I ask him about Bourdain's "philistine" quip. LeDuff admits he was hamming it up for the cameras. "I'm like, 'Why's Bourdain want me to be here?' I had to give him something," he says. "He was just razzing me, like guys do." It's not the first time LeDuff served as a Detroit consultant for a film project: He says he also worked behind the scenes helping Bjork's husband shoot around Detroit. ("That guy was a dick," he says.)
LeDuff has, by this point, accumulated a small circle of drinking buddies. At one point, he offers a patron an entire beer in exchange for one chicken wing. He orders a round of Jägerbombs in Spanish, despite the bartender insisting he doesn't speak Spanish.
There are no cameras rolling: LeDuff is the star of a show that people may or may not be watching. Later, he offers me a cigarette and tries to convince me not to do a profile on him after all.
My notes from the bar are a total mess. LeDuff made a passing offer to chat again after they filmed the train stuff. Several weeks later, he comes through, and we meet for coffee.
LeDuff is dressed in jeans, a black sweater, and a black scarf. Objectively, he looks like an artiste. LeDuff takes his coffee black.
I can't help it: I ask about the cowboy boots. "These are version 3.0," he explains. His wife made his first pair; the second was donated to an auction. The current pair look beat-up, hand-painted to cover up scuff marks.
A group of Canadian fans interrupt and ask LeDuff to pose for a photo. Like my girlfriend did, one of them mentions his dad is a fan. I begin to get the impression that on any given day, LeDuff is told by many people how much their dads like him. LeDuff agrees to pose for a photo, this time without asking the guy to put his dad on the line. They also ask about the boots, and LeDuff repeats the same explanation he gave to me minutes before.
Eventually, the fans leave and LeDuff plays the train clip. Following the recent riots in Baltimore, his bosses postponed the clip by a week in order to give a sensitive subject a cooling-off period. But a different news story added an unexpected and tragic dimension to the piece: On May 12, four days after LeDuff arrived, an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight and injuring 200.
The challenge with The Americans, LeDuff says, is cutting hours of footage down into a five-minute clip. And there's no script: With only the conceit of taking the train from Washington to Wall Street, LeDuff and his crew had a limited time to get off at each stop and find something interesting to film. For any given segment, LeDuff says there are hours of footage that don't get used.
"These cities, the largest in their respective states, used to be rich," LeDuff says in a voiceover. "Now they're among the poorest and most violent in the country: The Corridor of Pain."
He gets off at the first stop in Baltimore. By the time LeDuff arrives, there are no longer any protesters. The footage cuts to the riots from late April, a month before.
LeDuff gets out at each stop and talks to people, ending nearly every encounter with a combination handshake-hug. In Baltimore, a white police officer tells LeDuff not to film as he tries to disperse a group of black men. LeDuff asks both the cop and the black men if they're rich: They all answer no.
In Philadelphia, LeDuff talks to a mother whose children aren't allowed to bring their textbooks home from school due to a shortage. He then shows footage of tens of thousands of textbooks rotting in a warehouse.
"Something's not right in regular America. No money, no jobs, bad schools, crumbling infrastructure," he says at the close of the clip. "As one goes, we all go. E pluribus unum."
LeDuff asks me for a critique. I tell him the police officer shot is awkward, occupying one continuous shot that lasts nearly a minute.
He admits it's a long stretch for TV, but defends the choice. There was a second camera on the scene, he says, but they weren't able to cut to it because of a malfunction. Besides, there are so many interesting moments within the scene, "it makes for good cinéma-vérité," he says.
The segment alone could have been split into four, one for each stop, or even lengthened into a short documentary. The five-minute bookend is limiting in a way, even if it's comparatively chunky by TV news standards. I ask LeDuff if he's ever considered making a documentary film, a la Michael Moore.
"If you're a documentarian, you have a core audience," he says. "Some documentaries occasionally cross over — like Roger & Me — but they still have a limited audience. I want to have mass appeal."
A five-minute clip is punchy and shareable, long enough to include the minimum necessary information yet short enough to hold the average viewer's attention span. LeDuff says he likes the immediacy of the impact of the shorter clips: "If my brother calls me up after a clip airs," he says, "I know I hit a home run."
LeDuff's crew is small: Matt Phillips and Bob Schedlbower serve as photographers and editors. Deb Andrews serves as producer, "a jack of all trades," handling business, promoting stories, and logging tapes.
They used to fight with the bosses over edits, but not so much anymore.
"I used to fight all the time," LeDuff says. "Now, I let it go. I don't care." Besides, the unedited versions are available as originally edited on a portal website for The Americans. "It's art in a corporate context," LeDuff admits.
He mentions an early assignment at Fox 2, a mundane report on unshoveled sidewalks in the winter — typical nightly news fodder.
"I was like, are you kidding me?" LeDuff says. "I have a fucking Pulitzer!"
So LeDuff gave it the LeDuff touch. In the clip, he pretended to slip on the ice. A caption flashes: "Dramatization." LeDuff flails around dramatically: "Overdramatization."
"Some redneck guy was watching and he was like, 'Hmm, slow news day?'" LeDuff says. "These people know every bell and whistle of the media." So instead, LeDuff goes for self-reflexivity. "I try to show them that I'm in on the joke," he says.
In that sense, maybe critics are wrong to judge LeDuff as a reporter. Perhaps LeDuff is in fact the world's premier postmodern reporter.
For a 2008 story in Vanity Fair, LeDuff accompanied famed photographer Robert Frank on a trip to China. In the piece, LeDuff comes across as anything but a philistine, namechecking New American Cinema, Jack Kerouac, and paintings of Wassily Kandinsky.
Frank was in China to exhibit photos from his seminal book, The Americans, which was originally published 50 years before. The book contained raw black-and-white portraits of subjects he met on road trips — "old angry white men, young angry black men, severe disapproving Southern ladies, Indians in saloons, he/shes in New York alleyways, alienation on the assembly line, segregation south of the Mason-Dixon line, bitterness, dissipation, discontent," as LeDuff wrote for VF, or "83 daggers which he plunged directly into the heart of the Myth."
LeDuff seems to share more than just the name of his show with Frank's The Americans. Like Frank, his preferred subjects are the everyday characters he meets across the country. Like Frank, he's a magnet for extremes. And like Frank, LeDuff seems to be critical of the American Dream.
When I asked MT columnist and Wayne State University journalism professor Jack Lessenberry about LeDuff, he referenced "The Idiot Culture," a 1992 New Republic essay by Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein that lamented the decline of serious journalism in favor of amusing, ratings-based media. The ancient Romans might have had their own phrase for the same phenomenon: bread and circuses.
Entertainment or education is the simple version of the debate. When LeDuff eats a can of cat food on TV, do viewers remember why? Or do they just remember that he ate cat food?
Police response times have plummeted since he and others covered the lag. Conyers eventually resigned from City Council, and was later jailed for bribery. The squatter is serving a probationary sentence for assault with a dangerous weapon. Robertson is safe. And Keros got her cellphone back.
People are watching, whether they think LeDuff is an American, or an American idiot.
Staff writer Lee DeVito opines weekly on arts and culture for the Detroit Metro Times.
