Inside the Zoetrope

This month’s Stack delivery was Zoetrope, a wonderful literary magazine created by Francis Ford Coppola and designed every issue by a special guest designer. It’s a fascinating and award-winning magazine, and we caught up with editor Michael Ray to find out what it’s really like working with those superstar designers.

How did Zoetrope first start?
The magazine was founded in 1997 in New York City by Francis and its first editor, Adrienne Brodeur. Francis’s intention was to create a forum for great short stories that might become great films; he believes, as Alfred Hitchcock did, that short fiction is the narrative art form most akin to film. In the magazine’s second year, Francis introduced the guest designer concept (according to which he invites a leading artist to design each issue). And in 2001, the magazine won the National Magazine Award for fiction, becoming the youngest magazine ever to achieve the honor. By then Francis had found himself not necessarily with a film story factory but with a unique and perpetually good literary magazine, and he was ultimately satisfied with that.

How did you become involved in the magazine?
In the spring of 2002 I was writing for various magazines and considering a move from San Francisco to New York, to join a magazine staff. Around that time I spoke with Adrienne Brodeur, who mentioned that Francis was moving the magazine to San Francisco, to the building that housed his film company, American Zoetrope, and hiring a new staff, as the current editors preferred to remain in New York. I’d been reading the magazine since its inception, so was interested in the opportunity. I was hired in April of that year.

Does Francis Ford Coppola have any involvement in the magazine?
In the early years he was very involved, working with designers, commissioning stories, etc. More recently, as the magazine’s matured and he’s been making films, he’s been less involved in the daily functions. But still, he sets the magazine’s mission and artistic ambitions, and he catalyzes our special issues, such as last spring’s edition dedicated to the best emerging writers in Latin America.

You get some huge names writing and designing for you – how do you actually go about that?
As for the designers, the editors discuss potential artists with Francis, then propose the project to them. We provide them every creative freedom our budget allows and support them in achieving their visions for the magazine. And as for the writers, I sometimes bid people with whom I’ve worked in the past, or I expect to have something good. But primarily those stories come to me unsolicited. And whatever the name recognition of our contributors, our sole focus is on publishing the best stories possible, whether they’re authored by first-time writers or Nobel laureates.

How does the process work with your guest designers? Do you literally get Jason Schwartzman delivering you a bunch of Indesign files or is it more that you have a series of discussions with him and your designer creates a magazine along those lines?
The design and production processes vary according to the designers’ capabilities. Some designers turn over finished InDesign files, leaving to us only the copyfitting. Some provide us physical models of issues, which we recreate. With others, we talk through the potentials, tuning ideas until we arrive at a concrete conception of the designers’ intentions. We then lay out a couple of stories according to their directions, returning PDFs for their review, working gradually toward final layouts that the designers approve. So our processes are necessarily flexible and totally reactive to how a given designer chooses to work.

Everyone’s going to be looking to San Francisco today because Apple’s unveiling its new tablet. Could you see Zoetrope in an electronic tablet edition?
Yes, we’re always considering ways to evolve the material construction of the magazine, and new platforms are certainly part of that discussion. At the same time, we’re committed to presenting the magazine’s design in the optimal format, and we’ve yet to discover a popular mobile medium that can fully represent that design. Perhaps this new tablet will be that. It’s difficult to say without seeing it.