Journalists on film: the hacks who scoop to conquer
June 11, 2009
By John Wash
Russell Crowe's new film State of Play explores the contrast between two kinds of journalism.
One is the cute 2009 version: the sassy columnist, the "personality" feature writer, the charming blogger anxious to be liked by a wide audience.
The other is the old-fashioned investigative reporter, dogged, relentless, foot-in-the-door, determined to get the story.
Russell Crowe plays Cal as a weary, long-haired knight-errant, happy to bend the rules to find out what he needs.
His foil is the Bambi-eyed Rachel McAdams who plays Della Frye, a young online journalist who couldn't tell a scoop from a sausage roll.
The action is set in America, and the newspaper is the Washington Globe, edited by gutsy, seen-it-all Helen Mirren.
She and Cal pepper the film with bits of wisdom about hack integrity: "Good reporters don't have friends - only sources," grates Mirren.
"Did we just break the law?" asks Della. "Nope," replies Cal, "that's just what we call damn fine reporting".
At one key moment, Cal tells his editor: "This is as big, and as connected, as they get."
It's a line that may remind cinema-goers of another Washington newspaper with other journo heroes: All the President's Men, Alan J Pakula's 1976 film about the Watergate affair, as uncovered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
A key line in that movie was: "This goes all the way to the top", namely Richard Nixon's White House.
The paper was the real-life Washington Post, presided over by the veteran editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) whose all-or-nothing support for his reporters is the film's turning point.
Never mind the fact that, without the timely underground briefings from the shadowy Deep Throat there would have been little concrete evidence, the Woodward-Bernstein investigation motivated a generation of young men and women to seek out corruption and the abuse of power in a thousand public arenas.
I'm sure it inspired my generation of mid-1970s graduates, but some of us didn't have to wait for Woodward and Bernstein to appear.
I've no idea why, at 15, when asked by a career master how I "saw the future", I said without hesitation: "I'm going to be a journalist."
There weren't many obvious British role models for the reporter-as-hero around, apart from the insufferably smug John Pilger.
But there were journalists in movies I'd seen on TV: men and women seeking out the truth, testing their moral mettle in foreign danger zones, following leads like policemen, investigating official corruption, hanging out in bars with informants, treating each day as a crusade.
Hell, I was young.
But films have given us some astonishingly contradictory notions about the hack as action man.
The classic journalist movie is The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, first filmed in 1931 with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, remade in 1940 as His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, and remade yet again, with its original title in 1974, with the classic double act of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
Behind the shenanigans involving a press pack awaiting an execution and an escaped criminal, the centre of the drama is the tyrant-slave relationship between Walter Burns, editor of The Examiner, and his star reporter Hildy Johnson.
Hildy is desperate to leave town and get married; Walter is desperate not to lose his top man. Their manipulations are a joy to behold.
You could conclude from it that journalists are a convivial, bonhomous, wise-cracking and sentimental breed, a generalisation some way from the truth.
A less endearing image featured in It Happened One Night, which won the five top Oscars in 1935.
Claudette Colbert plays Ellie, a spoilt heiress who marries in secret and has to flee from her father's wrath.
On a Greyhound bus, she encounters journalist Peter Warne (Clark Gable), who discovers her identity and agrees to unite her with her husband provided she gives him "your story - a day-to-day account of your flight to happiness".
Warne is an anthology of journo clichés: he's a chronic drunkard who is rude to his editor, assuring him: "You wouldn't recognise a news story if it reached up and kicked you in the pants."
The editor, in turn, tells Gable his copy was "in Greek".
Despite these setbacks, they are reconciled by the prospect of publishing the apparently colossal exclusive story about a privileged young woman falling out with her millionaire father.
Journalism and snobbery was the theme of George Cukor's wildly popular 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, in which a reporter and photographer from Spy magazine (James Stewart and Ruth Hussey) are invited into the home of Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) who's about to marry for the second time.
The idea is greeted with horror by the bride-to-be: "So I'm to be examined, undressed and humiliated at 15 cents a copy?" she asks.
Her distaste for celebrity journalism is oddly shared by Stewart, who says: "I'm a writer, not a society snooper."
You wonder what he thinks he's doing working on a magazine called Spy.
If the journalist could be seen as either a romantic adventurer or a snooping snake-in-the-grass, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) offered the newspaperman as world-conquering businessman.
After inheriting a fortune, Kane becomes a media mogul, a political fixer, a creator and destroyer of presidents; seldom has journalism been presented as a fulcrum of massive power.
Kane ends his days an unhinged recluse, clearly paying the penalty for abandoning his once-lofty principles on a whim.
A more sinister journo monster was on display in Sweet Smell of Success, the 1957 masterpiece from Alexander Mackendrick.
No newspaper office, or editor or hungry hack appears in this film, only the awesome figure of J J Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), New York's hottest gossip columnist, known as "the eyes of Broadway", a man who knows where all the bodies are buried and by what dubious ladders the Manhattan high-fliers reached the top.
A paragraph in his column can ruin people's careers, marriages, lives.
He holds court at the 21 Club, where his table is laid out with notepads, photocopied secrets and a telephone. Around him buzz the public drones of "press agents" who feed him information for his column, including Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) who is to prove his nemesis.
"Beware these 'gentlemen' of the press!" ran the shout-line on the hoardings. Few viewers would disagree.
After All the President's Men set the template for journalists-as-heroes (oh, the clatter of those massive typewriter keys smacking the screen in close-up, like heat-seeking missiles), gentlemen of the press had an easier ride.
Reaganite interventions in Central America elicited two fine movies in the mid-1980s.
One was Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986) with a crazily manic James Woods driving into terrible danger from death squads and random shootings, and discovering his lost integrity as a reporter.
The other was Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire (1983) in which Joanna Cassidy, Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman come to Nicaragua in 1979 to cover the war against the Somoza regime and find their supposed neutrality ("I don't take sides," grunts Nolte, "I take pictures.") itself under fire.
More recently, David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) watched a cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, become embroiled in a serial-murderer hunt in the early 1970s, until his sleuthing falls foul of the police.
That's journalists for you - they've been portrayed as amateurs, quasi-cops, tyrants, snoopers, romantic adventurers, drifters, gamblers, seducers, drunkards, people who stand up for themselves and fight their superiors, knight-errants, social misfits, outsiders, moguls and complete bastards.
Such an arsenal of identities doesn't quite fit the majority of journalists - talented men and women who spend every day working quietly at their desks, checking their Facebook updates and looking forward to teatime.
But who'd want to make a film about people like that? - The Independent
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