SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Recently, our usual host Scott Detrow invited me to join one of his weekly movie conversations. This one is about a genre of filmmaking quite close to home for both of us. And now we're going to hear that chat.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: I will admit I have never once met a source in a parking garage.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN")
ROBERT REDFORD: (As Bob Woodward) I wouldn't quote you even as an anonymous source.
DETROW: I have never once heard swelling dramatic music play behind me as I flip through phone books or knocked on strangers' front doors.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: I have unfortunately never once stood in the middle of a newsroom delivering a righteous monologue to management at the top of my lungs.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE INSIDER")
AL PACINO: (As Lowell Bergman) Are you a businessman or are you a newsman?
DETROW: But as a journalist who loves movies, I have seen countless scenes like this in the movies that depict reporting, and I have gone back to them over and over again for motivation, inspiration and entertainment. So today, we are going to talk about a topic near and dear to our hearts, but also one that has played a big role in the movies over the years, and that is the journalism movie. To get into it all, I wanted to talk to some of my colleagues who know more than a thing or two about this. So joining me is Sacha Pfeiffer. Hey, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: Hi, Scott (laughter).
DETROW: I think a lot of listeners will know this, but you are the natural person to bring into this conversation because the Oscar-winning movie "Spotlight" was made about how you and your colleagues at the Boston Globe reported on the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Rachel McAdams played you doing your job.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPOTLIGHT")
RACHEL MCADAMS: (As Sacha Pfeiffer) Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Hi.
MCADAMS: (As Sacha Pfeiffer) I'm Sacha Pfeiffer from the Boston Globe.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah, what do you want?
MCADAMS: (As Sacha Pfeiffer) I'd like to speak with Thomas Kennedy (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) He doesn't live here anymore.
MCADAMS: (As Sacha Pfeiffer) Do you know where he lives? Sir, I'd just like to ask a few...
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR SLAMMING SHUT)
DETROW: And then we've also got Linda Holmes, a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast, who, in addition to always being a great guest to talk about the movies with, has written novels about podcasters and culture reporters. Linda, welcome back.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Hello, Scott. I have never been portrayed in a movie.
DETROW: There's always the future. We will see. I want to start with this - you see the previews. You see something go by your social media feed. You see a new movie is coming out based on a journalist, whether it's real life or fictional. It's coming in theaters. Sacha, I'll start with you. Are you excited when you see that? Are you skeptical? Are you wary?
PFEIFFER: I'm thinking, oh, please don't let another reporter be sleeping with their sources.
DETROW: (Laughter).
PFEIFFER: The movies always want to do that. I just wish they would stop, and so it's that wariness. And I think we'll go into more detail later about sort of the reputations that reporters get - some good, some bad. But that's my hesitation.
DETROW: No. 1 pet peeve, and rightfully so, for many of us - this is just a thing that does not happen, but it happens all the time in movies. Linda, what about you? Are you feeling good or wary when you see another journalism movie coming down the line?
HOLMES: Generally speaking, you know, a lot of the time, a journalism movie is going to be a kind of a thriller about people who are good at their jobs. And when that's the case, that is the kind of movie that tends to be up my alley. So a lot of times I'm optimistic.
DETROW: Linda, as we were getting ready to have this conversation, you had a really great observation. You broke down the journalism movie into a few different subgenres that you see again and again and again. Can you walk us through that?
HOLMES: Yeah. Well, the ones that tend to come to mind for people first are often what I would consider the kind of newsroom camaraderie movies. That is your "Spotlight," but also "All The President's Men." Those tend to be the ones where you're getting this - these exciting stories of reporters kind of on the phone in their office, at their desk, and a lot of them have the same kinds of scenes. You know, you referenced earlier that scene of the person sort of yelling out, you know, we got it, which Dustin Hoffman does in "All The President's Men."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN")
DUSTIN HOFFMAN: (As Carl Bernstein) We got it.
HOLMES: Another kind I think is the sort of rambling story of the reporting of a magazine feature.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ALMOST FAMOUS")
PATRICK FUGIT: (As William Miller) I'm here to interview Black Sabbath. I'm a journalist.
HOLMES: That's what "Almost Famous" is. So that's another kind. You also get these journalism movies that are very much indictments of the ethics. That would be something like "Nightcrawler"...
DETROW: Yeah.
HOLMES: ...Which Jake Gyllenhaal is in, about a kind of a bottom-feeding, I guess you'd say, photographer.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "NIGHTCRAWLER")
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: (As Louis Bloom) Will this be on television?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Morning news - if it bleeds, it leads.
HOLMES: So they fall into a few different buckets for me.
DETROW: Sacha, do you feel like - when you see all of these movies, like, what do you think this says about what pop culture thinks about what we do?
PFEIFFER: Well, I think that the movies seem to come in two buckets. There's the reporter as scoundrel. And it's very clear; we know this today. A lot of people don't like the media. They don't like the press. Some of that may be deservedly so, but I feel like our industry, when it works the best that it can, can fix broken things, can remedy injustices. So I feel very - I want to defend the honor of our profession. But so many movies show reporters lying, conniving. I'm thinking of "Ace In The Hole." It's this old black-and-white, wonderful Kirk Douglas movie. But this guy is just so irredeemably bad that he basically manufactures a news story, even to the detriment of someone's life and health.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ACE IN THE HOLE")
KIRK DOUGLAS: (As Chuck Tatum) I know what makes a good story because before I ever worked on a paper, I saw them on a street corner. You know, the first thing I found out? Bad news sells best.
PFEIFFER: But then there's also this category of heroic truth-seekers. So there are these two extremes, and I do have some concern about how the public perceives us. And I think our job is to explain the good that this industry can do.
HOLMES: What's interesting to me is that some of the ones where journalists are heroes are also the best at outlining the fact that sometimes what they do is ethically complicated. If you look at some of these films - "All The President's Men" is one. That is a journalist-as-hero movie, but they also do some things that may or may not be technically ethical. But they'll make you a little bit twitchy at places.
DETROW: So we already mentioned the No. 1 trope we hate that has - that is not real life at all, and that is romantic relationships with sources. Are there other tropes that you see - either of you see come up in again and again that you just - that your skin prickles as soon as you see it?
HOLMES: Well, I always wonder - when I watched "Spotlight" again before we had this conversation, I always wondered how Sacha feels about the way that they show investigative reporting happening and that it tends to happen in kind of a very quick montage and the struggle between, like, an exciting movie and, like, the slog of actually gathering information.
PFEIFFER: Well, I've said this many times in the past, but I had enormous reservations about any involvement with that movie. Ultimately, the only reason I agreed is that I thought they're never going to make it. It's an unpalatable topic. Clergy sex abuse will never get funded.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPOTLIGHT")
NEAL HUFF: (As Phil Saviano) I was 11. And I was preyed upon by Father David Holly in Wester. And I don't mean prayed for. I mean preyed upon.
PFEIFFER: But in the end, they made this beautiful tribute to the profession that also showed in a very authentic way what the work involves - a lot of research, a lot of creating databases, a lot of door-knocking. I rewatched "All The President's Men" in preparation for talking about this, and I found it a little slow. It was a procedural but not that fast moving. And I think what "Spotlight" did really skillfully was show the procedure and convey the tedium, but do it in a very quick, watchable way, like montages of all of us at the library or working at home or knocking on doors.
DETROW: What specifically were you thinking as that process began, knowing the work you did and knowing what the movies are often like? Is there one or two things where you were like, I really hope they get this, right?
PFEIFFER: Well, I was wary because my general gut says, don't get involved with Hollywood; it can only go badly. We know many people who've had - been portrayed in movies and feel that they were misportrayed (ph). But I think we had a great director, Tom McCarthy. We had a great writer, Josh Singer. They did a beautiful job. I did find myself being careful about how much I shared about my private life because I knew that whatever I told them would end up on screen, and I wanted to have some control over that.
DETROW: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: One of my colleagues at the Globe called "Spotlight" "Chariots Of Fire" for journalists. And I think that's what it is. It's an industry that needs a morale boost, and that movie gave it a morale boost.
DETROW: Yeah. Linda, you've been a little bit on the flip side of that, in that, I don't think as of yet, you've written a screenplay, but you've written fiction. You've written novels. You've had journalists who are characters in your novels. Has there been a moment where you're creating a character or a scene and you go, OK, I know I'm going to have to change a little bit of what real life is like, but I need to do it for the plot?
HOLMES: Yeah, I tried to be as honest as I could in writing about podcasting without making it really dry or getting too far into the weeds about technicalities. And I tried to find a couple of opportunities to use something that might seem like a minor thing, like editing audio to take out, you know, weird noises and stuff like that, in a narrative way.
DETROW: I love a good montage, you know?
PFEIFFER: (Laughter).
DETROW: And you can convey a lot of information in the montage, but in real life, it's the montage every day over and over again. You know, it's the 30th time you're running through the montage is maybe when you get that important piece of information.
PFEIFFER: Exactly. The other thing that surprised me about the "Spotlight" experience is that there are scenes in the movie of us, which we did in real life, knocking on strangers' doors. Many people said to me, do you really do that? And I thought, of course we do it. It's a basic part of reporting. It made me realize that a lot of people don't understand what basic reporting is about, and that movie helped show it.
DETROW: You know, one thing about this is that some of these movies really influence how we all think of these institutions - The Washington Post in "All The President's Men" and so many other movies. CBS News, Linda, I feel like plays this prominent role in movies about broadcast journalism - "The Insider," "Good Night, And Good Luck." But, you know, watching "The Insider" this week, which is about choices that CBS is making in this moment of potentially being bought and weighing the blunt financial picture they have to make versus what is right editorially, I can't help but think of real life and think about the fact that real life is not as clean-cut as these movies.
HOLMES: Yeah, I think that's true. And one of the things that you see, I think, particularly in "The Insider," the journalists who are working for "60 Minutes" are trying desperately to hang on to something they know is extremely valuable, which is that when they tell people that something is true, people believe that it's true.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE INSIDER")
PACINO: (As Lowell Bergman) Does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we going to air it? Of course not.
HOLMES: And when they tell people that they have checked something out, people believe it. And this comes up somewhat in "Good Night, And Good Luck" about Edward R. Murrow as well. You can sense in that film that they know how valuable that is, and they know how valuable that currency is.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK")
DAVID STRATHAIRN: (As Edward R. Murrow) We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. Good night and good luck.
HOLMES: And you're absolutely right that we are in a situation now where, for whatever sort of combination of reasons, I do not think people give that same benefit of the doubt, certainly to those kinds of large organizations. Maybe some of that is healthy, maybe some of it is not. But you don't see that same assumption anymore. You know, as CBS is navigating its current situation, you don't have that same assumption - I trust that whatever they do, it's going to be completely trustworthy to me. And whether they're right or wrong, you can feel how that pop culture sense of what CBS News is was very alive at the time of those films of "The Insider" and "Good Night, And Good Luck" in a way that maybe it is not now.
PFEIFFER: There's another older movie that I think really gets across why reporting can be so much fun. And it's "His Girl Friday"...
DETROW: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ...Cary Grant. I had never watched this before. I just watched it last week - so funny, so charming. It's like a black-and-white romcom. And not only do they have great chemistry as characters or the couple, but they really get across how reporting is exciting. It's kind of like getting paid to go to school and learn things. And if you like being a student, that's really exciting. It's a funny movie because Cary Grant has basically messed up his marriage by pursuing a story during his honeymoon. He's so obsessed. His sort of ex-wife Hildy, Rosalind Russell, says, I'm done with you. And at one point, he says to her, you may want to, Hildy, but you can't quit the newspaper business.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HIS GIRL FRIDAY")
CARY GRANT: (As Walter Burns) You can get mad (ph) all you want to Hildy, but you can't quit the newspaper business.
ROSALIND RUSSELL: (As Hildy Johnson) Oh, why not?
GRANT: (As Walter Burns) I know you, Hildy. I know what quitting would mean to you.
RUSSELL: (As Hildy Johnson) And what would it mean?
GRANT: (As Walter Burns) It would kill you.
PFEIFFER: And there is something about this business that keeps people coming back. And I like that that movie, without trying to send a big message, a societal message, shows the joy of the job.
DETROW: That is NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer and Linda Holmes. Thanks to both of you.
PFEIFFER: Thank you.
HOLMES: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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