Transcript for Justin Chang and Joe Morgenstern: On Cinevangelism

Recorded in Los Angeles, California.

Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast connecting Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences around the country. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board and a faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each spring, 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music. On this podcast, we talk with many of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.

Joe Morgenstern: I'm Joe Morgenstern. Until fairly recently, I was the film critic of The Wall Street Journal. And you are?

Justin Chang: Justin Chang. Film critic for The New Yorker. Oh, that's still fun to say, but until recently, I was a film critic at the L.A. Times.

Nicole Carroll: Justin Chang has wanted to be a film critic since he was a kid… and he’s been reading Joe Morgenstern’s work for many years. Joe has been reviewing films since 1959, and has written for major publications like Newsweek, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Wall Street Journal. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2005. 

Justin is from a more recent generation of film critics. In 2004, he was hired to write at Variety. And then he went on to become a film critic at the Los Angeles Times, where he won the 2024 Pulitzer for Criticism for his writing on movies. Now he's reviewing films for The New Yorker.

As movie lovers and film critics, Justin and Joe have spent a lot of time at theaters, especially in Los Angeles where they both live. But for this episode of “Pulitzer on the Road,” they’re at a particularly special theater. 

Joe Morgenstern: The legendary Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. It opened in 1922 with the first world premiere of any film, and the film was Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood. And Netflix took it over in 2020 and has done this extraordinarily loving job of restoration.

Justin Chang: Yeah, there's something exciting about it, kind of occupying this space between the old and the new. The ceiling, I believe, is the original ceiling, and it's this very, very ornate sunburst image that I remember looking up at even when I came to see – I believe it was Ben-Hur that I saw here – and it felt very [laughs/slightly unintelligible] years ago. I think it was one of the first things I saw here – and it feels like it is something from another era.

Joe Morgenstern: Movie theaters of this time were designed to give people a feeling of gloriousness, of specialness, of being in a special environment. And then during the Depression, the movie palaces were places where a poor nation could go to feel rich for two hours to feel they were in a privileged place. Do you remember the first movie you saw in a movie theater?

Justin Chang: God yes. I believe it was The Fox and the Hound that Disney animated, you know, not quite classic, but a movie with many charms. I watched it with my own kids not too long ago, and it was kind of fascinating to rediscover thinking this was the first movie that my parents took – that I can remember my parents taking me to.

Joe Morgenstern: How old were you?

Justin Chang: I was probably maybe 4 or 5 or something.

Joe Morgenstern: We’re contemporaries in one sense and in another sense, I’m 50 years older than you. And I mean I did grow up in the sound age. [laughter] I hasten to say and the first film I ever saw was a Betty Boop cartoon in the Center Theater, which was the theater in Rockefeller Center that wasn't Radio City Music Hall. And I don't remember the movie as much as the anticipation. I think I must have been 3 or 4 at that tender age. Had no idea what a movie was. So, you know, no idea what was going to happen, but I remember looking all over the theater and seeing what was going to happen from somewhere.

Justin Chang: There was such a fuss over moviegoing and hearing you talk about your upbringing in New York, where I can imagine there were just so many, you know just the vibrancy of that and just of, of cultural life, of moviegoing life. And I grew up in Orange County [California], which is, you know, suburbia, not a bastion of culture in any sense, but it's really sad because there were at least two movie theaters in my hometown of Anaheim Hills and they are both gone now. One of them's now a Tesla dealership, and it's just the most depressing thing in the world. [laughter] You know, because even in my little hometown that was where I fell in love with movies.

Joe Morgenstern: The trend is clear.

Justin Chang: Yeah.

Joe Morgenstern: I try very hard not to be depressed and, and we shouldn't be depressed because the truth is we don't know what will emerge as the new form of moviegoing. Though I must say the definitive horror story for me was I was on Vanuatu in the South Pacific, and it was just after the opening of Avatar, and I was staying in a ratty little hotel and there was an Australian couple, and the guy heard me say to somebody else that I was a movie critic. And he said, “Ah you're a movie critic. What’d you think of Avatar?” And I and I went on about the wonders of Cameron's vision and 3D and all of that. And he said, “I didn't think it was so hot.” [laughter] And I said, “Where did you see it?” And he said, “Well, on our laptop – we got a copy on our laptop.” So it was a bootleg copy of a zillion dollar James Cameron movie being judged on –

Justin Chang: Yeah – 

Joe Morgenstern: A laptop.

Justin Chang: You know, I have a rule and I think other critics – many have this rule – it's certainly one I try to uphold – which is that if I'm writing about something – this is in non-pandemic circumstances [laughter] – I always do try to see it on the big screen at least once. And maybe I'll try to see it again at a screening if possible. And I teach a film criticism class at nearby USC and I make my students go to theaters. And I told them, you know, this is important. And fortunately, many of them like to go to theaters. It's not some obsolete thing to them. I mean, it's still gratifying to, you know, it's good to know what young people are into, and some of them are still into movies and moviegoing.

Nicole Carroll: After walking around the theater for a bit, Justin and Joe sat down to talk about their approaches to writing, the joy of telling readers about great films and the weight of responsibility they each feel as critics.

Justin Chang: For me, falling in love with movies and falling in love with movie criticism kind of happened at the same time, almost in tandem. And I don't think that that's the case for everyone. I set out thinking like, I really want to be a movie critic, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit that but I think that for many others it’s you come to it through a more roundabout way. And for me, it was really – I remember, you know, starting to read the reviews in the L.A. Times, which was the paper that was available in my house. And so I got to know who Kenny Turan and Kevin Thomas were and then eventually discovered you, Joe Morgenstern, and discovered Manohla Dargis, discovered A.O. Scott, all these, you know, these, these great names in criticism, discovered Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. And you just, you just went on. And so, that kind of intellectual journey side of it really did evolve in tandem with loving movies. And it was partly because I sometimes – and this is a weird admission as a critic – but I didn't always know what to think. And I was curious. I mean, I sometimes knew what I thought, but then I would read people who, you know, really knew movies and were smarter about them than I was and who were so, so wonderful at expressing their ideas in really witty and thoughtful language, and I thought, that's a fun thing to do. That's a really great thing. Maybe I'll get to do that someday and that was sort of it and then I did college journalism, I did high school journalism, and I wrote about a lot of things, but I always had in the back of my mind, I think I want to write about movies. And I just kept at that and found my way into it. How about you?

Joe Morgenstern: I think I think it started with me being shorter than all the girls in in my elementary school and then even my middle school, which meant that I ended up going to a lot of Saturday matinees by myself and just seeing a lot of movies and being smitten by the beautiful colors and the MGM fogs and all of that and acquiring a level of knowledge that I didn't know I had and certainly didn't know what to do with. And then that, combined with a love of typing, I was given a typewriter for my eighth birthday by my parents because I wasn't writing thank you notes to my aunts and uncles for their $2 and $3 birthday gifts. So I got this typewriter, but I learned to be a really good typist, and the typing is what got me to loving words and playing with words. And then a first job out of college was as an office boy at The New York Times and there was a – gosh, he must have been a fourth-string movie critic named Richard Nason – who used to slink off to the grindhouses on Eighth Avenue to review the worst of the worst. [laughter] But I would watch him go with his brown bag lunch and thought to myself, that's pretty good, you can go and eat lunch while you're watching a movie. And little by little, I learned to climb the ladder and became an entertainment reporter and then started doing criticism and had a knack for it.

Justin Chang: Yeah.

Joe Morgenstern: Now, please indulge me in this, Justin. I just have to put in a plug for Ryan Coogler’s speech, which is available to anyone who's listening to this podcast. All you have to do is go to YouTube, look up Los Angeles Film Critics, 41st annual awards ceremony. And Ryan Coogler was there getting an award. This was three years, I think, before he did Black Panther. He was getting a New Generation Award for his direction of Creed, which was a quite remarkable film. And he was in Cannes, you were there as Variety's movie critic. And he got up there and gave the most impassioned speech. It was about being honored, about being challenged, but it was also about seeing his first movie critic, which happened to be you.

Ryan Coogler [archival audio]: There was this guy who would be going crazy on his laptop [makes frenetic typing sound] and, you know, run off and come back in and go crazy on his laptop [makes frenetic typing sound] and run off. And he looked different from everybody else in the room ‘cause he was Asian, you know? So I was thinking like, Man, what’s this Asian dude doing in here typing away on his laptop? Crazy. So, you know what I mean? And he would type like a mad man. He would type with a fury that I recognize because – you know – that's how I type, you know, with passion. I'll try and get words out. Um, and then one day I asked and they said, “That's Justin. He's our, he's our critic.” And it was crazy. 'Cause I said, "Oh, wow, this is the first time I've actually seen a critic work." You know what I mean? Like, I, you know I read reviews. You know what I mean? All I see is Siskel and Ebert on TV. I've never seen a critic like do, do the work. And I was like, man, this is crazy. So I watched this dude, and he would just blaze away and start foaming at the mouth and then come back and then blaze away and start foaming at the mouth, and I always remembered that. And when I left and went back home, I said you know, I'm gonna read that crazy typing dude, Justin's, review. I’m going to see if there’s any other good movies at the festival I missed, you know, and I read his review for a film called A Prophet. And while I was reading a review, I realized, I mean, this dude is crazy talented.

Joe Morgenstern: It was the first time he'd ever seen a critic work. And boy, was he impressed. And he picked the right guy to be impressed by.

Justin Chang: [laughter] Thank you for sharing that really wonderful story.

Joe Morgenstern: Oh, it was – we were all spellbound and overjoyed by that speech.

Justin Chang: For a while after that people were calling me what Ryan Coogler called me, Crazy Asian Typing Dude. [laughter]

Joe Morgenstern: Yes.

Justin Chang: Because it just really – and he was making a larger point too, about diversity versus him as a young Black filmmaker and me as a then-young Asian film critic who, you know, and just the underrepresentation of that.

Ryan Coogler [archival audio]: I had a newfound respect for what it is that you guys do, and its importance to the medium. It connects the world to the work that we do. You guys are kind of like our twin siblings, that you love filmmaking as much as filmmakers, but you guys have the talent to be able to talk about and articulate, and what you see in it. And it's so important. And in this world of Rotten Tomatoes and clickbait it’s so important that you guys keep doing the work, keep doing artistry, keep typing away at those computers and foaming at the mouth [laughing]. But I also have a challenge for you guys too: reach back out into the community and find the next Justin Chang, you know, find it – find diversity, find the voices that are in places that you might not think to look [fade under]...

Justin Chang: It's still one of the coolest things that's ever happened to me in public in any kind of way. It’s one of those things where I wish everyone in this life just, you know, to have a moment like that where you're just kind of unexpectedly singled out and for a moment that you didn't even realize somebody was watching. I think it's funny that we knew what you were saying, Joe, about typing and how that is sort of intrinsic to the process. I think I had a similar thing.

Joe Morgenstern: Really?

Justin Chang: I first typed on it on a typewriter myself way before we had a computer in the house we grew up in, and it it amazes me to hear when you hear about people like like Pauline Kael used to write her reviews out longhand and still did even when you know, and –

Joe Morgenstern: With a rubber thing on her index finger to help turn the pages –

Justin Chang: And then her daughter Gina would then type everything up for her. I couldn't imagine working that way. And of course, You get it done with whatever the tools are of your time. And you have a deadline and you're trying to make sense of a movie that you've just seen and you're looking at your notes and you want something that will be true to the experience as you've just had it and –

Joe Morgenstern: But it's having an enormous effect –

Justin Chang: It will have an effect. You know, careers and commercial fortunes, all of which you're writing about, do come into play. And the challenge is to write something that feels like it will hold up five minutes from now and also five years from now, and I got it wrong sometimes – 

Joe Morgenstern: Oh no. Tell me it’s not true.

Justin Chang: It's very true to me, you know, to the extent that you can ever get something wrong. I mean what we do is such a subjective thing inherently, but – 

Joe Morgenstern: Oh, I've gotten things wrong objectively as well as subjectively. And you know what I'm talking about –

Justin Chang: [laughter] And I've done my share of – thankfully not too much – but there are times when you have an opportunity to publicly recant or something, which you try not to do too often.

Joe Morgenstern: You can only do it once is my experience. [laughter] The reference that Justin is making is to my recanting of my Bonnie and Clyde review. I wrote a really disgracefully obtuse review of it. I was intimidated by the violence. I didn't understand it and then the same week, my wife and I used to go off to movies at the end of the week, And I said, “What about Bonnie and Clyde?” Which I had just reviewed in Newsweek, put the review in the editing process, but the magazine hadn't come out yet. It was a very negative review. And we went to see the movie on 34th Street, I remember, and I just started getting cold sweat on the back of my neck and realized I had missed the boat and started desperately taking notes, and when I got back to Newsweek Monday morning, I walked in with false bravado to the editor's office – [future Columbia Journalism School dean and Pulitzer Board member] Oz Eliott – and said, “I'm going to need six columns for this week,” which was a lot, you know, two full pages without ads. “What for? what's going on?” And I said, “Ah, I think there's more to say about Bonnie and Clyde.” He said, “No, you've had your say. Let's move on.” And I begged and pleaded. And he finally said, “Look, I can't stop you from writing. Write whatever you want. I'll read it.” And I wrote. I was blocked until I finally got started saying, “Last week this magazine ran one of the stupidest reviews I've ever read. And I'm sorry to say I wrote it.” And that, I must say, freed me up to write an intelligent reconsideration of the piece.

Justin Chang: I’m just curious: what is your process of writing and how has that changed for you just over the years?

Joe Morgenstern: I'm in the process of downloading all of my movie reviews. [laughter] And I dared to use the word count and discovered that I've written something like 1,400,000 words for The Wall Street Journal on movies. [laughter] Part of my process has always been taking too many notes, regretting that I feel a compulsion to take as many notes as I do, not wanting to split my attention. And I'd love to know how you deal with this problem. You want to be in the moment. You want to be completely immersed in the film, but you also need to make notes of ideas, facts, dialogue, details, all of that. I've usually come home with the sheaf of notes, printed them out, and then looked at them and underlined them to use the words physically to do something physical with them, to externalize them. And then just looked and thought to myself, Where's the juice? What's alive and what's dead? And then go with what's alive. Meaning go with feelings because that's what movies start with and that's what movies end with. What about you?

Justin Chang: Oh gosh, my notes are almost always illegible, but I'm glad to have taken them [laughter] because it means usually that I was paying attention in the moment and hopefully that's enough. I sometimes think about a scene that really stuck out to me from the film and what you say about feelings is absolutely right. Sometimes I try to choose a scene that had a particular emotional dimension to it, but also something that really maybe felt emblematic of the film or encapsulated it, and I like writing about a scene because you can bring the reader into the movie and you find yourself in the movie. It's almost as if I liken it to – it's like, I just need to get inside the film in some way. Once I've set a scene, it's great because you can convey a sense of not just what the plot and characters are, but you convey some sense of just even just the rhythm and how it looks. And you can write about the visuals. You can write about a lot of different things just by actually describing a scene in detail. And I tell my students this, it's like, it's really you don't think about movies visually, especially think about, you know, it's not just a plot from A to Z or whatever. The moments matter. And the decisions a filmmaker makes in those moments really, really matter. And so that's a device I use and I –

Joe Morgenstern: And there’s a reporting component –

Justin Chang: Exactly, absolutely –

Joe Morgenstern: Evoking the experience of the film, which is really important.

Justin Chang: I sometimes will be writing a lead or something and my wife will kind of look over my shoulder and see what – she’ll sometimes say, “Oh God. You're starting the review like that again?” [laughter] Because it's like when you're saying like, you know, In James Cameron's Avatar, there was a scene and then I'd be like, “Stop! I have no time for originality this week, I’m just trying to meet my deadline.” So, and then but when you do try to vary it, you do. It's funny, even though, you – of course, no one – except maybe one’s most obsessive readers – and I’m sure we all have them – but it’s like – no one is reading every single thing you write. But even so, you feel like varying just, you know, the kinds of things you're writing about. You know, sometimes I used to think about it, especially at the L.A. Times when I reviewed more movies, a sort of the one for me, one for you kind of school of things. You know, you write about some, a studio movie, you write about a really interesting movie from overseas or something, you write about a documentary. You really try to, you know, I think about this as we’re we are, not to get precious about it, but we are the proper care and feeding of the moviegoing audience and it's almost like having a balanced diet, a balanced cinema diet, they know about the big movies that are coming out, of course, and many of those movies are absolutely worth writing about and worth our attention. But so much of kind of ensuring that balanced diet, as I think of it, is, you know, writing about the things that they absolutely will not have heard about and which are really worth their time.

Joe Morgenstern: And I would add another element to those components. I mean, you want to write well, you want to be fair, but I wanted to be entertaining as well, because if you're not entertaining or at least interesting on some level, then all is lost. Then, then you don't have the reader staying with you long enough to find out about anything else you might have to say.

Justin Chang: Absolutely.

Joe Morgenstern: I can't resist the story you mentioned – illegible notes, and my handwriting is horrible, and I had just joined Newsweek in 1966, and I was doing a cover story on Charlie Chaplin, who was doing what was obviously his last film because of his age and health, A Countess from Hong Kong with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. And here I was on the set in London, just hanging out, watching Chaplin direct, and Loren and Brando acting and taking notes. And Chaplin came over to me one day and looked at my notebook and said, “What is that? Is that Arabic? Hebrew?” [laughter] And I said, “No, Charlie, it's English. But I just, you know, I've never learned to write properly. I can usually hardly read my own notes.” And he said, “Yeah, I know, I've read your stuff.” [laughter]

Nicole Carroll: Every year, the Pulitzer category for Criticism allows each critic to submit a packet of published pieces. A jury of their peers reviews those pieces and selects three finalists. Then, the Pulitzer Board picks the winner. For Joe, who wrote a weekly column, it was challenging to decide which articles from 2004 to include in his submission.

Joe Morgenstern: It was a rich year for movies. No lack of really good stuff to write about: The Incredibles, the Brad Bird Pixar movie, which I was just ecstatic about. And I knew that I had written, you know, I’d written fully, and I thought, well, about a whole bunch of movies. And then I got a kind of a stroke of conscience and thought there were two movies that I really struggled with. Maybe I should include those two. One was Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and I mean, you know, why the struggle? I mean, Michael Moore's this mixed bag. You know, he's a truth teller, he's a carny barker. He's reliable, he's unreliable. And it was really hard to get that review right. The other one was Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. And, you know, you wrote a piece that I found instructive and really moving a long time quite a while ago about working as a film critic and a committed Christian. It was a fascinating piece. I've had no religious training at all. I'm not proud of it. I feel it's a piece that's missing in my life. And when I had to review Mel Gibson's crazy-slash-wonderful Passion of the Christ, I was completely at sea. I got it done at five o’clock in the morning to send it to New York by, you know, eight o’clock their time. Well, during the years that I got my prize, the custom was they ask you to serve on a jury for two successive years. So the next year, I go to New York, and one of the Pulitzer administrators came over to me and said, “Um, what are you doing for lunch?” And I said, “Nothing.” He said, “Well, let me take you to a Greek restaurant nearby.” So we settle into this Greek restaurant, and he said, “We were going through the submissions and we looked at yours and everybody agreed this is worthy of – professional writing worthy of serious scrutiny.” But then he said, “We started reading your reviews of Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, and everybody was struck by the fact that you struggled with those reviews and you let the struggle show.”

Justin Chang: Wow.

Joe Morgenstern: And I can't tell you how pleased I was about that because it had not been my intent to let the struggle show, but it had been very much my intent when I started at The Wall Street Journal in this classic corporate journalism setting to be a human presence. To be fallible and companionable, and you know, that was the payoff.

Justin Chang: I was rereading your reviews of those films, and I have to say, I mean, it wouldn't have occurred to me that there was a struggle in the sense of, you know [laughter] –

Joe Morgenstern: Oh, you’re such a generous soul – 

Justin Chang: No, I mean it’s very true and I know – it's interesting what you say about religion especially. I mean, I was in college when I wrote something about The Passion of the Christ, a movie I actually violently hated. And that hatred came in part from my Christian upbringing. It's funny how –

Joe Morgenstern: Of Mel Gibson's movie.

Justin Chang: Of Mel Gibson's movie. Yes. You know, Mel Gibson, obviously a complicated figure. But even beyond that it was just – it's interesting to hear you say that, you know, this feeling that a lack of religious training maybe hobbled you or whatnot, but I always find that for me, the greatest Christian movies or the greatest religious movies are often made by nonbelievers. And so that's kind of a weird truth that I've sort of taken with me. We could talk about, you know, Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. And for example, one of the greatest – one of the great Christian films –

Joe Morgenstern: Oh, yeah, it’s glorious.

Justin Chang: It’s glorious. And so I've often felt that, background, you know, identification, these things are important, but it's important to feel liberated from those at times, too. And your reviews of those films. I mean, I think too just when you get a year where you get a Fahrenheit 9/11 and a Passion of the Christ. I remember that [year] coming out – and I was not a professional critic yet – but just the level of political polarization surrounding those there was so much to dig into. and I felt the same way with my year – not the polarization so much perhaps, but it was also a rich year, 2023. And it was a really resurgent year for Hollywood filmmaking, among others, but also a great year for international cinema. There was Oppenheimer, which was the piece that I wrote that really kind of anchored my portfolio. I didn't know necessarily what they were going to submit, but I knew they had to submit that one. And it was a sense that because movies obviously mattered to the culture that year in a way that maybe they don't seem to matter quite to the same degree. It was fortuitous.

Joe Morgenstern: We're operating as anachronisms to a certain extent. People don't care as passionately about movie culture as they did. And yet we have an obligation to simply do what we do and hope that our respect and passion rubs off, but we don't know the effect of what we're writing. We're writing what's important to us as we write it. And we don't know the effect. We don't know how we’re – I don’t know about changing lives – but affecting lives.

Justin Chang: Sometimes, of course, on social media, which I participate in a little bit, but much more tepidly than I did before, you do get some of that feedback. But even then, it feels very selective and very not necessarily representative of larger things because – and there's a whole, you know, this, this phenomenon of film, Twitter and whatnot. It's like where it's easy to confuse what happens there for what's going on outside of there. And sometimes – and I've written, you know, whether writing at Variety where or at the L.A. Times where, you know, now at The New Yorker – there are channels for feedback, but you sometimes do feel like you're just putting a lot into the world, and it means a lot to hear from people saying, “Oh, I really like that.” And it's especially meaningful when it's something that you felt like ten people are going to, you know, read this or care about this. And it got to one of those ten and that's great.

Joe Morgenstern: Yeah.

Justin Chang: And I'm curious, Joe, I want to ask – not a huge change of subject – but in addition to our writing – we both, many years, reviewed for radio and you –

Joe Morgenstern: Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up.

Justin Chang: Yes, no. You for KCRW and for me for “Fresh Air.” And so, like you, perhaps my, my native habitat or whatever is, is print or online or just, you know, longer form kind of writing. And so, but obviously writing and, and reading for a radio audience is a different thing. And you have to be much more economical, and I'm just curious how you got into that part of writing and of criticism and what your process is like there.

Joe Morgenstern: Well, Pauline Kael was the connection between me and Ruth Hirschman. Then she became Ruth Seymour, who was the guiding genius of KCRW. And then when I came out here, I came to know Ruth, and Ruth put me on the air and gave me three and half minutes every week on KCRW for – I think it was 22 years. And I loved doing that. I just – it was such fun. I felt like, you know, Clark Kent going into the phone booth and turning into, if not Superman, then a guy on the radio. And I also love the feedback that I would get. I wanted – when I was a kid, I was on the campus radio station in college. I wanted desperately to be a disc jockey and get a commercial job and wherever I went, people would say, “Nah, you don't have a radio voice.” And radio voice at that time was a deep, resonant baritone, very much like your voice. But I didn't have it. And then I started doing KCRW and wherever I went around town, people would say – “Oh you’ve got – I know who you are. You're Joe Morgenstern. You got such a great radio voice!” – proving you live long enough and everything happens. I now have a radio voice, but also loving the fact that I felt like part of the community that I never felt like working for a newspaper with millions of readers. You know, people coming up on the supermarket line – 

Justin Chang: Yes.

Joe Morgenstern: Or dog walking in Palisades Park saying, “Oh, you're Joe Morgenstern, nice piece last week.”

Justin Chang: Isn't that funny how – I’ve had exactly the same kind of experience.

Joe Morgenstern: It's not vanity, it’s the pleasure at being – 

Justin Chang: No.

Joe Morgenstern: Connected to people.

Justin Chang: Very much so and because everything changes, you know, for The New Yorker, me and my colleague Richard Brody do a lot of TikTok videos. A fair number. I don't know what, a lot, but we do that– 

Joe Morgenstern: You’re on the cutting edge, Justin.

Justin Chang: Oh God. I mean, everyone is. You know, at the L.A. Times, we did a video. You've done video, it's like it’s just part of it. Yeah, whatever the next phase is. And I was resistant to TikTok at first, but then I knew that. Well, it’s still The New Yorker, so they will be the most professionally mounted, rigorously fact-checked TikToks that are in existence. And so I was – but I made the mistake of reading the comments on one video once, and it ran the gamut from, “Oh, what a nice voice” to “What, who does he think he is and why is – who talks like this? And why is he so pretentious and affected?” And it could have been what I was saying as much as how I was saying it of course [laughter] but it was like so – but you know, as long as you're reaching the right people, you're reaching people who hopefully like and respond to what you have to say and how you say it. You can't please everyone, nor should you.

Joe Morgenstern: We're living in the moment now when criticism is less and less welcome. Where, on a lot of fronts, critics are being suppressed. I think the audience is inevitably going to be affected by that. You're practicing criticism right now at a very high level. At a publication that is a bastion of free speech. But what do you see in your immediate future? Would you be affected by this?

Justin Chang: I mean, I feel enormously grateful to be at The New Yorker, which does feel like that bastion in so many ways. That's true in terms of politics, it's also true just in terms of the economics of the business. And I feel that as long as there are movies, and I hope that's not up for debate anytime soon, The New Yorker will want to cover them and cover them thoughtfully. Hearing your question, Joe, I weirdly think not even so much about arts criticism, as important as that is but I think about opinion writers. I think about just the squelching of public opinion that, you know, at places like the L.A. Times, my former employer, with their absolutely shameful suppression of their endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris, and that obviously happened at The Washington Post as well. In a way, as a movie critic, I feel, you know – and this has been true maybe of our whole careers. You do feel in a lot of ways insulated. You're just here in the entertainment section, and you're being left alone for the most part, but you don't get the same scrutiny that perhaps opinion and political writers get. But you're writing about everything and you know politics.

Joe Morgenstern: Yes, you're writing about life.

Justin Chang: You’re writing about life, and my writing has all been film criticism. I haven't really written about much that's not movies or movie-related, but I've always felt that I've been able to write about everything through that. And so, it’s a scary time. And it's interesting because with the current administration, where you have, we have someone in the Oval Office who likes to just sound off on pop culture and culture and what he thinks of, you know, of that which and he doesn't think much of it most of the time – 

Joe Morgenstern: People like you and I are kind of a vanishing breed in that we have been well-paid to write in secure places where our right to have opinions is respected. And most critics, most particularly young critics today, don't have that luxury. They don't have the security of knowing that their employers are foursquare behind them.

Justin Chang: It is hard. And I teach film criticism students, and I don't know how many of them aspire to be critics and some, you know, invariably every year a few do. And you know, they ask, what avenues are open? What do I do next? And I don't always know how to answer. But then I also think about when I had professors like Ken Turan and Howard Rosenberg, who was at USC. And so I had great access to wonderful critics, you know, who were who I was fortunate enough to have as teachers and I think about the advice they gave me. And even though the circumstances are different, I try to give some form of that same wise counsel. And to say that, yes, it is hard to do this work. It is hard to make a living at this, but it was always hard. And I firmly believe that if you keep at it and you keep your mind open and you read voraciously, and you watch voraciously, and you write voraciously, that was the only formula I had. And that and just, you know, just seeing people like you, Joe, and other great critics. It's weird. Sometimes you read something and you're so taken with it and you're like, this is impossible. I will never be able to do this. But at the same time, it's almost like holding that side by side with. But they did it, so it's possible. So it's like when you sometimes read really great writing and you're inspired by it, it's like it can make even something really difficult seem possible to do. And so that's what I've just tried to carry with me, even now.

Joe Morgenstern: And I don't have the contact that you do with young film students, but I have to believe that the same impulse that I've always had will carry successive generations and they'll find a way to express their opinions to be critical. And I think I know the answer to this from you, but I'll ask all the same. Do you share my desire and pleasure in bringing good news? Not just dumping on things, but bringing good news about good work and good experiences?

Justin Chang: Cinevangelism, as we call it.

Joe Morgenstern: Cinevangelism. What a word!

Justin Chang: Of work. Yes. And you do feel like an evangelist sometimes.

Joe Morgenstern: You do.

Justin Chang: And it is funny because when I was first starting out, there was a real pleasure in dumping on things. And it's fun. It is fun.

Joe Morgenstern: It is fun. And we're both good at it. We’re dangerously good at it.

Justin Chang: Taking, you know, and a lot of times it is maybe taking potshots at some studio disaster that really deserves it, but I found over the years, increasingly, I want to write about things I like. I accentuate the positive. It's – and as I've gotten to be more selective with what I write, it's like that's just a better use of my time.

Joe Morgenstern: Absolutely. I feel the same thing. Could it be we’re growing up?

Justin Chang: Perish the thought.

Joe Morgenstern: How did you find out you got your Pulitzer?

Justin Chang: It was interesting circumstances because I had just left the L.A. Times a few months earlier and had just been at The New Yorker for a few months. And I get an email from my former editor, Craig Nakano at the L.A. Times saying, “Justin, can you talk?” And I will admit, I had an inkling of all the reasons my former editor could be getting touched beyond just the usual, you know, saying, hello, how are you? Which is nice. But I think “Oh, God, No! It can’t be about that!” But it was. And he – we got on the phone and it was not just him, but it was also Terry Tang, the executive editor at the L.A. Times. And like I think 3 or 4 other editors from the masthead. So, I was like, okay, something, something has happened. And I – they told me you won the Pulitzer Prize. And even with the inkling, I was in shock and I couldn't believe it. And the Times had been very kind, submitting me patiently year after year. I worked for them for eight years and I think that most of those years I was submitted to no avail. And so after a while, you feel like you've been submitted enough. It's like, okay, maybe it's not going to happen, but you don't have to keep, you know, submitting me. But they did. And so it was wonderful and it was bittersweet because I had, you know, left. And so I've been thinking about it as like a lovely parting gift to to both of us, you know, from the Pulitzers, the committee, the Board, and then it's very funny because my current boss, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, of course, sits on the Pulitzer Prize Board. And so after this, I got to talk to him a little bit. You know, after the announcement came out. And David, of course, was tremendously, you know, effusively proud and happy for me. But he did say, “Couldn't you have waited a year so that it would have been for The New Yorker?”

Joe Morgenstern: Oh, you're still the same guy.

Justin Chang: Exactly. Exactly. But, what was it like for you, Joe?

Joe Morgenstern: I must confess, I thought it would be wonderful to win for a very tactical reason. I just thought it would be a really good thing for job security if I got a Pulitzer. And then I was home by myself. and turned on my computer. And the criticism category was one of the last, and as I scroll down and then saw my name, and I'd been cool up to that point and then I really lost it and I wept tears of joy. 

Justin Chang: Yeah. I just want everyone listening to this to know that Joe is – and this is not me alone saying this – Joe is truly one of the kindest, most supportive people in this profession. I remember just over the years, a kind word from you after screening and said, “I really like that thing you wrote.” And it was just said, which always just bowled me over. I couldn't believe that Joe Morgenstern was saying these things to me. So to get to sit down with you, to talk about this, on this occasion is just so incredibly meaningful to me. And so thank you so much.

Joe Morgenstern: You're a wonderful, soulful, rich, elegant writer as well as a good critic. And here’s to you.

Nicole Carroll: That’s it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road.

Thank you to Justin Chang, the 2024 Pulitzer winner for Criticism, and Joe Morgenstern, the 2005 Pulitzer winner for Criticism. 

For more details about this work and the work of all Pulitzer winners, please visit our website at www.pulitzer.org. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. 

Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios. 

This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll. 

Our senior producer is Justine Daum. Natalie Peart is our associate producer. 

Production support from Melissa Akiko Slaughter and Eric Mennel. 

Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. 

The head of sound & engineering at Pineapple Street is Raj Makhija. 

This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz, with additional audio engineering by Pedro Alvira. 

Music licensing by APM.

Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. 

Bari Finkel and Marjorie Miller are our executive producers.