Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady Journalist

Henrietta Stackpole, a foreign correspondent with “fewer illusions…”

For any hardcore English majors among my “portrayal of the journalist in film, fiction and popular culture” students, I should mention another great American novel with a newspaperwoman lurking in its pages: Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, which is conveniently discussed at great length in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

Alas, the journalist, “Henrietta Stackpole,” is not the lady of the title, and she doesn’t get much mention in Anthony Lane’s almost 5,000 word article, itself in response to a new book, Michael Gorra’s “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece” (Liveright).

But Lane’s article may give students some ideas about writing about literature, as well as probably convincing them that Portrait of a Lady would be a lot to bite off as a two-week assignment in the middle of a broader course, even if it might be worth it just to meet Henrietta and ponder the life of a woman correspondent abroad 130 years ago.

They may be intrigued by Lane’s references to the journalist, at first comparing her to Isabel Archer, the title character:

“… her friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American reporter, who nourishes fewer illusions about European allure.”

… and, in a discussion of James’ Victorian sensibilities:

“When Henrietta heads off to see the Paris sights with a jovial bachelor named Bantling, and we hear that ‘they had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together,’ it is precisely in not knowing what they did together by night—whether they proceeded to feast in foodless ways upon each other—that one finds, as so often with James, a pleasurable ache of dissatisfaction.”

But if I catch any students turning a phrase like “feast in foodless ways upon each other,” now I’ll know where they stole it.

Lane also quotes Henrietta a trifle enigmatically:

“… consider Henrietta, the journalist in search of a topic, who admits to Isabel that ‘I should have delighted to do your uncle.’”

That tease (words do take on new shades of meaning over the years) may convince students that a 19th century novel might be a bit too risque for classroom discussion. But Henrietta is merely debating issues of privacy and publicity with Isabel, talking about painting word-pictures of people for her article, “Americans and Tudors.” Thanks to the searchable plain-text Project Gutenberg edition of the novel, here’s a  more complete quote:

“And I should have delighted to do your uncle, who seems to me a much nobler type — the American faithful still. He’s a grand old man; I don’t see how he can object to my paying him honour.”

Alas, Henrietta was entirely written out of the one radio adaptation of Portrait of a Lady that I’ve found (by NBC University Theater), but here it is, if you want to hear an hour of Jamesian prose…

I also haven’t seen the 1968 TV series or the 1994 film adaptations to see how much attention they paid to Henrietta. Mary-Louise Parker — pre-”Weeds” and “West Wing” — played her in the 1994 Portrait of a Lady, opposite Nicole Kidman as Isabel, but those reportorial spectacles were enough to inspire me to put her picture on this page, along with a YouTube clip of the movie trailer.

Meanwhile, my more general page about journalists in novels is over at my mostly-about-radio blog, under the subtitle “Books: The Truth with a Dragon Tattoo,” referring to the two novels most students read last year. Maybe I should move that whole page over here, since I already have my YouTube collection of films about journalists pages here.

Newspaper as interactive medium: Journalistic stars as paper dolls!

Always the fashion plate, Brenda Starr was retired last year after 70 years in newspapers. Click for an ABC feature interviewing author Mary Schmich and others.

When I started looking into the portrayal of journalists in popular culture, I never thought I’d wind up writing about paper dolls.

But that’s what my “Newspaper Films” post about the 1989 “Brenda Starr” movie led to… a discovery that long before blogs, readers had a unique way of interacting with their Sunday newspapers.

A Web search inadvertently turned up the fact that both “Brenda Star, Reporter” and the even earlier “Jane Arden” comic strips included a reader-participation gimmick: Fans were invited to send in suggestions for the reporters’ wardrobes, and the designs were published as cut-out paper doll costumes with the Sunday color comics, sometimes reprinted as separate comic books or paper-doll books.

A Chicago teenager — male — was reported to have designed 1,500 dresses for Brenda Star, according to a retrospective in the Chicago Tribune when the strip was cancelled — after 70 years.

A quick search of eBay or the Web will find an active hobby of collecting the comic strips and dolls. Who knew?

I can’t help but wonder whether Brenda and Jane inspired more future journalists, or more future fashion designers (or cartoonists).

Top 20 Lessons for Journalism Students from HBO’s “The Newsroom”

…and 30 other random observations, many out of order (think before talk). Some are true, some not. Some are less “top” than others.

For links to reviews of the show and the Hemingway-Gellhorn film, see my previous post. HBO customers can get online videos; the rest of us can use HBO’s official The Newsroom website for supplementary information and synopses of episodes.”

Class assignment in the fall will be to decide which items on this list are true and/or important — and to make your own list, preferably thinking and talking more slowly than Sorkin characters. The more linear-minded may number their lists. I took the numbers off this one, and wish I could randomize it. The class: Portrayal of Journalists in Film, Fiction and Popular Culture.

Yes, I’ll probably edit this a few times before September.

• A democracy needs robust, honest journalism.
• Talk fast.
• Think fast.
• Opinions are O.K. when you have the facts and say where you got them.
• We’ve had enough of slogan-filled talking-head shouting-matches.
• Every pretty blonde with a power-puff question is a sorority girl.
• Sorority girls’ parents may sue if you’re not nice.
• Have a walking-around knowledge of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Frank Capra, contemporary Musical Theater, and  how to tell one from the other. (Tip: Read Joe Saltzman’s book about all the journalists in Capra films, 1920s-’40s. Watch some of them on YouTube, starting with the first 1928 link.)
• Don’t call Rocinante a donkey.
• Know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
• Know who wrote them.
• Use the phone.
• Take notes.
• Beware patriotic buzzwords like “Freedom.”
• Believe in freedom.
• Have a sense of history and a sense of greatness.
• Office romances are essential to journalism movies.
• Anchors make millions.
• Producers do the work.
• On-camera reporters just turn up when you need them.
• Teleprompters are for wimps.
• Tough, strong older women mentor younger women by instigating romances and promising shopping trips.
• Work for a place that buys you Moleskine reporter’s notebooks ($12) not the $17-a-dozen spiral kind, or buy your own.
• Have a head full of walking-around knowledge, including facts and figures. (Know how much of your tax dollar goes to the N.E.A., how many Americans are in prison, more. Only the most obsessive will double-check to see if you’re right. When you use them in your reporting, be right.)
• Someone spouting statistics in the middle of a panel discussion is probably making up 80 percent of them.
• Don’t trust people in authority to tell you how important something is; even an Associated Press yellow alert may be posted by an intern who doesn’t have time to raise it to orange or red.
• Being there as a loyal intern can result in good things.
• Loyalty counts.
• Love counts, but complicates things.
• Respect your parents, even when lying to them.
• Respect your s.o.’s parents. Etc.
• Apologize.
• Do your best.
• Demand the best from others.
• Speak your mind.
• Let business leaders speak their P.R. platitudes if they give you something honest at the same time.
• Multi-millionaire geniuses and Peabody winners with battle scars can be condescending.
• Indians don’t mind being stereotyped as “Punjab” or “the I.T. guy” if they are really bloggers and closet science geeks. If they are under 50, they probably never read a “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip anyway. (Was Punjab also in the musical, “Annie”? If so, see rule #1.)
• Learn how to get people on the phone.
• Learn how to use the hold button.
• Blog.
• Use Twitter.
• Figure it out.
• Say condescending things about your audience, like “Speak truth to stupid,” but don’t really mean them.
• Don’t mention Hildy Johnson, Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant, Murphy Brown, Network or Broadcast News.
• If you want all the excitement of real reporting, such as watching journalists pore over stacks of library charge slips, see “All the President’s Men.”
• Remember people’s names.
• Remember significant statistics up to eight digits.
• Pick your college roommate wisely, and stay in touch.
• Pick your older sister wisely, and stay in touch.
• Take that grade school build-a-volcano project seriously.
• YouTube!
• More than 70 years after “The Front Page,” the best journalists still talk tough and drink straight whiskey. Protein bars are for losers. 
• It’s all about vertigo.

More links about the series and the recent Hemingway & Gellhorn
film.

Theory worth testing: The angriest negative reviews of The Newsroom were written out of guilt by reviewers who think they should be doing serious journalism themselves instead of writing about HBO entertainment programming and wishing it were better. (See Murrow on, “merely wires and lights in a box.”)

Final random observation: Anyone so taken with Jeff Daniels as a news anchor that they want him to step out of the HBO set and move to CNN hasn’t seen “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

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For video of episode 1 of The Newsroom and links to reviews of the show and the Hemingway-Gellhorn film, see my previous post.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, and The Newsroom

Things are looking up in the “recent examples” department for my fall course on the portrayal of journalists in popular culture.

HBO’s famous-writers docudrama about Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway reminds me a bit of United Press’s “Soldiers of the Press” radio series from the 1940s, which had actors in a studio dramatizing the lives of war correspondents while the reporters were still off on the battle-fronts.

Since Memorial Day I’ve been working my way through a batch of those World War II episodes over at jheroes: Newspaper Heroes on the Air, learning a little history, thinking about the blurred boundaries between reporting and propaganda, and puzzling through a mystery or two along the way.

I hope that when the fall semester starts, students will be able to get at the HBO Hemingway & Gellhorn film to do the same. Maybe I can convince one or two in my Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture course to do research projects drawing some comparisons between docudrama and history, film and radio, or between an HBO movie and the new HBO series, The Newsroom.

Thanks to HBO for putting the full first episode on YouTube for students (and faculty) who don’t have HBO in their back-to-school budgets! Alas, HBO only kept it there temporarily… This was the link.

HBO now (August) provides a The Newsroom website with supplementary information and synopses of episodes.

I started this blog post to gradually accumulate links to reviews and reflections on the two HBO offerings. Some I’ll just tag in my bookmark collection at http://delicious.com/bstepno

• http://www.hbo.com/movies/hemingway-and-gellhorn/index.html
• http://m.motherjones.com/media/2012/05/film-review-hemingway-and-gellhorn-hbo-clive-owen-nicole-kidman
• http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/movies/philip-kaufman-and-walter-murch-collaborate-on-hemingway-gellhorn.html
• http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/arts/television/hemingway-gellhorn-has-its-premiere-on-hbo.html
• http://www.metacritic.com/tv/hemingway-and-gellhorn
• Martha Gellhorn in PBS series on War Correspondents
• Gellhorn: D-Day Stowaway , U.S. Department of Defense article; also more general article on women war correspondents.
• delicious.com/bstepno/Hemingway
• delicious.com/bstepno/Gellhorn
• The earlier Newsroom, 1996 (Its IMDB page)
• delicious.com/bstepno/TheNewsroom
• New York Times items about The Newsroom

Updated Aug. 30, 2012

Happy New Year 2012

Enough of this 1930s and 1940s nostalgia… Here’s something that’s “only” 30 years old, The Roches getting a handle on a seasonal standard. Very, very hard to believe that was so many years ago. But remembering it was enough to get me to visit http://www.roches.com/ to see what the Roches are up to these days.

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Now, back to the ’40s…

I haven’t had a lot of luck finding journalism plots that take place on New Year’s Eve for use in my JHeroes podcast, so I’m giving in to late-night nostalgia and posting another piece of the past here: Lux Radio Theater’s production of After the Thin Man, from 1940. No journalism plot… just a classic mystery with a touch of humor and romance.

As much as I like old radio shows, the medium doesn’t do justice to Asta…

Since the movie trailer is on YouTube, I’m including it too.

Google as transcription Ace in the Hole? First try finds buddhism, pot, KGB

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.

(Another coincidence:Crowther reviewed 20,000 Leagues,too.)

What writing is…

The “quick Christmas break research project” that I began two and a half years ago keeps leading to new things, most of which I’m recording at my Newspaper Heroes on the Air site (jheroes.com for short), which is primarily about the golden age of radio drama, and how print journalists were portrayed on the radio. But some of the radio adventures I document there were based on movies, some on history books, biographies or novels, and some on movies that were based on books.

All of those themes will fit into my fall course on Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture. So I have gone from the early “research” of falling asleep listening to Superman, Green Hornet and Soldiers of the Press episodes to checking the film and print sources of the radio dramas,  watching the movies, reading the novels, paging through the histories and biographies, looking up the old newspaper stories, and once in a while finding a jewel of a quote like this:

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting,absorbing,exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1940, p.5

I guess that’s reason enough to my meandering train of thoughts spill over into this “Other Journalism” blog, making it more of a “my summer reading” discussion.  A Peculiar Treasure is an early autobiography by Ms. Ferber, an author I hadn’t read until a radio item led me to a movie, which led to one book, then another and another and another.

Ferber was born in 1885 and lived until 1968, almost 30 more years after deciding to turn introspective and write that biography… which touches on her ancestors’ lives in Hungary and Germany, her parents lives in Chicago, and her birth in “that faintly improbable-sounding town called Kalamazoo, Michigan.”

“… In that way perhaps I may be able to discover what I am doing at a typewriter in a penthouse apartment on top of a roof on Park Avenue, New York.”

The books, plays and movies that got her to that penthouse interest me, too, as do her reflections on being Jewish in early 20th century America, growing up with the publishing world in New York and the movie world of Hollywood. (She also wrote ShowBoat and Giant, among other less-newspaperish works.) But my main interest is journalism and the way journalists are portrayed in her books, in preparation for my  course in the fall. So my new summer reading is books by and about Edna Ferber. And I wasn’t surprised to find where her writing career began — although 17 was an earlier age than I expected:

“There never had been a woman reporter in Appleton. The town, broad-minded though it was, put me down as definitely cuckoo. Not crazy, but strange. Big-town newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Sentinel employed women on their editorial and reportorial staffs, but usually these were what is known as special or feature writers, or they conducted question-and-answer columns, advice to the lovelorn, society columns or woman’s pages. But at seventeen on the Appleton Crescent I found myself covering a regular news beat like any man reporter. I often was embarrassed, sometimes frightened, frequently offended and offensive, but I enjoyed it, and knowing what I know today I wouldn’t swap that year and a half of small town newspaper reporting for any four years of college education…. I learned how to sketch in human beings with a few rapid words, I learned to see, to observe to remember; learned, in short, the first rules of writing.”
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure, 1940, p.103

My own starting point with Edna Ferber was a pair of radio adaptations of a movie made from one of her novels, part of my investigation of more than three dozen radio adaptations of movies with journalists in them. Even though the radio scripts of “Cimarron” were short on details, they  featured a fascinating “newspaper” couple: a gunslinger-lawyer-editor, and his semi-abandoned wife, who takes over the newspaper and builds a career that takes her to Congress.

They have the unlikely “frontier” names of  Yancey and Sabra Cravat, and you can hear the rather thin radio adaptation of the Cimarron story at jheroes.com. For the 1931 Academy Award winning film adaptation, you will have to look elsewhere — but don’t settle for the 1960 version, which strays far from Ferber’s original. I went from there to the original novel, which has much more to say about American myths and themes like race, region and “the frontier,” than either movie attempted. The tale of the film adaptations itself is fascinating, told in another book on my summer shelf, Edna Ferber’s Hollywood.

From there, a little biographical and  bibliographical searching easily uncovered the fact that Ferber started writing as a 17-year-old newspaper reporter, and that her first novel was also about a young woman with a newspaper job, Dawn O’Hara, the Girl Who Laughed, which is now out of copyright and available in free e-book and LibriVox audiobook editions.

My most recent discovery: Not only was Ferber a newspaper reporter before becoming a Pulitzer-winning novelist and playwright, now she has become a somewhat fictional creation herself! A gentleman named Ed Ifkovic has turned her into a character in a series of mystery novels that involve even more famous people she knew, or might have known. The cover of one has James Dean, one of the stars of the film adaptation of her book, Giant. Another features escape artist Harry Houdini, and is set back in Appleton, Wisc., where Ferber got her start as a reporter right out of high school. That, of course, got me curious and clicking on Google again…

Fiction? Here, from the Appleton Public Library’s Edna Ferber page, is the young Ms. Ferber’s 1904 interview with Houdini.

JHeroes: Radio Newsies for Christmas

Pickpocket Fingers Fogarty shops for Christmas … not exactly a case of journalistic detachment in this 1946 Casey, Crime Photographer episode from my online old-time radio research, but at least a little bit of Christmas cheer.

Casey’s best line…

Annie: Maybe you need glasses.

Casey: I do; several glasses.

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This 1947 episode opens with the journalists and their bartender friend commiserating about working on the holiday, even if Casey and Ann do come back with the story about “The Santa Claus of Bums Boulevard.”

Source: http://www.archive.org/download/Casey_Crime_Photographer/

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While on this Christmas theme, I noticed a Big Town episode in the archive.org collection, “Prelude to Christmas,” from 1948, a World War II refugee Polish newspaper editor teaches his daughter about postwar faith in America and freedom of the press, with help (of course) from Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press:

Listen for a remarkably ecumenical message from a waterfront mission preacher who mentions Allah among other prophets, while searchers for the lost girl visit a synagogue as well as a Catholic church.

Source: http://www.archive.org/details/otr_bigtown

J-Heroes: “Not THE Flash Casey!”

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 radio episode, thanks to the Old Time Radio Research Group collection at the Internet Archive, is “Bright New Star,” in which Casey and Annie present some time-honored skepticism about press-agentry and publicity-seekers.

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.

J-Heroes: Sing a song of freedom of the press?

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).