THE PAPER
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
I don't believe but a minute of Ron Howard's THE PAPER. It's typical Howard -- showing his general competence as a storyteller and once more showing his insistence on making movies for the boobgoisie. If Howard had an adult movie maker's vision and audacity, THE PAPER would be about what's eating away at our media faster than an unchecked cancer -- the frightening Power PC speed of tabloiditis. But Howard's too pedestrian, too ready to avoid the very issues this and some of his other movies bring up and instead goes in for goofy fantasies: in his puerile confusion about the real condition of journalism, he's dispensing retrograde honor to a profession that lost its way -- way long ago. Giving benefit of doubt he's even aware there's a very powerful danger in what's happening in our press, the question may be -- Is Howard afraid of tackling it? He drags everything down to a suburban ha-ha teenage level; like James Brooks in BROADCAST NEWS, he codifies sitcom behavior. When one half of the audience for THE PAPER is listening to the other half laugh at scenes that don't seem to be very funny, it's like edited-in canned audience responses used by TV comdies to cover up their emptiness.
The news business has become the nation's favorite whipping boy -- as well as whipper -- by the very nature of its pervasiveness. It's our most publicly accessible, bottomless pit -- the ultimate voracious consumer. If we attack it for its excessive abuse and callous intrusion, we must also remember that it's often asked to be or condoned as the national intruder -- our communal "private eye." The current recklessness of media is the rage of disseminating fractured information: it's "Gotcha!" before the facts. All of us have the same conflicting feelings about the press, and especially TV news. As a nation reeling in a case of the hates over just about everything and probably hating the press more than anything else, we paradoxically "love" it because it makes complex issues simplistic and debase. We don't have to think if headlines and TV news shows scream out allegations of wrongdoings, cover-ups, scandals; the preponderance of gossip, rumor, innuendo, grudges make it seem that whoever is alleged to have committed a crime or violation is guilty first, innocent -- if that even matters nowadays -- later. (Like the apparent joy in branding the First Lady guilty of phantom crimes.) We love being glued to the box during a crisis or scandal or tragedy, absorbed by its immediacy, how we're "right there," as we were during the Persian Gulf War, or the scorching of the Waco cult compound, or the Oklahoma bombing. Our adrenaline is really pumping -- and particularly true in a live interview. Those of us who saw the original broadcast-exchange between Dan Rather and George Bush in 1988, or watched the Senate Confirmation Hearings of Clarence Thomas, felt a heightened sense of response, of danger, because we didn't know what direction the interview or hearings would take. (It is this element of risk, of the unknown, of intoxicating provocation that no other news medium can match. Radio is close, but it can't provide truth-or-lie-or-demeanor-telling properties the way the camera usually can.) What we hate about news isn't merely our suspicions about those in the business -- that "Gotcha!" is replacing hard news and real facts -- or our fears concerning our growing voyeuristic cravings for the sensational, as in the Thomas-Anita Hill, Gennifer Flowers, Magic Johnson, Michael Jackson, Tanya Harding cases, it's also our guilt in allowing ourselves to be so damned consumed by the titillating drama of news. Like we were during the trial of William Kennedy Smith vs. "I'm not a blue blob," or the Bobbitt thing, or the on-going mockery of justice of the O.J. SImpson fiasco.
Many of us feel guilty when we don't watch the unfolding of a news "event" -- afraid that we're going to miss something. Until very recently, some of us even felt guilt about missing a nightly newscast or two. It's the need to get it now and not later, in a newspaper, because by the time we read about something in the morning edition, the box has already updated that something; it's a matter of instant discretion -- the zapper's power -- because the growth of TV news has permitted choice; it's also subjective, aesthetic and cosmetic -- selectively allowing specific TV anchors or reporters or commentators into our homes because they appeal to us. Some women fantasize about suave Peter Jennings; outdoorsy males respond to Tom Brokaw's Lands End quality; college-age fattie bigots worship Rush; technocrats mainline with CSPAN. We're picky about newspapers and magazines and their writers too, but we can better control whatever our responses; we don't have to fight sensory overload. Yet it is the very addictive nature of the "overload" that compels us and the programmers and editors onward and thereby permitting a proliferation of TV tabloids, ideological talk shows, informercials, a rush of speculation in newspapers and, the latest kick, online forums. News has become stimulation, visceral, but without a filter of veracity. Is it any wonder that we've become a nation of instant paranoids, panicked not on the basis of facts but over rumors and gossip packaged as factoids? Murderess Susan Smith claimed a black man kidnapped her two children and Newtie invects implicit racism as election ploy. CNBC's effete flabbermouths are probably more responsible for any week's stock market dive than the Fed and actual investors. Is it exaggeration to say news has become dangerous to our national health? If dangerous now, what will we call it when the 500 channel nightmare arrives? To keep those channels profitable, there will be a new crisis or scandal manufactured every hour.
How often have we heard the media defend themselves over their moral infractions and insensitivity and intrusions by saying that they're constitutionally guaranteed freedom to "report"? Had Ron Howard had given us a newspaper that once had a tradition of solid reporting, of respectability, and had to resort to using tabloid tricks to bring in the revenues, there might have been something beyond fantasy, something hopeful, in the way THE PAPER climaxes, but more than that he might have looked into the future: he might have guessed that soon the Supreme Court will re-address the issue of the freedom of the press. Tthe Court is going to go after total disregard of the facts in reportage; it will recognize that, some years back, when decreeing that public figures are fair game, it set into motion a freedom of irresponsibility. That's why we can get Xmas time sex scandals concocted by misogynists like David Brock; that's why there's never an apology from the press over such stories that can not be proved, only alleged. That's why we're getting Gutter Encounters of the Weird Kind about Whitewater: Rush on TV repeating groundless rumors that Vince Foster was murdered in a "safe house" rented by Hillary Rodham Clinton. That's why we're getting scum like Jerry Falwell using a president to publicly preach hate as a family value. Scarier still is that perople are willing to accept fabrication over fact, as Paula Jones' money hunger confirms. The press has never been innocent, yet in recent years it's gotten intolerably bloody and trashy. Can we pinpoint a reason why? I think so: When sleepyhead Ronnie was elected in 1980, one of the first demolition jobs he instructed his henchmen to perform was on the FCC's "Fairness Doctrine." Basically, this guideline demanded, with TV in particular, equal time for opposing sides on issues. Ronnie didn't like that because it prevented his Morning in America propaganda from being promulgated as gospel. After his re-election, he managed to get the equality mandates downgraded to voluntary and national and local public affairs programs shifted the emphasis of fairness to screaming contentiousness: the exchange of views became ever less civilized and ever more Buchanan-loaded and Rushy. One notes with deep regret that though there are minimal efforts to maintain a balance of opinion, the scales have tipped to hypertensive demagoguery. The demise of the fairness doctrine also meant the death of hundreds of locally-produced public affairs shows, which at one time served the community well in that large numbers of the citizenry got on TV. What's left of these kinds of programs is now exclusively the domain of the hacks of local newspapers who write unreadable columns and send out correspondence written on notes with their pictures plastered on them, and the "nobodies" have moved to cable access channels where, to say the least, production values and sometimes transmissions are poor and viewership small. Something else happened as a result of the lack of enforcement of the fairness doctrine: a deluge of TV tabloid exposes that don't even bother to attempt to explain the absence of the "other side"; we're getting more and more on the so-called prestige newscasts and magazine shows a virulent form of vigilante journalism -- indicting and convicting people on air for only alleged crimes, especially child abuse crimes, that, with closer inspection, never happened. (It was TV that caused California to spend over $120 million to presecute without conviction the McMartin Pre-School case.) We get televised show trials that pretend to be "fair," but are monuments to horrible exploitation and very likely unconstitutionally censored. I'm thinking specifically about the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith.
Acknowledging that only two out of 250,000,000 really know what happened, the trial was, in the final analysis, a mockery of equal justice. CNN and other broadcasters decided that not only would they cover Patricia Bowman's face with the infamous "blue blob," but would do as much as they could to keep her name from being revealed. Spokesmen for the networks said that they were honoring so-called "shield laws," which in effect are supposed to be civilized protections of privacy for alleged rape victims. I even heard a few say that they were forced by Florida law to protect Bowman's identity. It didn't matter that the very shield law they used to defend their actions was in fact declared unconstitutional, and therefore, during the trial, not law. It gets worse: the media did not extend to the defendant the same level of privacy. As a member of the Kennedy Clan, he became a "public figure" who could be freely smeared without fear of litigation. The press, at the conniving behest of a Betty Anderson-Harrington, whose endless string of men, parties, drug-taking, abortions, mental history were community knowledge, made a private man a figure of obscene public abuse. Watching as much of the trial as was televised, I'd have voted for acquittal simply because of Bowman's performance. Not that I believed Smith more -- his demeanor drove me nuts and there's every likelihood he's at least as good a liar as his accuser. But there's every reason to believe that Bowman wanted not only the "shield" protection but also the show trial; it would give her the opportunity to audition for the her own story: PALM BEACH PLACE. Her first breakdown was moving, and the second almost as touching, but by the third cue-prompt, there was a surprising actor's polish in her voice -- even the sniffles were too grand. (I kept wanting to blow my nose.) Then she showed a fatally clumsy intellectual side -- having answered "I don't know or remember" 162 times. She wasn't helped when the prosecution's star witness admitted to taking $40,000 from "A Current Affair" and falsified under oath as to when she first met the plaintiff, and it didn't help Bowman much either that her heavy drinking and popping of muscle relaxants the evening of the alleged crime were disclosed. Booze and relaxants -- legal kicks for the trust fund set. Did the media pay much attention this, or to the witness for the prosecution's repeated lies, or to the lack of physical evidence of any forceful assault, or the sheer mind-boggling fact that during the time of the alleged rape, nine people were sleeping in the Kennedy compound, which has no air conditioning? No, they went on their merry way with the protective blobs and rumors that Bowman, having lost the trial, would likely file a civil suit for unspecified damages. She didn't; and one look at her PrimeTime and Larry King appearances tells us why.
The popular, sometimes accurate perception that most if not all news reporters are hard-boiled or bloodthirsty -- or, in some cases are as corrupt as the corrupters they report on -- probably got started back with the late 19th century London newspaper wars, many of them centering on Jack the Ripper, and the feeling was reinforced during the American yellow journalism wars engaged in by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. And renewed by the proliferation of lurid sex & crime tabloids and cheapie magazines that displayed boobs and bums and dismembered guts on their front pages during the 50s. In no small way, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's THE FRONT PAGE, a play that has been steadily performed since it first opened back in 1928 and has been filmed at least four times, has done its share to perpetuate the perceptions by glorifying them in a macho reverie. The almost-validating bite of their play is that journalism wouldn't be fair without some lowdown hanky panky. Movie makers in recent years haven't given the press a clean bill of health either: ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, which on the surface looks like a salute to journalism, eventually taxes a fair-minded audience's receptiveness by not only using our national hatred of Nixon but also by using the mysterious "Deep Throat" as method and news source -- subterfuge that, in retrospect, fails to earn an acquittal: doesn't the accused have the right to face his accuser? NETWORK, the bitchkrieg that admonishes TV-induced paranoia that's a 1976 look into our present; ABSENCE OF MALICE, ridiculing a reporter's naivete; THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY," a slam against a reporter's desire to make a name for himself; UNDER FIRE, depicting the suicidet of reporters when they take sides in political battles; and THE PAPER dealing with tabloid economics vs. twenty four hour suppression of facts. Naturally these films aren't acceptable to most responsible journalists -- they mistakenly think they're above the moral muddle, like Helen Thomas, who one day suggests Hillary should hold a news conference to explain Whitewater and then turn around and publicly attack the first lady on CSPAN for doing what she suggested.
At the height of Joseph McCarthy's rampage against supposed American Communists in the 50s, the climate in newspaper and radio journalism -- TV not having quite come into its own, although it played the key national part in McCarthy's demise -- was so rotted and feverish with paranoia that lives were daily sacrifices to the vicious killing machines of yellow headlines. Only when it became clear that McCarthy could be broken by the soft-spoken rebukes of rational voices did the press then turn on him, vilifying him for exactly what they so freely practiced without fear of retribution. Arguably the nation absolved the press of its role in whipping up a frenzied battle over the semantics of political freedom because it shared in the guilt. Slanted journalism, according to the ultra-conservatives, hit an apex during the Vietnam War -- especially television's coverage of it. No war before and probably no war after -- as proved by the Persian Gulf episode -- has been more documented by the lie-detecting camera; the daily bloodletting images of the Michael J. Arlen-termed "Living Room War," shown on ABC, NBC and CBS, betrayed the weekly General William Westmoreland pep rallies that promised victory. The Agnew speeches, jerked off by shock troopers Patrick Buchanan, and William Safire, were designed to counter the rising revulsion and attack those, mostly in the press who were against the war, as "nattering nabobs of negativity," "pampered prodigies of the radical liberals," and all the verbal attacks were peppered with codes like "pusillanimous," "sniveling," "eunuchs," "effete soobs." After the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and after the fascist Chicago Democratic Convention, "The Time of Illusion" -- the title of Jonathan Schell's collection of political pieces originally written for The New Yorker -- came to a halt for most press outlets. (Only temporarily: softball reporting got retrofitted for Reagan, and would again go soft during the actual bombing duration of Bush's tantrum against Saddam.) The gulf between country right or wrong and a national conscience would only enlarge when Nixon's Watergate adventure destroyed him. But audiences, at least at this writing, may not have evolved as much as the technologies of TV communications: voters may not fail to recognize a scoundrel, but that doesn't mean they won't vote for one: the Republican'ts recently elected a prevaricating, deadbeat daddy as House Majority Leader who once served his former wife divorce paper while she was in the throes of a serious battle with cancer.
Actors as anchors, editors or reporters aren't exactly caricatures, or impersonations; they're more like examples of the fear of being hip. You almost hear the actors anxiously half-giggling, "Are we getting it right?" Jane Fonda couldn't get in right in THE CHINA SYNDROME. Neither Sigourney Weaver in EYEWITNESS nor Christine Lahti in JUST BETWEEN FRIENDS got it right. Sally Field was a wipeout in ABSENCE OF MALICE and Joanna Cassidy failed to get "radiospeak" down pat in UNDER FIRE. Mel Gibson had the romantic fantasy but hardly the authority of a foreign correspondent in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY and Sam Waterston, looking a little like D. H. Lawrence, was a Yale poseur as Pulitzer Prize winning Sydney Schanberg in THE KILLING FIELDS.
With receding hairline and toughened face, Glenn Close could play a bean-counting managing editor, ala Katherine Graham, but not as Ron Howard directs her in THE PAPER, and he allowed Michael Keaton to be too scatterbrained a city editor to have the kind of righteous punch aimed for. He'd make it as an editor for something as low as the New York Sun but it's an insult that he'd be considered for anything more than a janitorial position for a competing paper like the New York Sentinel, which surrogates as the N.Y. Times. Only when Robert Duvall, as the Sun's editor, flays into his own editorial pages filled with "columnists, guests columnists and celebrity columnists," is there a bit of reality. (It's the only time the silent half of the audience responded -- by cheering.) Maybe it's me; I just can't seem to accept actors playing overly-familiar faces or professions. The blurring of celebrity tends to discount whatever value is left of the real professional journalist. This happened to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward when Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play them, respectively, in the moldy, chiaroscuristic ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. Somehow the movie fakery intensifies the often fake seriousness and righteousness of the business of news. Perhaps this is why audiences felt and still feel a charge from Peter Finch's Howard Beale in the bombastic NETWORK, which earns masterpiece status compared to the snoozing BROADCAST NEWS and the juvenile PAPER. Finch's rantings were manifestly rigged, and the audience knew it, but the rigging was also premonitory and the audience felt it. (Pauline Kael's most grievous error of perception is her review of the movie, entitled "Hot Air.") Though Finch, William Holden and Faye Dunaway weren't required to be anything other than Paddy Chayefsky's conniptions about what the box was -- in fact, is -- turning all of us into, they did it with such frenzied passion that the warnings, particularly those expressed by Holden about the dangers of many of us turning into Dunaway's Diana, have real resonance; we HAVE become little Diana horrors. These actors have a rip-roaring good time (and so does the audience) with dialogue actors kill for. What glorious diarrhea of the hates! Despite a few passable one-liners, William Hurt in BROADCAST NEWS seems frustrated by a lack of words -- he's constipated. He'd be right at home in THE PAPER, in which the only bits of minimal interest take place in the men's room.
Andy Rooney once described BROADCAST NEWS as "one of the best movies I've ever seen," and, if that's not enough of a wound, inflicted this: "As a writer, sitting there watching the movie, I was exultant, to the point of tears, with (James Brooks') success in converting what was in his head to paper and then to film...A movie director doesn't really want good writing -- just a sheaf of papers that provide some notes and an outline to keep in mind where to set up the cameras and what to tell the actors to do...The best writers have, with a lot of exceptions which I won't stop to note, never written for television or motion pictures. This is partly because good writers are nervous about being associated with what usually are considered to be second-class art forms, but also because good writers don't know how to write for television or the movies, and they're reluctant to expose their ignorance of something they don't respect much, anyway." No reluctance on Rooney's part to expose his. And clearly, in THE PAPER, in spite of the clever ads for Compaq, Multi-Sync monitors and QuarkXPress, Howard isn't afraid to reveal his, either. The one inescapable fact we can derive from the media's triumph of hype over fact, shamelessness over decency is that ignorance is indeed bliss. "Gotcha!" without responsibility, without accountability, is destroying what moral value is left in journalism.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews