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— Jonah & Erin
Last week, we unveiled a comprehensively updated edition of The B.L.I.S.S. List, our intel-rich guide to “Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples,” from socks and jeans, to natural deodorants and skin care, to belts and humane bug catchers, to towels and bed sheets, and much more in between.
If you haven’t dipped in yet, you can find the list here.
On to today’s Plane —
The celebrity profile is one of the most fascinating of all journalistic forms, capable of wild extremes: profundity and inanity, incisiveness and sycophancy, salaciousness and tedium. To hear people tell it, the celebrity profile has also been on death’s door for at least a decade. Last week, the writer Zach Baron, whose specialty is big, fun, insightful celebrity profiles, published a GQ cover story about Tom Cruise. This was a very rare get. It also represented a new milestone in the Are Celebrity Profiles Dead? discourse, because its text was, in effect, the edited transcript of a video interview — and the video was the main event.
Every now and then here at the Plane I (Jonah) write about writing. But I realized I’ve never really written about the two decades I spent as a profile writer, before Erin and I launched the newsletter. I want to finally share some notes from the frontlines of an extraordinarily weird job — a job I still do, here and there, but which can also feel like a memory from another lifetime.
Toward the end of 2010, Rolling Stone signed me to a freelance contract. I’d been writing for them for a couple years, and writing profiles of musicians, actors, filmmakers and artists since the early 2000s. The magazine agreed to pay me a fee of $90,000 annually, and I owed them 35,000 words in return. These sorts of contracts used to be common during the magazine business’s ‘90s and early-2000s boom times. By the time I signed mine, they were pretty rare. These days they’re virtually unheard of.
I loved the job, which sent me traveling all over the world, meeting fascinating people, writing about what they were like and how they made the things they made. The work was very fun, to no small extent because I took it very seriously — even if there were times when it felt deeply unserious (“We need you to fly to L.A. and hang out with Rae Sremmurd and their pet monkeys in a rented mansion”). I’d graduated from college intent on building a career as a magazine writer, and while the concepts of “career” and “magazine writer” were drifting further and further apart, I counted myself among the lucky ones who’d managed to pull it off. Phoning it in would have felt not merely depressing, but unconscionable.
When I was assigned to profile people whose work I admired — Daft Punk, Paul McCartney, Emma Stone, Drake, Will Ferrell & Adam McKay, Joanna Newsom, and Steve McQueen among them — I strove to file the liveliest, sharpest, most illuminating account of that person that had been written.
And when the subject was someone toward whom I felt what you’d call a less-immediate interest — say, Bruno Mars, or the Chainsmokers, or Macklemore, or Travis Scott? I strove to write the best profile that had ever been written of them, too. I owed that much to readers, and to myself.
Also, people had a way of surprising you. Bruno Mars was the man. So was Macklemore.
I cared about profiles the way I imagine a songwriter cares about songs: The profile is a popular form whose conventions, formulas and generic constraints — and whose opportunities for playing around with all of the above — absorbed me to no end.
I befriended fellow writers who felt similarly, with whom I could talk about, say, Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2012 New Yorker profile of Hilary Mantel — a piece whose brilliance was consolidated, in a quietly audacious way, by the fact that in its nearly 10,000 words, MacFarquhar somehow managed the incantatory feat of using the word “she” some 405 times, while using the name “Mantel” only twice.
I thrilled to pieces by profilers who demonstrated that level of attention, ingenuity and commitment to the craft of rendering a subject on the page. I loved reading profiles by Chris Heath, Ian Parker, Lauren Collins, Alex Pappademas and Molly Young, all of whom are uncommonly perceptive about their subjects, but also a plain delight to read in their own right, from one snappy sentence to the next. Certain profile-appreciating ball-knowers still drop their jaws talking about Amy Wallace’s 2010 Garry Shandling profile in GQ, or Stephen Rodrick’s 2013 Paul Schrader profile in the New York Times Magazine. I’d read profiles like that and aspire to achieve some fraction of their greatness in mine.
Different writers approach profiles in different ways. Since I mostly write about people in the arts, my fundamental interest has always been in creative decisions, in process, in the problems one encounters trying to produce something great. Negotiating for access to a subject, the three things I reliably ask for are 1. a sit-down interview, 2. time just hanging out in their orbit and 3. time watching work happen. I tell myself that even the most famous person is famous because they’re very good at doing something. How do they actually do it?
Jimmy Kimmel generously invited me to live at his house for three days, for a 2013 Rolling Stone cover story. For 72 hours, I shadowed Kimmel from breakfast to bedtime, got to see how a late show comes together in detail, and found him thoughtful and funny. He made me pizza in a backyard oven Chris Bianco built custom for him. I filed a story that, I heard through the grapevine, Kimmel hated, because I’d included a scene where he smoked a joint in Hermosa Beach, and executives at Disney, which owns ABC, were furious with him.
Maybe Kimmel disliked the story for some other reason. You can write a piece you think is overwhelmingly positive, and some fleeting detail you didn’t think twice about can poison the subject on the whole thing. This might sting, but your ultimate obligation as a writer isn’t to your subject — or rather, it’s not only to them, but to your readers, too.
Other subjects of mine delivered on the promise of a classic embedded profile and went on to regret it. In 2013, at Drake’s three-acre Calabasas compound, he showed me his remote-control waterfall and man-made grotto. We talked a ton, drove to a James Turrell show at LACMA where we took off our shoes, climbed into a sealed-metal orb Turrell calls the “Perceptual Cell,” then stepped into the “Ganzfeld” light installation, where Drake’s assistant took a bunch of pictures of him gazing off contemplatively for Instagram.
That profile was slated for the cover, but then Philip Seymour Hoffman died, the magazine crashed an in memoriam piece on him, and to both my and Drake’s disappointment, the editors bumped him to an inside feature. “They took my cover from me last minute and ran the issue,” Drake wrote on Twitter at the time. “I’m disgusted with that. RIP to Philip Seymour Hoffman. All respect due. But the press is evil.” A year later, on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, he rapped, “Gotta be careful around Rolling Stone / or anyone that’s tryina throw stones at me.” A fascinating dude.
Other subjects started off inscrutable to me and remain that way. Travis Scott spent a full day driving me around Houston in a Lamborghini SUV without once asking about, much less acknowledging, the fact that my head was immobilized by a plastic-and-foam neck brace. (Bike crash.)
I’ve stayed in touch with a handful of people I’ve written about, some to this day, some just for a little bit. Back in 2016, I sent a text to one celebrity I’d profiled previously. They replied, “whoa whoa whoa. this just freaked me out. i don’t want to creep you out but I woke up thinking of you!”
It’s easier for me to feel awesome than creeped out when a beautiful, gifted and famous person says they woke up thinking of me. But I didn’t know what to make of it when I sent them another text five months later, to which, without any reference to our previous exchange, they replied, “i can’t explain this to you but this text scared me because i thought of you JUST YESTERDAY and woke up to this!”
Had I actually woven my way into this person’s thoughts at random on multiple occasions? Or did they send notes like this to all kinds of people as a form of flattery?
Possibly some third thing. Spending time with somebody for a profile can create a singular kind of intensity, not least because, if you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.
I had my Rolling Stone contract until 2018. It felt like a small miracle every time the magazine renewed it. In 2014 we moved to the Bay. In 2017 Jann Wenner sold the magazine, and the new owner seemed to see less upside in relatively costly contracts like mine. My contract was reduced, and then the magazine killed it.
By that point, thankfully, I had a contract at the New York Times Magazine, too. It didn’t come with guaranteed monthly checks the way Rolling Stone’s did, but it paid well for the stories I did write. Between that and occasional freelance feature I wrote for magazines like the New Yorker, New York, WSJ, and Wired, I could still pay my bills.
Crucially, I could still call myself “a profile writer,” too, which was, after all, the thing I’d spent some 20 years of my life learning how to be.
In March of 2020, I was in Los Angeles, reporting a story about David Fincher for the NYT Magazine, when word broke that the NBA had suspended the season. Covid was upon us. My job involved spending time with other people, and, for the foreseeable future, that was off the table. In May, Erin and I smashed the send on the first Blackbird Spyplane.
Six years later, I still write features for the NYT Magazine, almost all of them profiles of people in the arts, like Fincher, Nathan Fielder, Lorde, Seth Rogen, Boots Riley, Bob Odenkirk, Michael Mann, Bong Joon-ho and, before he died, my childhood hero Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, who brought me to his favorite Walgreen’s in Hollywood. But if I’m accurately accounting for the way I spend most of my days, and for the way I earn most of my livelihood, then I have to call myself a “newsletter writer” now.
Unexpectedly, but proudly! I get to do my own thing, for the most beautiful & blessed readership across all media, at that. Meanwhile, so many other writers have migrated, or been squeezed, out of the profession. In some cases their new jobs are way more remunerative, in some cases less. Some writers I came up with, like Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey, are now film & TV podcasters — brilliant ones. Others took jobs in Hollywood, or in tech. Some married rich and spend their days doing God knows what.
One of the writers whose artist profiles astound me most these days — in a way that could be maddening if I were a hater of generational greatness — is the New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv, who is not, technically speaking, a profile writer at all, but whose penetrating, deeply reported stories about Asghar Farhadi and Alice Munro reveal as much about the dark, brilliant, f--ked-up ways creative minds can work as any conventional profile I’ve ever read.
Zach Baron has been writing enormous stories on the reg for over a decade — except now, maybe, less so? His print profiles routinely make a huge splash, but even for king, times are changing. He’s been doing on-camera “video cover stories” at GQ for a few years, and under the magazine’s new editor-in-chief, he just launched a new video-interview series, of which the Tom Cruise Q&A was the third installment. A few days later, Travis and Jason Kelce hosted Cruise on their YouTube podcast. Discussing his moves into this new-media ecosystem on Matt Belloni’s podcast, Zach talked about the upsides of pivoting from print profiles to video encounters, and about how, despite some misgivings about it, you’ve got to “try to adapt and find where the audience is.”
It’s hard to argue with him there. And to be sure, there used to be a glut of celebrity profiles, in the sense that the newsstand-sales-and-print-ads-fueled era of magazines generated way more of the stuff than the world wanted, much less “needed.” But as a profile-loving oldhead, it’s hard not to feel some dismay at the way video seems to be eating up all kinds of cultural forms whose excellence it can neither equal nor replace.
Every now and then, when we publish an interview here with someone like Cameron Winter, or Tyler, The Creator, or Clairo, younger fans of theirs who are unfamiliar with Blackbird Spyplane will ask, “Where can we listen to this?” or “How can we watch this?” But there isn’t any audio or video. The Plane is at its core a (brilliantly) written and (legendarily) Photoshopped textual-visual miracle. It’s only over the past year that I’ve come to realize how strange that is — how, as a lifelong writer, I’ve unwittingly transformed from “just doing what I do” to a written-word holdout.
It’s what I know best, and it’s what I love best. One of the most beautiful things to me about this newsletter boom that’s underway is how it demonstrates that I’m far from alone. But any profiles I write these days I do at the NYT Magazine, because, as profile-delivery-machines, magazines remain unparalleled, whereas newsletters lend themselves much more readily to other kinds of writing.
Sometimes this makes me feel like a 19th-century print engraver. But that doesn’t really do the situation justice. They say that, of all art forms, novels are unrivaled when it comes to capturing another human being’s consciousness. This is true. But damn it if a great profile can’t come close.
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