Graydon Carter - Career

Career

After high school in Trenton, Ontario, Carter attended Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, but never graduated from either school. In 1973, Carter co-founded The Canadian Review, a monthly general interest magazine. By 1977, The Canadian Review had become award-winning and the third-largest circulating magazine in Canada. Despite its success, The Canadian Review was bankrupt by 1978.

In 1983, Carter moved to the United States and began working for Time as a writer-trainee, where he met Andersen. Carter spent five years writing for Time on the topics of business, law, and entertainment before moving to Life in 1983. In 1986, Carter and Andersen founded Spy, which ultimately ceased publication in 1998. Carter was then editor at the New York Observer before being invited to Vanity Fair to take over from Tina Brown, who left for The New Yorker. He has been the editor since July 1992, with successes during his tenure including winning ten National Magazine Awards.

Carter's Vanity Fair has been notable for combining high-profile celebrity cover stories with serious journalism. His often idiosyncratic personal style was depicted in the book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a book by former Vanity Fair contributing editor Toby Young. Jeff Bridges played a character based on Carter in the 2008 film adaptation.

In addition to print journalism, Carter was a producer of Chicago 10, a documentary which premiered on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival in early 2007. He was also a producer of Surfwise, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007, and Gonzo, a biographical documentary of Hunter S. Thompson directed by Alex Gibney.

Carter was an executive producer of 9/11, the highly acclaimed film by Jules and Gedeon Naudet about the September 11 terrorist attacks, which aired on CBS. Carter received an Emmy Award for 9/11, as well as a Peabody Award. He also produced the acclaimed documentary adaptation of the book The Kid Stays in the Picture, about the legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans. It premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, screened at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, and opened in theaters in July of that year.

Read more about this topic:  Graydon Carter

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
    Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)

    I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.
    Ruth Behar (b. 1956)

    “Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.
    Lawrence Kutner (20th century)