In New York City, this month, an independent movie house is running a series its calling The Newspaper Picture. It looks like a great idea. The series leads off this weekend with Ace In The Hole , the 1951 film from ace director Billy Wilder, and closes with Alan J. Pakula’s classic All the President’s Men. It also includes His Girl Friday (1940), a favourite of one Mr. A. Coyne of Maclean’s magazine and mine, which you may have seen as The Front Page on stage or in the 1931 film or the 1974 version with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
A.O. Scott, the film critic, writes about the series in The New York Times, in a piece with the appropriate headline, “The Fearless Press, and other legends”:
“Remember newspapers? Neither do I, to tell you the truth, even though I’ve been working at this one for more than 10 years. But you have to go back a lot further— nearly half a century — to sample the sights, sounds and smells that still evoke the quintessence of print journalism in all its inky, hectic glory.
Or you could go to Film Forum, where a 43-movie month-long series called The Newspaper Picture opens on Friday … The program is a crackerjack history lesson and also, perhaps, a valediction. Not a day goes by that we don’t read something — a tweet, a blog, maybe even a column — proclaiming the death of newspapers, either to mourn or to dance on the grave. And even if those old newsprint creatures survive, say by migrating to the magic land of the iPad, they sure ain’t what they used to be. Where are the crusty editors and fast-talking girl reporters of yesteryear? I’m peeking over the cubicle wall, and all I see are Web producers and videographers.”
But, as Scott notes, the most modern picture in the series is Pakula’s All the President’s Men from 1976.
..”this marvelous series also suggests a sequel. Start with A Face in the Crowd and work forward to, say, Wag the Dog and you could fill a month with something not yet widely known as The Television Picture. And maybe 50 years from now there will be a retrospective devoted to the Web News Aggregator Picture. By then, thankfully, I’ll be as dead as dead-tree journalism.:
There’s certainly lots of films you could stuff into a festival filled with pics about the newspaper and, if you’re talking anything after the 1960s, the television news business.
If people ask me what it’s like in a newspaper newsroom, I often point them to The Paper . A lot of the stories and characters in that film have actually existed in the seven or eight newspaper newsrooms in which I’ve worked. If The Paper takes liberties, it’s with the compression of all this stuff into one single day. But that’s Hollywood (or, if you want to go way back, Aristotle). Still, stuff like you see in this movie really happens. And, as my friend and Toronto Star senior writer Susan Delacourt noted on Twitter, The Paper‘s “Picasso” anecdote is a teaching one for journalists themselves: “We’re not the people we cover,” she says. For Delacourt, me — and for a lot but not all journalists — that’s a Golden Rule. “The Paper’s attention to newsroom quirks is great, too,” writes Delacourt.
The Paper, though a lot of fun and generally illustrative of the rather chaotic nature of a newsroom, would be unlikely to qualify as one of the Great Films of All Time involving journalists. Two that are, if you’re asking me, would be The Killing Fields (1984) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). These films are “about” something other than the news business but I like them because, in both cases, they underscore the importance of the news business, of having capable empathetic witnesses and chroniclers to any range of events.
In The Killing Fields, New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, an American, and his Cambodian colleague Dith Pran become enemies of Pol Pot’s Cambodia (and not exactly favourites of Richard Nixon’s America either) precisely because they are so effective as witnesses and chroniclers. Schanberg and Dith Pran, though, are ideals or paragons of journalists. Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket is an imperfect journalist. There’s a lot going on in his head that he’s trying to sort out, including the most basic of questions: Is what I’m doing right or wrong? But he’s a journalist fighting for his own independent view of the world and that appeals to me. He has to deal with a corporate, i.e. the army, view on what is and what is not suitable for “news” and he has to deal with the peer pressure of his pals on the same issue. All this in the middle of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War.
When it comes to the television news business, everyone points at Network (1976) and rightfully so. It’s just a great piece of filmmaking (shot partly, I might add, in the studios at CTV’s headquarters in Agincourt, Toronto) But for verisimilitude, I’d pick Broadcast News (1987) — real accurate slice about the vanity, quirks, and egos of TV news and also the relationship of TV news to the “real news” that they do in print. The technology used to produce TV news in Broadcast News has long since been eclipsed but I’m told that, yes, the once did it that way!
Of course, films about the news biz aren’t all so weighty and serious. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) still makes me scream.
But what about some other pics? I fired up a hashtag on Twitter – #newspix — to solicit some titles. In alphabetical order, as they come rolling in:
- Absence of Malice (1981)
- Almost Famous (2000)
- The China Syndrome (1979)
- Citizen Kane (1941)
- Deadline USA (1952)
- Good Night and Good Luck (2005)
- The Insider (1999)
- Man of the Century (1999)
- A Mighty Heart (2007)
- The Parallax View (1974)
- Shattered Glass (2003)
- The Soloist (2009)
- State of Play (2009)
- The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
- The Year of Living Dangerously
State of Play (2009) starring Russell Crowe is based on a BBC six-part TV series that is far superior. You can smell the ink!
-Juliet O'Neill
Under Fire (1983 academy award nominee) starring Nick Nolte (photojournalist) and Gene Hackman, with Pat Metheny on the soundtrack (!) was my fave journo movie in the 80s. Hackman was also in Reds, the story of John Reed, who chronicled the Russian revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World. Ruined by Warren Beatty playing Reed.
-Juliet O'Neill
….how about “In the Loop,”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226774/
“Wag the Dog”?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885/
Great post/list!
I blogged about this myself. I shamelessly swiped your #newspix list. 🙂 But I also added another film for consideration ('Welcome to Sarajevo') and one to avoid ('The Quiet American').
http://www.billdoskoch.ca/2010/04/08/newspapers-in-the-movies/
Bill D.
“Quiet American” — of course. Also one to avoid involving journalists: “The Pelican Brief”. Yech.
Thanks, Bill!