The newsroom is a natural setting for a movie. Films are largely about momentum and conflict, and what environment presents more opportunities for both than a buzzing media center where everyone is chasing down stories, making phone calls, having loud opinionated conversations and quickly jotting things down before they forget them.
The classic movie newsrooms, perhaps like the real news organizations of old, have a pulsating energy that feels a million miles away from the quiet cubicles or home offices where most actual modern journalism takes place. Having said that, as we can see in some of the below selections like the contemporary documentary "Page One", the classic vision of bright offices where angry news professionals (some of them in suspenders) bark at one another about what's getting on the front page has yet to die out completely.
Andrew Rossi's documentary film "Page One" was granted unprecedented access behind-the-scenes in the New York Times newsroom. Rossi's film not only shows the day-to-day grind of preparing, fact-checking and writing articles on the paper's Media Desk, but also the way that new media and technology are disrupting business at usual at newspapers and presenting new challenges and opportunities to reporters. Media and culture columnist David Carr and Media Desk editor Bruce Headlam are among the film's primary subjects.
"The Daily Planet" is really a perfect hideout for Clark Kent when he's not being Superman. He gets to keep up with the day's events thanks to the constant busybody Lois Lane, he gets a plucky cohort in photographer Jimmy Olson AND there's a perfect explanation for why he's never around. (He's out chasing down a hot story!) It would all be perfect if not for the ill-tempered, ever-dismissive Perry White, embodied in the Richard Donner original by Jackie Cooper.
Cooper had originally auditioned to play Otis, the bumbling assistant to Lex Luthor who was eventually portrayed by Ned Beatty.
(NOTE: There aren't really any great clips of Jackie Cooper as White on YouTube for embedding, so here's a clip of John Hamilton playing the character on the old "Adventures of Superman" TV show.)
Any time you have Fred Willard running a movie newsroom, you know things are going to get heated and intense pretty fast. Such is the case in ""Anchorman,"" the 2004 comedy that confirmed star Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay as the comedic duo to beat at the box office. Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) opens the 1975-set film as San Diego's star news anchor, only to have his supremacy challenged by a new female anchor named Veronica Corningstone (Christine Applegate). What follows is an extremely silly but frequently hilarious take on 1970s local news, a world where the most important part of the broadcast is the anchor's hair and sign-off, and reporters from rival stations participate in organized streetfights.
The Coen Brothers ingenious, tragically misunderstood screwball comedy homage "The Hudsucker Proxy" doesn't so much depict a real newsroom environment. Instead, Jennifer Jason Lee's "no-nonsense girl reporter" archetype inhabits an ultimate cinematic dream of what a newsroom could be, with all the chaos and fast-talking banter that was synonymous with newspaper reporting in the '30s and '40s. Really, here's all you need to know - Bruce Campbell plays a beat reporter named Smitty. Done and done.
The only film on this list that's set at a magazine's newsroom, "Shattered Glass" is based on the true story of fabulist Stephen Glass, whose career at the New Republic came to an abrupt end when it was revealed that he had fabricated much of his subject matter. Hayden Christensen gives his best performance to date (sorry, Anakin) as Glass - capturing his devolution from slick to pathetic - and the film's also notable for how carefully it scrutinizes the clash of personalities and office politics at TNR that allowed Glass to get away with his lies for as long as he did.
Michael Mann's ceaselessly compelling 1999 drama tells the true story of tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand (played here by Russell Crowe in a truly transformative performance). Wigand was interviewed for an exclusive ""60 Minutes"" segments, alleging that his former employer, tobacco company Brown & Williamson, knowingly manipulated the formula in their cigarettes to deliver more nicotine to the smoker. (This, in turn, makes cigarettes more addictive).
The film depicts not only Wigand's difficulties following his decision to blow the whistle (including harassment by his former colleagues and even death trheats), but also the difficulty producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) faces in getting the story past CBS News' legal department and on to the air. It's a brilliant, depiction of the way the corporate entities which own news organizations interact with the reporters and journalists working for this organizations, and also of the struggles faced by everyone involved between their professional responsibilities and personal, moral obligations.
James L. Brooks comedy-drama concerns three people who work together on a TV news show. Holly Hunter is producer Jane Craig, who is pulled between her close friend, reporter Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), and the charming but somewhat dim anchorman Tom Grunick (William Hurt). Though it's far more about the emotional ups-and-downs of Jane's professional life, the film does manage to sneak in a lot of astute observations about working in TV, particularly as a woman struggling to be taken seriously in a male-dominated profession.
Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) decides to take control of the newspaper the New York Inquirer largely to irk Walter Parks Thatcher, the banker who raised him but had also taken him away from his parents as a boy. He also says at one point that he thinks it might be "fun" to run a newspaper. Kane eventually discovers that it is anything but fun, as he's repeatedly forced to sacrifice his principles in order to stay in business and protect himself. Eventually, the paper will cost him his longest (and perhaps his only) friendship, with Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), a drama critic who Kane fires for giving his wife's latest production a poor review.
Everyone always says this is the best film ever made for a REASON, people. Welles film is not only a brilliant character study and a dazzling bit of cinematic spectacle, but also a brutal takedown of the abuses of American publishers, particularly the film's main target, media mogul William Randolph Hearst.
David Fincher's police procedural about the hunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer is so in-depth, thorough and complex, it feels like sitting down and reading the entire case file. A perfectionist who obsesses about getting all the little details right, Fincher is said to have recreated the San Francisco Chronicle's newsroom circa the early '70s so closely, there were period-appropriate rulers and pencils in all the desks. (Trivia: This is one of 2, count 'em two, films on this list to feature Robert Downey Jr. as a reporter!)
Most of George Clooney's thoughtful, esoteric examination of the battle between broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy takes place in the CBS newsroom where Murrow, co-producer George Friendly (Clooney) and their colleagues toil away seeking the truth. The film magnificently brings to life the small details of how TV news broadcasts were created in 1953, from the confined, enclosed spaces behind the camera to the swirls of cigarette smoke everywhere filling those enclosed spaces. Though the film obviously has a sincere point to make about the changing ethics and standards of the journalistic profession, it also seems to have a nostalgia for old-fashioned TV production as well. News programming is far more slick now, but also less personal and immediate.
Also, this is the second of the two films on this list in which Robert Downey Jr. appears as a reporter. There's just something journalism-y about that guy!
Everyone remembers "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more," but it's less often recalled that the film which contains that memorable line was such an insightful take-down of TV news as well as a grim prediction of things to come. (The movie not only looks ahead to the rise of talk radio and cable news, but even reality TV!)
Peter Finch plays longtime evening news anchor Howard Beale, who has started to lose his faith in the mass media, not to mention his grip on reality. After he threatens to commit suicide live on the air, and sparks the public's fascination with his creeping insanity, self-serving executive Diana Christensen seizes the opportunity to exploit his madness for ratings. "Network" depicts the newsroom as a not just intense but terrifying place where low ratings can kill.
Howard Hawks' definitive screwball comedy remains one of the best and most influential films about journalists ever made (if maybe not the most realistic.) An extremely loose adaptation of the play "The Front Page" by Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur (the film even changes the lead character's gender from male to female), "His Girl Friday" follows the misadventures of Walter Burns (Cary Grant) as he tries desperately to stop his ex-wife and former star reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) from getting married and starting a family. The film depicts the life of a journalist as romantic and exciting, constantly moving between stories and chasing down leads, as compared to the dreary quotidian world of housewives and executives.
Alan J. Pakula's award-winning 1976 Watergate thriller was adapted from the book of the same name by the two journalists who broke the story - Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. There's a naturalism to the movie that's nearly astonishing - if this isn't what the Washington Post's newsroom was like during the Watergate years, it should have been. Yet the film also manages to infuse the setting with slowly-mounting dread, as the two reporters peel back the layers of corruption and deceit surrounding the Watergate break-in and follow the trail all the way to the White House. It's the movie that inspired a good number of present-day journalists to seek out their careers.
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