Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

Frances McDormand makes it a point to play strong, complicated female characters. Her latest role is one of her thorniest yet: she plays the title character in the miniseries Olive Kitteridge. Olive is a small-town Mainer, frustrated, occasionally unpleasant — and she teaches math. We hear from John Luther Adams, the Alaskan composer who didn’t have running water till he was nearly forty. Plus, the unlikely success of Fiddler on the Roof. The characters are Old Country Jews, but it’s really about everyone who made their home here in the US.

Before he made a movie, Damien Chazelle was a drummer studying jazz. After college, he wrote a screenplay based on his experience, but there was one big problem: it was about jazz, and no one wanted to make it. Chazelle figured out a way to show studios that his story wasn’t an homage to a worthy art form – it was about passion, ambition, and blood.  On paper, Whiplash sounds like an intense version of Mr. Holland’s Opus: a young jazz drummer is challenged by a demanding band leader. But demanding isn’t even the word for Chazelle’s Terence Fletcher – he cares so much he’s insane. Chazelle’s highly praised feature is bloodier than Christopher Nolan’s entire Dark Knight Trilogy (and it’s rated R). No wonder the movie earned the nickname “Full Metal Jazz” at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. As a guy in his 20s with no studio movies under his belt and a screenplay about an earnest jazz musician, Chazelle faced no small task in getting producers to fund Whiplash. This is not a little, DIY movie – it looks like the work of a master. To convince backers, he managed to scrape together enough money to make a short, which won an award at Sundance. “The idea was to take a scene and do it as a stand-alone short,” he says. “That will be proof of concept – show people how I would direct it, show people that I could direct it.” His confidence feels preternatural, but one day Chazelle had to show up – a rookie with nothing but a college thesis film under his belt – on a set, with a professional crew he didn’t know how to direct. He’d brought along a good friend from college to shore up his confidence. “That was probably the one thing that prevented me from having a meltdown.” Meltdown averted. Now, the 29-year-old’s biggest problem is fielding offers. Whiplash has yet to arrive in theaters and he’s already been tapped to direct another two movies. 

David Fincher filled movies like Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and even The Social Network with existential dread. His latest, Gone Girl, begins as a mystery and becomes a horror film about marriage. He tells Kurt Andersen his work is “lascivious, and merciless — but tastefully done.” (He’s only sort of kidding.) And we hear from Marcel the Shell, YouTube’s most popular snail, whose viral video launched the career of actor Jenny Slate.

Guest host and New Yorker critic Hilton Als interviews Toni Morrison, one of the greatest novelists of our time. Even though she’s won nearly every award in literature, the 83-year-old Morrison still rises before the sun to write. And we hear from Khandi Alexander, a dancer and choreographer (she worked on Whitney Houston’s tours) who became an actress, scaring the **** out of us on Scandal.

If you’re an illustrator with a dozen and a half New Yorker covers in your portfolio, several popular children’s books, and your own blog at the New York Times, you’re doing something right. But Christoph Niemann isn’t resting on any laurels.  “The one amazing advantage of the internet is you have more space,” the Berlin-based artist says. “In print, you can’t go to an editor and say, ‘Give me fifteen spreads, I have this great story to tell.” But the technology has also freed him from a sequence of static images.  The artist has expanded his vision to incorporate tools we’ve become familiar with (GIFs, video, animation, slideshows) to do things we haven’t seen before.  This summer, Niemann asked one of his many employers, The New York Times, if he could cover the World Cup. His pitch was one only an artist of his caliber could make: "I would really love to go to Brazil and do something about the World Cup. Will you please pay for my trip and trust me that something will come out at the end that will be intriguing? And I have absolutely no idea what that could be.”  Christoph Niemann's “My Travels with The Curse of Maracanã" (Christoph Niemann)  What Niemann delivered was "My Travels with The Curse of Maracanã" a slideshow of text, animation, photo, and video set to music. The artist uses every trick in the internet’s book to tell the story of the nation’s traumatic World Cup loss of 1950, which has hung over the team ever since.  (His story went live about a month before that curse seemed to come true in Brazil’s stunning semifinal loss to Germany.)  The New York Times had never done anything like it, and it went over well.  “You always bank on the visual savviness of the readers,” he says of using as little text as possible in his work. A recent convert to Instagram, he feels that these platforms are making us more sophisticated interpreters of the image. “You can use this visual literacy to tell stories.”  Christopher Neimann captured Summer 2014 in one GIF (Christopher Niemann / New Yorker) Much of Niemann’s work in print, online, and on Instagram, appears spontaneous – inspired in and by the moment. His profound GIF image about this summer’s terrible news is an example of how simple his work seems.  But it takes a lot of time to get there.  “The simplicity that I try to create is often dealing with a very complex set of issues,” he says. “I try to take away elements until I reveal the essence of that issue, and this is a long process. I like the feeling of having something presentable so much that I gladly accept the agony.” Christoph Niemann's 'New Yorker' cover after the Fukushima disaster (Christoph Niemann)   A sketch from Niemann's Brazil trip (Christoph Niemann)     Niemann's "Ice Bucket Challenge" (Christoph Niemann)     "yaaaawn" by Christoph Niemann (Christoph Niemann)

Guest host Alan Cumming interviews Cyndi Lauper, whose career has taken unforeseeable twists since she exploded into the pop firmament in 1983 with She’s So Unusual. While pop cognoscenti thought she’d burn out fast, 30 years later she’s just won a Tony Award. And the photographer John Dugdale tells Cumming why blindness hasn’t overcome his drive to create indelible images.

An epidemiologist explains how life is like World of Warcraft when a deadly plague breaks out online. Rabies experts connect the dots between The Iliad, Twilight, and Louis Pasteur. Plus, an apocalyptic world where children should be seen and not heard — the sound they make can be deadly. (Originally aired March 8, 2013)

Neil Gaiman has written dozens of books, comics, TV shows, movies — and now he’s playing Carnegie Hall with a live band. His only complaint: He’s too busy! The band Hurray for the Riff Raff returns folk music to its punk rock roots. And in light of the Slender Man killing, we’ll consider whether the internet is making it harder to distinguish fiction from reality.

In the mid-90s, rappers from the East Coast to the West convinced an entire generation to consume malt liquor in “40s”— 40-ounce glass bottles that delivered the alcohol equivalent of a six-pack in one serving. Songs like N.W.A.’s “8 Ball” glamorized the cheap, potent beer alternative. The brewery that made St. Ides exploited the rap-malt liquor connection, putting all the stars of the era in commercials, from Ice Cube to Notorious B.I.G. to Snoop Dogg, who memorably slow jammed his tribute to 40s: At their peak, 40s made headlines and spawned editorials. The Los Angeles Times in 1992 explored the widespread backlash to malt liquor, claiming  that “shrewd advertising in ethnic neighborhoods” had “turned it into a status symbol.” Soon, though, 40s disappeared from hip-hop. “Right in the mid- to late-90s, rap culture took a serious turn from sitting in the hood drinking a 40 to sitting in the club drinking champagne,” says Besha Rodell, an LA Weekly food writer who penned the first history of the drink, “40 Ounces to Freedom.” “Rap culture became about having money. There’s nothing fancy about drinking malt liquor.” But the 40 survives. I still like my high school drink of choice — Olde English malt liquor mixed with orange juice, a concoction known as the Brass Monkey. I was introduced to it by friends who pointed out that it was the subject of a Beastie Boys song, also called “Brass Monkey.” But when I called Mike D to talk about his inspiration, he was confused: malt liquor? In a Brass Monkey? It turns out that the Brass Monkey he was singing about was a cocktail comprised of orange juice, vodka, and dark rum, which came premixed in a can. “Homeboy,” Mike said, “have you ever used Google in your life?” SUBSCRIBE TO THE SIDESHOW PODCAST → iTunes → RSS

This week, Studio 360 visits the Aspen Ideas Festival — it’s like summer camp for some of the world’s most influential people. In a show taped live at 2009's Aspen Ideas Festival, the writer Susan Orlean remembers the optimism of her late father, who came of age during the Depression. The band They Might Be Giants has a warning about dangerous fads. And inventor Saul Griffith explains how to get kids excited about the future again. (Originally aired: July 17, 2009)

Twitter thrives on the short and sweet. So it’s a testament to Gavin Speiller that he has more than 30,000 followers for @UnfinishedS, because he cheats like crazy. Instead of 140 characters, Speiller tweets a photo of the first page of a screenplay, easily a couple hundred words. Most of them are clichés. Not to mention the fact that Speiller’s photos are glarey smartphone shots of his laptop monitor. It wouldn’t work if Speiller’s Unfinished Scripts weren’t really funny. A performer and improv coach with the Upright Citizens Brigade, he starts each script with a question: “What are two movies that would be tough to put together on the same page?” Then he does it. Since he doesn’t have to see these ideas through to their conclusions – they are just one page, always one page – there’s no limit on his imagination.  The outlandish premise of Face/Off is far more bizarre when it’s mashed into a mawkish scene about a failing marriage. The Silence of the Lambs is more heartwarming when combined with a Bad News Bears like football team in need of adult supervision. A killer faces judgement... pic.twitter.com/k63Ss4q3el — Unfinished Scripts (@UnfinishedS) November 5, 2013 Twitter has proved invaluable for comedians. “You’re told immediately if people think this is funny or not,” Speiller says, comparing retweets and favorites to the laughs and chuckles of a live performance. And he appreciates that his fans take the time to read his Unfinished Scripts the second they’re tweeted. “There’s some guy waiting on line for the bathroom at Applebee’s reading them,” he says. “Applebee’s. Not Red Lobster. Not Sizzler.” FBI agents with a dilemma... pic.twitter.com/yoUZd6JXtr — Unfinished Scripts (@UnfinishedS) November 1, 2013 SUBSCRIBE TO THE SIDESHOW PODCAST → iTunes → RSS

After winning a Tony Award and starring as Disney’s first African-American heroine, Anika Noni Rose just wants to kick butt as a big-budget superhero. A young upstart who rocked Broadway in the 1930s is the subject of a new play by James Lapine, an upstart who rocked Broadway in the 1980s. At age 8, guitarist Julian Lage sat in with Carlos Santana; where do you go from there? Plus, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman on what’s wrong with the September 11 Memorial and Museum.

For some, the best way to reply to a message isn’t with words (so 2003!) but with a GIF, those short animations, just a few seconds long, usually drawn from a popular movie or video footage.  From that perspective, the image of President Obama’s head on Beyoncé’s body doing a sassy dance in outer space, while riding a pizza, is the best thing the internet ever gave us.  In recent years, the animated GIF has made the jump from email chains and message boards to art galleries and museum exhibitions. New York’s Museum of the Moving Image was recently host to “The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture,” a show whose curator culled his selections from a Reddit thread. To really learn about GIFs, though, the Obi Wan to seek out is Tyler Menzel, editorial director (he’d prefer Notorious G.I.F.) at Giphy, the most popular GIF search engine. Menzel sees and tags thousands of animated images every day. “I’d like to meet the person who sees more than I do and doesn’t get paid for it,” he tells Sideshow’s Sean Rameswaram. Sean and Tyler discuss the fine art of sending the perfect reaction GIF. Tyler explains his devotion to GIFs drawn from the anime series Sailor Moon, representing as they do “the essential human emotions: hunger, love, and sadness.  "If you're feeling things other than that, you're wasting your energy." He also acknowledges that the form has its limitations. “GIFs are supposed to be fun,” he says; you can send a reaction GIF to bad news, but not real bad news. If there’s a perfect GIF for the news that someone has died, Tyler hasn’t tagged it yet.  SUBSCRIBE TO THE SIDESHOW PODCAST → iTunes → RSS Giphy’s Tyler Menzel and Sideshow’s Sean Rameswaram during their contentious interview about GIFs (Tyler Menzel)   For Fans Only: Classic Sailor Moon   For a Birthday: Happy Birthday Cake Mistake    For Good News: Levar Burton Thumbs Up   For Good Space News: A Space Cat Riding a Burrito   For Any Occasion: Beyoncé Obama Dancing on Pizza  

Producer Rick Rubin was a pioneer of hip-hop, and he’s worked with its biggest names. But he also reinvigorated the late careers of legends like Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. His one rule in the studio: no talking about business. For indie songwriter Joan As Police Woman, the best lyrics are the ones that feel too embarrassing to sing in public. And we’ll discuss controversial new policies at universities that require professors to warn students about books they may find upsetting — like The Great Gatsby.

This week, a triple header from the series American Icons, which focuses on works of art that changed the way we think about America. More than 150 years ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne put his finger on how we ostracize women for their sexuality in The Scarlet Letter. Meanwhile, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” celebrates the opposite tendency in American culture: the devil-may-care slide towards looser morals. And in Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman captured the way that being a woman — or maybe being a person — is just playing a role. (Segments in this week's show aired previously.)