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Alexandra Pechman dipped into her own story for “Magazine,” a coming-of-age tale set in the early 2010s in a New York City print scene on the verge of change from forces it can’t imagine. That could also describe Nora
(Lily McInerny, who made waves two years ago at TIFF in “Bonjour Tristesse”), a recent college grad from an Arizona university doing an internship at the prestigious Platen magazine.
Nora’s an outsider — not from an elite East Coast school, not from a wealthy background — but she’s smart and eventually bonds with her fellow interns. She also embarks on an affair with slightly older and charming editor (Joshuah Melnick). Pechman’s terrific cast includes Lukita Maxwell, Iris Apatow, Ruby Cruz, Daniel Zolghadri, AnnaSophia Robb, Delaney Rowe and Jake Lacy.
“I think one of my favorite parts of working on this film was just what a strong ensemble of actors I had to build off of,” says McInerny. ”You really are only as strong as like your scene partners, and you discover so much about your character in listening to the incredible work that your other actors are providing you.”
Veteran magazine writer Pechman, who wrote the screenplay and is making her directorial feature debut with the film, says over the years she had witnessed the sea change in publishing. With “Magazine,” she explores that era with nostalgia: “It was sort of wanting to try to like answer that question of ‘Why do I miss that?’”
She adds that the script was structured to capture the experience from a person in their early 20s: “You’re trying to find your place, you’re trying to find your people, and you think the job is going to answer that question. Then you think maybe sex and love are going to answer that question. But really, if we all think back in that time in our lives, whoever the guy or girl was probably wasn’t that great. Whatever the job was that we thought we wanted probably wasn’t that great. And it’s really the friendships of that time and who we were sitting next to that really prove lasting. That’s what I hope people take away from the film, and what I have already seen is connecting to people no matter what age they are.”
McInerny saw a character who deviated from the usual ingenue. “I was really compelled by it being a New York-based story because I myself I was born and raised in New York, and I thought it depicted in this really nuanced, complex way, this sort of bygone era that I certainly find myself romanticizing now as a young person in New York. Immediately following the financial crisis of 2008, and immediately preceding smartphones and social media, and just this amazing sort of gray area, — it felt like the last gasp of this era of borderline affordability, borderline creative freedom.”
The film also shows Nora’s veil being lifted, as she realizes “there’s no secret to success behind these like powerful figures. Everyone is just as clueless as the next, and the ways in which we sort of assign power can oftentimes be so political and random.”
Now, with social media, an intern could look up everyone on Instagram, says Pechman, and figure our the lay of the land. But Nora’s character didn’t have those tools. “I think that was also really attractive to me. That kind of ‘cuspiness’ of sort of our own media coming of age at that time, before we kind of had all the tools at our disposal,” says Pechman
“Magazine” makes its world premiere Sept. 11. Pechman, Anne Alexander and Tess Cohen produce; Julia Nelson and Christine D’Souza exec produce. Global Constellation is handling international sales; After Hours and UTA have U.S. sales.
