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.”
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