist who, you know, had the ability to write a reported story, but, you know, specialized in opinion writing and criticism and voice and bringing that to the table. But, you know, by the end of the two thousands, it started to feel like, gosh, it's gonna be really hard to sustain that. And I, in addition to working for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, I had a contract with Texas Monthly Magazine, which is a well-known and really good magazine in Texas. And so I was their cultural writer. And we do monthly pieces, occasional reported pieces. So like I was making the living that like most people think, five people are able to luck into. Like, that was me. Like I wasn't rich certainly, but like sustaining like just a nice adult life just from words. But you could see the clouds on the horizon where it was like, that's not gonna be possible forever. And, and so, you know, there were real debates at that point. Do I, you know, want to go back to school? Do I wanna switch out of journalism? Do I want to move into editing? And I just kind of, you kept thinking about all those things.
I think the one thing that I did smart in retrospect was I didn't ever give up something while moving to the next step. So in Fort Worth, when it was clear that the feature section, which was a glorious feature section—I mean one of the most well-staffed and sophisticated feature sections in the country at that time—when it became clear that that was going to be no more, they offered me a position editing, trying to develop the arts and entertainment website that they were trying to launch. And I said, I will do that, but I want to hold on to being able to write about movies. You know, I didn't wanna let that go. That was too much of my identity and too much of what I love. And so that began the process of eventually becoming, you know, a full-time editor. But even when I moved to New Jersey which was to run the arts and culture team here, you know, I held on to that. I still occasionally will write a theater review, just to keep my writing muscles strong. But for the first couple years, that was the thing that I made sure I said, I will do this, but I wanna make sure I can hold onto a little bit of what got me in all this in the first place and what reminds me of what I love.
And I think that process, it's maybe, it's sort of, you know, the frog boiling in water, you know. It’s you don't fully, right away that like, oh, I'm not doing the thing I purely love, but I can live with this new version of it. You know, it still feels part and parcel with a journey and a progression. So I, I think that was a smart thing, is not do that sort of radical, like, I'm gonna just totally restart my career. But I don't know, you know, that's how it worked for me. And it has worked out.
LJR: Yeah, exactly. And more like the frog, you know, you were in a pot that was evolving, right?
CK: Yep.
LJR: Like, so there was no right way to create a digital news outlet or arts and entertainment section or any of that. That hadn't been done yet. And so you were growing as this thing was growing, so that probably helped to kind of keep it fresh and keep it, or keep your blinders on a bit too, to what you weren't doing, cuz there was so much new that you were doing.
CK: Absolutely. I mean it's really interesting because the sort of puzzle solver part of my brain really became engaged with this question of how do you evolve legacy media into the digital age? And is it even financially sustainable? And how do you do it? What does it look like? What does the future look like? And it's really interesting when you compare media, I mean, it's all media, right? But when you compare print newspapers to something like the film industry, you've seen the same progression. You've seen the foundationals all be disrupted and no one knows what to do. And everybody's trying to, clinging to the thing that they know and they love, even as the audience is moving in a completely different direction and the technology's moving in a completely different direction. So I talk about this all the time with friends I know in the entertainment industry, we've faced the same challenges and the same riddles, and it's still a process of figuring it out. So there has been that kind of like sort of macro problem to solve while the job has evolved and I've really found engaging. I might be a masochist, but I have found that engaging.
LJR: Well, maybe not masochist, but it…because it's tied so well to what you love and do. So if you are a critic of culture or just even someone who's attuned to culture, and culture is shifting, it's kind of at this meta level where you're having to do the thing, but you're also analyzing it in such a way that it probably enhances the doing of it, and it's reflective of, okay, I know what people are wanting. It's so different from what they were wanting before, but I've seen these, I, I understand mar…like the audience market and technologies. It's just a different technology than what we had before that's allowing us to communicate. So it's, I think you were well poised for that. I don't know if you had been writing on the agricultural beat or something, whether it would've been as easy to make those shifts into…
CK: That that's a really, really, yeah, that's a really insightful observation, because covering culture, it's like you have to think about who is the audience, what is this reaching, how is it reaching them, and how are they constantly evolving? And that's really become my whole job now is overseeing an entire newsroom. They're not interacting with our work as they once did, which was to go off the front lawn and pick up their newspaper, sit down with their cup of coffee. They're interacting with it online, they're interacting with it via podcasts via TikToks, you know, as our organization enters the realm of TikToks. And so thinking about that, seeing that, you know, seeing that that's where things are going, I think probably has given me a bit of a leg up, but also seeing like the pace of all this. My brain is now like the second you think you know where the audience is, it's like something else is coming down the horizon. How we consume things is gonna change yet again. I tell this to my reporters all the time. I used to say to them, don’t worry about the newspaper anymore; just worry about the website. Worry about how it looks on the website. Worry about how it presents on the website. And now I say, stop worrying about the website; You know, just worry about the thing. It might get out there on a website. It might get out there on a TikTok reel. It might get out there via podcast. But think about the thing. Think about the story you're telling. And that's really hard for people to wrap their heads around, obviously. But that's the direction we've gone and it's not gonna stop, you know?
LJR: Yeah, well it might be hard for those of us of a certain age to get our head around. I think other generations, that's water to them, so, we'll see. So you're…actually, tell us what your job is right now, where, the scope of it, and for whom, and where and all that.
CK: Yeah, so I work for a company called NJ Advance Media, which is the parent company for nj.com and the Newark Star Ledger. And we are the largest news organization in New Jersey. And it is, again, part and parcel of what I started doing. You know, it's the Newark Star Ledger was the daily newspaper in New Jersey and has since evolved to nj.com as its core brand. And I oversee the newsroom and all of our content initiatives from, you know, sports to investigations, to features to culture, which I still beat the drum for. In some respects, it's the kind of old-fashioned, traditional editor-in-chief job. But in some respects it's the respects that really interest me. It's also really thinking about the kind of what's next? Is it a podcast? Is it, you know, a new form of storytelling we haven't thought about? So and yeah, I've been here eight years and as I said, I started as the life and culture editor and I've kind of just, you know, gradually expanded my purview to the whole newsroom. And that too has been an interesting trajectory because all of these organizations have largely been populated by, you know, very dyed in the wool, very traditional serious journalists, you know, who cover the crimes and cover the fires and cover the corruption. And for someone to come from a features background, from an arts and entertainment background, there was tension. There's was friction of like, who is this guy? He's just the silly movie guy. He can't tell us how to run an investigation. He can't tell us how to cover crime and public safety in new ways.
But you know, my argument on that is like, this is what this industry needs. It needs the outsider perspective of the people who've been thinking about how to tell stories differently from the start.
LJR: Yeah. And who understands that, that current consumer so well of, yeah, yes, we need to know about the crimes. But I mean, we were chatting earlier offline about true crime podcasts and true crime, this and that. And there is a bit of en—I hate to say this, but like—entertainment in your, you know, daily nitty or gritty grittiness, I guess.
CK: Oh we talk about this all the time with my reporters. Still, some of them still have the notion that by writing something that they think is important, people are going to read it ,which is a very sweet notion. But man, is it naive. And what we are all engaged in is, you know, selling our stuff to people. And when you think about the flood of information and headlines and content you see on your Twitter feed, on your Facebook feed, that friends text to you, versus the percentage that you actually click on versus the percentage of the things not only do you click on, but then read all the way through or engage with all the way through. It's, microscopic and we're all, you know, we're all trying to get that same microscopic audience and it's not easy to find. And so you really have to think about how do I frame every single thing in a way that's gonna get people to pay attention and make it think it matters to them. And how do you think about news as a kind of entertainment, as a thing that people are really gonna engage with on a deeper level?
We, last year, launched a podcast, our first narrative podcast, nine parts. The podcast was called Father Wans Us Dead. It's a true crime podcast about the John List murders, which were a very famous murder case in New Jersey. And I was very skeptical at first cuz I thought, well, we're not podcast people, we're words people. But it's the same thing, you know? It's how do you build a story? How do you tell a story in a way that keeps people coming back for more? And what we were able to bring to it was our journalistic chops, you know. How do you tell a true crime story, but really report it and really go deep and really, really give people things they wouldn't know otherwise? So, yeah, it really is very, very parallel to what I started out doing, which is thinking about entertainment and thinking about culture.
LJR: Yeah. So seismic shifts in all of that from those kernels and seeds of what you loved in this small way, and now it's gotten bigger. There have been seismic shifts in your own life, too. You were a freelancer doing your own thing alone, and that's not the case anymore. So where along the way did that part of your life shift?
CK: So I met my husband in Fort Worth in 2009 and the two thousands I was so singularly focused on writing. And I also wrote a novel during that time. [LJR: Oh.] And you know, that process, that two or three year process was. So…like every minute I wasn't at my job, I was working on the book. Like I didn't have friends, I didn't talk to anybody. I was just so monomaniacally kind of focused. And so I met Neridan my husband in 2009 and we got married in 2013. And, you know, priorities start to reorder and you're like, okay, book writing is probably not something that you can do, as a functional adult with a spouse. I mean, some people can, I can't. And I'm very proud of the two books I've written, but gosh, it's really hard to carve out that space when there's another person involved.
But we also wanted to have a family. I mean, both of us were very eager to have a family and that, I think that was in part what drew us together. And it was really important for us not to raise kids as two dads in Texas. We just didn't think it would be culturally right for us. Both of our families, Neridan’s family’s in Europe, mine’s in the east coast, so we also wanted to be closer to our families. So that's what precipitated the move and why I was even interested in the job in New Jersey in the first place. And yeah, and then we had two kids and no one warned me that the second one would make everything exponentially more difficult, and make it impossible for me to leave the house to go see a movie. But we have two kids now. Edward's almost five, and Francis has just turned two. And it's been really interesting as someone who's probably had kids, I would guess, like 10 years later than everybody else, you know? So on the one hand I actually feel so much more like mature and confident and able to parent, but on the other, oh my God, I'm so tired, you know. S that kind of comes into play, but it's been really interesting to do this through the pandemic, and it's opened my eyes to the challenges of making sure that parents fit into the workplace, you know, and that kids running into calls and disrupting things is okay and part of how we should all be thinking and working going forward. And so I credit them a little bit, I think for making me a better leader and a less kind of stringent and structured leader and being much more comfortable with chaos cuz they are the chaos agents.
LJR: Yes, for sure. So if you were to go back to your 20 something year old self, maybe have just gotten Joe's advice “You can make money doing anything” and you told him, look where you're gonna be in the 25, 30 years: A leadership role, fatherhood, still have a finger on the pulse of audience, but audiences have shifted. What would he say to you at that point?
CK: You know, I think weirdly, the thing I wouldn't have believe is the kids. That I'd be married and have kids. It's hard to sort of like process that, that cultural shift, you know, to go from, you know, the real I mean the tail end of the AIDS era when we were in college to I'm getting married at this like, you know, picture perfect country house in Connecticut, 10, you know, 15 years later. And I am in a delivery room welcoming, you know, my children into the world. And that would be a thing that not only is possible, but is, you know, increasingly commonplace. You know, I'm like, I don't even get any like originality points anymore cuz our neighbors are, you know, same sex dads. But that part of it actually is the part that I was, I would be like, oh no, you're just making stuff up. And that just fills me with like happiness for the world and obviously joy for myself. I think professionally, I think if future Chris came back and been like, yay, you're gonna end a pretty cool place. I don't think college Chris would've thought that was a compromise. I mean, it hasn't felt like there's been any compromises or great sacrifices. I mostly feel the same as I did even when I was freelancing. Work has never really felt like work to me. Some days it does, obviously. But it's fun. It's engaging. It's engaging with the things that animate my brain and as long as I can keep doing that, I feel like a pretty successful dude. You know, I think the fantasy version of me, you know, would've been like, oh, I'll be the writer for the New Yorker. I'll have written six novels by the end and whatever. You know, I got other things that I can point to that are pretty cool. And not everybody gets to live out the exact fantasy, but I'm pretty cool with it, you know. It's a pretty good setup I got.
LJR: Yeah, and you could have told him, Nobody reads now anyway, so.
CK: That's right. That's right. Who even knows what the New Yorker is? Whatever.
LJR: Well, it sounds like you definitely took Joe's advice to heart and figured out some way to make money. It just happened that it coincided with kind of the true Chris of who you were and who you wanted to be, and you've gotten to really weave together a really interesting path for yourself.
CK: Yes.
And I'm sure it will continue to be interesting and lead to some twists that none of us could expect, but probably still core to who you are. So thank you so much for [CK: Oh, thank you] sharing all this. And it's just been a delight to reconnect.
CK: Any excuse to talk about myself, you know? Same here. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it.
LJR: That was cultural critic and media leader Christopher Kelly, who is Vice President of Content of NJ Advance Media, overseeing all content for NJ.com and the Newark Star-Ledger. He is also a novelist, who won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction in 2008 for his debut novel A Push and a Shove. His second novel, The Pink Bus, was published in 2016, just before he found other ways to spend his free time with his husband and two kids. You can find links to all of that in the show notes. And speaking of show notes, don’t forget you can find link-laden show notes fand great then-and-now photos for all of our episodes at RoadsTakenShow.com. Starting this season, we’ve even added to each one a recommendation for a related episodes in our archive that might be on a similar theme. So many things to consume, so little time. However you choose to navigate through our show, we’re glad you keep listening and joining me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, each week on Roads Taken.
All right, so I can't let you go without asking both: What's your favorite film and what's your favorite film to have written about?
CK: That's a hard question, actually. So probably my go-to when people ask me my favorite movie of all time, it remains a movie called All That Jazz, which I actually saw freshman fall, Spalding Auditorium, Dartmouth Film Society. It came out in 1979. Bob Fosse directed it and it's very auto…It's an autobiographical musical about Fosse having this career crisis. And it is a, to me, it's just a brilliant visionary, like exciting. Every time I watch it, like my heart races, it's just such an inventive and original movie, but it also combines when I saw it, which was, you know, this nervous, homesick, anxious kid. And I remember walking into Spalding Auditorium that Sunday night. It was a Sunday night, it was the 9:15 show. And I felt my body just kind of leave, you know, and just being transported. And I don't think I've ever had that transcendental experience watching a movie ever again. So it was a perfect combination of perfect time in my life and really perfect movie. I think it's just magnificent. So I cite that one as my favorite of all time.
My favorite movie to have written about. Gimme a second. I'm sorry. I gotta think about this. It's a good question.
So I'm gonna say something very, this is an odd movie to pick, but The Devil Wears Prada.
LJR: Oh.
CK: And the reason why is it falls into my favorite sweet spot of things people don't take seriously that I, in fact, think are profound. And I watched that movie the first time. I saw it three times before it opened, cuz I was so fascinated by what, what I think, what I still think it does and was trying to do.
But the first time I saw it, I was expecting, you know, a silly, frothy, romantic comedy. I thought, gosh, this is one of the most sophisticated things I've ever seen. Remains one of the most sophisticated things I've ever seen about women in the workplace and women of different generations and the tensions and dynamics therein, and the thought that they were able to go that deep within the context of this, you know, wonderfully frothy and funny and beautifully costume-designed project really just excited me and I think I put it like number one or two on my 10 best list that year. And I love that reaction of like,”What? You're not serious.” And it's a little bit of what I deal with still at work. It's like you're the movie guy telling us how to run investigations. You're telling us that this silly romantic comedy is better than Capote or whatever else came out that year? And I love making those kinds of arguments. So that's probably one of them. I don't wanna say that's the one, but it's definitely one of them.
LJR: All right. Well, when your children allow you go to go back to the theaters. [CK: Yes.] If there are theaters to go back to [CK: Exactly], I hope you'll keep us posted on your top 10 list.
CK: Yeah, totally.