What Becomes a Reporter Most? ‘Up Close’ Is Close

This just in.

“Up Close & Personal” is only incidentally a movie about two television journalists. Instead it’s a big, crescendoing romance that, given the heart-pumping sexual tension between its two stars, Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, would be as successful were its protagonists in other occupations. (Master plumber Warren Justice and his apprentice, Tally Atwater, fall in love and into bed. His career is flushed, hers soars.)

Yet what the saga of Warren and Tally articulates about TV news, in a broad sense, is on target: Being a potential star is far likelier to get you somewhere than being a credible journalist with high standards.

“Broadcast News,” a superior romantic comedy with different priorities, said about the same thing in 1987. It did so through both Aaron Altman, the highly capable and ethical reporter whose frustrations at the network ultimately drove him and his wisecracks to Oregon (as if working in local news would ease his migraine), and Tom Grunick, the unschooled yet charismatic anchor-in-waiting whose career flourished despite his lack of smarts and his penchant for unethical corner-cutting. In a story on date rape, Tom put himself on camera and faked a tear that he later edited into an interview. When he was warned that he could be fired for things like that, he replied that he’d been promoted for things like that.

Tally isn’t purposely deceptive. Yet like Grunick, it’s mostly her camera presence that boosts her. And so heady, glamorous and exciting is her life as a local news star and can’t-miss network anchor prospect--she gets to cover a prison riot from inside the prison--that “Up Close & Personal” may drive young Pfeifferphiles en masse to journalism schools in hopes of emulating her. Wow, what a wonderful way to get famous and make a lot of money.

You wouldn’t expect these budding journalists to copy that dinosaur Warren unless they hungered for a career of hard knocks.

Tally is on a fast track to Diane Sawyerdom, with only a couple of brief pit stops. She’s feisty--and sexy and gorgeous, of course. But what she also has is something that can’t be taught or precisely defined, a quality you know only when you see it.

Warren sees it early in the film when she stumbles through her tryout as a weathercaster at the Miami Beach station where he’s news director. “She eats the camera,” he says in awe. A few hairstyles later, she’s eating a snazzier camera in Philadelphia while getting ogled like a hunk of French pastry by the big boys at the network. Clearly, a TV dish is being born.

But poor Warren. He amasses an admirable career and coaches Tally to the top, only to trip over his principles, becoming blacklisted because he’s hard-boiled about integrity and stubbornly advocates sound, old-fashioned news values over shallowcasting. Will someone please pull the plug on this antique? No wonder that, despite outstanding credentials as a local news director and world-class reporter, he’s forced to forage for work and martyrdom in the freelance outback of TV journalism.

Whimsy? “Up Close & Personal” has no agendas beyond good entertainment and profits, and is a serious primer only on the packaging of a box-office hit.

Yet glance around and observe whose careers are on the rise in TV news in the mid-’90s and you’ll observe a swelling of Tallys, fewer and fewer Warrens. Thus is “Up Close & Personal,” despite the eclipsing prominence of its lovely, extravagant romancing, a microcosm of today, flawed in many of its details about the industry but acutely accurate in depicting its priorities.

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Not nearly as cool as Tally, though, was Jessica Savitch, who flamed briefly at NBC News in the late 1970s and early 1980s and whose tragic story inspired the largely upbeat one told by “Up Close & Personal.”

Although its credits say it was “suggested” by Alanna Nash’s “Golden Girl,” rarely has a movie been less like the biography that sparked it. As noted by Nash, Savitch was a local news wunderkind who was pushed forward too swiftly and whose star qualities earned her a disastrous shot at doing serious news at NBC well before she was ready. She was erratic, a tormented personality whose tumultuous personal life included a reported dependency on cocaine. At age 30, she was a network anchorwoman. Yet when she died several years later in a 1983 auto accident, her career was already spiraling downward.

Savitch’s agent near the end of her life was Ed Hookstratten, who for years has represented top TV news stars. He’s listed as an executive producer of “Up Close & Personal,” whose script underwent scores of tenderizing rewrites until reaching its present degree of softness.

Hookstratten optioned the rights to Nash’s book upon its publication in 1988. “He told me it was going to be a great movie,” Nash said recently by phone from her home in Louisville, Ky. “But he also said, ‘It isn’t going to be the Jessica from your book. It’s going to be the Jessica I remember.’ I think the movie is his fantasy of what she was about.”

The Disney movie also bears no resemblance to “Almost Golden,” a Savitch biography by Gwenda Blair that cable’s Lifetime network turned into a grim movie last year starring Sela Ward as a messed-up Savitch.

The book on Savitch was that she was a work in progress, but not enough progress to match the premature anointing she was given by NBC. The book on “Up Close & Personal” is that it’s what it intends to be, a sweet love story that, almost offhandedly, punctuates the bitter reality we see every day on the small screen.