A young man living with his parents starts a newsletter from his mother’s kitchen table; a young woman goes home from a waitressing stint and writes an article about her experiences; a young man drives from potential client to potential client in a borrowed Porsche telling them of his planned underground newspaper. So began Playboy, Ms and Rolling Stone.

These are the worlds Irene Angelico of DLI Productions plans to explore in her Documart pitch Inside the Great Magazines.

While DLI is only pitching a three-hour, three-part special budgeted at $1.8 million, Angelico is also planning 13 half-hours, ‘but we won’t be pitching that.’

Great magazines to be covered in the three-part special include such publishing luminaries as Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Paris Match, The New Yorker, Saturday Night, Shift and Wallpaper.

‘These magazines are easy to choose because they had an incredible impact socially and politically. We’re looking for variety. We’ll do the film so there’s a balance: a bit of looking back and looking forward,’ says Angelico.

Plans include historical references such as the creation of the first magazine and the coining of the word itself.

‘In the second part of the [special], we’re thinking of starting with Ebony. It was important in creating social changes, in having a big, glossy magazine for the black population excluded from the pages of the others.

‘And then we’ll bring it to New York, where Vanity Fair and the New Yorker are on the cutting edge of new magazines,’ says Angelico.

As for the series, to be produced using some of the same sources, ‘We would like to focus on one of the great magazines and do a fly-on-the-wall observational film for 13 weeks, during which we would spend time in the magazine and go out on locations and interviews. It’s economically sound, we can use some of that material for the special. We went through a long process of considering which way we want to go with this, and then we decided: Let’s do both,’ says Angelico.

‘Magazines have an incredible influence on who we are and how we look at things. From teenagers who look at Seventeen and feel they’re fat, to magazines telling us politically what to think and how to have an orgasm. Magazines look into every part of our lives.’ *