Graydon Carter
Birthday:
14 July 1949, Canada
Birth Name:
Edward Graydon Carter
Graydon Carter has been editor of Vanity Fair since July 1992. He founded Spy magazine in 1986 with Kurt Andersen and Tom Phillips. He worked as a staff writer for Time, where he covered business, law, and entertainment for five years before joining Life as a staff writer in 1983. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Mr. Carter was the editor of The New Y...
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Graydon Carter has been editor of Vanity Fair since July 1992. He founded Spy magazine in 1986 with Kurt Andersen and Tom Phillips. He worked as a staff writer for Time, where he covered business, law, and entertainment for five years before joining Life as a staff writer in 1983. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Mr. Carter was the editor of The New York Observer.Under Mr. Carter, Vanity Fair has won 14 National Magazine Awards, including two for General Excellence. He was recently named to the ASME Hall of Fame. He has been named Advertising Age's editor of the year and is the first editor ever to be twice named Adweek magazine's editor of the year.Mr. Carter is the author of What We've Lost (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2004), a comprehensive critical examination of the Bush administration. He is also the co-editor, with Kurt Andersen and George Kalogerakis, of Spy: The Funny Years (Miramax, October 2006). He edited the best-selling Vanity Fair's Hollywood (Viking Studio, October 2000), as well as Oscar Night (Knopf, October 2004), a lavish photographic history of the exclusive Oscar parties held over the past 75 years, and Vanity Fair Portraits (Abrams, September 2008), a collection of the magazine's most memorable portraits taken over the past 95 years. He also edited Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood (Penguin, 2008) and Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life (Rodale, 2009), as well as The Great Hangover (HarperCollins, 2010), a collection of articles from Vanity Fair written about the 2008 financial crisis. More recently, Mr. Carter edited Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells (Penguin, 2014), a book of works by Vanity Fair's astonishing early catalogue of writers, from Dorothy Parker to P. G. Wodehouse, in honor of the magazine's 100th anniversary.Mr. Carter was a producer of "I'll Eat You Last," a one-woman play starring Bette Midler, about legendary Hollywood talent agent Sue Mengers. The show, directed by Tony Award-winner Joe Mantello, opened at the Booth Theater in New York City on April 2013, and at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles on December 3.Mr. Carter co-produced two documentaries for HBO: Public Speaking (2010), directed by Martin Scorsese, which spotlights writer Fran Lebowitz, and His Way (2011), about acclaimed Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub, which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy. Mr. Carter was an executive producer of 9/11, the highly acclaimed film by Jules and Gedeon Naudet about the World Trade Center attacks, which aired on CBS. He received an Emmy Award for 9/11, as well as a Peabody Award. He produced the acclaimed documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, about the legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans, which premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and had its European premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.Mr. Carter produced the documentary Chicago 10, which premiered on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007. He also produced Surfwise, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007, and Gonzo, about the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, which was directed by Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney.Mr. Carter is a co-owner of three New York City restaurants: the Waverly Inn, the Monkey Bar, and the Beatrice Inn.Born in Toronto, Canada, Mr. Carter resides in Manhattan with his wife, Anna, and their daughter. He also has four older children. Show less «
It's a subtle craft, the art of the playboy - the creation of a life of tasteful public and private pleasure - and it's one that is complete...Show more »
It's a subtle craft, the art of the playboy - the creation of a life of tasteful public and private pleasure - and it's one that is completely lost on the rich of today. Many men think they're playboys but they invariably land wide of the mark. Surrounding yourself with champagne, fast friends and paid escorts is the very definition of the word 'loser'. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school And men such as Dominique Stauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think 'role model'. Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon. Show less «
Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading, it's betting. Now might be the time to stop cal...Show more »
Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading, it's betting. Now might be the time to stop calling all banks 'banks'. Only institutions that go about the old-fashioned business of taking in deposits from customer A and lending them out to customer B should be called banks. The rest should call themselves what they are. 'Parlors' would be appropriate, or 'dens' - words more suitable to venerable betting pursuits. Show less «
It could fairly be said, given how many Oscars were handed out to non-Americans at this year's [2012] Academy Awards, that it might be time ...Show more »
It could fairly be said, given how many Oscars were handed out to non-Americans at this year's [2012] Academy Awards, that it might be time to create a new category: Best American Film. Finding enough contenders could prove difficult, however, if you eliminate much of what the American film has become: an endless succession of sequels, prequels, remakes, movies spun off of action figures or board games, movies with vampires or fire-breathing mutants, bromantic comedies, teenage love sagas and high-minded adaptations of the sort of minimalist, writing-school-inspired fictions that have sent the American novel into a slow, self-admiring death spiral. Show less «
[on 21st century American cinema] The essential difference between then and now is that, a half-century ago, movies were geared primarily to...Show more »
[on 21st century American cinema] The essential difference between then and now is that, a half-century ago, movies were geared primarily to adults, and television was aimed primarily at kids. Now it's the reverse. Show less «
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well he was a gift from, dare I say it, God...That t...Show more »
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well he was a gift from, dare I say it, God...That the New York Times ripped up its front page at midnight the day he died to make room for his obituary is a testament to his standing in the world of ideas and letters. Show less «
Not to generalize, but mankind can be divided into three groups. There are those who like to record and share every aspect of their lives no...Show more »
Not to generalize, but mankind can be divided into three groups. There are those who like to record and share every aspect of their lives no matter how inconsequential. There are those who live lives that are actually worth recording yet don't. And there are the rest of us, the vast sweep of humanity, who neither record our lives nor live ones particularly worth recording. Let's concentrate on the first group. It's a younger, growing demographic, and one reflective of a new movement called Quantified Self. Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all the time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things. Show less «
James Mayfield

