What do Leonid Brezhnev and the guy who invented the slinky have in common? Nothing, besides being dead. Each also warranted an obituary in America’s paper of record, the New York Times. They earned that spot—although, of course, no obituarized person is around to enjoy that particular honor—through the nebulous idea of impact. OBIT, the new documentary from director Vanessa Gould, lingers at the newspaper’s death-desk to think through the meaning of remembrance, and to show the workday of these uncommon journalists.

We meet Times obituary editor William McDonald, writers Bruce Weber, Margalit Fox, William Grimes, Douglas Martin, and Paul Vitello, and the sole remaining clip filer (where once there were 30), the rangy and bizarre Jeff Roth. The practicalities of their workday are the documentary’s best details.

The film opens with a phone call: “Where was he when he died?” So much time is spent on the phone, checking facts, because the facts of each workday are not known until that day begins. “Literally, I show up in the morning and say, ‘Who’s dead?’” one writer explains. Most obituaries run to 800 words, it seems, although they can go down to 500 or up to thousands upon thousands in the case of, say, a dead pope.

“Literally, I show up in the morning and say, ‘Who’s dead?’”

The writers insist that the word-counts are not about placing a numerical value on the worth of a human life. But, of course, they are measures of newsworthiness: At the Page One meeting each afternoon (which is thrilling to watch), each desk pitches their stories. Slinky guy is never going to make it above the fold.



The movie is structured around individual deaths and the obituaries that followed them. John Fairfax, the record-setting ocean oarsman, who attempted suicide by jaguar. David Foster Wallace, whose dad the obituarist had to call on the day his son died. Jack Kinzler, who saved Skylab, a billion-dollar space station, with a makeshift parasol. In a particularly charming story, Kinzler’s family cold-pitched the Times, which initially didn’t believe them. But after checking the “morgue”—the Times archive filled with obituarizable old clips—the paper was delighted to memorialize this remarkable man, who was otherwise slipping into history’s abyss. (Ten to 15 people call the obit desk every day, asking to have their unremarkable grandfather written up.)

