The 10 Best Journalism Movies Ever Made

http://trueslant.com/caitlinkelly/2010/04/17/the-10-best-journalism-movies-ever-made/
The 10 Best Journalism Movies Ever Made

Nostalgia smackdown!

This month one of Manhattan’s best indie cinemas, Film Forum, is running a 43-film series of movies about newspapering. Here are my picks:

1) “Deadline U.S.A“, starring Humphrey Bogart as Ed Hutcheson, an editor who has to tell his newsroom staff they’ve got two weeks before they’re all canned, Sound familiar? This was in 1952. The owner, (Kay Graham? Alicia Patterson?) is an elegant older woman who inherited the paper from her husband. The paper’s star female reporter sounds like plenty of career journo’s I’ve met: “I’ve got $81 in the bank, two dead husbands and two or three kids I never had.”

2) Absence of Malice, 1981, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field. From Wikipedia:

“tells the story of Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), the son of a deceased Mafia boss who discovers that he has become a front-page story in the local Miami newspaper, indicating that he is being investigated for a murder of a local longshoreman Union official he may or may not have been involved in. Sally Field as Megan is the reporter who writes the story after being prodded by a former lover who is working on the investigation for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The worlds of Gallagher and Megan start to come closer and closer, and although she is a modern woman and as he says, he is “from the stone age”, her the ethics of journalism are tested, including how close a reporter should get to his or her source.”

3) The Paper, 1994. Starring Michael Keaton as a NYC tabloid paper editor Henry Hackett and Marisa Tomei as his weary wife. I love this movie. Sue me. I get a hoot out of crazy Glenn Close fist-fighting as the presses roll, I love Keaton’s absurd passion for his work, the tabloid nuttiness that’s totally true to form. Having survived my time at the Daily News, I know some of this stuff isn’t very far from fiction.

4) All The President’s Men. 1976. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who reported the Watergate scandal and brought down a President. One of the few movies that makes journalism look like something worth doing.

5) The Year of Living Dangerously. Hopelessly romantic, this 1982 film made me yearn endlessly to become a foreign correspondent. From Wikipedia:

The story is about a love affair set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno. It follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta on the eve of an attempted coup by the so-called 30 September Movement on 30 September 1965 and during the beginning of the violent reprisals by military-led vigilante groups who killed hundreds of thousands.

The film stars Mel Gibson as Guy Hamilton, an Australian journalist, and Sigourney Weaver as Jill Bryant, a British Embassy officer. It also stars Linda Hunt as the male dwarf Billy Kwan, Gibson’s local photographer contact, a role for which Hunt won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.[1] The film was shot in both Australia and the Philippines and includes Australian actors Bill Kerr as Colonel Henderson and Noel Ferrier as Wally O’Sullivan.

It was banned from being shown in Indonesia until 1999.[2] The title The Year of Living Dangerously is a quote which refers to a famous Italian phrase used by Sukarno; vivere pericoloso, meaning “living dangerously”

The soundtrack, of Indonesian gamelan, is also beautiful and haunting.

6) The China Syndrome, 1979, starring Jane Fonda as a new, eager, totally dismissed television news reporter who discovers a leak at a local nuclear power reactor, as described to her by an employee there, played by Jack Lemmon. What life was like, (and still is) for some female reporters trying to get their producers’ attention for a serious story.

7) The Killing Fields, 1984. The true story of the relationship between an American reporter, Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian fixer and interpreter, Dith Pran, who later came to work for The New York Times as a photographer.

From Dith’s Times‘ 2008 obituary:

The film, directed by Roland Joffé, showed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news. He believed that his country could be saved only if other countries grasped the gathering tragedy and responded…

Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith escaped over the Thai border on Oct. 3, 1979. An overjoyed Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

“To all of us who have worked as foreign reporters in frightening places,” Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said on Sunday, “Pran reminds us of a special category of journalistic heroism " the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer, who knows the ropes, who makes your work possible, who often becomes your friend, who may save your life, who shares little of the glory, and who risks so much more than you do.”

Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events

8) Almost Famous. Fun! Any eager young journo, let alone one who’s spent any time around the bizarreness of the music industry, will enjoy this 2000 film. Based on a true story of a young and ambitious music writer. The best scene? How Cameron Crowe “negotiates” his Rolling Stone story fee higher through stunned silence.

9) Capote. I loved this 2005 film. Dark, scary, filled with mutual manipulation of murderous sources and the ambitious writer of “In Cold Blood”, Truman Capote. Such dealings happen, it rarely gets talked about, rarely gets acknowledged and needs to. The images, music and Capote’s ruthless behavior haunt me still. Stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener.

10) Missing,1982. A powerful and searing film about an American journalist missing in Chile. Starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. I found this film almost unbearably painful to watch because, as an undergraduate college student in Toronto, I worked as a volunteer translator for Chilean refugees of torture who came to Canada for political refuge. I learned from them how many of the film’s gruesome details were real.

From Wikipedia:

It is based on the true story of American journalist Charles Horman, who disappeared in the bloody aftermath of the US-backed Chilean coup of 1973 that deposed Leftist President Salvador Allende.

The film was banned in Chile during Pinochet’s regime, even though the nation is not mentioned by name in the film (although the Chilean cities of Viña del Mar and Santiago are).[1] Both the film and Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman were removed from the market, following a lawsuit filed against Costa-Gavras and Universal’s parent company MCA by former Ambassador Nathaniel Davis, and two others. A lawsuit against Hauser himself was dismissed because the statute of limitations had passed. Davis and his compatriots lost the lawsuit. After the lawsuit, the film was again released by Universal in 2006.[citation needed]

Here are some others’ opinions on the best J-films ever…and here…and a British journo’s tight list of only five.

Will there be some legendary, can’t-miss future classic film made about….blogging? The thrumming and humming of all those…WordPresses firing up?

I think not.

i might have included Salvador, but i'm not sure which i would have bumped

Salvador is a 1986 film which tells the story of an American journalist in El Salvador covering the Salvadoran civil war. While trying to get footage, he becomes entangled with both leftist guerrillas and the right wing military. It stars James Woods, James Belushi, Michael Murphy, John Savage, Elpidia Carrillo, Tony Plana, Cynthia Gibb, Juan Fernandez and José Carlos Ruiz.[1]

The film was written by Oliver Stone and Richard Boyle, and was directed by Stone. Stone's portrayal is sympathetic towards the left wing peasant revolutionaries, but deplores their killing of prisoners in a crucial scene. He is strongly critical towards the U.S.-supported right wing military and the allied death squads, focusing on their assassination of four American churchwomen, including Jean Donovan. Stone's portrayal of the Catholic Church as a force for justice reflects events of the time, exemplified in the political sermon of Archbishop ?"scar Romero, which is based almost word-for-word on the speech Romero made before he was assassinated by a death squad.

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Woods) and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (Stone and Boyle).