In the third installment of our ‘Movies and Shakers’ summer series, we’ll take a look at some of the best movies about journalism, from some black and white classics to recent Oscar winners.

Like our previous two articles, on political movies and TV series, there are bound to be many good ones we’ve left out, so let us know your own personal favourites.

Before Hollywood even existed, the popular press was often a startling source of sensationalism; yellow yarns and sexy stories that made readers want to hear more, and want to tell their friends. (There is a great scene in the Tim Robbins movie The Player where he goes through every story on the front page of that day’s newspaper and explains how each one would make a great screenplay because there’s nothing more dramatic than the human condition.)

Yet the essence of journalism can be difficult to accurately portray in a ninety-minute drama, simply because so much of its day-to-day function can be anything but dramatic. For example, a lot of classic “shoe-leather” journalism is depicted as “hurry up and wait” segments; like where Woodward and Bernstein painstakingly go through the loan cards at the Library of Congress in All The President’s Men, or Michael Rezendes waits way too patiently at the country records office to get an incriminating document in Spotlight.

Network

But generally movies with a journalist as the protagonist – true stories or not – have always drawn moviegoers into what can often be complex plot lines because, like films focused on doctors or cops, the audience usually has a stylized, truncated view of what that role entails and the best portrayals usually remember that there is a human being behind the title. All good stories are fundamentally about people; and having a journalist as a central character is a great vehicle for holding the strands of a story together and driving it forward.

Beyond that human element, some of the movies we’ve chosen here are also wonderful snapshots of the industry at a particular time and it’s interesting to watch what has changed and what remains a constant.

But before we get into silver screen portrayals of arguably the second-oldest profession, there are a couple of small-screen series with journalism and journalists at their heart that are well worth your attention if you haven’t seen them.

 

TV on TV

Aaron Sorkin returned to television after The West Wing with The Newsroom in 2012 and even though he later “apologized” for its early episodes, it was compelling in a “ripped from the headlines” kind of way, and always – of course – full of shareable clips, like this by now very famous sequence from the pilot episode.

 

David Simon’s brilliant HBO blockbuster The Wire ran from 2002 to 2008 and was maybe the best-ever detective drama about newspapers; set in Baltimore, Simon – himself a former police reporter – showed the city’s paper, The Sun, as many other titles across the country were doing at the time, wrestling with the implications of a changing industry and what that meant for covering corruption and holding power to account.

While The Wire was almost fly-on-the-newsroom-wall as drama, a new documentary series by Liz Garbus for Showtime called The Fourth Estate looks at the dynamics at work within the New York Times as it covers the Trump presidency. “There’s an old saying,” says Garbus. “The rhetoric may be at war, but the journalists are at work.”

The series certainly has echoes of Andrew Rossi’s excellent 2011 doc, Page One – Inside The New York Times which famously featured the roles of much-missed media critic David Carr and upstart techie “robot” Brian Stelter, now host of CNN’s Reliable Sources.

 

Golden Age

Jumping right back to when newspapermen were in demand to write movies about the newspaper business, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1931 play The Front Page was given the Hollywood treatment several times, including most famously as His Girl Friday in 1940.

Another boy-girl rom-com in a similar vein was Teacher’s Pet (1958) starring Doris Day as a journalism instructor and Clark Gable as the hard-bitten (and what a great description that was) night editor who thinks he has nothing to learn.

James Stewart starred in the 1948 documentary-style Call Northside 777 – incidentally the first feature film to be shot entirely on location in Chicago – as the reporter who uses what was then new technology to prove the innocence of a man whose story he picked up in his paper’s classifieds.

 

1952’s Deadline USA stars Humphrey Bogart as the editor who stands up to organized crime, and features a famous closing scene where Bogart tells the mob boss on the phone what the sound he can hear is: “That’s the press, baby. The press. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing.”

Meanwhile, Kirk Douglas plays a manipulative and cynical reporter who has the story of a lifetime fall into his lap in Ace in the Hole (1951), directed by Billy Wilder. One of the best scenes in this dark narrative of human nature, is when Douglas is telling the idealistic young J-school graduate about how he covered a story of missing snakes. “Bad news sells. Good news is no news.”

Covering the World

Back in the UK, The Day The Earth Caught Fire is a low-budget (obviously) 1961 film where, believe it or not, the science editor is the hero. It also features the real-life editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christensen, and a fantastic final scene where the hot-metal composing room is waiting on the fate of the earth to know which splash to run.

 

Also set in London, but with an American star and a backdrop of international espionage, Joel McCrea plays the crusading Foreign Correspondent in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie of the same name. It was what A.O. Scott of the New York Times called “an unusual celebration of America’s lack of seriousness.”

Among definitely more serious attempts to portray the life of a war correspondent, four movies from the 1980s stand out: Under Fire (1983) about the conflict in Nicaragua; Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) set in strife-torn Indonesia; Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) starring James Woods as a photographer in central America, and, of course, The Killing Fields (1984) set in Cambodia and based on the true story of New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer prize-winner Sydney Schanberg.

 

I’m not going to take it anymore

Back in the US, two important movies from the 1970s explored the influence – and lack thereof – of television news. Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976) looked at what happens when reality TV becomes all too real, with an iconic performance by Peter Finch as Howard Beale, among a great ensemble cast.

The China Syndrome (1979), meanwhile, pits idealistic TV reporters against the nuclear power industry – and their own station – in a tale of potential disaster that foreshadowed the accident at Three Mile Island. The movie was released twelve days before the accident occurred.

1987’s Broadcast News addresses journalistic ethics and ambition at a TV network news division against the backdrop of a character triangle featuring William Hurt, Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter.

Another altogether darker look at TV news comes with The Insider (1999), directed by Michael Mann and based on the true story of a tobacco industry whistleblower (Russell Crowe) and the ’60 Minutes’ producer (Al Pacino) who tries to tell his story but runs up against the might of the CBS legal team.

And for a more modern take on the darker side of TV news reportage and the market for infotainment in an insatiable, always-on, always-hungry environment, try Nightcrawler (2014), with Jake Gyllenhaal manically brilliant as the unethical and ambitious stringer who points his camera at the worst of humanity. Rene Russo, as the station producer who eggs him on, tells him “I want something people can’t turn away from.” Definite echoes of Network here.

 

Read all about it

Two movies that romanticize newspapers just ahead of the time when it was part of the narrative to contemplate their decline, are also two of my personal favorites.

Absence of Malice (1981) is the story of how a journalist can get caught between the authorities, a suspected crime figure and a murder that needs solving. It’s a little dated by now, but no less enthralling.

 

The Paper (1994) is one of the best collective representations of the workings of a newsroom, and the flawed characters who inhabit it. Set as a ‘day in the life’ of a story and those who tell it, Michael Keaton is brilliant as the competitive metro editor of a New York tabloid who is torn between getting the story right and doing the right thing in the rest of his life – the boring parts. Watch for the scene on the phone to Spalding Grey as Keaton blows a job offer with Grey’s very proper competitor paper, supposed to be the New York Times.

Keaton is also wonderful as part of an excellent cast in the 2015 Oscar-winning Spotlight, the true story of the Boston Globe’s coverage of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church over many years; driven by the investigative team led by Keaton and supported by the paper’s new editor (and current editor of the Washington Post) Marty Baron. It is one of those real-life dramas where even if you know how it ends, it is still thrilling, tense and cathartic.

 

Another true story well worth watching is Shattered Glass (2003) which looks at how writer Stephen Glass managed to dupe his editors at The New Republic in the mid-1990s and how his many story fabrications were discovered.

 

Down to our final two, and no list of movies about journalism or newspapers would be complete without them.

In Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, written by Herman Mankiewicz, the title character is loosely modeled on media tycoon William Randolph Hearst and explores the relationship between press, politics and power. The innovative movie looks at the power of yellow journalism and how newspapers are used to advance a personal agenda and influence public opinion. The study of the cinematic labyrinth that is Kane has almost become a genre in itself.

 

Finally, All The President’s Men is Alan J Pakula’s 1976 dramatisation of the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate and the ultimate fall of Richard Nixon, with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and – crucially – Jason Robards brilliant as Ben Bradlee. It introduced America to the phrase “follow the money” in political investigations and, obviously, has a clear and striking resonance today. Two subsequent “companion piece” movies – Frost/Nixon from 2008 and The Post from earlier this year, bolster the story both of Nixon’s downfall and of the reputation of the Post.

But there is hardly a better line of real drama – in a movie that is filled with them – than when Robards/Bradlee finishes a long, critical and tense read of one of “Woodstein’s” stories and just says “Run that baby.”

 

Thanks for watching – and reading. See you next time.

Next up in the series:

* 1 July – Political movies about the UK

* 15 July – Political movies about Ireland/NI

and finishing up on 29 July with a look at some of the  Best political protest songs/videos.

 

Also published on Medium.