Frank Hart Rich Jr.
Rich is currently writer-at-large for New York magazine, where he writes essays on politics and culture and engages in regular dialogues on news of the week for the "Daily Intelligencer".
Early life and education
Born on June 2, 1949, Rich grew up in Washington, D.C. His mother, Helene Fisher (née Aaronson), a schoolteacher and artist, was from a
Russian Jewish family that originally settled in
Brooklyn, New York City, but moved to Washington, D.C., following the stock market crash of 1929. His father, Frank Hart Rich, a businessman, was from a
German Jewish family long-settled in Washington.
He attended public schools and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1967.
Rich attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson,
Career
Before joining
The New York Times in 1980, Rich was a
film criticism for
Time, a film critic for
The New York Post, and film critic and senior editor of
New Times Magazine. In the early 1970s, he was a founding editor of the
Richmond (Va.) Mercury.
Theater criticism
Rich served as chief theater critic of
The New York Times from 1980 to 1993, earning the nickname "Butcher of Broadway" for the perceived power of his negative reviews to close Broadway shows.
He claimed that the actor
Rowan Atkinson first used the nickname after Rich had panned a revue Atkinson brought to New York from London.
He first won attention from theater-goers with an essay for
The Harvard Crimson about the
musical theatre Follies (1971), by
Stephen Sondheim, during its pre-
Broadway theatre tryout run in
Boston.
In his study of the work, Rich was "the first person to predict the legendary status the show eventually would achieve". The article "fascinated"
Harold Prince, the musical's co-
theatre director, and "absolutely intrigued" Sondheim, who invited the undergraduate to lunch to further discuss his feelings about the production.
[Chapin, Ted (2003). Everything Was Possible — The Birth of the Musical Follies. New York: Knopf. pp. 116, 193–195. .]
In a retrospective article for The New York Times Magazine, "Exit the Critic," published in 1994, Rich reflected on the controversies during his tenure as drama critic as well as on the playwrights he championed and on the tragedies that decimated the New York theater during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Media and political criticism
From 1994 to 2011, Rich was an
op-ed columnist for
The New York Times; he wrote regularly on the connections between
mass media and American politics. His columns, now appearing in
New York Magazine, make regular references to a broad range of popular culture—including television, movies, theater and literature. In addition to his long-time work for the
Times and
New York, Rich has written for many other publications, including
The New York Review of Books and
The New Republic.
The commentator Bill O'Reilly, host of the Fox News Channel talk show The O'Reilly Factor, criticized Rich following Rich's criticism of Fox in 2004 as having a politically conservative media bias.
Rich also attracted controversy by dismissing the historical-drama film The Passion of the Christ (2004), directed by Mel Gibson, as "nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slow motion climaxes and pounding music for the money shots."[Rich, Frank (essay) (March 7, 2004). "Mel Gibson Forgives Us For His Sins". The New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2010.]
In a January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, commenting on the James Frey memoir scandal, Rich expanded on his usage in his column of the term truthiness to summarize a variety of ills in culture and politics.[Transcript of interview (January 26, 2006). "Journalists Speak Out". Accessed May 17, 2010] His book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (2006), criticized the American media for what he perceived as its support of George W. Bush's administration's propaganda following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and during the run-up to the Iraq war.
A July 2009 column focused on what Rich believes is the bigotry nature of President Barack Obama's detractors.[ ] On the Tea Party movement, which emerged in 2009, Rich opined that at one of their rallies they were "kowtowing to secessionists." He wrote that death threats and a brick thrown through a congressman's window were a "small-scale mimicry of "Kristallnacht" (or "night of broken glass", the November 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria).[ Jewish Journal: "When Jews on the Left See Americans on the Right as Nazis" by Dennis Prager May 4, 2010] In his essays at New York, Rich has continued to examine the American right, including its latest revival during the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump.
Television
Since 2008, Rich has been a creative consultant for HBO, where he has helped initiate and develop new programming and was an Executive Producer of
Veep, the long-running comedy series created by
Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He was also an Executive Producer of
Succession, the HBO drama series created by
Jesse Armstrong that debuted in June 2018 to critical praise.
Rich was also an Executive Producer for the HBO documentaries Six by Sondheim (2013), directed by James Lapine, and Becoming Mike Nichols (2016), directed by Douglas McGrath.
Awards
Rich's journalistic honors include the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005
and, in 2011, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University (also his alma mater). In 2011, Rich was awarded an honorary doctorate from The New School.
In 2016, he received the Mirror Award for Best Commentary from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2014.
Rich was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in 1987 and 2005.
Rich received in 2015, 2016, and 2017 for Veep, which was named Outstanding Comedy Series, and in 2020 for Succession, which was named Outstanding Drama Series.
Criticism
In 2011,
The New Republic included him along with
Rachel Maddow,
Newt Gingrich,
Paul Ryan, etc. in an editorial roundup of the "Most Over-Rated Thinkers" of the year, calling him "an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety".
Personal life
Rich lives in
Manhattan with his wife, Alex Witchel, an author and journalist; they married in 1991.
He has two sons from his previous marriage to Gail Winston:
, a novelist and short story writer who created the television series
Man Seeking Woman and was a writer for
Saturday Night Live, and Nathaniel Rich, who is a novelist, journalist, and essayist.
Memoir
Frank Rich's memoir
Ghost Light (2000) chronicles his childhood in the late 1950s and 1960s in Washington, D.C., with a focus on his lifelong adoration of the theater and the impact it had on his life.
Bibliography
-
Rich, Frank; Aronson, Lisa (1987). The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. New York: Knopf. .
-
Rich, Frank (1998). Hot Seat — Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980–1993. New York: Random House. .
-
Rich, Frank (2000). Ghost Light — A Memoir. New York: Random House. .
-
Rich, Frank (2006). The Greatest Story Ever Sold — The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. New York: Penguin Press. .
External links
