Biography
Allen Salkin is a world-renowned journalist, screenwriter, producer, documentarian, podcaster and actor who has written about nearly everything. He is the author or co-author of three books and the reporter behind numerous memorable articles in major newspapers and magazines as well as a frequent guest on news programs and in documentaries. He has various TV, film and podcast projects, scripted and unscripted, in development at Hollywood production companies.
Allen's cover article in the December 2016 issue of Vanity Fair, "From Vegan Food Queen to Fugitive" told the wrenching story of Sarma Melngailis, suggesting that the Wharton-educated businesswoman might have fallen into a "coercive control" relationship with a gambling addict she met via her friend Alec Baldwin's Twitter feed. Allen is featured throughout the documentary Bad Vegan: Fame, Fraud, Fugitives about the case, the #1 show on Netflix in March 2022 and filed a third Vanity Fair article about it.
Covering "The Bling Ring" for the New York Times led to his appearance in The Ringleader, Erin Lee Carr's 2023 MAX / HBO documentary focused on Rachel Lee.
For his book From Scratch: The Uncensored History of the Food Network (2013), Allen interviewed on-camera talent like Anthony Bourdain, Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis and Guy Fieri, and behind the scenes players including past network presidents, cameramen, drivers and recipe writers to tell the gripping 20-plus-year history of the network that changed the way the world eats and thinks about food. He contributes food media articles to Food & Wine and Vanity Fair and hosted the podcast New Books in Food. From Scratch is his second book. Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us (2005), with a forward by Jerry Stiller, a journalistic romp through the world of Festivus, is his first.
His third book, The Method to the Madness, Untold Stories of Donald Trump's 16-Year Quest for the White House (2019), co-authored with journalist Aaron Short, is an oral history that taps 114 named and on the record sources from all points on the political spectrum who in their own words make an incontrovertible case that Trump studied long and hard over many years about how a man like him could win a presidential election. The book launched to rave reviews and massive press coverage on CNN, Vanity Fair, USA Today, The Daily Beast, Vice and numerous other outlets.
Allen appears frequently on television news, on radio and podcasts, and in documentaries as an expert on politics, culture and media. He was a featured player on the E! channel reality series Lisa Loeb: #1 Single. (2006). In the Los Angeles Times review of the Jonathan Gold documentary City of Gold (2015), Allen was quoted from the film, extolling its subject as "the food-writing equivalent of Raymond Chandler."
Among Allen's many pieces that captured cultural attention are his New York Times scoop that Annie Liebovitz had pawned her entire photographic archive (2009), the first major profile of Jared Kushner when he purchased the New York Observer (2007), the first article examining Donald Trump's then new practice of licensing the Trump name to other developer's projects (1999), a controversial Times Style Section story on the new popularity of monocles (2014), the first story pointing out the existence of hipster farmers (2008), the first on food bloggers (2007), the first on the celebration, outside Seinfeld, of Festivus (2004), and an account of men over 40 in summer share houses. Due to Allen's ability to find the social significance in the trivial in his work at the Times, Gawker equated him, sardonically and yet with praise, to the reporter who uncovered the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, calling Allen "The Seymour Hersh of the Sunday Styles Section."
Recent articles in Los Angeles Magazine include columns on the Sundance Film Festival (2023), White Lotus (2023), tribulations at the Los Angeles Times (2022) and the ups and downs of Presidential Impersonators (2020).
In the 1990s at the New York Post, he worked as a reporter with Jack Newfield, Maggie Haberman, Kyle Smith, Gersh Kuntzman, Richard Johnson and Devlin Barrett, filing articles about corruption in the surrogate court system, a horrendous child sex abuse case, the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., Eliot Spitzer's first election, battles between ambulance companies, and a little girl who was separated from her mother in an immigration snafu. After the article, and intervention by a U.S. Congressman, the mother and daughter were re-united.
Allen has had many jobs, including casting industrial films in Hong Kong, wholesaling rubber duckies in Las Vegas, picking oranges in Crete, and peddling oil paintings door to door in Western Australia. A fan of the Olympics, he has attended nine.
