The warning signal went off 21 years ago in Sidney Lumet’s landmark film “Network.” It’s been ringing ever since — although rarely as loudly as in “Mad City,” a new movie that takes the news media to task and suggests that if network television isn’t careful, it could wind up in the same cesspool of bad taste as tabloid TV.
Directed by Costa-Gavras, the Greek-born, Paris-based director of such political thrillers as “Z,” “State of Siege” and “Missing,” “Mad City” stars Dustin Hoffman as a cynical TV reporter who lucks into a major media event while reporting a routine story.
A laid-off museum security guard, played by John Travolta, has taken a group of schoolchildren hostage. Hoffman, who is in the museum at the time, proceeds to manipulate, massage and exploit the story, seeing it as his springboard to national fame and a network job.
“It’s something probably all of us do,” Costa-Gavras said during a recent conversation. “We move the line of ethics a little bit because we’re all trying to have a success, to make a career. For me, it’s the most human thing.”
Costa-Gavras, 64, the son of a World War II resistance fighter, says he knows a bit about journalism. His wife, Michele Raui, is a former journalist who covered the Vietnam War in the early ’70s, was held prisoner by the Viet Cong and wrote about it in her book “The Two Sides of Hell.”
Hoffman’s character, the director insists, is portrayed realistically. “I don’t like it when journalists are portrayed in movies as scum or like big heroes. It’s like in every profession: Journalists are human beings who have major problems, as we have, and they try to deliver.”
The vulgarization of mainstream media, Costa-Gavras adds, is the byproduct of tabloid TV’s popularity. With new cable channels popping up and competition for news stories fiercer than ever, he says, journalists don’t have time to analyze or think about what they’re reporting.
“It’s something that happens all over the world,” he says. “The media, particularly television, is deeply influenced by the American model.”
Hoffman, who played Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein in the 1976 film “All the President’s Men,” drew upon that experience — and visits to television news centers.
Costa-Gavras got along well with the two-time Oscar winner and says Hoffman’s notorious perfectionism remained largely in check while they shot the film last fall in San Jose and Los Angeles.
“He has a lot of curiosity, a lot of questions about the character, about everything,” Costa-Gavras says. “I think a director has to have a special relationship with Dustin — which means to be very patient, to hear exactly what he says, because he doesn’t say stupid things.”
When Hoffman goes into his nitpicky, dissecting mode, the director says, “it’s his way of challenging the director. It’s also a way of challenging himself. And convincing himself.”
Working with Travolta, on the other hand, was a piece of cake. When Costa-Gavras decided that the character should have a beer belly from too many hours watching baseball on TV, Travolta had no problem gaining the weight and wearing an extra-tight shirt to emphasize his paunch.
Costa-Gavras, whose first name is Constantin, although he doesn’t use it professionally, also directed “Betrayed” with Debra Winger and “The Music Box” with Jessica Lange. He says he works so seldom because it takes a long time — “too much time” — to find the right material and hammer out an acceptable script.
Until the 1970s, Costa-Gavras says, “the American cinema produced extraordinarily good movies. Which is not so today.” He says he’s been asked to direct an action blockbuster but turned it down.
Would he consent if the studio offered him $3 million? “No, I wouldn’t do it for money,” he replies. “I don’t care about money.
“I think the press, the media and the cinema have a big responsibility,” he says, “because we deal with thousands, sometimes millions of people.”
In the case of “Mad City,” Costa-Gavras says, “If the movie succeeds in raising questions, that’s a big accomplishment — especially if they are the right questions.”
If the film accomplishes anything more than that, he adds, “that would be very dangerous. Stalin used the movies. Hitler did it. But they were able to do it because they were living in a non-free society.”
