After Twenty-Five Years As a Road Comic, Leslie Jones Becomes a Star

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For Immediate Release: December 28, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255

After Twenty-five Years as a Road Comic, Leslie Jones Becomes a Star

In the January 4, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, in “Ready for Prime Time” (p.22), Andrew Marantz, speaking with some of comedy’s biggest names—including Chris Rock, Lorne Michaels, and Marc Maron—chronicles the rise of Leslie Jones, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member and star of the forthcoming “Ghostbusters” reboot, who, after two decades as a standup comedian, is becoming a household name. At the age of forty-six, Jones had been a standup comedian for more than a quarter century; her peers respected her, but that re- spect rarely translated into high-paying gigs. She spent much of her career performing in what she calls “shitty chitlin-circuit-ass rooms, where you’re just hoping the promoter pays you.” She tells Marantz, “I remember some nights where I was, like, ‘All right, this comedy shit just ain’t working out,’ ” She adds, “And not just when I was twenty-five. Like, when I was forty-five.” Although she’d had success as a road comic, she worried that the gatekeepers of mainstream comedy—bookers for the “Tonight Show,” casting directors of big-budget films— had never heard her name. “Every black comedian in the country knew what I could do,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean everyone else is paying attention.” Her longtime friend Chris Rock mentioned her name to Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “S.N.L.” “You should look at Leslie Jones,” Rock said. “She’s the funniest woman I know.” Michaels agreed to give her a chance, hiring her first as a writer and then adding her as a cast member, months later. The show brought Jones her first regular paycheck. “I mentioned her to sev- eral managers and agents over the years. Everybody passed,” Rock says, adding, “Lorne, because he’s the best at what he does, is the one who saw it. I don’t think he’d hired a cast member her age in a long time.” Marantz notes that, in fact, Jones was the oldest cast member the show had ever hired. “My sense was that, before she came here, she wasn’t a regular viewer,” Lorne Michaels says. Jones confirms this. “I watched ‘S.N.L.’ the way most black people watched it: I watched Eddie. Then I stopped,” she says.

The director Paul Feig first saw Jones during an appearance on S.N.L.’s “Weekend Update,” four months into her time on the show. “I don’t normally like when actors are big and loud,” he tells Marantz. “But she was able to do it with this grounded, relatable sort of energy. Before her segment was over, I said to my wife, ‘I think she’s one of our ghostbusters.’ ” Feig’s remake of “Ghostbusters,” to be released next summer, will star Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Jones. Of the characters, Jones says, Feig “made it completely equal.” She continues, “It was like a superhero team, where each one has her own skill but can’t use it without the others.” Jones tells Ma- rantz, “I’m glad this whole success thing is happening now,” adding, “I can’t even imagine a twenty-three-year-old Leslie in this position. They would have kicked me oﬀ the set after two days.” She continues: “I was a less conﬁdent person back then. And damn sure not as funny.”

Jeb Bush’s Fight for the Everglades

In “Swamped” (p.32), Dexter Filkins, reporting from Florida, delves into one of the most con- tentious parts of Jeb Bush’s tenure as governor—his protracted struggle with the federal government over the fate of the Everglades. As a candidate in the Presidential primaries, Bush has spoken little about his record on the environment, instead preferring to talk broadly about his experience as governor. According to Filkins, what lingers in Florida is the memory of a governor who liked to announce his pursuit of “big, hairy, audacious goals”—which, in a state with natural bipartisan coalitions, often worked. “But when it didn’t Bush pushed on, even at the price of gruelling and ex- pensive political conflict,” Filkins writes, adding that nowhere was Bush’s style more evident than in his handling of amendments to the Everglades Forever Act, legislation that drastically weakened pollution regulations—the result of an extraordinary lobbying blitz by the sugar industry, the largest polluter in the Everglades and one of the largest political donors in the state. “It was basically a license for polluters to keep polluting for years and years,” Don Jodrey, a senior policy adviser at the Department of the Interior, who works on Everglades issues, tells Filkins. A lobbyist for U.S. Sugar, Mac Stipanovich, tells Filkins that the Governor led a collaboration between his staf and the industry. “Jeb was very active,” he says. “He brought people to the table.” Richard Harvey, the for- mer chief E.P.A. regulator in South Florida, said that the sugar manufacturers had agreed to draft the bill, and to move it through the legislature—allowing Bush to remain out of the pub- lic glare. “The sugar industry was carrying the ball for Bush,” Harvey, who is now retired, tells

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