The Fake Magazines of Blade Runner

Over at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal tracks down and displays some of the fake magazines used in Ridley Scott's great film Blade Runner. Worth a look.

Along that same line of thinking, Shortlist.com has a look at some fake covers of real magazines that were used in non-science-fiction films through the years.

And if that amuses you, but you don't have InDesign and Photoshop on your computer, check out this Fake Magazine Cover Creator (they even have Future magazine, how sweet). Such as the bit of fun I had creating my own Fangoria cover (at right).

Fake is fun.

Ellie Award Nominations Announced

Also see May 1, 2009, update: Ellie winners announced.

The list of nominees for the American Society of Magazine Editors' Ellie Awards reads a bit like the nominating committee walked up Park Avenue South or Broadway and picked candidates by location. GQ. Esquire. The New Yorker. New York. Vogue.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. There are folks from the provinces, as well. San Francisco's Mother Jones.Texas Monthly (which calls itself "the national magazine of Texas," and one wonders why no one likes Texans). And so on. But it's still dominated by the Gotham crowd, who also hold records for the most Ellie nominations and wins in the past, as well as the most multiple-nominations this year.

Is GQ really one of the greatest magazines around? I live and work in San Francisco with educated, media-savvy people (many of them veterans of the magazine, newspaper, internet, or TV industries). Not once have I heard anyone cite a GQ article. Never have I heard a young J-school graduate list working for GQ as one of their goals (and I meet a lot of J-school grads in my line of work). I do hear such things about Esquire and The Atlantic, and there's often talk about New Yorker articles.

But I'm not picking on GQ. It's a fine magazine, for what it is. I frankly don't know what its aspirations are beyond hitting the revenue marks for its publisher, but there are worse crimes than putting out a successful magazine. My only point is: Really? That's the magazine that ASME nominated for 8 awards this year? New York has some of the best newsstands and magazine shops in the country (one of my favorite things about living in Manhattan was walking the four miles between my apartment on 82 and Second and my office on Park Ave. South and stopping at numerous shops full of magazines from around the country and all over the world). Surely they could have gotten some nominations a bit farther afield?

The Old New Republic Redux?

The New Republic magazine, the nearly century-old liberal (and occasionally conservative) political journal from Washington, D.C., may be getting another new owner, just a few years after being acquired by its current, er, new owner. And the new owner might turn out to be an old owner, reports Folio:.

Martin Peretz was the owner when I became a disciple of the magazine in the early 1980s. A friend of the family gave me a subscription (first issue featured the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner), and I remained a loyal subscriber for most of the decade. My devotion waned when the magazine went through some journalism problems (i.e., accusations of bad reporting practices by some of its younger reporters) and the magazine seemed to shrug them off. TNR has always been a little bit too nice to the people it's pals with (friends, former students, etc.). But I still kept up with it from time to time, finally giving up when an editor was reportedly let go because he didn't support the presidential candidacy of Peretz pal Al Gore. (That was the story at the time.)

Wrote Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times in Sept. 6, 1997, when editor Michael Kelly was fired (the "TRB" to which Kelly refers is the magazine's Washington political column):

Mr. Peretz has a well-known friendship with Vice President Gore, who was a student of his at Harvard University. In light of that, Mr. Kelly said, Mr. Peretz was concerned that the magazine's continued negative coverage would hurt Mr. Gore's Presidential prospects.

''I think that he probably saw that I was going to continue writing TRB's on the soft-money scandals, since I had made something of a cause out of it,'' Mr. Kelly said. ''And he made it clear to me that he didn't like that, and that is a subject area that is obviously increasingly involving Al Gore.''

Mr. Peretz, however, said Mr. Gore was not his primary concern. ''I anticipated having differences with Kelly about Gore,'' he said. ''But that wasn't the reason I asked him to leave.''

Kelly, of course, went on to revitalize The Atlantic Monthly before he was killed while covering the Iraq War.

So if the story about Peretz's intentions to repurchase his old magazine come true, what can we expect? Probably not much. He has remained editor-in-chief of the publication under its current owners. But we'll probably continue to get some juicy journalistic melodrama from the magazine, if the past is any indication.