… or not. Some of the movies I’ve linked to here are decidedly not “Citizen Kane” or “All the President’s Men.”
But students in my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction & Popular Culture” class may be happy to know that YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other sources have trailers, clips and sometimes full-length feature films relevant to their final research projects on Newspaper Movies and related fictions — projects that are due in a couple of weeks after they return from Thanksgiving break.
Of course Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and the local video store can also rent films, but the number of resources available for free online is impressive.
I’ve been collecting links to films available online — not always great films, and certainly not an attempt at a “best” or “complete” list of films with journalists in the plot. For the most complete source I know, see Joe Saltzman’s Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture website and database.
For others, just do a Web search for “best newspaper movies” or “best journalism films” or a variation on that theme. You’ll find scores of newspaper columns, blogs and websites where reporters, editors, critics and fans have compiled their own lists. A few examples, some of which I’ve linked to elsewhere:
I’ve broken my collection of YouTube links by decade or part of a decade, to keep the screen-loading time manageable. (Some pages still may load very slowly.) They are all on the “Video” drop-down/fly-out menu at the top of the page, but here’s a shortcut: Newspaper Films. And here’s the full set, a mini-menu I’ve added to the top of each page:
Note: I don’t maintain any of the uploaded files at YouTube, Vimeo or archive.org. From time to time, those sites discover that some of the videos people post are still under copyright protection and take them down at the “rights” owner’s request. If I have linked to one of those posts, my “player” code will also cease functioning.
Connecticut lives with fewer presses, as “Digital First” Journal Register Co. turns to nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper to keep printing — Tribune-owned Hartford Courant.
I’ll teach a class about movie portrayals of journalists this fall, so I’ve been exploring video clip resources at YouTube. I’m also teaching a Web production class, where I talk about screen-capturing and multimedia plug-ins from the likes of YouTube, so this post will function as a demo, as well as an excuse to share a memorable quote or two, along with links to the movie clip and a 60-year-old New York Times review of the film.
Add some recent problems with my hearing, and I couldn’t help noticing that YouTube offers Google voice as a way to create closed-caption transcriptions of film clips. So testing that became the “hook” for this item. For the seriously hearing-impaired, Google does call the technique “better than nothing,” and perhaps it will be improved. For instance, I wonder if the system could use some kind of “contextual dictionary” dealing with the time and place of the video, in this case early-1950s New Mexico. As you’ll see below, a few words don’t fit the time and place… and a couple may fit well enough to be misleading.
“We have a shop rule here,” an editor warns: “No liquor on the premises.” The caption looks like an unrelated policy, “we have a shop rule here electoral promises.”
And the reporter’s quick rejoinder, “How about smoking?” (almost a newsroom requirement in 1951), becomes “how pot-smoking,” making the editor’s “which of course” reply seem quite liberal for its day.
As some of you may have noticed, I tested the transcription feature with a scene from Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” one of the darkest movies about reckless, ego-driven journalists. The result was a near-Zen experience, as the “caption” on the picture above/right may indicate. If you watch the film, you will never hear the words: “sure belt and his family’s about that publishes wife i think he should know missus buddhism.” And, while there is some drinking, pot-smoking is never an issue.
Luckily, my hearing problem is clearing up — and there were some amusing ironies in the transcription that I can share here, just for fun.
The scene: Big city reporter Kirk Douglas encounters a small-town editor-in-chief. No buddhism, but still quite a culture-clash. Their job-interview conversation is one my “Portrayal of the Journalist in Film, Fiction & Popular Culture” students should enjoy discussing.
Our Radford University library has the excellent Criterion DVD of Ace in the Hole, but someone has uploaded the movie’s first six minutes to YouTube, which is convenient — and makes my caption experiment possible. You can find the scene under the heading “Meet Chuck Tatum.” It opens as out-of-work reporter Tatum arrives in Albuquerque unannounced.
Proper names are an easy-to-forgive problem for any speech-recognition program, but given the aggressive personality of Douglas’s character, I like the ironies of “Chuck Tatum” being translated as “thrust at him,” a fair description of how the editor may feel. Tatum’s list of past jobs gets a post-modern touch: “New York, Chicago, Detroit” becoming “new york chicago defrauded,” which anticipates a theme of the movie as much as the “Tell the Truth” embroidery on the editor’s wall.
Tatum’s best self-promoting lines are in the left column below. The Google CC version on the right is less memorable.
“I know newspapers backward, forward and sideways. I can write ‘em, edit ‘em, print ‘em, wrap ‘em and sell ‘em…
“…sideways agony right american freedom wrapping himself…
“I can handle big news and little news, and if there’s no news I can go out and bite a dog.”
“the environmental can help big news in a little bit and there’s no notice outlined by dole“
While the reporter isn’t asking for the dole, pay rates do get the voice-to-text robot treatment. Self-described $250-a-week newspaperman Tatum asks for $50, then compromises, “make it $45.” The captioning however, seems more threatening, with an advanced Soviet-bloc weapon: “an a_k_-forty fast.”
Editor and publisher Jacob Q. Boot doesn’t need threats to be more generous than $45, although not as generous as the transcription implies. It turns his “I pay 60 a week in this shop” into “and uh… I’d pay sixty a week and michelle.” Dark though the film is, there is no hint of a “Michelle.”
The women who do feature in the conversation include a previous employer’s wife, with whom Tatum admits to having an affair — one of the reasons he is back on the job market, and the grandmotherly ”Mrs. Boot,” source of that Google captioning garble ending with “missus buddhism.” (Google also turns the careful editor’s symbolic “belt and suspenders” into “belt and his family’s.”)
Earlier, before he gets to see the editor, Tatum does some verbal sparring with Herbie Cook, cub reporter, who eventually becomes his protege. The conversation begins…
Chuck: “I’d like to see the boss. What did you say his name is?”
Herbie: “I didn’t say...”
Chuck: “Cagey, huh?“
Then, a moment later…
Herbie: “What did you say you were selling? Insurance?“
Chuck: “I didn’t say.“
Herbie: “Cagey, huh?“
The lad’s “I didn’t say,” gets a touch of yoga-class greeting, if slightly garbled, emerging as “but uses namaste.” As you can see in the captured frame, the computer’s translation of “cagey” is more sinister, especially in a McCarthy-era film: “k_g_b.”
For the record, “Ace in the Hole” is a fascinating film with plenty of film noir elements and moral lessons about excessive ambition, media exploitation, audience vulgarity, bad marriages, and government corruption. Back in 1951, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it “A sordid and cynical drama of a corrupt newspaper man, set against a grisly panorama of mob morbidity… delivered with all the stinging impact of an angry slap in the face.”
But buddhism and the Soviet secret police are twists that, as far as I know, no one but Google’s text robot has considered adding.
Utterly whimsical coincidence
There are, of course, other text-captioning technologies out there, which can be accomplished with human intervention and video-editing software. I stumbled across a coincidental Kirk Douglas clip where he is cast in the quasi-journalistic role of “troubadour.”
The captions are clearly by Disney, and the “whale of a tale” takes a somewhat more light-hearted (and moist) approach than Chuck Tatum’s desert-cave reporting. If you watch “Ace in the Hole” and come away feeling like Bosley Crowther did, you may want to come back to this bit of silliness.
Archive.org has had copies of this film at various resolutions for years, but I just noticed that it’s now at YouTube too, which means I can embed it here for easy reference.
Actually spelled “Back of the Mike,” this nine-minute 1938 film shows what’s going on in a young radio listener’s mind, along with what’s going on in the radio studio.
The film reminds me a bit of an ad for one of the old Infocom text-only computer adventures; the ad showed a rainbow-hued cross section of a human brain, with the headline “We put our graphics where the sun don’t shine.”
Like his first boss, a crusty editor whose quote in the headline above ends “Not THE Flash Casey!… Never heard of you,” you should get to know Flash Casey, radio’s best news photographer. For a dozen years on radio, plus film, comic book and TV incarnations, Casey was the classic wise-cracking, fedora-wearing newspaper cameraman. In this 1938 film clip, he’s right out of college, hat-in-hand looking for his first job.
Casey in the comics
With winter commencement coming up tomorrow, I thought the film might raise students’ spirits: Finding a job may be rough today, but it has rarely been easy. Still, like Casey, you never know whom you might run into. (Watch the clip, or the full-length Here’s Flash Casey, at Archive.org.) His attitude, camera and sense of a humor already show promise, even if it is only a B-movie.
(If you’re interested in “new technology,” watch for the appearance of a pre-war Leica 35mm camera later in the film, along with several scenes worth discussing in a media-ethics class.)
During his long run on radio, Casey was the old pro, not the young graduate in the movie. In the series called “Casey, Crime Photographer” or just “Crime Photographer,” he was the “ace cameraman who covers the crime news of a great city,” usually with the help of reporter Ann Williams and the regulars at the Blue Note Cafe. Most of the plots involved more crime-solving than crime-reporting, but often had very good jazz piano in the background.
This second episode, also thanks to the OTRRG collection at Archive.org, is “Source of Information,” in which Casey has a visit from a down-on-his-luck former reporter who has been sitting on a big expose for, perhaps, too long.
NOTE: This blog item, like a few before it, is testing WordPress’s multimedia features. If the audio or video give you any problems, let me know.
This is the 52-minute Hollywood Radio Theater version of the often quoted, but hard to find, newspaper movie, Deadline USA. In the movie version, you had Humphrey Bogart, but Dan Dailey is a strong lead as the crusading editor in this 1953 radio broadcast about a newspaper fighting for its life against both the mob and the paper’s own board of directors.
(“Hollywood Radio Theater” was Lux Radio Theater minus the soap commercials, for re-broadcast over the Armed Forces Radio Service, which was the source of this set of broadcasts from 1953 stored at Archive.org, including the one my player launches.)
I’m posting this as a test of the audio player, the archive.org hosting site, and to see if WordPress includes the audio link in its RSS feed for this blog — which would make the feed a very low-budget “podcast.” In fact, it does appear to work. I was able to subscribe to this feed in iTunes using the “Subscribe to Podcast” item on its its “Advanced” menu.
I may start a regular “J-Heroes” podcast of old-time radio shows this way, once I check the Archive.org terms-of-service pages to make sure I wouldn’t be breaking any rules there. (If anyone reading this has experience in that area, please drop me a line at stepno.com or add a comment here.)
Yes, it’s a song about freedom of the press, I guess. But probably not one the Newspaper Guild ever used as a marching song. And not one that will get today’s students marching off to journalism careers, but still an intriguing artifact — sung by Nelson Eddy.
I haven’t seen the whole film, but IMDB’s plot summary explains that the hero of “Knickerbocker Holiday” is a journalist-printer cranking out broadsides attacking the government of Peter Stuyvesant in 17th century New Amsterdam.
This song isn’t from the original Broadway play, which had more songs by Kurt Weill, including the famous “September Song.” (Weill did not write this “Sing Out!”) The play featured as narrator the author Washington Irving, who actually had been a newspaper correspondent early in his career. However, journalism wasn’t a theme of the story. Instead, Irving was composing a history of New Amsterdam and describing the characters he would create to tell the tale.
That older version of “Knickerbocker Holiday” is available as a 1945 Theater Guild on the Air broadcast — available here as a 13.4MB MP3 from the series collection at Archive.org. The original 1938 yarn apparently had an anti-Roosevelt moral, continued gently in the radio broadcast: “Let’s keep the government small, and funny.”
The movie musical dropped Irving as the writer/narrator character and made his creation Brom Broeck a pamphleteer/journalist troublemaker. In the original, he was just a troublemaking prototypical American — a man who couldn’t take orders.
As a result of the rewrite, we get this freedom of the press singalong, as the printer escapes the stocks to pass out his pamphlets to the crowd.
“Sing out! Say your say! … A man’s no man who never can sing out… It’s your right!… Make your vow. The time is now. Sing out!… (spoken) Read those pamphlets…”
In any case, he sure gets those Quakers singing along… and in the end, he gets the girl, even if the older man gets the bigger hit song (and, for a doubly happy ending — at least in the radio version — the old gent does get another girl, or two).
A “newspaper” guy by journalistic background, Tim Thornton does a nice radio job of blending interviews to create this two-minute profile of a retiring Radford University professor:
I’m saving that link here for my fall classes. I’ll also show his Thornton’s Work blog to students as a “portfolio” example of how to preserve their own work as their careers transition from medium to medium. (Or from “rare” to “medium” to “well done,” for that matter.)
I only wish Tim had worked a little of his own banjo playing into the background for a full “multimedia” approach!
With nearly 70 website categories (from “activism” to “weird” and “youth”) and 17 advertising categories, the Webby Awards give themselves so much room for collaborative-self-promotion that I hate to encourage the annual excuse for a big party I don’t have time to go to.
But the project did give Roger Ebert a 2010 “Person of the Year” award, and cited Vinton Cerf for “Lifetime Achievement,” which are good things.
In the “News” category (one of the 70), don’t hold your breath: The NYTimes.com was the winner, with BBC.com/news getting a People’s Voice award.
NewYorker.com won for “Best Copy/Writing” with NYTimes.com getting that category’s People’s Voice award.
Similarly, under “Best Practices,” Twitter.com (Webby) and NPR.org (People’s Voice)
I agree with all of the above as excellent sites, but, is it me, or does much of the project appear to be figuring out which category name to put over some of these usual suspects?
Still, every year I browse around the Webby pages and find some things that had been completely off my radar and others that were on it, but that I’ve neglected to visit or use.
There may be others you find interesting; but I didn’t go there if (a) I clicked a link, counted to 10 and didn’t see anything or (b) the name of the link suggested the destination was trying to sell me something I don’t want, or have enough of already.
A combination of the above kept me from seeing hboimagine.com or Miroslaw Balka‘s exhibition at the Tate… not just because they are massive, slow-loading Flash “art” things, but because the Webbyawards.com link text started with “HBO” for one and “The Unilever Series 2009…” for the other, and I have enough TV and soap.
I still have a stack of Stein’s pioneering e-books, which combined text, graphics, audio and video on CD-ROMS or DVDs before we had devices that allowed comfortable reading from a screen. I wish my new OS-X Macintosh would run OS-9 to play them.
I met Bob Stein almost 10 years ago, when he was working on an e-book authoring/reading system called TK3 (more about it here), but somehow I lost track of his projects. Archive.org shows his company’s last page here. I wonder what happened. It looks like Sophie is its new incarnation. In fact, checking my bookmark lists, I see I saved a link to it in 2006! So much software, so little time. Still, it will be good to catch up when I have time for more browsing.
Speaking of catching up, Stein’s observation about how long it took to get from Gutenberg to Cervantes reminded me someone else I met around the same time — Mitchell Stephens, whose “the rise of the image, the fall of the word“ would be a great candidate for a multimedia e-book treatment itself.
RT @marissakmelton: Who named the show "Does Someone Have to Go?" without realizing it was going to sound like a reality show about inconti… 20 hours ago
… or not. Some of the movies I’ve linked to here are decidedly not “Citizen Kane” or “All the President’s Men.”
