LEAH WOLCHOK: VERY SEMI-SERIOUS (2014)


BOB MANKOFF AND FARLEY KATZ

Here at The New Yorker: a cartoon survey

We have already had a film available in YouTube video, Bob Mankoff: The Anatomy of a New Yorker cartoon (actually just a condensation of a Bob Mankoff lecture), and Every Tuesday, a Portrait of the New Yorker Cartoonists , a movie made by Rachel Loube (SFJFF 2013) about some of the cartoonists and the weekly selection process. And less an in-house New Yorker story but more interesting yet, we've had Clara Kuperberg and Joelle Oosterlinck's documentary, The Art of Spiegelman (2010). So did we need another film, feature length, about New Yorker cartoonists? Well, yes, we did, actually. They are a significant cultural institution, and those films still left a lot unsaid, particularly the story of great New Yorker cartoonists now no longer living, and a sense of the new generations coming. Leah Wlochok's film gives us a bit of both, a quick history begun by editor in chief David Remnick and continued by the subject, again, the current cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff. A look at two of the oldest living ones, Mort Gerberg, who's 84, and George Booth, who's 88. Booth's still submitting cartoons. Gerberg seems to consider himself a back number, but he still plays at a New Yorker baseball game. There's a glance at older greats like Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, James Thurber, and Saul Steinberg, none of whose like, as current editor Mankoff notes, we will see again.

The film comes to life with two newcomers, both delicate, slightly odd souls. First is Liana Finck, graphic novelist and aspiring one-panel cartoonist, whom the film follows home a bit. She says she may have Asperger's. Cartooning is clearly her passion. Bob Mankoff encourages her, but suggests she try to make her drawings communicate more directly. No such problem with the very quiet Edward Steed, who grew up on a farm in England. With him it's love at first sight. His loose, quirky drawings look a little like William Steig, and also like Fifties Punch cartoons (or so it seemed to me, before I knew he was English). When he walks out of his Tuesday meeting, Mankoff says, "He's a genius!" Steed has big blue eyes, pale skin. He's rather beautiful, and pure (as in Liana Finck in her way too). Steed was traveling in Vietnam, and saw New Yorker cartoons on the Internet for the first time, and knew at once, "It wasn't so much I wanted to do it. I knew I could do it. I wanted to do something." And he was looking for something to do with the rest of his life. Plainly, he has found it. His first published cartoon in the magazine was 4 March. 2013, but there are already 79 of his cartoons in the New Yorker cartoon bank. Genius.

I don't know exactly how being a New Yorker cartoonist works. Are even ones like Roz Chast, who's had 1,231 cartoons published, simple free lancers? It seems they all come in on Tuesdays and show what they've got to Mankoff, and he picks his faves and runs them by editor-in-chief David Remnick, who puts them in the "Yes" and "No" baskets. It's pointed out that it's a part-time job for some, perhaps many; another source of income is needed. Carolita Johnson (92 cartoons) is a "pattern model." Zach Kanin is a "Saturday Night Live" writer. Bruce Eric Kaplan ("BEK"), whose cartoon style is very distinctive, and his signature, the three initials in separate boxes, familiar, is a TV writer and producer. Young Farley Katz is an ad copywriter. But aren't some salaried? Wasn't Peter Arno? Surely Charles Addams was? Such delicate matters are omitted.

Speaking of delicacy, right after 9/11 -- to whose site Condé Nast moved the magazine's offices this year -- the issue had no cartoons. There was just one submitted that was used. Leo Collum's set in a bar of a woman talking to a man: "I never thought I'd laugh again, till I saw that jacket." BEK did one several months later: "It's hard, but slowly I'm getting back to hating everyone." Many of the cartoonists are Jewish. But some of the great ones are not.

Wolchok, a woman, makes reference to current female cartoonists. She does not refer to the most famous one, Helen Hokinson, whose clubby women were once a fixture; but it's understandable. Hokinson died in 1949. My mother, who taught me about "Helen Hokinson women," subscribed to the magazine in the Twenties and Thirties -- it's heyday. But Wolchok is too young to know about that time. In fact, this is too large a subject for a short feature film. There have been over 50,000 New Yorker cartoons. They have reflected the many stages American culture and New York have gone through. There are collections. This is just a glimpse.

Part of the history is that many magazines, like Esquire, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, used cartoons, and older cartoonists like Gerberg submitted to all these; they were not just "New Yorker cartoonists," but cartoonists. Most of the other magazines cut out cartoons, or vanished, and The New Yorker's association with cartoons has remained the most lasting and essential. However, the notion that there is a "New Yorker cartoon" is one that's not worked out. The best cartoons are often both universal and timeless. This seems definitely to be true of Edward Steed's.

Perhaps inevitably, Wolchok anchors her film with a recurring focus on Bob Mankoff, who himself is writing a memoir of his life in cartoons, and we see him not only doing his job, and at home, but working with an editor of his coming book, which has as its title his most famous cartoon's line, "Does Never Work for You?" Though perhaps not the most interesting subject, he is articulate, and is both one of the magazine's most often published cartoonists and now its editor. (Lee Lorenz was head of the department from 11973 to 1997: thats as far back as she goes.) Mankoff lost his son a year or so ago, we learn, and he he is working comedy while dealing with personal tragedy -- as well as the decision to sell the house and move with his wife with a new one, to try to start anew. He comments that he can (is it true?) edit cartoons just as well when he's in a bad mood. Is it important to know he hated his mother, or that he thinks cartoonists need to have had lousy childhoods? (It looks like Edward Steed didn't; that he merely has always "had an odd view of things.")

Wolchok has produced another, and longer, and valuable movie about New Yorker cartoons. The Spiegelman one is still more interesting, because it focuses on a more interesting life in more detail. But she keeps a light touch. The photography is sometimes shaky, not in a Bourne movie way, just in a clumsy way. But the job gets done. And to meet the young cartoonists, especially Edward Steed, is a treat. But as Scott Foundas says in his Variety review, this film, its director's feature debut, "Doesn't strive to be comprehensive." Perhaps it shouldn't be heavy handed in dealing with such light stuff, but there's much more to say.

Very Semi-Serious, 83 mins., is a new film, which debuted at Tribeca 19 April 2015. It was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it showed 1,3, and 5 May, and won the Golden Gate Award for Bay Area Documentary Feature. (The larger doc award went to Bill Turner Ross's Western, which I reviewed in New Directors/New Films in March.)

A Steed cartoon:

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.