“(…) The New Journalism can no longer be ignored in an artistic sense. The rest I take back…The hell with it… Let chaos reign… louder music, more wine… The hell with the standings… The top rang is up for grabs. All the old traditions are exhausted, and no new one is yet established. All bets are off! the odds are cancelled! It’s any body’s ball game! ... The horses are all drugged! The track is glass!... and out of such glorious chaos may come, from the most unexpected source, in the most unexpected form, some nice new fat star streamer Rockets that will light up the sky. “Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism
It was 1966 when people first started talking about the New Journalism and before that in the period between 1940 and early 50s the idea of American Dream for journalist was to write a novel. Feature writers belonged to a little league, one of them Portis began his career at this exact level. One day he decided to quit the Herald Tribune and became a novelist. This brought him a bestseller, “Norwood” and then sold to a movie that is how his life became a rich fairytale. Following this example feature writers began to write articles that read like a story (Joe Louis, “The Kind as a Middle-aged Man”) hoping that one day they will and up like Portis.
Journalists explored the style of becoming part of the action rather than staying an outside narrator. And using this new style of narration they could be involved in the scene and ignore the objective approach to the topic. In some articles authors went even further (Breslin, about Phil Spector), they would begin the article not only inside the character’s mind but also with a “virtual stream of consciousness.” Eventually, these further reaching authors were “accused of ‘entering people’s minds’… as if that was ‘one more doorbell a reporter had to push’.”
The New Journalism book is also “a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous (baton twirling competitions) to the deadly serious The pieces are notable because they do not conform to the standard dispassionate and even-handed model of journalism. Rather they incorporate literary devices usually only found in fictional works.” (ref.2)
Hunter S Thompson, a Californian journalist represented all time free-lance style a nonfiction novel and got awarded with the writer’s Brass Stud Award for the “The Hell’s Angels : Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang” . Hell's Angels was the book that launched Thompson's career as a writer. He followed the Hell’s Angels for 18months. “When 'jokingly' threatened with violence he pointed to a loaded double-barrelled shotgun that he kept hanging on his wall and replied in a similar vein that he would "croak two of them first.”(ref.2)”few really look forward to being gang-raped. It is a very ugly experience - a fact the angels tacitly admit by classifying it as a form of punishment. (...) It is a definite ceremony, like the purging of a witch: the girl is stripped, held down on the floor and mounted by who ever has seniority. The punishment is administered in a place where everyone can watch.” (ref.2) The sentence he came up with summarizing his experiences (while getting beaten up by the gang) was “Exterminate all the brutes!”(ref.1) The book was widely read even though the story was about the gang that was feared and even accused of number of criminal activities it described "a world most of us would never dare encounter." (The New York Times)
Another great author Truman Capote happened to have found out about the brutal murders of 1959 of Herbert Clutter, his wife and two of their children who lived in Kansas. Capote decided to write about the crime when the killers were not yet captured. All the detailed descriptions of the scene set up and people as well mysterious dialogues make the piece even more colored and vivid in imagination. Reading the conversation between Dick and Perry, the reader can get into the characters head and see what the killers saw during the scenes of reconstruction. The killers, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested not long after the murders, and Capote effectively spent six years working on the book.
Wolfe writes “For all his attention to novelistic technique, however, Capote does not use point of view in as sophisticated way as he does in fiction. One seldom feels that he is really inside of the minds of the characters. One gets a curious blend of third-person point of view and omniscient narration. Capote probably had sufficient information to use point of view in a more complex fashion but was not yet ready to let himself go in nonfiction.” (ref.2) he also adds that, "The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset ... Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end." (ref.2)
1960s was time of a ‘generation gap, the counterculture, black consciousnesses, sexual permissiveness’, ‘death of God’ and ‘fast money’. Journalists also focused on writing about the changes after the Vietnam War (Social realism). For example The Armies of the Night, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning nonfiction novel written by Norman Mailer. The book deals ostensibly with the March on the Pentagon (the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington DC). Armies was a significant contribution to the newly founded genre, which was otherwise somewhat preoccupied by Tom Wolfe's theories of the new journalism. A departure from Capote's more journalistic example of the form, Armies suggests the historical value of a more contemporary mode of literature. (ref 1&2)
Journalists were learning techniques of realism through the progress of New Journalism and discovering new styles and possibilities within the feature writing. Another example of the New Journalism was Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that tell a story about love and death in the golden land of California. It shows Didion's impressions of San Francisco during the neighborhood's heyday as a countercultural center. In contrast to the more utopian image of the milieu promoted by counterculture sympathizers then and now, Didion offered a rather grim portrayal of the goings-on, including an encounter with a pre-school age child who was given LSD by her parents. (ref.1&2)
Paper Lion was published in 1966, is a non-fiction book by prominent American writer George Plimpton. To write the book, Plimpton repeated the experiment in the NFL, joining the training camp of the 1963 Detroit Lions on the premise of trying out to be the team's third-string quarterback. The book is memorable for its insights into the personalities of the players and the coaches. Another sport laden inspiration can be found in The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved by Hunter S. Thompson who was one of the first authors to use Gonzo style Journalism. (ref.1&2)
My trailer for a Fly on the Wall, Gonzo style Journalism on Day in life of Richard Benyon, Conservative MP for Newbury - click in here.
In film some of the examples of the New Journalism are also shown through movies like Haiti... a gonzo style documentary that captures the cultural routine of rural Haitian life. Experienced in the first person and presented in the same way, we want to show the honesty of the people we encountered and the impression they made on us. It shouts through realistic pictures, not edited, rough, down to earth uncut. The feelings represented and shared by the viewer are honesty and authentic experience, seeing not telling all through visual images.
John Steinbeck used an unique style of floating naturalistic point of view, realistic and honest (ad on my blog)in his The Wings of Desire movie. Joe Eszterhas work who was a Hungarian-American writer, best known for his work on the pulp erotic films Basic Instinct and Showgirls also uses the concept of New Journalism. He has also written several non-fiction books, including an autobiography entitled Hollywood Animal. He became a National Book Award nominee for his nonfiction work Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse in 1974. A polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his “poet on the Frontline” explores concept of war, repetitive memories from the past, impact of the war and structuring the culture and polish believes, it is essentially the drama caused by past affecting the future. (link to my blog!) Another and slightly different but using Gonzo Journalism documentary was Horace Andy with Sly & Robbie “livin'it up 11/17 rastafari...” which is a documentary of the making of a traditional album in harry studio with sly and robbie with some of the greatest living reggae artist, shot in Kingston Jamaica.
The University of Winchester Journalism Course
History and Context of Journalism, part IV
Refferance:
1. Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism
2. The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe on wikipedia
3. Horace Andy with Sly & Robbie “livin'it up 11/17 rastafari...”
4. “Ryszard Kapucinski, poet on the Frontline”
5. John Steinbeck, wings of Desire
6. Haiti...
7. The New Journalism on wikipedia
