The Drama of Typing
(wikimedia)
Alyssa Rosenberg wants to see the great American news media movie:
I don’t know why there hasn’t been a truly great movie about journalism in the United States in recent years. I thought the State of Play remake was fun, but not even close to great. Perhaps it’s that Hollywood isn’t inclined to kick journalism when it’s down. Or that American politicians who hate the press these days tend to hate it with a dull, hammer-like disregard, rather than a poisonous, personal, specific loathing combined with need, something that colors both In the Loop and State of Play (I was at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota last year when delegates at the floor began chanting “NBC” in derision and doing a kind of reverse tomahawk chop in the direction of the press box. Strange to say the least).
I think the issue here is just that not enough happens in journalism. I’ve watched Spencer Ackerman report out some pretty good stories. It involved a certain amount of looking stuff up online, a great deal of waiting for people to return phone calls, some taking notes, some talking. And then you kind of need to do it all over again. Filling out FOIA requests is important, but watching someone do it would be deadly dull. If you think about All The President’s Men they manage to build an awful lot of somewhat frenetic physical action into the process—people are always physically going places to do things. Which makes the film watchable, but I think is not all that reflective of how people really find where the bodies are buried. Back when I had bosses who wanted to try to turn me into a real reporter-type journalist, the slogan was “pick up the damn phone” not “go do something that would look interesting on a large movie screen.”
That said, journalists stationed abroad are another matter. I think Welcome to Sarajevo is very good and there must be some great stories to tell about life in the Baghdad Bureau of an American news organization.
57 Responses to “The Drama of Typing”
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July 16th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Although it was made quite a while ago, Broadcast News was utterly terrific — one of my all time favorites as a matter of fact.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I don’t know why there hasn’t been a truly great movie about journalism in the United States in recent years.
Watch ‘Nothing but the truth’. It was released straight to DVD because the company went bankrupt, but it is very good.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Maybe it’s unkind, but there’s also the fact that most (not all, no, but most) journalism has been pretty inept about doing anything heroic over the past few years. I can see the movie trailer now:
In a world of navel-gazing and inside baseball . . .
Where reporters fail to actually investigate or question their blind sources . . .
One reporter had the courage to also repeat the RNC’s talking points.
I’d totally buy tickets.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
This speaks more to the laziness of screenwriters and the prejudices of producers. A movie in this ouevre would simply require more interpersonal interaction — a reporter convincing a reluctant whistleblower to come forward even though the government won’t provide him or her with the protection they should, the arguments between journalist, editor, and publisher — will an important story get spiked due to economic concerns, etc. So, no, the gathering of the details may not be all Woodward and Bernstein in the parking garage with Deep Throat, but the process behind the publishing of the story can be fraught with drama nonetheless.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
there must be some great stories to tell about life in the Baghdad Bureau of an American news organization.
HBO made a movie a few years back called “Live from Baghdad” with Michael Keaton. It was, I believe, based on the true story of the CNN Baghdad bureau during the first Gulf War. Haven’t seen it, so can’t vouch for quality, but clearly some producers think like you do.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Speaking as a screenwriter, you’re an idiot.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
<i.This speaks more to the laziness of screenwriters and the prejudices of producers. A movie in this ouevre would simply require more interpersonal interaction — a reporter convincing a reluctant whistleblower to come forward even though the government won’t provide him or her with the protection they should, the arguments between journalist, editor, and publisher — will an important story get spiked due to economic concerns, etc.
Sounds like The Insider, which wasn’t that long ago.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Season 5 of “The Wire” focused on the role journalism plays in society and in American city politics as well. Without question, “The Wire” was the best thing ever put on television.
As for Erik’s comment, the movie you described is called “The Insider” and was directed by Michael Mann. Its the story of a tobacco company whistle blower going on 60 Minutes…
July 16th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Ryan M. Powers has been known to deliver some dramatic typing
July 16th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
When someone does make that movie, I want some character to explain the live stand-up where nothing happens. Why, for example, is someone on the 11:00 o’clock NYC news standing live with a camera crew outside a darkened Brooklyn courthouse where all activity in the trial being covered ceased several hours earlier?
July 16th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I’m still waiting for the great movie about academics doing academics, as opposed to, say, having mental breakdowns. I did watch ‘Proof’ a few weeks ago and got a kick out of seeing my grad school go by on film. But no work got done on screen…
July 16th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I recently re-watched All the Presidents Men. I was really impressed with how interesting the movie was, given how boring the real practice of journalism is. In college, I was a reporter for the student newspaper – don’t knock it, when the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News were on strike for one year – we were the highest circulation daily newspaper for a couple of weeks.
When I was the crime reporter, sometimes I would get on my bike to go to a crime scene, or bike to City Hall to cover a trial. But mostly, I just called people.
My colleague, Steve Glass, did even less as reporter. He just made shit up, but apparently that was enough to get Hayden Christiansen to depict him in on the big screen in Shattered Glass.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Without question, “The Wire” was the best thing ever put on television.
And without question, the journalism subplot was the worst thing ever put into “The Wire”.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
When someone does make that movie, I want some character to explain the live stand-up where nothing happens.
In that case, I highly recommend the play Tragedy: A Tragedy by Will Eno.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Isn’t Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about academics doing academics? Not very pretty, but … Also, didn’t Will Ferrell do an SNL skit about academics doing academics, while their bodies were sluggish with goat meat?
Oh, I see. You mean doing “academics” as an abstract noun.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Movies seldom show work of any kind (except old movie montages where they build stuff, train for big boxing matches, etc.) because almost all work is not very visually engaging-even if it’s satisfying and important work. Chefs appear in lots of movies, but you never see them dicing onions.
Al Pacino played a football coach in that awful Oliver Stone movie “Any Given Sunday,” and he was never seen watching film. Knute Rockne watched film for God’s sake. Stone’s a fan, too, he knew it was fraudulent. But a movie of a man watching movies might lack a certain zip.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
What about *Good Night and Good Luck*?
July 16th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
You could focus on the editorial and business side. For example, if you haven’t seen it in a while, re-watch _Network_. At the time it was made it must have seemed ridiculous. Now, it seems prophetic.
Also, _The Insider_ was dramatic because it dealt with the courage of the informant who came out with the story (against Big Tobacco). Casting Russel Crowe and Al Pacino didn’t hurt, either.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
I, myself, am hoping Hollywood finally makes a movie about a plucky urban planner who, with a rag-tag band of neighborhood activists, community organizers, and historic preservation officers, secures that federal grant to revitalize an inner city riverfront by helping local residents start their own businesses.
With Wilford Brimley as the gruff-but-lovable zoning board chair.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Um, hello. Fletch anyone? Best journalism movie ever!
July 16th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Deep throat was pretty exhilarating. Edgy, too.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
It involved a certain amount of looking stuff up online, a great deal of waiting for people to return phone calls, some taking notes, some talking.
Geez, this sounds kind of like writing a research paper for a seminar class. Since most journalists continue to write after graduating, you’d think the results would reflect increasingly higher quality research over time, but evidence to the contrary leaves me with the feeling that the editors aren’t wielding their professorial red pen as much as they should.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I do have to say that Alyssa Rosenberg’s point here seems a lot better than MY’s. As JMG says @16, few forms of work are inherently dramatic. That doesn’t mean you can’t write a good screenplay about them. T
here have been tons of great movies about journalists — as everyone on the thread has been illustrating. Just not many in recent years. It’s not likely that journalism has become inherently less interesting. The recent deficit is more likely to reveal the fading of a certain mystique, and/or just the fact that there haven’t been a lot of great feature films lately, period.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I found its depiction of leaks during the Watergate investigation to be of dubious historical accuracy.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
In fairness, there are even fewer movies that focus on accounting. Accounting is usually very boring, but it can get exciting. Those last few days of Enron had accountants scrambling to make impossible numbers. If they actually had guns pointed to their heads, it wouldn’t have made any difference to them. You could do a movie about the last three weeks of Enron from the accountant’s perspective, and it actually would be compelling.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Maybe a movie about hands-on reporting on the hard core pornography industry would do well.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Speaking as a screenwriter, you’re an idiot.
Perhaps, but lets play along for a moment. Think back to Pulp Fiction, in which there’s a whole lot of nothing but dialog, infrequently punctured by an accidental shooting or a rape. The locations and sets were largely unremarkable, so we are pretty much left with the dialog.
Now, a scene with nothing but interesting dialog is hard to write, compared to one centered on mating, physical danger, or passing through an exotic locale. It’s harder, and the potential for boring the audience is much higher.
So, I’ll concede that labeling screenwriters as “lazy” might seem a bit harsh, but from the consuming public’s POV, a reasonable shorthand.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Ever see the movie Swordfish? It had the most god-awful attempt to make typing looking interesting. Hugh Jackson proving he can hack a computer would have been too boring, so the director put a gun to his head and had a girl giving him a blowjob while typing.
Still boring.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I really enjoyed Shattered Glass. It was fairly balanced about the whole crisis, and since the magazine did the right thing after the truth came to light, it wasn’t even really a media-bashing film.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
@ 19, awesome
July 16th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
There’s certainly an awesome movie to be made about the decline of journalism. I don’t think that it necessarily has to seem like it’s kicking journalism while it’s down. Think about stories being killed at a paper that turns a profit but is being downsized to meet the corporate bottom line or whatever. State of Play had some of this, but it was more of an obnoxious subplot about far-fetched conspiracies.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Oh boo-hoo — you think archeologists really raid ancient ruins with intricate defense contraptions? For that matter, you really think most spies don’t just do deskwork?
A number of journalists travel to locations in pursuit of information — input action movie here, accuracy* be damned, and you’ve got a summer popcorn movie.
*and, preferably, the laws of physics
July 16th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Geez, this sounds kind of like writing a research paper for a seminar class. Since most journalists continue to write after graduating, you’d think the results would reflect increasingly higher quality research over time, but evidence to the contrary leaves me with the feeling that the editors aren’t wielding their professorial red pen as much as they should.
First of all, how many journalists get this kind of experience in college or grad school? I didn’t – no grad school, double-major in college in English and Political Science, longest paper I wrote was ~15 pages, research never involved interviews IIRC – and I did OK as a journalist, but only at a small-town paper, so maybe the credential is essential at big papers but I wouldn’t know about it. Even at grad schools, do they require that kind of research? It would be useful, but tough to include in a course curriculum. Like I said, I don’t know.
More importantly though, I don’t think a lack of research skill is a major problem in journalism these days, as you seem to be saying. Writers are producing articles with a dozen different sources, but letting them all comment anonymously. Writers are talking to all the relevant people about an article, but then they keep going and let disingenuous hacks comment as well to create the appearance of balance. Writers write painstakingly researched articles on tendentious bullshit like flag pins. And so on.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Speaking as a screenwriter, you’re an idiot.
Also speaking as a screenwriter (the above is a pseudonym), you’re also an idiot.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Glad someone already nominated “Shattered Glass”, which I thought was excellent.
Except for the ending, which was portrayed as some sort of triumph, when the whole business was actually very embarassing. But other than that, excellent.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
without question, the journalism subplot was the worst thing ever put into “The Wire”.
Seconded.
He just made shit up, but apparently that was enough to get Hayden Christiansen to depict him in on the big screen in Shattered Glass.
This is completely off-topic, but it’s a problem when you have have attractive (and/or charismatic) actors – which by real life standards is most of them – playing scumbags. It’s very rewarding for the scumbags if they still happen to be alive. I recently saw a program about the real Henry Hill, whose life was the basis for Goodfellas. The guy’s an ugly old scumbag, and didn’t look very good even when he was younger. But they got Ray Liotta to play him. Speaking of ‘The Wire’ what was so amazing about Snoop that she was unlike every other actor there.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
brad2,
“C’mon, gang! We’ve got a youth center to build!”
July 16th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
“To Die For” is fine as well; worth it for Nicole Kidman’s great performance if nothing else.
July 16th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Hopefully Erik Vanderhoff will come back and show whether he actually is an idiot, or just writes like one.
July 16th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Wow,
now we know why Yglesias left the Atlantic. His bosses actually wanted him to do something.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
We have the great American news drama. It’s called Anchorman, and it was almost a perfect mimesis of the jackass naval gazing type that ends up as our press corps.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Hello? Ron Howard’s “The Paper?” Best journo flick ever (not, as mentioned above, “Fletch”!)
July 17th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Maybe the senators are inept…or maybe they’re just putting up token resistance, enough to make it look as if they tried but not enough to actually stir up a shitstorm they aren’t ready to deal with.
You had a boss who tried to turn you into a real reporter? Pour rire!
July 17th, 2009 at 12:32 am
Ace in the Hole…aka The Big Carnival laid out the course of professional journalism over 50 years ago.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043338/
July 17th, 2009 at 5:29 am
The great journalism movie of our day is the sadly overlooked “Wrong Is Right”, a 1992 black-comedy thriller starring Sean Connery as superstar TV news reporter Patrick Hale, a kind of combination Walter Cronkite/Geraldo Rivera, who uncovers a story involving Arab terrorists, Islamic religious fanatics (suicide bombers, in fact), nuclear suitcase bombs, which threaten Israel and America, and a secret government conspiracy involving the CIA and the White House. It was a flop at the time, many finding it implausible, but looks pretty prescient today.
July 17th, 2009 at 5:55 am
Sorry, in the above comment I have the release date of “Wrong Is Right” as 1992. It is in fact 1982. Even more prescient!
July 17th, 2009 at 9:13 am
When journalism was more like blogging
An oldie but … for those that didn’t know, an eyeopener:Foreign Correspondent (1940)
July 17th, 2009 at 9:29 am
In the old days journalists didn’t even write, apparently. They phoned in their story and someone else wrote it.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I had already ordered it from NETFLIX, and it arrived yesterday. I watched it last night, and it still stands up. As you say, it is even better in today’s context than it was 23 years ago.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:50 am
You want to watch a journalist do something interesting? Watch Lara Logan.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Regarding journalism as a subject for inspection, I listened to the Glenn Greenwald-Chuck Todd podcast and couldn’t finish it. “Pitch defileth.”
July 17th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Someone could just remake “The Front Page” again.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:33 am
the one about the burgundy fellow
July 17th, 2009 at 11:39 am
We already have the great American news movie. It’s called “Network” and it can’t be improved upon.
July 17th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Journalism may be boring but it is not as boring as lab work, yet CSI, CSIMiami, CSI New York, CSI Las Vegas and, for all I know, CSI Wichita Falls are very successful.
The secrets seem to be get lots of practice with music videos, lots of jump cuts and zooming during the deadly boring bits, add some really old rock and employ extremely good looking actors and actresses except for one or two middle aged guys with whom middle aged guys can identify.
July 17th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
[...] funny to watch Ackerman and Yglesias ponder why Hollywood doesn’t make more movies about them — you know, intrepid [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Um, isn’t Superman a journalist?