The Thing That Made Anthony Bourdain So Good

In a new book excerpt, the former director of Parts Unknown and No Reservations writes about what it was like to work with the legendary TV host, who was as “ingenious as he was demanding.”

Courtesy of Tom Vitale

Courtesy of Tom Vitale

“Be increasingly surreal,” Tony said.“ Make this show as hallucinogenic as possible. I want images from Haitian art, crosses, skulls, dicks, babies, limbs intercut with the dreamlike surreality of the actual environment.”

By 2010 the show was starting to repeat locations, and Tony had wanted to stretch his legs, tell some different stories. He’d insisted, then finally demanded, we go to Haiti, and ultimately the Travel Channel had begrudgingly approved the trip. We arrived several months after the massive 7.0 earthquake that had left a quarter million people dead. This would be the first time the show had purposefully ventured to a truly “high-risk environment.” I don’t think any of us quite realized what we’d signed up for until landing in Port-au-Prince. The city was gone. In its place was a patchwork of grief, mass graves, countless makeshift refugee camps, collapsed and twisted concrete stitched together by a network of partially blocked roads. Thousands were still missing, survivors were dealing with a cholera outbreak, and foreign aid and attention were flagging. Driving at night, the only light came from an occasional passing car or burning oil drum, indication of an improvised roadblock. Our head of security, Damien, never had his hand far from a gun secreted in the glove box.

The shoot had been emotionally intense, but two months later back in New York, the edit was coming together well—really well—until the network did what seemed like their best to ruin it: “Lose Tony eating second helping. Doesn’t make him look good in a food shortage” and “Is there any tourism still available?” More worrisome, there were demands for more clarity in the voiceover, more linear explanation, a neat sum-up at the end and generally less artistry in the storytelling. Eric, the editor, and I were horrified, fearing the network might succeed in gutting our show. But Tony stepped in and pushed back, fiercely defending the cut.

“This episode is Emmy material. This is not Frontline. We want impressionistic . . . we are showingnot telling. This is not polemic. There is no happy conclusion or any conclusion to be reached that won’t be out of date by airtime.”

Tony ultimately prevailed, and he was right: the show won Zach and Todd a well-deserved Emmy for cinematography. It also set a precedent that raising the bar sometimes required traveling to more challenging locations. It also required knowing how and when to push back against the powers that be.

If I wasn’t in the field shooting an episode or sleeping for a week straight when I got back home, you could probably find me working with the editors. I was always intimately involved in my edits; I had to be. The way I looked at it, if the show got left on the edit room floor, it didn’t matter how hard we worked in the field. Edits may not have been as glamorous as the shoots, but they were just as high stakes and far more satisfying. In a strange way, through the edit I’d actually realize I had been there and sort of vicariously enjoy the trip in a way I hadn’t been able to while filming. Television production—especially with Tony—was an “ends justifies the means” operation. It might have been the most horrible, painful, humiliating, awful shoot, but if it was a spectacular edit—a great end product—almost everything bad that happened in the field was forgotten.

Successfully guiding a show through the edit required long days screening raw footage, pulling sound bites, doing additional research, and creative collaboration with the editor. The real storytelling happened in the edit room. I always strived to add bells and whistles, make something that was beautiful, emotional, honest, or even just special to me personally. The ultimate goal was, of course, making a good show, and Tony was the ultimate judge of success.

The edit was the part of the creative process Tony enjoyed the most. Tony was as ingenious as he was demanding, and his feedback could be scorching.

My professional experience was pretty much limited to making shows with Tony, but I had a dim understanding that our post-production workflow was a little unusual. We had nine weeks to edit each episode, which was apparently a lot compared to the industry standard of four and a half weeks. And nine weeks was based on everything going according to plan. Nothing ever went according to plan. Edits would continue on at roughly $10,000 a week until Tony was satisfied the episode was right, budget be damned. Looking back, I knew I was lucky, but I don’t think I realized just how spoiled I was to work on a show where quality not only came first, but it was also pretty much the only concern.

But nothing good comes easy, and navigating the potential editorial pitfalls was a long and bumpy road. Despite Tony’s unique voice and style permeating every frame, he most often couldn’t offer much in the way of specific direction until he saw the all-important first cut (our initial attempt to make sense of the sixty to eighty hours of raw footage). Tony’s opinion of an episode would never recover from a bad first impression, so the more polished, the better. The editor would basically have to cut a refined first pass of the entire episode, even though it was almost inevitably going to be redone.

If Tony didn’t like how an edit was going, he’d refuse to write the voiceover script. I should really say rewrite the script, as it was up to the editors or me to write the initial scratch narration. Tony’s voiceover made up the literal backbone of the shows, and his rewrites essentially served as the seal of approval. But even if Tony liked a cut, he often didn’t write to what had been edited or even the scratch voiceover script he’d been given. Tony wrote what he wanted to write. This meant reverse engineering the cut to fit what Tony provided was all but inevitable. It was an admittedly inefficient backward workflow, but it was what Tony needed and therefore just the way things were done. It was also demoralizing for editorial department morale.

Tony, who wasn’t the type to take prisoners, often seemed to have little if any sympathy for the editor’s perspective. Part of the issue certainly stemmed from Tony being naturally suspicious of “pale, pasty-face types that actually choose to sit alone locked in a dark room in front of an editing board all day watching other people do things.”

Since I moved through the production as well as the post-production worlds, I felt like I understood both sides, and I’d learned it was best to wear kid gloves when offering my edit feedback. Even more important was softening how Tony felt whenever possible. If he didn’t like the way a cut was going, if he found himself unimpressed with the artistry in the storytelling? Well, let’s just say Tony’s feedback was an art form in and of itself. My inbox contains countless three a.m. emails that go something like this:

The end of the show is turgid and saccharine and schmaltzy to a fault. it’s painfully, sophomorically WAY WAY WAY over the top. Currently the show is a pointlessly arty mish mosh of mixed metaphors. Don’t bludgeon the obvious references/homage into the ground for fuck’s sake. Please! It’s bathos-soaked and delivered at the end of a meat mallet. So some SERIOUS surgery on Act Six. It utterly blows. As is its conventional season two, and the MUSIC is abominable—or inappropriate throughout. It sounds like an 80s Tom Cruise film. PLEASE. Un-fuck this show.

Sent from my iPad

Tom Vitale is the author of “In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain.” He was a director on “Parts Unknown” and “No Reservations.”

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The Spotted Cat Magazine December 2024