You tell ’em, Bogie!
The gangster dials the newspaper, in the hopes of killing an expose about the rackets. But the editor is Humphrey Bogart, and nobody’s gonna walk into his gin joint and tell him what to do.
Bogart holds up the phone so the mug can hear the noise of the morning papers coming off the production line. “That’s the press, baby, the press!” he barks. “And there’s nothing you can do about it! Nothing!”
Cue music, fade to black.
That was “Deadline USA,” from 1952. A crusty 1st Amendment hero, wrapped in Hollywood celluloid. Now consider the events that take place in “Mad City,” the Dustin Hoffman-John Travolta drama now playing in theaters.
A local TV reporter, eager for a sexy story, prolongs a hostage crisis. He manipulates the gunman–becoming, in essence, his image consultant. The incident itself becomes hostage to the medium.
The standoff continues, overnight TV ratings soar, and soon a network anchor decides he’d like some of that career-enhancing face-time. When he shows up and demands an interview, the local reporter warns the unlikely gunman, “Be afraid, be very afraid.”
Which is what they said about the guy who morphed into “The Fly.”
Perhaps something can be read into the fact that it’s Hoffman, the crusading scribe from “All the President’s Men,” who plays the craven manipulator of “Mad City.” If Hollywood flicks are a barometer of the public mood, if filmmakers are wired at all to the zeitgeist, it would appear that the media’s public image has plunged in the last 21 years.
But Hollywood has always voiced ambivalence about the media, depicting journalists as cynical romantics who manipulate the public, but who also manage on occasion to stumble their way to truth and glory. In that sense–and despite its postmodern flourishes–“Mad City” is part of a grand tradition.
“Movies about the press speak to ongoing cultural anxieties about media power in America,” says Matthew Ehrlich, a former TV producer who teaches on this topic at the University of Illinois. “On screen, the press has always enjoyed virtually unchecked power to do good or to ruin’s people’s lives. These anxieties are real–Hollywood heightens them for dramatic purposes.
“These movies have always asked, `What is truth? What are the lives we are leading, and how are they being reflected or transformed by the media?’ `Mad City’ just adds new, contemporary elements to the formula so it can speak to contemporary audiences.”
Those elements are the staples of today’s media landscape: the hegemony of television, the poll-driven triumph of flash over substance, the cult of personality, the tyranny of immediacy and the shaping of events to feed the needs of the medium. It’s what former PBS anchorman Robert MacNeil calls “the end of news as a service to people, and its conversion to an amusement.”
Veteran director Constantin Costa-Gavras, who helmed “Mad City,” would be the first to agree: “(The electronic media) give to the people what they think the people want to see, instead of trying to teach them something. More and more, they’re treating the audience like it’s an animal that needs to be fed.”
Sadly, Costa-Gavras said in an interview last month, the public is a party to this conspiracy of dumb and dumber. Indeed, one recent poll reported that half of its respondents watched tabloid TV shows.
“The majority of people now,
working 10 hours a day–they get home, and they’re tired. So they turn on the television, and what they see are network shows that mix up the news with gossips and fantasies,” said the 64-year-old director, who lives most of the time in Paris. “People should take an hour with a newspaper, they should take the time to think about politics, but they have no time to think.”
In fact, “Mad City” doesn’t contain a single soul who makes a living from the printed word. Hollywood has done previous movies about broadcast journalism. In “Network” (1976), the wimpy division chief at least worries about getting pilloried in The New York Times. And in “Broadcast News” (1987), the feisty news aide is miffed that newspapers mock her craft. In “Mad City,” nobody even thinks to care.
What a comedown for ink-stained wretches everywhere. Back in 1981, “Absence of Malice” dramatized newsroom sleaze–the use of anonymous sources to ruin innocent people, the publication of information that was supposed to be off the record–and that was embarrassing, but at least the spotlight was still on print.
“Sixteen years ago (in “Malice”), the issue was whether a newspaper should use an anonymous source,” says Costa-Gavras, whose political thriller “Z” won the 1969 Oscar for best foreign-language film. “Today, an anonymous source would probably just go to television to tell his story, and somebody would pay him for that. There’s no longer an issue of anonymity. Now the issue is cash and fame. And if you are more famous, you can get more cash.”
At one point in “Mad City,” the gunman–a laid-off security guard played with sweetness and desperation by Travolta–nurses second thoughts about the sudden notoriety Hoffman has orchestrated. “I’m famous in a bad way” he laments. “Doesn’t make any difference on television,” says the reporter. What matters is that “everyone knows who you are.”
Ehrlich noticed a few newspaper movies in 1994–“I Love Trouble” and “The Paper”–but says that “if you see print reporters now, it’s mostly for their nostalgic value.”
Ron Howard’s “Paper,” starring Michael Keaton, etched a frenzied day in the life of a modern New York tabloid, but its roots were clearly in the wise-guy ’30s world of Ben Hecht. And “I Love Trouble,” with Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts, was a failed attempt at Tracy-Hepburn repartee.
No surprise there. When portraying journalists, Hollywood loves stereotypes. First, there’s the rogue who bends the rules for the greater good–as evidenced in “The Front Page” (1931), in which a newshound obstructs justice by hiding an escaped convict in a rolltop desk, and “Meet John Doe” (1941), in which a feisty columnist invents a sob story to boost circulation for the new mogul.
Then there’s the evil slime who would sell his mom for a scoop. See Edward G. Robinson in “Five Star Final” (1931), ruining a woman’s life and driving her to suicide, and Lee Tracy in “Blessed Event” (1932), mocking a victim, “Ever hear of the power of the press? It’s what makes a bird like me make suckers out of birds like you.” Want more? There’s also Burt Lancaster’s columnist in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957), telling his legman, “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.” And “Ace in the Hole” (1951), in which Kirk Douglas so lusts for a story that he delays the rescue of a man trapped in a cave. “Ace” and wall-to-wall TV coverage of the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, are among the influences cited by “Mad City’s” creators.
And, of course, there’s the sainted crusader: Jimmy Stewart freeing an innocent man in “Call Northside 777,” Hoffman and Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men,” and the aforementioned Bogart, who fights to keep his paper from closing and gives an earnest little speech that would never make it to the screen today. “The Day is more than machines. . . . It’s 1,500 men and women whose skill, heart, brains and experience make a great newspaper possible!”
But Hoffman’s “Mad City” reporter manages to break the mold. While most Hollywood newshounds have been outsiders eager for the inside scoop, Hoffman is so far inside he winds up orchestrating events–dispatching an intern to get footage of the gunman’s sick, old dog (dogs rank high on the empathy meter), and fielding offers from media heavyweights.
He tells the overwrought gunman to talk about his children on camera, because that will “build a positive image.” He scolds him for panicking: “You start shooting out windows, and now your image is down the drain.” And when it’s time to choose a hostage for release, he advises, “You show kindness to a black child; it’s harder for them to play the race card against you.”
Still, one can hear echoes of “The Front Page” in this newest entry–most notably, the implicit attacks on the public’s hunger for mindless human interest. While the ’30s newsmen knew in their gut that their seamy yarns would be devoured by all the “motormen’s wives,” the reporter in “Mad City” tells the gunman to “let those people know what you’re about,” because “they’ll `want’ to know.”
That’s just human nature, says Ehrlich: “In the 1930s, more people knew about the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Ruth Snyder murder case than about what was going on at the League of Nations.”
And if that’s true, does Costa-Gavras really aspire to defy the stereotypes of journalism movies and change some minds?
“It’s up to the media to create a kind of taboo about that sort of coverage,” he says. “I’m just saying they should think more about content and about responsibility. . . . If we can start asking questions of ourselves, that would be a big accomplishment.”
