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Hollywood’s paper chase Many shades of
journalism have been portrayed in memorable movies, reports Ervell
E. Menezes
Journalism has always been associated with Hollywood but may be the floodgates were opened after Watergate (the break-in was on June 17, 1972) when All the President’s Men proved to be such an enlightened entertainer. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman did an excellent job as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the two New York Times reporters who blew the lid of the bugging issue that got "Tricky Dick" Richard Nixon out of power. But even before that we had Citizen Kane, a masterpiece by Orson Welles as he unravelled the story of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst and his lust for power on the American political scene. It was a film Welles could never have bettered and endowed him with immortality. There is that famous "rosebud" motif and the love story in tow and the Hearst mansion on the West Coast in California is still a tourist attraction. His grand-daughter Patty Hearst, however, made news decades later for different reasons as she was one of the flower children. I think it was the mid-1970s when Hollywood came out with a spate of journalistic subjects. The media had become a force to reckon with and whether it was the print media of the TV version it always made news because it helped resolve daily problems and the investigative journalist was born. Paul Newman did an excellent job as a journalist in Absence of Malice where the female lead was I think Sally Field and what an engrossing drama it was. The inside of a newspaper office had now come to the fore and every fifth film had a journalist in it. Why even Peter Finch was the first actor to get a posthumous Best Actor Oscar for his role in Network. Finch played an anchorman who was losing ratings and the TV station even tried to cash in on his attempt to commit suicide by putting it on the air. It brought to light the ruthlessness of TV ratings and Faye Dunaway played his ruthless boss who wouldn’t stop at anything to get her work done. Then there was Nightwatch which dealt with implanting a lens in the victim so that the TV channel would get an insight into the subjects movements. The subject in this case was a person suffering from a terminal illness and what a masterpiece the film became. French actress Romy Schneider and Harvey Kietel played the lead roles in this pulse-pounding expose of TV journalism. Another film which comes readily to mind is Broadcast News in which Holly Hunter plays a cub reporter who makes it big on TV because she refuses to compromise. Ms Hunter, petite, cute and tough gives an impeccable display. Michael Keaton played a harried editor of a New York tabloid in The Paper, whose race for a scoop is impeded both by a bossy superior and a pregnant wife. Sally Field won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as a trade unionist in Norma Rae but it also involved investigative journalism which show the activities of a trade union leader. It was the film that brought Field into the limelight and that was much after Watergate but one of the perennial classics is the delightful The Front Page. It is a Billy Wilder film and Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond are known to have scripted a number of films from The Apartment, and The Odd Couple to Out of Towner to Irma la Douce and Avanti and Buddie, Buddie with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau being their favourite actors. And excellent as this duo of Lemmon and Matthau became it was The Front Page that became a real masterpiece. Matthau with his facial expressions and Lemmon with his simulated simplicity were real winners but few realise that it was in the excellent script that the strength of the film lay. And though All the
President’s Men would still be one of the weightiest subject
covered by Hollywood I’d opt for The Front Page because it
was a more all-round film with humour that gave it an extra zing. |
