Show Business (Uptown Broadway)

It was hard times for Columbia Journalism School as the storied institution neared its 2012 centennial—and not for the first time in its tumultuous history.

The fabled J-School, iconic temple of the profession, had come perilously close to dissolution during the university’s lean years from the early ’70s to mid ’90s, saved only by a stalwart dean who’d previously been Bill Moyers’ executive producer. For a lot of years the place was better known for the various awards it bestowed, and the homeless who’d taken over a few of its bathrooms, than for any of its curriculum.

(Truth be told, the standard program was/is an undistinguished 10-month bootcamp of rather basic training, and something close to an Ivy League diploma mill. The truth is, real journalists tend to be born or self-made, not manufactured in Morningside Heights.)

But war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the broader surge of anti-George W. Bush sentiment, had proved awfully good for business: the romantic ideal of journalism became sexier than since Watergate, attracting that many more applicants. Plus, the school began drawing lots more daughters of uber wealthy families from abroad who looked like juicy development prospects.

The J-School grew and grew through the Bush-Cheney era, bullish on its future even as the Internet increasingly drained revenues from the field, and then suddenly the economy collapsed—donations cratered, grants dried up, and most of the hoped-for benefactors overseas ended up giving in their home countries rather than send their millions to New York. Short of a massive capital infusion, the institution would soon be forced to make painful cuts.

The centennial was the last, best chance to turn things around—to raise a mountain of cash showcasing the school’s prestige and newfound global reach. So it’d be a yearlong extravaganza convening experts and VIPs all around the world, including books and a film and an ambitious online campaign.

That’s where I came in, circa early 2011, a fresh-faced twenty-something straight out of public broadcasting hired as much for marketing panache as journalistic experience. Every element had to be just so, magisterial PR enticing donors into Pulitzer’s timeless tradition—nudging people who liked thinking highly of themselves into opening their checkbooks without us always quite needing to make the ask. There were plenty of internal factions to placate, too, tip-toeing around imperious complainers.

All the research and writing and revisions were like a giant jigsaw puzzle, sorting out the big players who needed to be namedropped and the very biggest stories of the century that the J-School could plausibly assert some ownership of, and how to make it all feel relatively seamless. Tons of talented people had come through the building, from A.J. Liebling to Judith Crist to Richard Ben Cramer, though there was a surprising lack of household names—Pat Buchanan, Geraldo Rivera, and Mitch Albom of Tuesdays with Morrie were probably our best-known alums.

Drafting texts and listicles I could handle, curating dramatic historical photos I could figure out with a consulting editor courtesy of the New York Times, but filmmaking required bringing in an outside firm. My boss, an anxious Harvard grad previously an underling at 60 Minutes, had taped the school’s latest promo video with all the production values of a Long Island infomercial; we had to get it right this time.

So we really did do our due diligence, starting with catching the subway downtown to chat with longtime PBS documentarian David Grubin, who looked just like Larry David, at his Upper West Side townhouse. He needed seven figures, while we wanted to stay out of six, but had a keen sense of the sort of burnished air of access we hoped to conjure.

However limited our budget, my boss thought she had a secret weapon: celebs! George Clooney’s people had been so very gracious when they’d wanted to stage an event on campus for Good Night and Good Luck, his Oscar bait from a number of years earlier, so presumably he’d be happy to come back.

After George, she most of all coveted Tina Fey, the ultimate avatar of our savvy Manhattan sensibility—and if Tina weren’t available, we’d settle for Seth Meyers. We also drooled over landing Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or even Johnny Depp if we could figure out some hook to Hunter S. Thompson, as we brainstormed famous journalists and the faculty we had to include.

So my boss could hardly contain her excitement when she heard from one of her ladies who lunched about some fabulous short films commissioned by the Clinton Global Initiative. Hollywood director Jesse Dylan, Bob’s eldest, had tastefully interpolated global thought leaders with top-shelf celebrities to capture what the glamorous initiative was really all about. It seemed perfect, not just a glide path to the A-listers we desired but the extra feather in our cap of bringing the legendary Dylan brand into our own.

On a hastily arranged phone call, we spoke with an associate producer (niece of a very famous artist) who was vague about deliverables but eager to ballpark some figures. Right after Jesse Dylan himself, director of How High, dropped in for a perfunctory 60 seconds, my boss accidently blurted out a number at the very upper end of our budget—the producer was silent for a few beats, as if surprised we’d made it that easy.

And so it was set: filming on campus for a few days early in the new year, hopefully with some big names though no guarantees were made. As the weeks went by, George and Tina and even Seth Meyers ignored our calls, as did all the other non-news celebs we’d dreamed of, though we did manage to book Tom Brokaw, Malcolm Gladwell, and our alum John Quiñones from What Would You Do? among some other recognizable names.

Shortly before principal photography, I led Jesse Dylan’s LA production team (including the nephew of a very famous artist) on a tour of campus seeking scenic vistas and architectural details for B-roll. The group was stark contrast to the burlier New York crews I’d previously worked with, whose focus was producing on budget in cramped noisy rooms, and who would otherwise be roaring their hogs around New Jersey.

Fortunately, the J-School had a spacious mock television studio to work with, the legacy of multiple endowments throughout the years. The shoot would happen across two jam-packed days, with Jesse Dylan conducting an array of 20-30 minute interviews with a focus on eliciting pithy soundbites. I’d have to get up before dawn to go swipe his team into the studio, but would get to sit through the live tapings. (That soon became a tenuous thing; the first morning Jesse threatened to throw me out if I yawned one more goddamn time.)

However unforgiving, Dylan the younger turned out to be a pretty impressive person. He’d obviously done his homework: every interview was a miniature Bill Moyers-style conversation, with organic ebb and flow, that could readily have worked in long form even though our priority would be extracting clips of just a few seconds. He had a knack for teasing out snappy quotables that really should’ve sounded canned to feel profound, and also brought some substance—he was every bit the geeky fanboy gushing to Robert Caro about The Power Broker as a lot of J-School folks were to get to meet a Dylan.

Almost as soon as it had begun, production was over, and the crew returned to Los Angeles for post. As we approached our campaign launch that spring, my boss and I weighed in on rough cuts. Things were looking good, we thought: the emerging four and a half minute product was stylishly assembled, demographically diverse, and had the requisite Philip Glass-esque piano soundtrack.

But at our lavish launch gala that April, and after, the film was a flop—a few seconds of underwhelmed silence followed by audiences’ murmurs of disappointment. It wasn’t that Jesse Dylan & co. hadn’t given us exactly what we’d asked for, but that in our fixation on exalting everything the J-School was supposed to represent we’d neglected the actual institution.

Portentous talking heads waxing poetic about the fourth estate were only part of people’s authentic experience up at 2950 Broadway, a schmutzy underdog of a finishing school where bright-eyed young adults spent a formative year around picturesque NYC before having to settle down to grown-up responsibilities. The film we’d bought was handsome but hollow, perfect for an amorphous foundation or political campaign but not a tangible brick and mortar where humans lived and breathed and made memories—our alums didn’t feel seen.

It was an expensive disaster, but we just so happened to have a fortuitous backup plan. Earlier in the semester a couple of students had wanted to do a video about the centennial for one of their classes, and I’d provided them with loads of archival materials. The project had turned out pleasantly homespun and genuinely grounded in real people’s experience of the school—plus, most importantly, the students were flattered to let us use it for free. Either film on its own was distinctly inadequate, but together somehow implied something greater, and proved decently crowd-pleasing once we started playing both to introduce the rest of our events.

Thus the centennial campaign rolled along, a full year of glitzy fundraisers from SoHo to Mumbai. I left the Journalism School a few months before the end, headed for greener pastures across campus at the Law School, but did attend the closing blowout thrown down at the New York Public Library. My sense from former colleagues was that the centennial had done pretty respectably OK bringing in donations, but not nearly enough to defray the expense of all the spectacle.

Another year or two later I heard that my old boss had moved on elsewhere in the nonprofit sector as our whole office of communications was dissolved, along with various other programs and sinecures. Down but not out, the J-School would have to lick its wounds as it plotted its next big score.

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Next: Cracking the Prestige Cartel

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