Descriptive writing at its best

Ryan Murphy is the man behind television's smash-hit musical, Glee. He has also directed Eat Pray Love, the just-released movie starring Julia Roberts. What is Murphy like? And how did he get to direct one of the world's biggest stars?

Look at how Brooks Barnes, reporting from Los Angeles, sets up the story for us in this New York Times feature (reproduced by arrangement in today's DNA):

How had a man with almost no film experience wormed his way into directing a big, juicy movie? Curious, she [Julia Roberts] agreed to meet Mr. Murphy at a Malibu restaurant and realized the answer before the first Arnold Palmers arrived. “I fell totally under his spell,” Ms. Roberts said. “We’re sort of like best girlfriends now.”

Mr. Murphy is nothing if not seductive. Self-assured to the point of cockiness, a wicked sense of humor, scary-ambitious yet charmingly eager to please, fashion-forward: it’s an intoxicating brew. Not to mention the literal light-headedness you feel standing near him. This is not a man who is bashful about his Yves Saint Laurent cologne.

“Ah, my famous cologne,” he said over a dinner at the Chateau Marmont here. “It’s because when I was growing up, I could only afford that cheap Halston stuff.”

Don't you feel like reading on?

And then, a point of style: The film is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book is called Eat, Pray, Love. The movie is called Eat Pray Love. Notice the subtle difference?

Now here is the intro:

WHEN Julia Roberts got word that Ryan Murphy planned to turn the best-selling memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” into a movie, she had a fast response: “Who?” You know, her agent explained, the guy who created “Nip/Tuck,” that sick and twisted plastic surgery show. “Oh, the ‘Nip/Tuck’ guy, that pricked up my ears a little,” Ms. Roberts recalled.

And here's the fifth paragraph:

He’s plenty rich now. Mr. Murphy, who followed up “Nip/Tuck” with “Glee,” the smash Fox musical about a high school choir, has become one of the most sought-after talents in Hollywood. His name is swirling as a candidate to direct a big-screen version of “Wicked” for Universal Pictures. Sony Pictures Entertainment, which will release “Eat Pray Love”  (without commas) on Friday, just paid him $2.5 million to write a romantic comedy — with Ms. Roberts — and another $2.5 million to direct it. “I’ll do anything Ryan wants,” said Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairwoman.

Did you notice those two words in parentheses? For the NYT, the devil is in the details. And it is for this attention to detail, among many, many other attributes, that the NYT is acknowledged as one of the world's great newspapers.

Now here's how Mary Pols dealt with those commas in Time:

[The book's] fairy-tale quality, the one by which a woman's quest ends with a man, seemed less like real life and more like a Julia Roberts movie.

Which is why I found myself rather happily anticipating Eat Pray Love, the big-screen version of Gilbert's book directed by Glee and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy. (He shares a screenplay credit for the movie with Jennifer Salt.) Now that Eat, Pray, Love had lost its commas and become a movie actually starring Julia Roberts, I was no longer annoyed by how much it seemed like one; it had assumed its rightful place in the entertainment universe.

Once again, that attention to detail. Once again, a "problem" tackled with style.