Opinion: Headless body in topless bar? That ain’t news. Headless biker in from-beyond revenge scheme? That’s news!
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For the deadline-ignoring navel-gazers who haunt Jim Romenesko’s Media News, the premiere of Zodiac offers another chance (of many) to ponder a perennial favorite topic: how newsrooms are depicted in the movies. But it’s Glenn Garvin, TV critic for the Miami Herald and staunch anti-communist, who wins walking away with a hidden-in-plain-sight observation: In the many years since Cary Grant in His Girl Friday told his typesetter to leave the rooster story alone (because ‘that’s human interest’), the greatest Hollywood version of the newspaper business has been...Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Says Garvin:
Darren McGavin played reporter Carl Kolchak, who week after week busted his butt on investigative pieces uncovering rings of vampires, werewolves and zombies, only to have every single one spiked by his craven, lickspittle editors. Fierce pressure from ASNE and other special-interest lobbies got the show shut down after a single season, and ever since, vampires and their slavering editorial quislings have gotten a free pass from Hollywood.
Glenn is goofing with that reference to pressure from American Society of Newspaper Editors (unless he’s really privy to the kind of confidential information only a tireless reporter in a beaten-up straw hat can gather). And honorable people can disagree on whether Simon Oakland’s hotheaded Tony Vincenzo qualified as a ‘lickspittle.’ But I fully countenance his praise for Kolchak, a classic of seventies television that, despite occasional rediscoveries and a failed remake, has never gotten the cultural-historical attention it deserves. During its initial run, in fact, Kolchak persuaded me that I wanted to be a newspaper journalist—a position that to my six-year-old mind seemed to be a quasi-official position invested with vague powers of subpoena and arrest, but also a fun and dispreputable gig that would leave you free to laugh off the demands of strutting authority figures.
It ended up being neither of those things, of course. Beware of realizing youthful wishes, which come true decades too late, are achieved long after they have lost any meaning, and generally turn out to suck. The challenge for Hollywood is that the ultimate job of a journalist is to sit down and write stuff—a visually uninteresting activity, especially since the end of the typewriter era. Where’s the newsroom movie that features a half-hour sequence of the hero staring at a blank screen, repeatedly hitting backspace, using somebody’s business card to extract an uneaten piece of lunch from his teeth, and in a bravura Steadicam shot, shuffling down to the supply closet to see if there’s any letterhead left? The workplace sequences in Kolchak (listen to the affectless but oddly compelling opening score) did a fair job of capturing the musty, 80/20 environment of a newsroom (populated by brilliant character actors like Ruth McDevitt and John Fiedler), and I should probably blame the show for its small part in bringing me to my current predicament. But I still live in hope that I’m just one manitou or demonically possessed Senate candidate away from winning a Pulitzer, or being fired.
Courtesy of Jesse Walker, who gets an authentic-sounding comment from Tony Vincenzo himself.