The Unofficial mediabistro.com Fall Media Film Festival
Confidentially, I will watch “ShowGirls” anytime it comes on TV, but every good media person should know the best media movies.
THE GOOD
The Educational, The Moving and The Grittily Realistic…
All the President’s Men (1976, Directed by Alan Pakula)
If media movies constitute an actual genre, All the President’s Men is the hands-down sin qua non. The classic dramatization of the newspaper investigation that brought the Nixon administration to its knees (insert the obvious “Deep Throat” joke here) also made minor celebrities of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein by, for once, making journalists sexy.
The Killing Fields (1984, Directed by Roland Joffe)
This Oscar-winning film follows the plight of New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg as he reports on the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal atrocities in Cambodia and tries to save his assistant Dith Pran from an equally dark fate.
Shattered Glass (2003, Directed by Billy Ray)
Ray’s film is based on the true story of Stephen Glass, up-and-coming reporter for The New Republic (a.k.a., “The In-Flight Magazine of Air Force One,” if you happen to miss the references), who got himself fired for committing the cardinal journalistic sin—presenting fiction as journalism. “Are you mad at me?” Glass (played by Hayden Christensen) asks friends and colleagues repeatedly. To which the viewer would have to reply after five minutes of Glass’s whining, “Yes, Stephen. Yes, we are.”
Check out the rest. Of course you know we’ve missed some, too. My additions:
The Hucksters, in which Clark Gable makes advertising look way sexy.
And speaking of Rhett Butler, he plays a man who will do anything to get his story in It Happened One Night–as long as ‘anything’ includes hanging out with Claudette Colbert.
Geraldo Rivera could learn a thing or two from Broadcast News.
And while more of an acting movie than a media movie, PR can build you up and tear you down again in “All About Eve.”
Those are just a few. Write in and let me know your additions to this list.
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