![]() ![]() Even the stories that David Sedaris does currently are much more journalism than about his own life. Now there is much less emphasis on everything that isn't actually reporting. So a basic show would include a conceptual piece, some reporting, maybe something by David Sedaris or a poet reading something, and one more reporting piece. We tried to have a fiction writer matched up with a journalist, or a performance artist with a journalist. In the beginning, we matched up these everyday-life stories with lots of arts programming. It was just going to be stories of everyday life. IG: One of the founding ideas of the show was, Nobody who's famous, nothing you've ever heard of, nothing in the news. How has the show evolved in the past decade? In fact, at that time, the working title was Your Radio Playhouse. MFC: When we got together ten years ago, you were working on the pilots for This American Life. Because there's something really nice about radio shows coming out of the Midwest, like Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion coming from Minnesota or Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? coming from Wisconsin. ![]() They might experience some kind of psychological shift. It won't change the show at all, except for those who know that now we'll actually be in New York. So even though we'll be in New York, I'll be saying, “ This American Life is produced by WBEZ in Chicago." And WBEZ will still be the producer of the radio show. IG: Yes, it's because This American Life is going to become a TV series for Showtime. MFC: So let's talk about the real news: you're moving to New York. IG: Of all those things, everyone is so excited about the losing weight part. And I've just finished writing a screenplay and doing a TV pilot, and I got married and I lost 30 pounds. Besides doing the radio show every week, I've done at least 14 little speeches promoting the show in different cities. But then I remember I have good reason to be tired. IG: Gosh, I feel a little, uh, overwhelmed, and I don't know exactly what. Now, after the tenth anniversary of This American Life, he sits down in his still messy office and talks about life, love, storytelling, movie watching, and how a bad relationship led to a creative breakthrough. With an if-only-life-were-more-like-the-radio attitude, he still tries to edit conversations as they go along, searching for that perfectly pitched sentence-pause-reaction combo. He still speaks in a breathless rush, with pauses thrown in when least expected. He is still boyishly thin and still wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, but now his once all-black hair displays highlights of gray. Today, Glass, 46, is still busy and full of startlingly fresh ideas, like making a new Showtime television series based on This American Life. It has won the prestigious Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards, and Glass has also been invited to do the show at the HBO Comedy Festival. It has an annual budget of more than $1 million and now plays on 500 stations across the country, reaching 1.6 million listeners. The show, of course, morphed into This American Life, one of the fastest-growing programs on public radio. And Chicago magazine published the story about Glass and Your Radio Playhouse, as he was calling the show back then, before the first episode played on the air on WBEZ. It still seemed a little vague, but certainly everyone involved was having a lot of fun. It all sounded a little vague, but then he let me follow him around while he and a part-time crew worked on the show in Glass's largely unfurnished apartment. Glass wanted to apply novelistic techniques to radio reporting. It was going to concentrate on everyday life, with fiction or poems sandwiched between strangely ordinary people telling strange stories. Ten years ago, in the first interview of his career, Ira Glass, a producer and on-air reporter for National Public Radio's idiosyncratic news and features program All Things Considered, sat down and told me about the idea he had for a new kind of radio program.
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