Recently, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Twentieth Century Fox hosted a cocktail party and screening for his former colleagues at LIFE magazine, where he worked in the 1980s. The occasion: the pending premiere of Ben Stiller’s new comedy, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” based on the famous New Yorker short story by James Thurber.
Much of the film, now in theaters in the U.S., is set in the Time and Life Building at a vibrant, if fictional LIFE magazine. Stiller plays a hybrid picture editor/archivist/photo-lab-chief who loses the negative for the cover of the final issue of LIFE. (In a painful case of deja vu, the magazine – the one depicted on the screen – is being shuttered, yet again.) The lost frame, it turns out, has been shot by a swashbuckling photographer in the mold of Robert Capa and Gene Smith, played by Sean Penn.
Among the 100 former staffers in attendance at the party from the weekly and monthly LIFE, 13 photographers were on hand. And many were of like mind: In this era of Instagram, Photoshop, and digital imagery run rampant, wouldn’t it be a great time to launch a picture magazine like … LIFE?
