“Dad, you want me to choose my words so carefully, then you throw a word like ‘obsessive’ at me.“
“Now, unless I’m wrong, and please correct me if I am – But obsessive is practically a psychiatric term…”
-The woman as a child
The woman power-walks. She powerwalks in a blue tracksuit and leg warmers.
She drops quarters into a bank of news dispensers. Her father doesn’t need a PhD in psychology.
He was right, all those years ago, about his “preternaturally smart daughter.”
The power-walking news producer, Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) IS obsessive.
It’s a ritual. Like how she has a good cry before starting off her day at work, fraught with problem-solving, challenges signifying chaos, and angst, both personal and professional.
Nobody bothers to check on her.
She’s the boss. It’s a power-cry.
Friends and colleagues can expect to see Jane at work with six periodicals tucked under her arm like clockwork. Two, however, the Nebraska titles, are fictitious. Why? What is the production design telling us?
- An inside joke?
- A filmic reference, perhaps?
It’s both: an inside joke and a filmic reference.
The filmmaker, arguably, was awake when the late night talk show host told America to “call the Daily Planet,” the non-sequitur he used as an introduction to his remote.
The filmmaker also would’ve know that SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE was in production during his shoot.
Smallville, where Clark Kent spent his formative years, is not in Nebraska. The filmmaker, if you’ve heard the veteran of film and television speak in any capacity, from press junkets to interviews, comes across as a humble guy.
He wouldn’t want to draw you out of the movie with his own cleverness. It’s Kansas. Smallville is in Kansas.
The inside joke and filmic reference was meant to be subliminal. The Daily “Omaha Post” and Nebraska “Clarion” are not just anachronisms, they’re signposts to another filmic world.
They’re fake publications, just like The Daily Planet:
A blink-and-miss-it reference to the DC universe that coexists with DC, our nation’s capital. The power-walking and power-crying woman in a blue tracksuit with six periodicals under her arm is a news producer for the Washington bureau of an unnamed network affiliate. Jane Craig is the filmmaker’s proxy; a Cassandra whose influence can be felt backwards and forwards in time.
“There’s a civil war in Angola, another one in Beirut. New York City’s still facing default.“
“They finally caught up with Patty Hearst.“
“And the whole front page of the Daily News is Howard Beale.”
– Diane Christensen (1976)
“Our profession is in danger.”
-Jane Craig (1987)
An early December release, just in time for Christmas and Oscar contention, James L. Brooks’ BROADCAST NEWS, starring William Hurt, Holly Hunter, and Albert Brooks, was the second but more discernible film that initiated the filmic alchemization of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay about a news industry in decline from broadly drawn satire into speculative fiction.
Holly Hunter plays Jane Craig, a professional childless cat lady.
Who, in a pivotal scene that doubles as the filmic text’s overarching thesis, voices her disappointment that her speech at a local broadcast news anchors convention doesn’t mobilize her brothers and sisters in arms to advocate for a hard news renaissance. The symposium in ruins, seeing nothing in her rifled notecards that would win back these supposedly civic-minded people fleeing towards the exits, she abandons her polemic and runs footage of a Japanese dominoes competition.
Her rallying cry: “It’s not news:”
Hard news, for instance, like a policy change in the Salt II nuclear disarmament talks. To her barely-concealed horror, it inspires wild applause, not furrowed brows and silent introspection over being stewards of time-killing filler.
Lois Chiles, an ex-bond girl (MOONRAKER), is judiciously cast as reporter Jennifer Mack:
Who, in another era would’ve been a glass ceiling casualty.
Jennifer stands on the shoulders of countless weather girls who fought tooth and nail to be taken seriously. The capable field reporter could be a model for an old Virginia Slims Cigarettes ad campaign: “You’ve come a long way, Jennifer,” as in, ‘don’t call me “baby.’ ”
However, in 1987, The pendulum seemed to be swinging back.
In SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, David Warner (Sam Wanamaker) treats women as “eye candy”, exemplified by the nude woman above the fold of the Daily Planet’s front page as a means to assuage its readership from the cold war escalation in thirty-point type.
Neither Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) nor the boss’ daughter, Lacy Warner (Mariel Hemingway), take issue with the editor-in-chief’s pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Second wave feminism was on the wane.
Eye candy for eye candy’s sake, the filmmaker suggests in BROADCAST NEWS, was making a comeback but this time on the women’s own terms. During Jane’s presentation, a feather-haired and made-up blonde with one hand perched on the knee of Tom Grunick (William Hurt), cattily opines to the newsman about his future colleague:
“Oh, I’ve known so many women like that. They don’t like their looks, so they’re angry.”
It’s predictable and, maybe, expected that men would take umbrage with an opinionated woman lecturing them on being custodians of the public’s trust. But Jane somehow manages to repel the females, too.
The meteorologist, perhaps, conspiring with Tom against the poorly-received keynote speaker, antedates a well-received book on the millennia phenomena of “girl on girl” warfare in the workplace by a noted Atlantic staff writer.
The director, James L. Brooks, who has network news writing on his resume:
(THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW and LOU GRANT.)
He likes women, and respects females in the workplace.
Especially Jane, who in one sequence, gets sent on assignment in Nicaragua to cover its civil war, which the filmmaker utilizes as a juxtaposition against soft news, like the dominoes exhibition.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
Jane stares down death, holding her own against the same enemy gunfire as Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) just inches away in a South American jungle. Conversely, Lois Lane, despite being a successful working woman like Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), in retrospect, doesn’t have the same kind of cheerleader behind the camera. Her agency is undermined.
Not dissimilar to AIRPORT ’75, directed by Jack Smight.
The stewardess should’ve landed the plane.
In SUPERMAN II, when Lois discovers the truth about Clark Kent, she realizes, albeit undramatized, that her career-making interview with the Man of Steel was made possible by her friend’s unsound journalistic ethics.
In essence, she’s interviewing a coworker on the patio of her bachelorette pad.
Being the only girl in a boys club, you have to be a good sport; it goes with the territory, a rite of passage:
Like when your front page bonanza gets slightly debased by a tawdry headline: “I Spent the Night with Superman”, with its intended double entendre and innuendo to kindle the reader’s imagination with lurid imagery.
Despite what Perry White (Jackie Cooper) claims his long and storied newspaper to be, a “grand old dame”, in SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, the Daily Planet, in actuality, always was less a paper of record than tabloid; a “hussy”. Would the New York Times put Superman’s exploits on the front page? Seen through a modern lens, this alien could be a hoax, like UFO sightings.
“This is the first decent hard news story we had in months.”
-KXLA’s news manager
Did feminism peak in 1979, the year of “We Are Family”, the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar, and James Bridges’ THE CHINA SYNDROME?
Advertised as a thriller – and few events are more thrilling than a nuclear meltdown – the film is also about journalism.
In particular, women in journalism. And that’s thrilling, too.
Hired for her sex appeal by a Southern California TV news station, Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda), the human interest reporter, grows more exasperated by the day covering “happy news:” trivial featurettes such as singing telegrams, a fish doctor who makes house calls, and birthday parties for tigers. It’s just the sort of crowd-pleasing dreck that Jane Craig rails against.
At the nuclear power plant, which started out as another routine assignment, Kimberly and her small crew film a near-accident.
As a seemingly independent news station, KLAX has some autonomy, but Ventana’s P.R. team convinces Don Jackovich (Peter Donat), the station manager, that killing the story is in the public’s best interest. Undeterred, Kimberly, a former weather girl, goes rogue, making it up as she goes along like Nellie Bly without a head.
As some people say, you make your own luck.
She finds Jack Goddell (Jack Lemmon), a Ventana middle manager, instead of her cameraman, Richard Adams(Michael Douglas), at a tavern celebrating with friends after receiving a clean bill of health from their own regulators.
He complains to Kimberly that reporters “give our industry a very hard time.”
Reporters are supposed to give their subject a hard time. Ask the appropriate question. The tough question.
She asks Jack the tough question: “Was the public at any time in danger?” Jack lies through his teeth. Kimberly is green, new at this, investigative reporting, admitting as much during the informal interview, but not so green to file the story.
It was the seventies, after all. Everybody wanted to be the next Woodward or Bernstein.
The stenography practiced by contemporary reporters that passes as journalism would arrive soon enough.
But in 1979, the monoculture was still intact, so when a small town Pennsylvania radio director, suspecting that he was being fed lies, shouted at a press briefing to a real life nuclear plant spokesperson:
“You melted down that thing,” [meaning the core], “didn’t you?”
Just two weeks after THE CHINA SYNDROME opened on 534 screens.
It was because he remembered to use a superpower that reporters forget they have in their arsenal:
The follow-up question.
The small town radio director didn’t need no stinkin’ cape to beat Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow). THE CHINA SYNDROME documents, perhaps, the last gasp of journalism’s golden age.
Kimberly’s dogged pursuit of the truth, her integrity, inspired the small town radio director.
And paved the way for somebody like Jane Craig to fight and lose the battle against profits over people, the civic-adverse men with deep pockets beholden to their stockholders.
“I ain’t no superhero, lady. I’m just a kid from the neighborhood. I’m…”
-Paul Giamatti
It’s Halloween night, 1950, still lighted.
Batman’s sidekick, Robin, rings the doorbell. Superman, “The Caped Crusader”, The Green Knight, and ██████ ██████ as a kid are greeted by the homeowner: a middle-aged woman accustomed to social norms, handing out candied apples.
The strange kid’s maverick resolve to forego the act of dressing up flusters her. She asks the nascent iconoclast a question that offends him so greatly, he throws down his booty sack in disgust and wonders aloud about the human condition.
AMERICAN SPLENDOR, directed by Shari Springer Bergman and Robert Pulcini, makes its case for the underground comic book writer as a working class hero.
Adapted from a comic series’ namesake and OUR CANCER YEAR, co-written by Joyce Brabner, his wife:
The 2003 biopic, also starring Hope Davis and Judah Friedlander, the underground comic book writer makes a prediction that can be described as Chayefsky-like, practically oracular.
Which will be revealed in the next chapter…
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So when you cover the 90s, will a certain film with a cloying Diane Warren ballad (is there any other kind?) make the cut?
For all those times you stood by me
For all the truth that you made me see…