This is Part Two of my Headliners of the LA Times Travel & Adventure Show posts.
Part One was “Arthur Frommer: Travel Royalty“.
Had no clue what to expect from Andrew McCarthy. Turns out he’s a fairly strange guy. He didn’t seem totally comfortable being in front of the audience and sometimes seemed like he didn’t feel like he had any special knowledge to impart. I got the feeling that he traveled to avoid people, as he usually goes solo and seemed to be the type of actor who “turns it on” for the camera, but doesn’t always want or need to be the center of attention. Whereas the other speakers had the stage to themselves, McCarthy’s talk was a ‘conversation’. The interviewer was Christopher Reynolds of the LA Times, who had his own travel and writing career stories. It was a good mix. Reynolds kept things moving, but let McCarthy be the star. They had chemistry together.
McCarthy thinks of himself as a storyteller, which he felt lent itself well to travel writing. During Q&A, a journalist asked him about where he got his journalistic abilities, which he took as a compliment, but said he just was interested in hearing people’s stories.
Reynolds kept making references to people who he worked with at the Times, then following up with a mention that they’re now dead. One such person was a foreign correspondant, who told Reynolds to avoid photographers:
Don’t go with them. They’re like children. They’re attracted to bright colors.
One interesting thing about McCarthy was the jealousy factor from people watching. People were happy for Sam Brown and just wanted to be her, but seemed to have a chip on their shoulder about McCarthy. I heard it mentioned after that he wouldn’t have gotten what he got in the travel writing world without his prior fame. Sure, and McCarthy admitted it throughout, that no one would have cared if he “wasn’t the Pretty in Pink guy”.
It was a free-flowing conversation. I’m really struggling to come up with what concrete information I took from it, other than:
- It helps to be a celebrity if you want to get into a new field.
- I generally dislike Q&A sessions, especially when people treat their question as their chance to soapbox or have a personal conversation with someone in front of a room full of people.
The first woman came up and decried the villainization of the word ‘tourist’. By the end of her monologue, it seemed that all she wanted was to be told she was right. McCarthy and Reynolds didn’t know what to say, so they half-assedly agreed.
A point of contention between the two was on how to take criticism. Reynolds’ take was to listen to people that have been around longer than you, but he also admitted that a lot of times editors will tend toward taking out the more personal stuff, causing a more generic piece. McCarthy then said the exact opposite, that all you have is your voice and that when he first started, someone totally changed his piece, so he told them that they could take the money back, because he needed “to be edited, not rewritten”. Apparently, McCarthy won. They used the piece and it won him an award.
All around, he seemed like a guy that knew that he was lucky for what he had and was working for more, in another direction. A respectable celebrity, more used to the limelight than loving it.
Continue on to Part Three, “Rick Steves: American Everyman“.
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