Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 23: Mad as Hell - The Journalism Genre in Hollywood

From Citizen Kane, All The Presidents Men, Anchorman, and Newsroom to this years much buzzed about films Truth and Spotlight – Hollywood has had a long, adoring, but complicated relationship portraying journalism. The iconic 1976 film Network staring Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall will soon celebrate its fortieth anniversary. In both television and film, journalism is still a hot topic today with crusading journalists, cutthroat executives and stressed newsrooms front and center. The film Network was groundbreaking when it premiered but it’s influence is still felt and has inspired filmmakers like Aaron Sorkin and TV personality Stephen Colbert. On the show, we speak to New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff and author of the hit book Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies about Network on the continuing allure of the journalism genre. Why are these depictions important in our greater culture? Why do newspaper journalists get so much more respect then their counterparts on TV? And is there any truth to the power-hungry female news producer? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 31m
Broadcast on:: 17 Jan 2016
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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He's that really your idea, how to run a newspaper. I don't know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Batch, I just try everything I can think of. I'm Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Mr. Mark, are you here in connection with the Watergate breakery? I'll remote standby please. Okay, we're going to George. That the F-14 is one of the most difficult planes to master, executive producer. The China syndrome, it's about people, people who lie, and people faced with the agony of telling the truth. People like Kimberly Wells, a television reporter, paid to smile, not to think. Cambodia, to many Westerners, it seemed to paradise, another world, a secret world. The war in neighboring Vietnam burst its borders, and the fighting soon spread to neutral Cambodia. In 1973 I went to cover this side show struggle as foreign correspondent of the New York Times. Well, well, well, Ron Burgundy, and the Channel 4 News team. Where's your mommy? You back off, evening news team. Hi, thanks for tuning in. I'm Christina Yerling-Biro. Journalism plays a big part in the movie and TV lineup this fall. There's a lot of Oscar buzz around spotlights starring Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams, about the Boston Globe investigation into the child's sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. And truth, starring Kate Blanchitt and Robert Redford, as producer Mary Mapes and Dan Rather, about the CBS 60 Minutes report into President Bush's military service, a report that cost careers. In television, Amazon has a new show, The Good Girl's Revolt, a newsroom drama inspired by real events that took place at Newsweek, and the sexist working conditions of journalism in 1969. Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep's daughter, stars as the legendary journalist Nora Ephron. And in the new fall show, Supergirl, Kara, of course, follows in the footsteps of other superheroes working in a newspaper, while in this case, a media conglomerate. Not surprisingly, this trend is fine by me. I adore the journalism genre, both the flattering and unflattering portrayals of reporters and their subjects. The machine-gun dialogue of His Girl Friday, the crusading journals of all the President's men in the China Syndrome, Billy Wilders, Ace and the Whole with some of the best dialogue in film, period, Citizen Kane seemingly predicting the fall of newspapers, and the thrill of getting press access to the band and almost famous. The comedies, Anchorman, Groundhog Day and Trainwreck? And what about the movies about the cynical TV newsrooms, where TV ratings bring out the worst? The classics like Network, Broadcast News, and last year's thriller Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal. Network is a subject of an excellent book by author David Skoff, who's also a culture reporter for The New York Times. In the book, The Making of Network and the fateful vision of the angriest man in movies, David Skoff writes about Patty Chievsky, the tough Oscar-winning screenwriter whose vision of the news media seems almost prophetic today, the blurred lines between news and entertainment, the rise of reality television, the ratings craze. Fay Dunaway played the ruthless UBS executive Diana Christensen and William Holden, executive Max Schumacher, and Peter Finch, the unhinged anchor man Howard Beale, called The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, whose rebel yell on air, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore," is stuff of journalism movie legend and made network a sensation. I'm now the distinguished television news commentator, Mr. Howard Beale. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks' time because of poor ratings. Since this show was the only thing I had going for me in my life, I have decided to kill myself. I'm going to blow my brains out right on this program, a week from today. What the hell's going on? Repair yourself for a perfectly outrageous motion picture. I started by asking Mr. Itzkoff why he thinks we and the filmmakers are so drawn to the journalism genre. Well, I think that, you know, in general, I mean, there's just a sort of a kind of category of screenwriters and dramatists that are just really drawn to newspaper reporters, television reporters, and anchors. There's just something about that world. There's something almost binary about how these characters tend to be depicted, that they're either these kind of crusaders, people who are motivated by the truth and wanting to bring truth to life, or they're totally corrupt, and they understand that they have this kind of power to create perception and dictate to a wide audience what they think of the world. And then they completely abuse that, and there is something really rich about that kind of an idea, particularly as we, you know, I think the sort of the man on the street today is so the person on the street, the woman on the street, everyone, we're so much more aware of how we have access to media and how the sort of the citizen reporter, in a way, can become as powerful as, you know, a television network or a broadcaster in the right moment and that that's such a huge responsibility. And so it just, I think there's just endless ways to kind of reinvent that wheel. Mark turns 40 in 2016, and it's a pretty amazingly prophetic portrait of television and media. What are some of the things from the movie that you've seen come true? Well, I think the most prominent, the most sort of obvious and ubiquitous is the way that, you know, the lines between what was considered television news and television entertainment have been completely obliterated. That's what the Faye Dunaway character is sort of warning throughout the movie. She's an entertainment executive. She develops, you know, cop dramas and sitcoms and she's the one who's warning Max Schumacher, the news president, that she's going to take over his side of the channel and that's essentially what she does. The American people are turning sullen. They've been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They turned off, shot up, and they fuck themselves, limp, and nothing helps. So this concept analysis report concludes the American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them. I've been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows. I don't want conventional programming on this network. I want counterculture. I want anti-establishment. I don't want to play butch boss people. But when I took over this department, it had the worst programming record in television history. This network has one show in the top 20. This network is an industry joke and we better start putting together one winner for next September. I want a show developed based on the activities of a terrorist group. This realization that news was once this sort of protected hallowed field on television and it was meant to just share information with people. It wasn't meant to drive ratings or necessarily even turn a profit. Once TV news divisions had to be profitable and had to chase ratings, they became indistinguishable from entertainment content. There's that amazing scene where one of the staffers is pitching to her and just saying all these cliches which ring true today, like we need the trustee and benign character. The attorney, the lady cops, the brilliant and beautiful fighting for feminists. I mean, that just rings so true even of the cliches today on TV. Exactly. It's so funny that in an era 40 years ago, when you only had three broadcast networks and no cable television to speak of, that those were the tired, tried and true formats and it's no different now given that you have not only hundreds of cable channels but also all the digital streaming channels that basically people can't seem to think of more than four or five different kinds of ways to tell a story on television. Writer-director Aaron Sorkin, he thanked Mr. Chayevsky when he won the Oscar for Social Network. He was a big influence on him as a writer and Sorkin said regarding your book, "I believe this is the first thing written about Patty Chayevsky that Chayevsky would actually have liked." What do you think he meant? I think he's being very kind and generous to say that. I mean, I think more to the point, I mean, Chayevsky was a very idiosyncratic person. I'm part of what made him, I think, so attuned to what was going on in his world at the time, not just only in media, but in society was that he was, you know, he was kind of, you know, I guess you'd call him a curmudgeon or a dyspeptic personality. I mean, he was a very loving man and funny man, but I think also he was deeply, deeply cynical about the times that he lived in, really believed. I mean, genuinely believed that, you know, things were just getting worse in every arena, everywhere he looked in, you know, national politics, global politics, the mid-east. It was a big concern to him, and that, of course, got solved soon after, but in his day, it was a big problem, that, you know, that just all these, he saw all these powder kegs everywhere and really saw no solutions to these kinds of problems. And I think it really preyed on his mind in a way that he felt he had a certain responsibility as a screenwriter and as a dramatist to kind of, you know, grab people by their lapels and make them, you know, pay attention to what these problems that he saw. But it's funny, though. I was thinking with Sorkin and Chayevsky, network is just so different from newsroom. Good evening. I'm Will McAvoy. This is News Night. I'm beginning this newscast by apologizing to the American people for the failure of this program during the time I've been in charge of it. The reason we failed is in a mystery. We took a dive for the ratings. I'm quitting the circus, the switching teams. I'm going with the guys who are getting creeped. I think that they had very different aims. I think if anything, I mean, newsroom was at least at its outset or at its inception. I think it was meant to be a more sort of, I wouldn't necessarily optimistic, but a more sort of uplifting take or more. It was a kind of wish fulfillment that if a dramatist or a screenwriter was creating the sort of perfect news channel where people acted out of altruism and a belief in the truth, it would still run into lots of moral and practical dilemmas, but that's what it would essentially look like on the newsroom. Whereas in network, it's complete opposite. Every shortcut is being taken. Everyone is compromised in some way. Everyone is almost literally in bed with somebody else, and that, that leads to different results. Also, Stephen Colbert's favorite movie, "Why?" Well, I think that if you just look at his, at Colbert's body of work, that that's sort of, particularly in the era when he was hosting the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, I mean, that's very much the idea that he was playing with no matter what they were making fun of on a given night, because it was all being channelled through that Colbert persona at the time, that kind of fake, conservative commentator character, that he was very much playing with that same idea of the meaning of the news, what we assume are objective facts that can change dramatically depending on who the person is that's delivering it. That's certainly one of the themes of network. As we see, the Howard Beale character played by Peter Finch become more and more popular, but also grow more and more insane. We know his audience members were watching a person who is literally losing his mind and yet becoming more attuned to his audience and becoming, just gaining a wider viewership. There's such a disconnect there, and that's sort of, that's the area that Colbert was playing in. I mean, he was talking to an audience that knew what he was making fun of, and yet if you, if you weren't in on the joke, or you just looked at the words, sort of literally that he was delivering it, as they were written, they would seem very different. He would seem very sincere about what he was saying, even though it was all done with a wink and a nod. One of the things I think is excellent is your book is all the descriptions and stories of Faye Dunaway and the women and that, but I want to talk, because her character, I could see it a little bit in Renee Russo's character in Nightcrawler as well, and you would agree that sort of these women of the newsroom, is there a trope of this, of the powerful women in positions of power in newsrooms? Oh, I mean, if you certainly do see it in the fictional poor trails, and I mean, it's interesting, first of all, in terms of how Trievsky developed the character that Faye Dunaway plays, Diana Christensen, because in sort of earlier versions of the screenplay, he recognized that there had to be a kind of a romance in the story somewhere, and the female character that he created originally was very conventional and meant to be a kind of young idealist who would fall in love with the crusty, but benign newsman. And that somehow, as these things usually play out, her love would redeem him or they would have some permanent falling out and that would symbolize the newsman's final corruption. And then he had this kind of flash of inspiration to make the female lead still to love interest, but also make her one of the most corrupt characters in the movie. And that was very different, certainly from how audiences were used to seeing women portrayed in film at the time, that it was rare enough in the world to see women in that kind of a position of power and even a rarer to see them, to see a kind of character like that who was in no way an idealist who could be just as kind of mercenary as her male peers and as the character, as Christensen kind of talks about herself, I mean, she recognizes that she has to be, she has to work twice as hard and be even more up to task than her male peers. That was certainly the nature of the industry 40 years ago and in many ways no different today. I mean, certainly there are many more women in positions of power, but I think that certainly that sense of having to impose pressure of having to be better than your male colleagues just to prove that you are worthy of the job and that has not been solved by any means. And then you sort of have that again in Nightcrawler with the Renee Rist a very recent movie. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, I don't know this for a fact, but I certainly have a sense from Nightcrawler there are, I think lots of sort of tips of the hat to network. I think if you make a movie today about television news gathering, you can't help but operate in the shadow of network in some way and I think they really did, they certainly embraced it there, again, having a strong female lead, a woman who will basically go to any lengths and cut a check of any size in order to basically get the story that she wants on her hair. What about Kate Blanchett in Truth? I haven't seen it myself, but is that sort of the same? I think that that cuts a somewhat different way, although it's true that you're dealing with, I mean, yes, that's certainly an example of a powerful female producer character. Why didn't you get into journalism? Curiosity. Why'd you get into it? You. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my friend, Dan Rather. I'm the producer. I put the team together. We have Lucy Scott to run point. Colonel Roger Charles worked Abu Ghraib for us. Mike Smith was a researcher for us back in 2000. What's our next move? I might have something for the election. The President of the United States may have gone AWOL from the military. Journalists and movies tend to be one thing or the other, and in that case, it's more the example of the crusader for whatever is the real objective truth of what happened in a situation. At least that's how she's portrayed in the film. It's obviously very still fairly controversial, or I think more or less a certainty that what the movie depicts is truth and what actually happened in real life, I think they're still two fairly different things. And then another movie coming, Spotlight, which is sort of in itself seeped in journalism. It's the Boston Globe, the investigative unit, and the director, Tom McCarthy, he played a journalist, and David Simon's The Wire, and David Simon, of course, the creator is a steam journalist, and you have this tradition, and I'm generalizing here, but movies hate TV news. I mean, they're often portrayed as cynical and a cutthroat, and taking in, you know, all these movies we were talking about before, but not only them, not only broadcast news and network. You have The Truman Show, Hunger Games, Gone Girl. While these newspaper men and women get much more respect than television, would you say and why? In the United States right now, you know, I mean, Spotlight has been, you know, very well reviewed, and that seems like it's going to do well financially. It's probably going to be a year-end awards contender, whereas truth is not fairing very well. You know, one hand, I mean, you could, in the abstract, say that these are, you know, telling similar stories, or at least following similar models, and yet the specifics of them are very different. And, you know, they each present, I would say, fairly positive depictions of the journalists in their movies. So again, it's not even that isn't the sort of defining quality of the film, or what's turning audiences on or off. I think it also has to do with the stories that the journalists are chasing, and do we feel in our heart as audiences, are these worthwhile stories, did the real-life journalism turn out to be accurate and influential? I know there's things you cannot tell me, but I also know there's a story here, and I think everybody will hear about it. Do you think your paper has the resources to take that on? I do, do you? The Boston priest, molested kids in six different passions over the last 30 years. The church found out about it and did nothing. We haven't committed any long-term investigative resources to the case. No, we haven't. And that's the kind of thing you're a team would do. Spotlight? Guys, listen, everybody's going to be interested in this thing. Obviously, the church will fight us very hard. We can certainly feel like the journalists in Spotlight are heroes. I think people still have a lot of misgivings about lionizing people like Jan Rather and Mary Mapes, who are the real-life people depicted in truth, I think that the factuality of that story is, again, very different from what is presented in the film. What's sort of the movie trope of the war correspondent? Well, I mean, those people, I think, are by and large, unassailable. Maybe you can think of examples where there were, again, corrupt war correspondents, but those are people who... High work. Maybe Dennis Hopper and Apokosnak. Right. But not corrupt. Oh, God. We don't want to utilize him in a certain way, up to a point. I'm pretty... I don't know if we want to live that life, but it certainly seems exotic. Fun for awhile. Right, right. What do you think of Warren Beatty in Reds? I mean, in some ways, they're very romantic figures. They're people who are putting themselves in really dangerous circumstances. They often become part of the story. They see something that the wider world hasn't seen yet or doesn't know about, and that always often seems to drive them to want to tell that story to the world, even at the risk of their own lives. And I think for journalists, that's the most romantic thing they can think of. I still want to go home to my wife and kid every day. I don't want to die doing my job, but we wish the stakes were that high in the stories that we write and report. You were mentioning before citizen journalism and Twitter and how we're following the horrific events of Paris on Twitter for the latest updates and such. You haven't seen much of that in movies and television yet, that sort of citizen journalism. Do you think that's going to be the next thing coming? Oh, I'm sure that it's the next threshold. I can't imagine that. If I don't want to bring the conversation to a halt, if I stopped and thought about it or did some Googling, I'm sure I could remember at least some TV storylines that have to do with some miscreant putting some false information out on the internet or on some form of social media and that getting picked up by a mainstream news outlet. I know that was played within the newsroom in some form, and I think it is a genuine concern. It is such a powerful tool, and again, it can be as with traditional legacy journalism that power can either be used well or can be used poorly. And it still puts the onus on these sort of professional journalism's to professional journalists, excuse me, to sort out what's accurate or inaccurate, and there's a danger for myself and my peers if we use that information sort of willy-nilly, and there's danger for these sort of the rank-and-file citizenry that people are suddenly, they're just typing words into a box and suddenly with enough retweets or likes it can be shared in front of millions of people and it maybe puts people in a spotlight in a way that they never intended. I didn't ask you about a sub-genre, the sort of comedy journalist movies, everything from Groundhog Day to Anchor Man and Trainwreck, do you see anything, what are they joking about? I think even movies like the Anchor Man series that you, for instance, it's interesting, Adam McKay here in the US is about to release a new movie, it is called The Big Short which is adapted from the Michael Lewis book, and that's also about a really sort of morally derelict moment in American history that's the beginning of the financial panic, or rather the financial crisis here, and it's a movie that is very much a comedy, but also one that has a real sort of moral underpinning to it or a kind of polemic side to it, and it's just interesting that that was present to a certain extent even in the Anchor Man movies that yes he's making fun of the sort of vacuousness of the characters that Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell and other actors play, and yes it's set in the sort of 1970s and 80s, but there is a point that I think McKay was trying to make even in those films about how if you have an Anchor Man who's literally just reading words off of a teleprompter and has no idea what he's saying, or you have a weatherman who doesn't even have the IQ of your shoe, that these are dangerous people, I mean they're comical, but the risks that they're taking and the dangers that they present to their audience are, if these movies weren't comedies they would be horror films. There was a time when people believed everything they heard on TV. This was an age when only men were allowed to read the news, and one Anchor Man was more man than the rest. Good evening, I'm Ron Burgundy, who typed a question mark on the teleprompter? Are there any Howard Beals today? Oh I think they're just about everywhere you look, certainly American television, I don't want to grind any personal acts here, because you know I have to, I still have to do my job every day, I don't want to burn any bridges, but I think it's very easy to flip through the dial on new STV, especially now, especially the moment that we're in, which is so heightened and xenophobic, and you know people really are trying to bang the drum for their particular audience, and the danger is that standards can just go out the window in a moment like this, and you know it's not just something that's happening on American cable, I feel like I see it on American network television just as much. And if you would have had, you've spent so much time with Paddy, I mean reading all his diaries and doing this book, and what do you think he would have said if he'd split through TV today? Well I think he'd probably be pretty horrified, you know, I mean I think the moment that we're living in now is sort of eerily similar to what he was going through then, I mean obviously we have, the amount of media that we have at our fingertips, the number of different channels, you know is so much greater than what he had access to, but you know as I was saying earlier, he still felt like you know he was attuned to so many different problems and crises that just couldn't be solved, and I think you know sometimes here in America and certainly I'm sure elsewhere in the world it can feel that way sometimes that you know whether you look to Europe or you look to the Middle Eastern, certainly you look to parts of America and you see you know massive inequity, you see these problems that you just feel that if you're only one person, how can you ever hope to solve them and can they ever be resolved in our lifetimes, and so just that layer upon layer of that it's hard to know what to do as an individual, I think that's what he was writing to as much as the idea of you know TV is bad and getting worse, it certainly feels like that too, but I think I think he was trying to say something a little bit even larger than that and I think he would very much recognize the moment that we're in today. Thank you so much Dave, this was so much fun. Oh it was my pleasure, thank you for a great book. Oh they're very kind to say that, thank you. Thank you to Dave Itzkoff, you can read his great reporting on TV, film and culture in the New York Times and his book about network is called The Making of Network and the Faithful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies. And thank you for tuning in, follow us on Twitter @podpopculture, you can follow me @YarlinkBeero and on Facebook. This show was edited by Tom Hanson, music by Call Boy and produced by Renee Vittishtethen myself. I'm Kristina Yarlink-Beero, thank you. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years I worked on the Academy Awards so you didn't have to. In that time I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now for the first time I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars. The blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking, available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]