Here's a dirty little secret about journalism: With all of that excitement comes a great deal of tedium.
Sitting at desks, waiting for phone calls. Meetings with editors (or, if you're an editor, meeting with writers). It can be a rather sedentary business, and that makes exciting journalism movies seem all the more miraculous. Good filmmakers can craft thrillers about lives that aren't always thrilling.
As luck would have it, you can catch two fine examples in theaters this season. The good one, out now, is Truth, the story of how CBS News producer (and Dallas resident) Mary Mapes and legendary anchor Dan Rather came to loggerheads with their corporate overlords. The great one, opening Friday, is Spotlight, which chronicles the Boston Globe's investigation of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy.
Both films have a few things in common with the standard-bearer of journalism movies, All the President's Men. They dramatize the act of speaking truth to power, arguably the profession's primary function. They illustrate why the pursuit of information and context remains a noble cause. More important for the average moviegoer, they move like the dickens. They create a fierce narrative momentum from the basic building blocks of the journalist's job.
Spotlight director Tom McCarthy felt that thrust as he wrote the screenplay with Josh Singer. "What I found is it creates its own propulsion, its own excitement and its own sense of mystery to some extent," McCarthy says in a phone interview. "The journalists didn't know, and hopefully audiences don't quite know, where this is leading to next."
Spotlight creates this sensation even as it shows the interminable legwork that goes into reporting a big story. The Globe staffers, played by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, among others, meet with sources in bars and cafes, at charity dinners and on the golf course. Their boss, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber), is new to Boston; he provides the outsider perspective often needed to topple sacred cows. Spotlight depicts journalism as a complex and heroic calling. Journalists, needless to say, will love it.
They should like Truth, too, though it might make them a little sad. You might remember the controversy at the movie's core: Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and Rather (Robert Redford) broke a 2004 story detailing alleged special treatment of George W. Bush during his Vietnam-era National Guard service, only to see their careers collapse amid a flurry of enraged blog posts and competitors' media reports that questioned the veracity of their documents (though not always the information contained therein).
Mapes remains adamant that CBS forced her and Rather out under pressure from the network's corporate parent, Viacom, which had close ties with the Bush administration. CBS has refused to carry advertising for the film. CBS spokesman Gil Schwartz, played in Truth by Steve Bastoni, issued a pithy assessment of the movie: "It's astounding how little truth there is in Truth." (In the parlance of All the President's Men, that might qualify as a nondenial denial.) It's impossible to watch Truth and not think of The Insider, another movie in which CBS News doesn't come off particularly well (and which the network didn't particularly like).
Mapes, who won a Peabody Award for her CBS reporting on Abu Ghraib after she was let go, stood before a Dallas audience recently and offered a theory on why the public has an appetite for movies like Spotlight and Truth.
"Maybe we have a journalism-sized hole in our culture," she said. "Maybe we have noticed there's something missing. I hope we have, because there is. We used to live in a 24-hour news cycle; now we live in a 140-character news cycle. I don't believe that movies change the world or anything like that, but I love it that people are talking."
That's the irony of recent journalism movies: They're thriving at a time when legacy media face unprecedented challenges, from digital adaptation to financial compromise. For journalists, even the inspiring Spotlight carries subtle questions. Chief among them: How many newsrooms still have the experience, resources and gumption to take on a force as massive as the Catholic Church? The elegiac tone of Truth is front and center; in Spotlight, it lingers between the lines.
McCarthy and Singer, as well as Truth writer/director James Vanderbilt, did plenty of their own reporting in making their films. They interviewed the principal figures, and they refused to create composite characters, as filmmakers often do. McCarthy had a reliable sounding board in David Simon, the former journalist and creator of The Wire. In the final season of that series, McCarthy played a reporter who commits the cardinal sin of making up his stories (for which he's awarded a Pulitzer Prize). It's fun to view Spotlight as McCarthy's penance.
"We knew we had to get it right," McCarthy says of Spotlight. "It had to be accurate. We need journalists to see this movie and say, 'OK, that's how we do it.'"
Spotlight and Truth are merely the latest and biggest journalism movies to arrive recently. Others include Nightcrawler, in which local TV news takes a savagely satirical drubbing; Kill the Messenger, which dramatizes the troubling demise of the late San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb (a story with echoes of Truth); and Rosewater, the story of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian government after reporting on the country's election.
Rosewater reminds us that it's more dangerous to commit journalism in some parts of the world than in others. It also reinforces why vigorous reporting is more important now than ever. It ultimately comes down to providing information about people and institutions that often prefer operating in the shadows.
That usually makes for a good story, and there's always room for those at the movies.
