The Monday Media Diet with Chris Nashawaty

Chris Nashawaty (CW) is a writer, editor, and critic. He was on staff for Entertainment Weekly for 25 years, and the is author of books about legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, the cocaine-fueled making of Caddyshack, and most recently, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 — a look at eight seminal sci-fi/fantasy films that all arrived in theaters within eight weeks of one another. It comes out in paperback July 29th.

Tell us about yourself.

Let’s see…I’m a writer, editor and critic. I’m a father of twin 11-year-old boys, which is not unlike being put through a meat grinder on a daily basis (but, you know, in a good way!). I’m a native New Englander still trying to find his sea legs in Los Angeles after two years (I still can’t tell you where the 101 or the 5 goes). I’m a diehard Red Sox and Celtics fan who’s desperately trying to pass that fandom on to his kids. I’m a perfectly adequate kids’ soccer coach, a voracious reader of hardboiled crime fiction, and an equal-opportunity movie nerd who believes there’s as much art in genre trash as there is in the awards-y arthouse stuff (I’ll take TimeCop or Terminator 2 over a Wes Anderson film any day of the week — although Gene Hackman gave one of my all-time favorite performances in The Royal Tenenbaums). I grew up in Needham, Massachusetts (Go Rockets!) and since then have lived in Connecticut, Cairo, Chicago, Jerusalem, Brooklyn, Connecticut (again), and now Manhattan Beach. After getting a Masters in Journalism at Northwestern, my first gig was working as a reporting intern in the Jerusalem bureau of Reuters. After that, I spent 25 years on staff at Entertainment Weekly and loved most of them. I was lucky enough to get a taste of the last fizzy days of lavish, expense-account magazine publishing before the whole thing went belly-up. Over the course of my career, I’ve interviewed everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to Britney Spears. I’ve had bylines in Esquire, Vanity Fair, Wired, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Departures, Travel & Leisure, Vulture, Golf, Inc., The Hollywood Reporter, and many others. I’m the author of books about legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, the cocaine-fueled making of Caddyshack, and most recently, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 — a look at eight seminal sci-fi/fantasy films that all arrived in theaters within eight weeks of one another and became the bridge between Star Wars and the modern blockbuster (FYI: the paperback goes on sale on July 29^th! Word is, it makes a great gift!). One last fun fact: In the late ‘90s, when Mad magazine (my personal bible growing up) published a parody of EW, they changed by name to “Chris Wishywashy,” which I quite honestly consider my proudest professional moment. I was on the business end of a Mad zinging!

Describe your media diet.

The whole reason I got into journalism in the first place was because I wanted to figure out a way to get paid for reading the newspaper, which I still consider one of life’s greatest (and most affordable) pleasures. When I started working at EW in the ‘90s, we used to get a fat stack of newspapers delivered to our individual offices every morning — offices which, I should point out, you could still smoke in! That age now seems as distant as the Hindenburg… I just realized I sound like Graydon Carter…or Grampa Simpson. Enough nostalgia.

In the last few years, like everyone, I’ve become a lot more comfortable consuming media digitally. But I’m not going to lie, I do think there’s a special, almost ineffable part of the reading experience that you only get from an actual newspaper or magazine. I like having ink-stained fingers by the time I’m finished. There’s a tactile mindfulness that you just don’t get from opening a tab on your phone or computer screen.

That said, there are a few long-term physical media relationships that I’m not ready to give up yet: The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist (because sometimes you just want to know what’s going on in Burkina Faso). As for my daily smorgasbord, I usually start the morning off by scanning the handful of newspapers I subscribe to: The New York Times (the gold standard…plus, The Athletic is soooo good!), The Wall Street Journal (pricey, but their digital sub is a bargain), The Washington Post (probably won’t renew), The Los Angeles Times (getting thinner by the day, but it’s my hometown paper for the time being), and The Boston Globe (because you never truly move on from your first love; also, mandatory sports coverage from a Murderer’s Row of beat reporters and columnists like the legendary Dan Shaughnessy).

After that, I’ll move on to the curated handful of newsletters and substacks that arrive in my inbox while I’m sound asleep. Right now, I’m really liking Sean McNulty’s “The Wakeup” in The Ankler (full disclosure: I do some editing for them) and I’ll read anything Richard Rushfield writes about the entertainment biz there. I don’t particularly line up politically with Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, but I think they really get how to put together a compelling substack that rolls out new stories at the tight cadence (plus, they’ve got a couple of really sharp, voice-y writers in Nellie Bowles and Suzy Weiss). Then it’s on to the two V’s: Vulture and Vanity Fair, which both tend to have a nice buffet of articles. Next, I’ll quickly skim through the trades (I hover a bit longer on Fridays, when I catch up with the week’s movie reviews — Variety’s Owen Gleiberman is still the best). Finally, I might click on some of the more esoteric or eclectic or straight-up random things I like, such as Offball (a newish daily sports and culture digest that’s smartly packaged), Sam Miller’s Pebble Hunting (obsessive and stats-based deep dives on baseball), and Wax Pack Gods (playful, laser-focused essays about vintage baseball cards). At that point, I’m usually about three or four coffees deep and I’ll begin to spiral into a panic attack because I have assignments and deadlines of my own, goddamnit, and I can’t spend the entire day reading other people’s stuff. The rent isn’t gonna pay itself!

What’s the last great book you read?

That’s easy. It’s actually a series of books. Hard Case Crime publishes some new, but mostly older, out-of-print hardboiled crime novels in paperback form. They’re short, they’re fast-paced and they’re a blast to read. They’ve put out about 130 of them to date and I haven’t come across a dud in the bunch. Since I’m not into sourdough or Peloton, poring through the entire Hard Case library was my personal quest during the pandemic. I still have about 10 titles left to go. In my opinion, the best of the bunch are the Quarry books by Max Allan Collins. Which is saying something because Hard Case’s literary stable also includes Donald E. Westlake, Ed McBain, John Lange (aka Michael Crichton), and Christa Faust. I’ve always been a sucker for noir cinema classics like The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, but scarfing down these lurid little capers about tough-talking detectives and double-dealing dames is one of the most enjoyable rabbit holes I’ve ever burrowed down.

What are you reading now?

I tend to be more of a non-fiction guy. Books about the movie business and film history are catnip to me. Beyond that, I recently tore through Nicholas Shakespeare’s excellent biography of Ian Fleming and Susan Morrison’s slightly underwhelming Lorne Michaels bio. The four books currently taxiing on my nightstand are: Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice (like many others, my first media gig when I moved to NYC was copyediting at The Voice); low-slung bassist extraordinaire Peter Hook’s autobiography Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen New Order in concert); American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by ESPN’s Seth Wickersham (I love the narrative approach of this book and it sounds like Wickersham got some juicy dish); and Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels, a book I’ve been meaning to read for years that I vowed to finally start before summer kicks off.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

Depends on the publication. But first, I need absolute quiet. I am not somehow who can read with music on in the background. I want to really dial in. If I’m reading the Sunday Times, I might start with Arts & Leisure or the Book Review and slowly work way to the dessert course of the magazine. The cherry on top of that dessert is the Sunday crossword. If you can knock that bad boy off on a Sunday night, you can be damn sure you’re off to a good week.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m in London is to go to a newsstand and pick up the full array of dailies and just make a day of it. With the more serious and stuffy British papers, there’s absolutely nothing better than diving in straight for the obits. The Brits really know how to write a tribute. I particularly enjoy reading the ones about people I’ve never heard of who turn out to have had some daring, stranger-than-fiction episode during WWII, or some Kim Philby-esque dalliance with the KGB, or some wonderfully bizarre anecdotes about their time in the House of Lords. As for the tabloids, I still can’t get past the fact that they actually cover the world of professional darts! The Brits are adorable.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I’ll give you four:

-Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris: Mark was my editor at EW for years and he really is the smartest person in the room in just about any room he walks into. As someone who writes books about film history and the movie business, this is the model for what I’m trying to do. Harris uses the five Best Picture nominees from 1967 as a lens to look at a seismic moment of change and disruption in Hollywood. The writing is great, the reporting is great, the narrative structure is great. It’s great.

-The Magus by John Fowles: This was assigned by a philosophy professor in college. In other words, I expected to hate it. Turns out, it’s one of my all-time favorite books…and one that not enough people seem to know about. It’s a haunting, romantic, weird little magic trick of a story with a sun-dappled Greek island setting that will completely transport you. Pick it up.

-On Writing by Stephen King: The best book about putting sentences together for a living that I’ve read.

-The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: OK, this is hardly unknown or unsung. But if you aren’t a reader of comics or are intimidated by their visual grammar of graphic novels, this is absolutely the place to start. The Watchmen is smart and thrilling and cynical and beautiful. It’s the perfect gateway drug to a literary form too many people dismiss.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Either MyShake (an earthquake-measuring app; you want the number to be low) or Ludex (scan your sports cards and get an instant value estimate; you want the number to be high).

Plane or train?

For pure pleasure and comfort, nothing beats a train. I commuted from Westport, CT, to Grand Central Station on Metro North every day for 15 years. You can have the shittiest day ever, but at least you know you’ll have an hour of peace and blissful quiet to read each way as the Long Island Sound blurs past the window. Frankly, I miss it.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Egypt. I did my junior year abroad at the American University in Cairo and it was magical. The Pyramids are as impressive and awesome as you want them to be. The Sahara is as widescreen-stunning as a David Lean movie. Abu Simbel and the Valley of the Kings are every kid’s Howard Carter/Indiana Jones fantasies come to life. And Cairo is a wild, cacophonous madhouse.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I feel like I’m plunging down a new one every single day, whether it’s looking for old, choppy, black-and-white videos of early B-52s concerts, or reading back issues of Rolling Stone from 1978, or getting into the deep weeds about the facts and fictions swirling around Sal Mineo’s murder. This is exactly what the internet is good for. My most entertaining recent time-suck detour was reading about all of the movie projects that Michael Cimino, the infamous director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate, was attached to but never came to pass. They make up one of Hollywood’s greatest and most colorful “What If” careers. (CW)