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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Reality shows exploit dubious myths by turning them into contests--you really can lose thirty pounds, snow a billionaire into giving you a dream job, win the cheerleader's heart with a rose. Simply assemble the cast from a Benetton ad, serve drinks, and start removing the chairs. Someone will always emerge triumphant. MTV's "I'm from Rolling Stone" applies this durable formula to six twentyish writers who intern at the magazine for a summer, competing for a one-year contract as a contributing editor. The two music-culture manufactories seem to have devised the program to preserve the bewhiskered legend that they still hire, and chronicle, raw youths.
In the sixties and the early seventies, Rolling Stone actually did work something like that. The critics Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs broke into the magazine in their early twenties, and Cameron Crowe was only sixteen when the editors sent him on the road with the Allman Brothers Band--an episode that inspired Crowe's 2000 film "Almost Famous."
Nowadays, Rolling Stone is a grown-up business, one whose non-camera-ready interns are in the office making photocopies while the "interns" are out covering Lollapalooza. Despite this rickety foundation, however, the show holds together, because the kids, selected from more than...
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