"[A]s i look back today, Graydon’s Vanity Fair does feel like some lost world, a gold-encrusted Atlantis ultimately inundated by economic and technological tsunamis, its glories only now being picked over by media anthropologists. I’ve never talked much about what it was like to write there. Because I have always worried about how I’d come off. I mean, the money alone. I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

Then there was the Hollywood money. Every third or fourth article I wrote ended up optioned for the movies. Most were in the $15,000 to $25,000 range for a renewable eighteen-month option. A handful crossed into six figures. (You haven’t lived until you’ve sat across from Robert De Niro on a film set as he reads your own words back to you—although, sadly, that adaptation of my piece “The Miranda Obsession” never made it past development.) This was an era when management allowed writers to keep that movie money. These days? One magazine I love takes 90 percent off the top."

https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-carter

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