ABOUT JOURNALISTS AS MOVIE STARS

By Allan R. Andrews
Managing Editor, Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan

First Published July 21, 1996

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Readers know about Siskel and Ebert and other movie critics who run their opinions of movies across the television screen. Their job is to watch movies, hundreds of them.

As a young man, I went through a movie-watching spree. I worked as a messenger for a law firm that handled the accounts of several movie companies. Because of the connection, our company received complimentary passes to new movies.

Looking back, I suspect my position on the company's seniority list got me free passes no one else wanted. I sat through some awful movies: ``The Return of the Creature (from the Black Lagoon)'' and the Audie Murphy autobiography in which he played himself, ``To Hell and Back.''

Others I recall seeing were ``Mr. Roberts,'' the Jack Lemmon-Henry Fonda version of a play, and another Navy movie called ``Away All Boats.''

For some reason, most of my free passes got me in to see war movies, or at least movies involving the military.

At the time, one could say I drew my impressions of military life from movies, and my impression was an intense mix of hero-worship and hostility.

Recently, I came across what seems a dream job for a movie fan. It belongs to Matthew C. Ehrlich, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois.

Ehrlich designed a course for undergraduates that, he writes, ``is aimed at helping students . . . to think critically about journalism by watching movies about it.''

For fifteen or sixteen weeks, Ehrlich's students watch movies about journalists that have been produced since the 1930s.

To get a grade, students write six essays that address real journalism problems such as objectivity, cynicism, social justice or corporate profit, discussing how such problems are handled on celluloid.

Readers might be surprised at the number of movies made with journalism as a theme.

Ehrlich's list, in chronological order, includes: ``The Front Page'' (1931); ``Nothing Sacred'' (1937); ``His Girl Friday'' (1940); ``Meet John Doe'' (1941); ``Call Northside 777'' (1948); ``Ace in the Hole'' (1951); ``Deadline USA'' (1952); ``Teacher's Pet'' (1958); ``Medium Cool'' (1969); ``All the President's Men'' (1976); ``Network'' (1976); ``The China Syndrome'' (1979); ``Absence of Malice'' (1981); ``Under Fire'' (1983); ``Broadcast News'' (1987); and ``The Paper'' (1994).

Not on Ehrlich's list, but certain to be considered, are: ``The Front Page'' (remake 1974); ``The Year of Living Dangerously'' (1983); ``The Killing Fields'' (1984); ``Natural Born Killers'' (1994); ``I Love Trouble'' (1994), and ``Up Close and Personal'' (1996).

I wondered after reading about Ehrlich's class whether students were getting their impressions of life as a journalist from these movies in the same manner that I got the impression every soldier was Audie Murphy and every sailor was Henry Fonda.

I put the question to Professor Ehrlich in an e-mail interview: ``Do your students come to this course with an image of journalism that is colored by what they've viewed in movies?''
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`Yes,'' Ehrlich said, but he tempered his answer with what he called his students' ``defensiveness.''

``Their impression is that movies portray journalists very negatively, and they don't like that, since they of course are journalism students,'' he said.

He pointed out that movies about journalists are a mixed bag. For every negative image, there seems to be a positive, even romanticized image.

``I think many students did begin to realize,'' Ehrlich concluded, ``that the movies' portrayal of journalism was more complex and ambivalent than they may have thought at first.''

This reminded me of questions I was asked almost weekly when I was a reporter and ``Lou Grant'' was popular TV fare.

Questions to me frequently aimed at the TV show's accuracy: ``Is the life of a reporter really like that?''

My answer wreaked, to borrow Professor Ehrlich's words, of complexity and ambivalence.

``Yes,'' I'd say, ``It's accurate, but the drama is heightened and the timing is collapsed,'' sounding as if I'd memorized words I'd learned from a drama coach.

``Look,'' I'd say, ``Most working reporters would give a year's pay to be assigned just one story in a lifetime that had the drama and significance of the stories the TV reporters fall into every week.
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`The details of newsroom atmosphere are accurate, but it's like compressing a reporter's lifetime. Lou Grant's reporters never cover a boring or routine story.''

As one of my colleagues put it, ``Lou Grant was about a major metropolitan daily newspaper with two reporters and one photographer.''

The movie ``All the President's Men,'' which is supposed to have triggered a surge in young people seeking careers in journalism, is often held as an extremely accurate portrayal of journalists.

Professor Ehrlich admits this was one of his students' favorites and that his class spent much time challenging the myth that The Washington Post broke Watergate wide open.

Ehrlich points out that the movie largely ignores the role in the Watergate story of government agencies, the courts and strategically placed workers while exaggerating the role of the press in breaking the story open.

He thinks ``All the President's Men'' is a favorite of journalism students because of ``the heroic picture it paints of journalism.''

Once again, I'm drawn to Ehrlich's words, perhaps because it seems Hollywood -- much like journalism-- has difficulty handling complexity and ambivalence.

The movies would like to make all journalists heroes or villains. In real-life we're a little bit of both.

Like the rest of humanity that we sometimes one-sidedly depict.