Well, I can say for sure this is a journalism movie. Almost the entire running time is taken up with an inside look at the television news business. But it is really more a star vehicle for Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford, whose love affair provides the non-journalistic content. The movie is loosely based on messed-up life of NBC newscaster Jessica Savitch. Screenwriters John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion wrote Monster, Living Off The Big Screen about their experiences writing the movie. As Dunne said to Esquire (as quoted in an online review), "Disney wasn't going to make a movie about a lesbian who drank and took drugs," which is why they movie took so long and so many rewrites to become what it became--a star-studded love story. Sally Atwater, who later becomes Tally Atwater, is fresh, innocent Michelle Pfeiffer. Warren Justice, deposed network correspondent looking for another shot at the big time, is Robert Redford. Sparks were supposed to ensue. They didn't. Still, it is an enjoyable movie, slightly better than the two- and three-star reviews it got in most places. And as a journalism movie, it is first rate--lots of inside looks at how TV news REALLY works.

Holly Hunter and William Hurt pow-wow in a scene from the first-rate TV news drama/comedy/ parody Broadcast News.

It is possible that William Hurt and Holly Hunter gave their best-ever performances in this excellent, cynical look at the inner workings of TV news, written and directed by James L. Brooks. Bismarck said people who like government and wieners should never watch laws or sausage being made. The same can be said for TV news. This film is often lumped in, unfairly, with Paddy Chayefsky's brilliant fantasy Network, but that was fantasy and this is based, at least partly, on reality.

This film was The Paper of its era, well-written and meticulously researched and loving in its depiction of its journalist heroes, due, it seems certain, to the fact that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward wrote the film. Veteran Alan J .Pakula then realized their vision with care and aplomb.

For those too young to recall, Woodward and Bernstein were a pair of Washington Post reporters who covered Watergate when it appeared to be just what President Richard Nixon said it was, "a second-rate burglary." Their tenacity, combined with some effective prodding by Judge John Sirica (revisionists will tell you his role is overplayed--don't you believe them) broke the case open and brought down a president.

This movie is one of the few journalism films in history that had a perceptible effect, both on the field of journalism and the public perception of journalists. In combination with the book of the same name, it made heroes of journalists--and goats and liars of most public figures depicted, and so by implication, most public figures. It affected the field of journalism in two ways. First, it brought an entire generation of fresh, eager recruits into the field. Alas, it also taught them that there was scandal everywhere. As a result, journalists have uncovered 13 of the last 10 scandals in Washington. That is to say, they see scandal everywhere, even in innocent mistakes. Napoleon said, "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." I agree. We have criminalized trivial error in government, and thrown the baby out with the bath water. Scoundrels have, indeed, been driven from the public weal. So have good, honest public servants whose only mistakes were small and/or personal.

As for the film itself, it was masterpiece of recreation. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford spent time at The Post and with Woodward and Bernstein, and it shows in their lifelike portrayals, which capture the nuance of journalism. Amazingly, for a Hollywood film, it manages to capture some of the slogging and monotony, the combination of luck and persistence often required for good journalism. The Post newsroom in the film was a precise copy of the original--so precise that it included "desk litter" imported from Washington (including, reporters say, press releases for the film).

Reporters have never looked better, smarter, more noble--or handsomer (well, at least in the case of Redford). Whether All The President's Men has been a net positive for American journalism remains to be seen.

This is a first-class piece of work, although it is way too long, at 158 minutes. It is one of those "ripped from the headlines" stories, based on a magazine article by Marie Brenner (a neophyte who co-wrote the screenplay with veteran scribe Eric Roth) entited "The Man Who Knew Too Much." It is the story of fired Brown and Williamson research chief Jeffery Wigand, and his relationship with Lowell Bergman, a producer for the CBS Television newsmagazine, "60 Minutes." The story has many threads, one of which is the CBS corporate decision to force the news division not to air its interview with Wigand. As Joe Salztman of USC puts it, "watch out for those terribly mean and vicious publishers. They men who owned the media were always out to get you." True in the 1930s, true in the fin-de-siècle.

One of the first things I always wonder about a film is "how true is it." Most of the major events in the film are true. There was a Jeffrey Wigand, he did work for Brown and Williamson, he was fired. He was interviewed, the interview was suppressed, Brown and Williamson did smear him with a 500-page dossier the Wall Street Journal debunked. Bergman did leak the story to the New York Times. Bergman quit 60 Minutes and now teaches journalism at Cal. The devil is in the details of course, and Mike Wallace was spitting mad about this film, which, frankly, isn't a very flattering portrayal of the journalistic lion. Bergman comes off much better, but since he was a consultant on the film, is that any surprise? It tends to support Saltzman's observation that journalists as portrayed sympathetically when it's a journalist writing the script, less sympathetically when its a pure screenwriter putting the words in the actors' mouths.

There are so many wonderful things about this film it is hard to know where to start. Of course, like all journalism films, it concentrates on the most exciting, important days in a journalist's life, because tedium isn't very entertaining. You could be a journalist for 50 years and never be driven through the streeets of Beruit with a sack over your head, as Bergman is in the opening scene.

I have never been a producer on a television magazine show, but I've read plenty about the process, and this is an illuminating and eye opening portrayal of the way that particular kind of journalistic sausage gets stuffed in its case. In particular, if you didn't already know it, you learn that producers do most of the work on a story so that the talent can parachute in and ask the questions on camera. Each of the correspondents works with four producers for one week a month; the producers each have three weeks to get ready for their "on" week. Knowledge of this system makes Pacino/Bergman's speech to Wallace about "you've never landed and found a source has changed his mind" particularly poignant.

One aspect of this film is unique in my experience: you get a snootful of what it's like to be the subject/source of a major investigative story. This is an extreme case, of course, but it raises the ethical question of whether a journalist must consider the consequences of a story for the people who supply the raw facts.

In fact, this movie raises a number of ethical questions, including, but not limited to, issues surrounding keeping your word to a source, protecting a source, when corporate can overrule the news division, when you quit on principle and when you continue to work from the inside for change. Not to mention the dilemma faced by Wigand (and many other sources) of violating a confidentiality agreement when you know you are being asked to keep secret information the public needs to know.

This entry is not proportional to the importance of this film among journalism films, or even where it stands on my list of great movies in this genre--its location near the bottom of the file says more about that. But Michael Mann is a great director, this was a major Hollywood film, and it treated broadcast journalism accurately, lovingly, dramatically and with a great deal of respect. Plus, I may start analyzing journalism movies for a living, so I'd better find a few more intelligent things to say about them.

Hey, Al Pacino again. Only this time, he isn't a journalist, he's a "victim." And that's my gripe with this film. Its depiction of journalists.

Here's the plot summary from IMDB:

When Al Yankovic does one of his marathons on VH1, they call it Al TV. Well, this is Al Movie. I like Al Pacino. I don't even mind that he is in virtually every scene of this movie, many of them by himself in a room talking to himself via his creation, Simone. That's because he's a very good, very entertaining actor, even (or especially) when he is doing comedy. This is a funny film with a message. Not surprising, perhaps, given that director/writer Andrew Niccol previously did the rather similar Truman Show. Both films invite us to examine the nature of reality.

This one was widely touted and long-awaited, although the close-in publicity blitz was rather lighter than I might have expected. Probably the low budget and the low expectations. It was dumped into the dog days of August. Not as ignominously as Pluto Nash which was withheld from reviewers--the kiss of death; Simone just got no promotion, the kiss of a bad hacking cough.

But enough inside baseball. As the computer graphically aware among you must know (Craig Reynolds--go see this and check me if I'm wrong), most of the simthespian's work was done by Canadian model Rachel Roberts, on whom Simone is clearly based. So, it's as everyone says; you still can't build a plausible computer actor from scratch. Yet. But Pacino's line, "with the cost of actors going up and the cost of computer going down... the scales tipped," is spot on.

It's worth going to this film just to see Catherine Keener play a relatively normal human being. And I am a big Jay Mohr fan, so I enjoyed his 30 seconds of screen time. Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Pacino and Keener's daughter, is fresh and refreshing and will now be seen regularly, I predict. The sensuality is of a PG-13 sort.

While most professional reviews were mixed, I give this film an undiluted rave. I found myself, literally, laughing out on a half-dozen occasions. Go see it.

As a semi-professional observer of journalist depictions in movies, however, I must register a protest. Credit where credit is due; I owe this insight to Joe Saltzman of the IJPC. I have read the syllabus of his USC course on the media image of journalists, and it isn't a pretty picture. We (OK, they, since I am no longer a practicing journalist) were depicted for decades as basically noble people doing the Lord's work--afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted, that sort of thing. But starting in the 70s, the image turned, and by the 80s and 90s, journalists were depicted as ravening pack animals. This coincided when the disappearance of the ex-journalist as screenwriter and his replacement by the screenwriter who has never done anything else but write screenplays, and whose best friends--movie people all--thing of journalists as, to use the British term, "reptiles." Check out the pack of journalists in The Right Stuff, actually played by a comedy troupe!

The trend continues with a vengeance in this film. Two scenes of the Hollywood press on a movie lot literally chasing the Al Pacino character. A horde trespassing on his property at the beach house. Hordes outside the hotel. Hordes outside the courtroom. The only differentiated journalists are Pruitt Taylor Vince, the editor of Echo (a cross between People and the National Enquirer), and his comic relief lackey, Jason Schwartzman. Vince is depicted as an underwear-sniffing weirdo and a blackmailer (well, OK, that's a sensitive portrayal of an editor). Schwartzman, by the way, has a bright future as a comic character actor.

The portrayal of reports in this film is not a pretty picture, and it is a long way from Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, the journalists in this film are a lot closer to the model of Richard "Dick" Thornburg, Reporter for WWTW-TV in Die Hard. Can't place him? He's the one who gets cold-cocked by Willis' wife, Bonnie Bedelia, to the sound of overwhelming cheers in the movie theater.

The journalists in this film as depicted as stupid, vicious or both. Not one of them acts out of noble motives, and in this film they don't even advance the plot--they just annoy and harass the main characters. Goodness, the Hollywood elite must really resent their dependence on publicity to depict reporters like this.

I have never seen anyone call this movie The Big Carnival except movie reference books and, now, the Internet Movie Database, but apparently somewhere, at some time, in some forum, it also went by that name, as well as The Human Interest Story.

By whatever name you know it, it is an important film in the development of the image of the journalist in popular culture. It was the first robin of spring, the first crack in the dyke, the first faint echo of the future. As was so often the case, Billy Wilder was ahead of his time. Ace In The Hole was not the first movie to feature a journalist as protagonist as villian, but it was the first good one that did, and it laid the groundwork for the gradual deterioration of the journalist from generally good, or at least well-meaning, seeker after the truth to the cynical, semi-evil, story-at-any-price journalist whos portrayal dominates journalism fiction in Hollywood, in movies and on television, as of this writing (2002).

(Novels continue to be an exception in the popular depiction of journalists, but that's probably because journalism novels continue to be written by journalists, for the most part. Back when journalists wrote journalism movies, the portrayal was, perhaps not surprisingly, substantially more positive).

In this film, Kirk Douglas has drunk his way out of a position as a crack New York newspaper reporter, and been forced to take a series of increasingly more humiliating jobs until he ends up editing a dump of a newspaper in New Mexico. Then his luck changes; a miner is trapped, and it becomes a national story. His ticket back to the big time!

Because I like it so much, I'd like to quote the capsule description of this movie developed by Joe Saltzman for The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) at USC:

This is a tour de force role for Kirk Douglas, and one of Billy Wilder's rare commercial failures. Even he did not consistently dump on journalists after this noir look at Journalism's underbelly; he directed the 1974 remake of The Front Page, the most celebratory piece of fiction about journalism in the entire canon, the ur-journalism story of hard-drinking, but ultimately good hearted journalists. Still, he blazed a path with this film. See it. Don't miss the final scene, when Douglas keeps over directly into the camera in a drunken stupor.

Like many masterpieces, it was not recognized in its own time as a great film. We have the opportunity to make up for that now.

The most vicious of all the Walter Winchell romans a clef, this one was written by a Sidney Falco-like PR man, Ernest Lehman, who had to prostrate himself before the real Winchell in much the same way that Falco does for Hunsecker. If it seems over the top, you haven't read enough Winchell biographies. I recommend you take the time, as I did, to find the original Lehman short stories in Cosmopolitan, on which the novel and then the movie were based. A lot of good background on Sweet Smell of Success was posted on the website for the abortive Broadway musical version starring John Lithgow that opened in May 2002 and closed in June 2002. The site is gone, and with it all that great data. Dig up the Vanity Fair article from April 2000 promoting the musical, if you can find it, and find out a lot about Lehman, Winchell and the making of the movie. The stories upon which the movie is based were in Colliers on April 17, 1948 and Cosmopolitan in April 1950 ("Tell Me About It Tomorrow"). The Buffalo Film Seminar Series offers excellent notes on the film:
Alexander Mackendrick, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS 1957 (fall 2001) (big file) (small file)

Once again, because I like it so much, I'd like to quote the capsule description of this movie developed by Joe Saltzman for The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) at USC:

From everything I have ever read about Winchell, this perfectly sums up his feelings about criticism, and was his excuse for being so thin-skinned. I hope, someday, to write the comprehensive overview of Winchell depictions in popular culture--but that's a project for someday in the future. Contributions are welcome.

Not since Evelyn Waugh's novel of foreign correspondence, Scoop, or Tom Stoppard's telex-obsessed play Night and Day has anyone done a better job of showing and explaining the fact that the best reporting in the world is useless if the journalist can't get the story back the headquarters for dissemination. This critical element of journalism is frequently and vividly demonstrated in this pretty good HBO production. It is, as other critics have noted, pretty much a non-stop commercial for CNN, but that's what you'd expect from a movie co-written by the CNN producer who was there. It certainly meets my criterion for a true "journalism movie," in the sense that it is all about the process and the journalism. There is a pointless love story tacked on, but unlike, say, It Happened One Night, this movie isn't about the love story or the growth of the reporter into a better human being. It is first, last and completely about the story: getting it and getting it out. I assume it will be available on videotape someday, and HBO scheduling being what it is, you may be able to catch a re-run sometime. But if you're interested in the nature of television news at the network level on an international story, you won't find a much better primer.

This film should be mandatory viewing for all journalism students in high school and college.

You may have heard of "police procedurals." That's the name for the television shows which show detective work step by step, in a simulation of the way it is actually done in real life by real police. Well, Shattered Glass is a "journalism procedural," and one of the best examples of this genre since All The President's Men. We see, step by step, how Stephen Glass was exposed as a serial faker in the pages of the New Republic magazine. Not only did he make up quotes, he made up supporting material and deliberately structure his deceptions to sneak them past the magazine's fact-checking procedure. As Nixon learned, it is one thing to lie, another to cover up your lie.

It has always been tempting to make up a quote to make a story "sing," the support the conclusion, to give an article a great "snapper." That, and plagiarism, are, in fact, the two mighty temptations of journalists everywhere. I am proud to say I never "piped" (made up) a quote in 30 years of professional journalism, and I advise against it, unless you want to suffer the fate of Stephen Glass.

Of course, when I say the "fate" of Stephen Glass, I don't mean writing a best seller and passing the bar exam. I'd love to be a fly on the all when he attempts to prove to the New York State Bar (or any other bar) that he's fit to be a lawyer. If he'd admitted to practice anywhere, that would be a whole new definition of "fit to practice" with which I wasn't previously familiar.

Rated PG-13 for language, sexual references and brief drug use

You can see Welles arriving at the Citizen Kane premiere among other great pictures at the Internet Movie Database.

For many years, along with a lot of other people, when I was asked what my favorite film is, I always said Citizen Kane. It seemed like a safe thing to say. Pauline Kael, among many others, had vouchsafed that it was the single best movie ever made. Has there ever been a 50 best movies of all time list that didn't include this Orson Welles masterpiece? Then I realized that the answer to the question "What's your favorite movie" actually says a lot about a person. I decided I wanted to say something different. So I sat down and thought carefully about the movie that has brought me the most pleasure, the most consistently over the years, that stands the test of time and represents my own sensibility.

I was surprised that it turned out to be, not a journalism movie (although this remains my favorite genre), but rather Groundhog Day. Click the link for a fuller explanation.

It doesn't mean I think less of Welles' effort, just that I think more of some others. Citizen Kane was and is a fantastic effort, technically and in terms of the story. This thinly disguised roman a clef of the life of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst (Rosebud, in case you haven't heard, was his nickname for a portion of the anatomy of his mistress, Marion Davies) is head and shoulders above any other "A" journalism movie made until All The President's Men in 1974.

Most good journalism movies, as I define the term (see the top of this page) deal mainly with reporters. Editors are bit players. This film not only focuses on an editor and publisher, but dissects his life, his motivations and his inner life in an illuminating and thought-provoking way never equaled before or since. There are better journalism movies for our time that represent today's reporters and today's issues in a more current, realistic and entertaining way than Kane, but I don't mean to suggest that any of them are better movies qua movies.

As is so often the case, Welles made this movie at a time when he didn't know what couldn't be done in Hollywood. Hearst swiftly taught him, by destroying Welles' career. Welles spent the last three decades of his life walking around, refusing to fall over, after Hearst and his minions had shot and killed him professionally.

Yet a third time, because I like it so much, I'd like to quote the capsule description of this movie developed by Joe Saltzman for The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) at USC:

800-466-8437, fax: 215-725-3683. Amex, Visa and MC accepted. Email is movies@moviesunlimited.com.