Wes Anderson based the fictional magazine in his latest film on a certain real-life periodical. The New Yorker’s archive editor considers the resemblance.

One day in May of 2003, I answered the phone in The New Yorker’s archive and received a very unusual request. “I’m calling on behalf of the director Wes Anderson,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “He’s interested in buying your archive.” It took a moment to sink in. Buy the archive? (This was a couple of years before the magazine gave subscribers access to every edition online.) I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so I simply told her that our archive wasn’t for sale, and that we were sorry we couldn’t accommodate the filmmaker. When I reminded Anderson of this incident recently, he replied that he remembered making the attempt—although, he remarked dryly, “I don’t think I had anything close to the money it would have taken.” Instead, he purchased a large set of bound volumes of the magazine from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently the caretaker of the New Yorker collection that belonged to the longtime staff writer Lillian Ross, who died in 2017. All of which is to say that Anderson has had, and continues to have, a lifelong interest in The New Yorker, its writers, and its innermost workings.

Anderson’s latest film, “The French Dispatch,” about a magazine in mid-century France that bears a striking resemblance to The New Yorker, will première in theatres across the country...

The New Yorker Writers and Editors Who Inspired “The French Dispatch”