And the best newspaper flicks are ...
A couple weeks ago, we ran an Associated Press feature about great films.
In fact, it was a list of what the critic insisted were the 10 best-ever movies about newspapers.
No offense to the AP, but I’ve never seen a newsroom full of handsome, beautiful and brilliant reporters — let alone editors.
The chart-topper in that story was “All the President’s Men,” the story of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein breaking open the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post.
There’s no denying that was a watershed moment for American journalism, but I promise you it was a long reporting slog filled with unanswered phone calls, hours looking through lists and receipts ...
In other words, historic but hardly action-packed.
If you took “Deep Throat” out of the picture, audiences would have dozed off a few times.
Also, one story in a million.
We rarely gather at The Press and plot to bring down the government. Mostly, we have coffee and hope that a county commissioner will phone back for the story on some budget item.
So what, you might ask, would be a newspaper movie that I’d give a solid thumbs-up?
Well, I’m going to gift you two movies and two made-for-TV series (neither of which was done in the United States).
We absolutely need our first film just to show what a vicious and cynical business this used to be ...
Orson Welles’ 1941 classic “Citizen Kane” pulled it off with a thinly disguised bio of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
It certainly angered Hearst, who refused to mention it in any of his 20-plus metro papers.
Perhaps Hearst was too busy running wild headlines to start the Spanish-American War.
Next up is “Absence of Malice,” a great 1981 flick featuring Sally Field as a young and ambitious reporter who basically drags an innocent man and erstwhile lover (Paul Newman) through the mud.
IT’S A movie about everything a newspaper can do wrong while thinking the effort is actually noble.
“Absence of Malice” also features one of the great scenes ever, when the wonderful Wilford Brimley shows up as an assistant U.S. attorney and, in his classic fashion, cleans up the mess.
Now my foreign candidates ...
The first is “State of Play,” a 2003 British six-part series that digs into the danger of reporters and politicians getting too chummy, and also throws in the sins of a giant oil company.
In typical American style, Hollywood turned that excellent series into a two-hour movie in 2009 — acceptable, but not the same story at all.
Sigh ...
My final offering gives you a chance to see a newsroom where everyone is in chaos, and yet another rushed edition miraculously reaches newsstands.
It’s a Swedish series called “Annika Bengtzon,” and the heroine (Malin Crepin) generally winds up in danger while breaking some immense story.
But the really cool part happens back in the newsroom at the manic tabloid Kvallspressen — with constant back-stabbing, shouting about whether there’s proof of a scandal, and through it all, an overweight boss named Spyken constantly yelling that he needs more photos.
Hey, I’ve been in THAT newsroom.
The crusty old guy wasn’t screaming in Swedish, or ...
Maybe he was.
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Steve Cameron is a columnist for The Press.
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