Take It To Print! : April - May Theme
“Nothing's riding on this except the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.”
In many ways, journalism is a romantic profession — a moral occupation that provides checks and balances between the powers that be and the populace on the receiving end. They are, for better or worse, pervaders of truth and narrative, and a necessary component to a functioning society. But holding truth to power carries a great deal of responsibility to get the facts right. Just as there is a possibility for good, journalism can also be a source of malice, seeding misinformation with falsehoods or abusing the position for ulterior motives. It’s the qualities of good journalism — the due diligence, the insight, the public accountability — that makes the occupation so commendable.
Journalists spends days or weeks or months following every lead, verifying every source, checking every detail just to get the honest story. The culmination of their efforts result in public information that would otherwise go unheard, punctuated with the humbling realization that their efforts will be yesterday’s news come sunrise tomorrow as the news cycle continues to turn. But it's because the story matters that publishers and journalists are willing to TAKE IT TO PRINT in the first place.
For our April & May theme, we’re selecting films that focus on journalism, and more specifically print journalism. As much as the medium has shifted to online publication, there remains a special place in our hearts for ink and paper and the means with which it arrives in our hands every morning without fail. These films embody the age-old tradition of journalism: hitting the streets, getting the facts, writing the story, and breaking the news. Whether that be hardboiled journalists uncovering a blockbuster conspiracy, or fine-toothed research that turns into compulsive obsession, or even a scandalous abuse of the position, the films in this selection define the complicated relationship between the profession and the public and do so through the lens of printing presses and Sunday editions.
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Zodiac
(David Fincher, 2007)
“Just because you can't prove it doesn't mean it isn't true.”
In some of the best films about journalism, the lines between investigative journalist and police detective become curiously – and sometimes dangerously – blurred. In 1969, the San Francisco Bay Area press received letters written by a man calling himself the “Zodiac” killer, claiming responsibility for a murder and threatening to kill a dozen more unless four ciphers were printed on the respective papers’ front pages. More murders and cryptic letters followed. David Fincher’s absorbing true-crime thriller Zodiac recounts the infamous – and still officially unsolved – case from the perspective of three men at its centre: detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), sardonic crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), and Avery’s colleague Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), an excitable cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle whose interest in and proximity to the case would eventually lead him to write the two books on which Zodiac is based.
Though Fincher’s film is faithful to Graysmith’s books – including their suggestions of likely identities of the Zodiac killer – the distance afforded by the adaptation process allows the filmmaker to focus on themes that recur throughout his oeuvre: obsession and disillusionment. The film’s first hour is a terrifying dramatization of the murders and resulting paranoia that gripped Northern California; the following hour and a half largely concerns the obsessive, lonely efforts of a few individuals to catch a killer already being consigned to the realm of myth. Avery suggests at one point that the Zodiac is merely “in it for the press,” but there’s also the suggestion that all three protagonists are likewise perversely drawn to the thrill and theatricality of it all.
As in his recent film Mank, Fincher is cynically attentive to the ways in which Hollywood is shaped by and in turn shapes American culture. A key scene takes place at a screening of the 1971 thriller Dirty Harry, which drew inspiration from the Zodiac case; it’s all too much for Toschi, who leaves the auditorium. He’s found in the cinema’s lobby by Graysmith, who eagerly assures the detective he will catch the killer. “Pal,” Toschi bitterly replies, “they’re already making movies about it.” If Fincher is wary of uncritically replicating the sensationalism surrounding the investigation, he’s not immune to the more compulsive side of its reconstruction. For a scene shot on location at Lake Berryessa, for example, Fincher helicoptered in trees so as to make it resemble as closely as possible the site of the murder as it was in the late 1960s. In fact, we might say that Graysmith’s infectious obsession becomes Fincher’s becomes our own – certainly, Zodiac has a sinister tendency to send its viewers down their own investigative rabbit holes.
—Theo Rollason
Ace in the Hole
(Billy Wilder, 1951)
“Bad news sells best. Cause good news is no news.”
In contrast to the instances of ethical journalism on this list, Billy Wilder’s assuredly bleak Ace in the Hole depicts quite the opposite. After being run out of every reputable big city paper on the East coast, hardboiled journalist Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) finds himself in Albuquerque, New Mexico looking for work. Pitching himself as a $250 a week writer attainable for a meager $50, a local newspaper hires him and assigns him stories too small for his big time ambitions. But opportunity comes soon enough when a man in the middle of nowhere, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), finds himself stuck inside a Native American burial site after a cave in pins him under debris. Sensing the potential for a front page sensation, Tatum goes to work selling, inflating, and capitalizing on the time-sensitive situation with the hopes of being welcomed back by the outlets who once outcasted him.
Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard follow-up is as much a cautionary tale as any, one that asks us to evaluate the influence media plays in shaping narratives and public opinion. Early in the film, framed inside the local paper’s press room hangs a crocheted proverb stating, “Tell the truth.” Though the assertion is an ideal with which we hope all media abides by, it is certainly not one for Tatum as Wilder presents a scenario of journalistic malpractice and suggesting more cynically that such an occurrence happens more frequently than the public may realize.
In Tatum’s big carnival, the story is whatever he wants it to be. He’s more than willing to use his far-reaching platform for corrupt purposes that extend to not only him, but also dubiously tempted figures around him. Tatum promises to write sheriff Gus Kretzer in a favorable light so he can win reelection if in return he receives exclusive access to the cave and Leo. To extend the duration of the story, Tatum pressures the rescue contractor with future business if he instead drills down into the cave to save Leo in leu of the quicker, more direct path via fortifying and clearing the preexisting tunnel. And to validate his embellished narrative, Tatum convinces Leo’s indifferent wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), to stick around and capitalize on the windfall of tourists who flock from across the country to watch the rescue operation. All of whom sideline Leo and his wellbeing in the process.
It’s a kinda of sordid corruption one would find straight out of a noir — in fact, much of Ace in the Hole’s stylings feel ripe for the genre and period — and though Wilder makes abundantly clear the dangers presented by a corrupt media, he also highlights the role we as a public afford such abuses. With one of the darkest endings you’ll find in any 1950s Hollywood movie, Ace in the Hole leaves audiences on a grime note, but it emphasizes the arm’s length relationship one should have with the media if we’re to have any hope of public accountability.
—Greg Arietta
Between the Lines
(Joan Micklin Silver, 1977)
“All the news behind the news... and some hippie smut.”
For years, the Back Bay Mainline has been providing Boston with independent, muckraking journalism they can count on. Their staff are a communal bunch, consisting of award-wining reporter Lucas, staff photographer Abbie, weary hopeful Laura, ambitious up-and-comer David, ever-friendly secretary Lynn, and the far-out, red-bomber-jacket- wearing music columnist Max who are all willing to accept dismal pay and long hours in exchange for meaningful work and, perhaps with more bearing on their willingness to stay, the company of each other. They’re a bunch of ragtag journalists who scrape by on $75 a week each just so they can expose little known corruption and maybe get drunk and dance together on a Saturday night. That’s the Back Bay Mainline and camaraderie holds it together.
Joan Micklin Silver’s brilliant 1977 comedy isn’t so much a film about the act of journalism as it is about the interpersonal minutia of the journalists’ lives themselves. Under this theme, Between the Lines neatly satisfies the narrower subcategory of local journalism — an independent paper responsible for meaningful regional coverage gets scooped up by a corporate investor who threatens the very work that made the paper important to begin with — but, as the title would suggest, Silver puts the magic of the film between the lines of plot, finding interest in the mundanities and dilemmas these writers face when a major period in their lives is about to end. Years of rewarding work suddenly doesn’t feel so meaningful anymore, and every one at the Mainline has to ask where they see themselves now and where they want to be, confronting a bitter sweet morbidity that might mean going each other’s separate ways.
The film’s miracle is how it smuggles these melancholic sentiments through consistent levity. Conversational rapport between writers, isolated scenes dedicated to irrelevant comedic bits, and distinctly written characters are ways in which the Mainline feels open to the viewer, as if we belong along side this ragtag bunch of scrappy journalist, clichéd as that might sound. Upon rewatch, it is a film with which I have developed an unequivocal affection for, not only for its moments of tenderness and uplift, but also for its assurances that good times lie ahead, even when life reaches its most difficult impasses.
—Greg Arietta
His Girl friday
(Howard hawks, 1940)
“Did you hear that? That's the story I just wrote. Yes, yes, I know we had a bargain. I just said I'd write it, I didn't say I wouldn't tear it up! It's all in little pieces now, Walter, and I hope to do the same for you some day!”
There may not be a character more at home in a bustling newsroom than Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell). Her mile-a-minute banter and stedfast confidence functions like the conductor of an active symphony of clanging dial phones, shuffling papers, and jackhammering typewriters. But when we first see Hildy strutting into her old stomping grounds at the The Morning Post, she’s there to unexpectedly announce her impending marriage to an insurance salesman (Ralph Bellamy) and early retirement from the news business altogether. The breaking headline of Hildy’s departure does not sit well with her former Morning Post editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), who desperately uses his wit and newsroom prowess to scour up a top story in an attempt to lure Hildy back into the newspaper game and, subsequently, his life.
What follows is Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, a film so influential to the screwball romance comedy that it’s often paired alongside Hawk’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) as one of the first examples of the genre. But His Girl Friday is such a seamless mixture of genres it is often hard to discern whether it’s more of a romance in the world of old journalism, or old journalism in the trappings of a romance.
The film is an adaptation of the successful play The Front Page, and differs most significantly in the role of Hildy, who has been gendered swapped from the original text. Though The Front Page was known on its own for its signature quip of dialogue, Hawks, Grant and Russell all ad-libbed additional lines to give His Girl Friday a cadence and wit that is likely the envy of Aaron Sorkin-eque figures to this day. The heart of the film is as entertaining as any, but Hawk also includes a sharp critique of cutthroat journalism, preceding his film with: “It all happened in the ‘Dark Ages’ of the newspaper game--when to a reporter ‘Getting that story’ justified anything short of murder. Incidentally you will see in this picture no resemblance to the man and woman of the press today.” An apt and intriguing lede for the antics that follow at The Morning Post.
--Kevin Conner
The Post
(Steven Spielberg, 2017)
“If the government wins and we're convicted, the Washington Post as we know it will cease to exist.”
“Well, if we live in a world where the government could tell us what we can and cannot print, then the Washington Post as we know it has already ceased to exist.”
Steven Spielberg receives plenty of flack for his sentimental sensibilities. The emotional punches deployed in common favorites like E.T. or Saving Private Ryan have become derisive critiques in the last decade of his career for films like Bridge of Spies or War Horse. Whether his ethos resonates boils down to a matter of personal preference, but irrespective of taste, Spielberg’s steadfast conviction in emotional cinema is one of his greatest strengths as a filmmaker, and The Post is recent evidence of that.
Helmed early in the Trump presidency, The Post is undeniably a response to the rhetoric leveled at the ‘fake news’ media. The plot centers on The Washington Post’s go-or-no-go decision involving the publication of the famous Pentagon Papers, classified documents that exposed the United States’ acknowledged failure in Vietnam. In the midst of an IPO and under unscrupulous legal pressure from the Nixon administration, the outlet weighs publishing said documents that could potentially sink the paper or set forth a landmark precedent in journalism.
In all his sentimental glory, Spielberg unapologetically dramatizes every act of the journalistic process and squarely directs the film’s thematic aims at the importance of the profession as a requisite public institution. The foundation of these sentiments are built early and consistently, but they are realized during a sequence where the Post gets their hands on the papers and the journalists go to work on an all night writing bender pushing up against the morning’s deadline. Reams of papers are parsed over while typewriters pound away, editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) works the phone with legal and Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) to get sign off, and offscreen, the threat of the federal government looms overhead. Paired with the narrative imperative to hold higher powers accountable, Spielberg articulates in the span of one act the societal role of journalism: to do anything but publish would be a precursor to the death of democracy.
—Greg Arietta
Park Row
(Samuel Fuller, 1952)
“The press is good or evil according to the character of those who direct it.”
Samuel Fuller makes no secret from the onset of Park Row his admiration for the press. The names of hundreds of local and national newspapers slowly scroll beneath the opening titles that introduces the film: “These are the names of 1,772 daily newspapers in the United States. One of them is the paper you read. All of them are the stars of this story… Dedicated to the American Press.” After having set the table for his intentions, Fuller proceeds with a dramatized rendition of an honorable press and the harmful tabloid journalism that threatens to upend it.
Set in 1880s New York, on the titular street where many news outlets once operated, our story quickly begins with Phineas Mitchell being fired from “The Star” after he criticizes the paper for provoking the execution of an innocent man. Fed up with the immoral practices of papers on the Row, he starts his own rag, “The Globe,” and quickly gains notoriety for breaking major headlining stories, including the corruption of “The Star’s” publisher and his main rival Charity Hackett. A push and pull narrative soon unfolds as Mitchell and the “The Globe” find themselves in competition with Hackett who is willing to deploy defamatory and criminal tactics to stop their publication.
With heightened dramatics, Fuller makes every edition at “The Globe” feels like a small miracle. Pulling together a mixed and matched group of muckrake journalists on a shoe string budget. Working through all hours of the night just to print the latest edition on butcher paper. And publishing the news regardless of circumstantial set backs are events in Park Row that characterize journalism as a labor carried out for the public’s benefit. It’s from that labor, where we come to appreciate the work of the press, that Fuller eventually comes full circle and makes good on his opening dedication.
—Greg Arietta
Almost Famous
(Cameron Crowe, 2000)
“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool … Listen my advice to you, and I know you think these guys are your friends, if you wanna be a true friend to them, be honest and unmerciful.”
Almost Famous was always going to make a CAWKI theme at some point, it was just a matter of when. After making the short list as a coming of age film for Youth in Revolt, and then again for Sonic Dreams Redux, it feels right that on the film’s third consideration we give Cameron Crowe’s 2000 classic its dues for its journalism play.
Reflecting on Crowe’s experiences as a young rock journalist, Almost Famous follows 15 years old William Miller (Patrick Fugit) as he hits the road with the Stillwater band to write a feature on them for Rolling Stone. From city to city, William collects interviews from and stories about the band, but after a short while, he starts to notice the performative, outward facing facades of Stillwater have some cracks not noticeable while they’re on stage. The band’s guitarist, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), has a heightened superiority complex which naturally causes fissures for a “mid level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom.” All the while, a Stillwater ‘band-aid’ groupie named Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) befriends William as she herself becomes caught up with the idea of creating a false reality through the band. The interconnected drama between Stillwater, Penny, and William eventually force a confrontation with what’s real and an inevitable and personal change that each character much face.
Beyond its exceptional sound track, coming of age trappings, and journalism set up, Almost Famous works miracles in its nuances, offering a cathartic understanding about how we see ourselves, perceive others, and what we’ll do to render our desired image. Such vastness comes through in the littles details — the glances, the soft touches, and the moments of pause — all of which culminate in a film that feels deeply personal and relatable for anyone trying to find themselves, or as the film likes to frame it, what makes us cool.
—Greg Arietta
All the President’s Men
(Alan J Pakula, 1976)
“All non-denial denials. They doubt our ancestry, but they don't say the story isn't accurate.”
We’re rounding out ‘Take It To Print!’ with the one true journalism film to rule them all: All the President’s Men. Hot on the heals of the Pentagon Papers, the 1972 break in at the Democratic National Committees’ headquarters at the Watergate Hotel spelled trouble for the Nixon administration, especially when members of the White House Counsel were linked to the crime by Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) of The Washington Post. Tasked with digging deeper by their editor Benjamin Bradlee (Jason Robards), the two go down a rabbit hole leading to a cover up that would rattle a nation and result in the resignation of the disgraced former president Richard M Nixon.
In ever sense of the word, Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men is a gripping film. Much of the film is comprised of scenes where Woodward and Bernstein are simply on the phone chasing down sources or plugging away at their typewriters — a set up that, on the surface, is tailor made for languid exposition — but it speaks to Pakula’s sensibilities as a director and screenwriter that the material takes on greater depth beyond their narrative services, cultivating both the pressing onus of journalistic responsibility and the paranoia that comes with a taught, conspiracy thriller.
No scene speaks to this better than Bernstein’s arrival at the home of the bookkeeper for Nixon’s reelection committee. The need to tie the payment money between the criminals and the administration is contingent on this one person’s testimony, but within the scene, there is a pervading sense of surveillance and paranoia communicated by the framed distance and smart blocking of characters, minimizing both the bookkeeper and Bernstein within the frame as if the United States government itself fills the negative space.
With each sequence, the conspiratorial spool unravels further, the details become clearer, and the truth comes to light. As Pakula so subtly conveys in split diopter shots, often in contrast to cynical depictions of cable news networks and their sensationalism, it’s the persistent and unending work of journalists like Bernstein and Woodward that amass to public accountability for even the most powerful people in the world. In the realm of journalism films, there is no greater work than All the President’s Men.
—Greg Arietta