TV

Hal Clement, KFMB-TV Channel 8’s 4:30 p.m. anchor, was the appropriate guest at Southern California’s premiere screening of “Broadcast News,” a pre-season inaugural for the Cinema Society of North San Diego County at Edwards San Marcos Cinemas last week.

The anchor said he found director James Brooks’ work “the most accurate film ever made about TV news by far,” praising it for being the “first movie to depict us as not being ogres sticking microphones in victims’ faces.”

Clement did have one reservation about Tom Grunick, the charismatic but mentally unendowed anchor played by William Hurt, however. “No one who starts in sports and goes to news is an airhead,” said Clement with a smile. Clement, who similarly began his career covering sports for KGTV-TV Channel 10, pointed out, too, that unlike Grunick, he can think on his feet, something he proceeded to do quite ably in a short talk followed by a question-and-answer period.

He said the film did a good job conveying the stress level of the profession. “Every person in TV has run over at least three other people trying to get a piece on the air. It’s the nature of the business.”

He even defended it against one viewer’s complaint that the picture was unduly pessimistic about the personal lives of people in the field. “There are an awful lot of unhappy marriages in network news. It’s a profession that in many cases draws neurotics. Maybe I’m one. . . . It’s not a real existence to talk into a piece of glass that represents 200,000 people.”

The 500-seat house was packed at the screening, which beat out the Los Angeles premiere of the film by one day. The Cinema Society of North San Diego County, a companion to Andrew Friedenberg’s four-season-old Cinema Society of San Diego based in the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, is planning to show Cher’s new film, “Moonstruck,” as its season opener Jan. 12.