Going Home

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Billy (Gordon Pinsent): It's finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it, that's what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, what do you see? [Points at dark clouds on the horizon] Tell me the headline.

Quoyle (Kevin Spacey): Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds?

Billy: Imminent Storm Threatens Village.

Quoyle: But what if no storm comes?

Billy: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.

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Some actors and actresses become typecast because they play a certain kind of role so well.

When I saw Kevin Spacey in "The Shipping News," which made its big–screen debut on this day in 2001, I kind of had that sensation about him. He is always playing dysfunctional characters, I thought to myself.

That wasn't really fair. His characters aren't always dysfunctional — but his character in "The Shipping News" sure was.

In my experience dysfunctional people generally don't owe that condition to any one person or one event. Oh, sure, there are some who do, but for most it seems to have been an ongoing process to which many people and many events contributed. So it was with Spacey's character in "The Shipping News."

Some of it was beyond his control — his emotionally abusive father, for example — but some of it was simply the outcome of the kind of bad choice that most of us make at some point in our lives — like marrying the wrong person. In Spacey's case, that was Cate Blanchett, who played the town tramp (and was virtually unrecognizable); she gave Spacey a daughter and took off.

He got an answering machine message from his father, who hinted that he and his wife would be gone soon, presumably in a murder–suicide, and, it turned out, they were. Spacey barely had time to mourn that loss when he got news about his wife. She and her, uh, friend took a plunge off a bridge and died when the car hit the water.

His aunt (Judi Dench) stopped to see him as she was en route to the family's ancestral home in Newfoundland; Spacey and his daughter wound up accompanying her. He'd been an ink setter for a newspaper in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and naturally gravitated to the local newspaper, The Gammy Bird — but was hired as a reporter, not an ink setter. His standing assignment was to cover the shipping news — a pretty important beat in a seaside community.

He wasn't a trained journalist, but he took the initiative to write an article he hadn't been assigned to write. When it was published, to his surprise (and to the surprise of his co–workers), his publisher (Scott Glenn) liked it well enough to make him a columnist.

He also became friendly with a young widow named Wavey (Julianne Moore).

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Wavey lost her husband when his ship went down during a storm. I thought one of her most powerful lines must surely resonate with people who have lost someone to whom they were close — in other words, everyone.

"It was four years ago," she said of the loss, "and it was yesterday."

That was a realistic observation, I thought then (and still think today; my hat is off to whoever wrote that line). When you lose someone close to you, the moment you experienced the loss is always lurking just beneath the surface. No matter how much times passes, it doesn't take much to bring back the sharpness of the pain as if it were happening for the first time.

I was impressed with that — but mostly, I think, I was impressed with the portrayal of a small–town newspaper office and staff. I have worked for newspapers large and small, and the atmosphere in a small newspaper office is special. You know you aren't likely to be or work with a Pulitzer Prize winner at a small–town newspaper — after all, William Allen Whites are few and far between — but the work that is done at a small–town newspaper every day truly is the embodiment of what community journalism is all about. It may not be exciting or particularly interesting to anyone outside what may be a rather narrow circulation area, but to those readers in your newspaper's readership, local news is important to them — and there is nowhere else they can get it.

Not even in the digital age.

But there is a dark side to small–town newspapers, and Spacey encountered it in the form of the editor, who apparently made it his mission to get Spacey's character fired. If you haven't seen the movie, you'll have to watch it to find out whether he succeeded.

Well, I guess there is probably at least one sociopathic personality in every newsroom, even the small ones. I'm sure it isn't limited to newsrooms, though. Perhaps there is one in every workplace.

But it didn't stop Spacey's character.

Telling the Tale of Special Kind of Men

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"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, 750 miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it: The sound barrier. Then, they built a small plane, the X–1, to try and break the sound barrier. And men came to the High Desert in California to ride it. They were called test pilots. And no one knew their names."

Opening narration (by Levon Helm)

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With the recent death of Scott Carpenter, John Glenn is the last of the Mercury Seven astronauts who is still standing.

Their adventures are part of American history now. It is easy enough to read their stories, to learn of their accomplishments, to see how space travel came to be seen as routine by ordinary folks because a handful of extraordinary men had the courage to explore the unknown.

A lot of folks living today simply don't appreciate how hazardous it all was when it was still new to everyone. There were no guarantees of success.

Those early, tentative steps outside Earth's atmosphere seem quaint to 21st–century eyes, I suppose. The first couple of flights lasted less than half an hour, the next three only a matter of hours. It wasn't until the sixth flight that a man spent more than a day in space.

That was also the last one–man mission.

All that was before my time, but my grandmother told me stories of how seemingly everyone was caught up in what was happening, and people held their breath as the rockets lifted off, uncertain what would happen when a huge vehicle was thrust into the sky with enough force to burst through the atmosphere — and one lone man sitting at the top, hurtling into the heavens.

There was so much that people didn't know then. I guess that is hard for people of this century to comprehend. But those astronauts were latter–day pioneers, daring to run into the darkness.

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As a student of history, I found the story that was told in "The Right Stuff," which was released as a movie on this day in 1983, rang true to what I had been told and what I had read. In fact, I read much of it in Tom Wolfe's book, upon which the movie was based.

"The Right Stuff" never needed to create dramatic moments. There were many human dramas in the lives of the Mercury Seven.

Scott Glenn played Alan Shepard, the first man in space whose historic journey lasted only 15 minutes. That mission would seem laughably short to folks today, almost like a Saturday Night Live parody, but it was met with a hero's welcome, a ticker–tape parade and a visit to the White House to dine with President and Mrs. Kennedy.

The astronauts' wives, who felt they had made a deal with NASA to be supportive of the program and to make sacrifices in its name, believed they would be repaid for their loyalty the way Shepard's wife had been. But when the mission of Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) was regarded as a failure because the capsule sank, Grissom's wife (Veronica Cartwright) bitterly complained about the unfair treatment they received.

"I thought I was going to be Honorable Mrs. Astronaut," she said, "and I ended up being Honorable Mrs. Squirming Hatchblower."

Perhaps it was inevitable that the mission of John Glenn (Ed Harris) got the most attention in the movie. He was the first to orbit the Earth and, consequently, witnessed things no man had seen before.

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"It takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially when it's on national TV."

Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard)

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But the movie was really a salute to Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier and, although not one of the Mercury Seven, the test pilot against whom all other test pilots were judged.

When it comes to heroic figures, it's hard to beat Yeager. He withheld the fact that he had broken his ribs while on a horseback ride with his wife (played in the movie by Barbara Hershey) so he could fly the experimental X–1 — and, in the process, he became the first man to break the sound barrier, to conquer "the demon."

Yeager was a persistent presence in a true story that read like a novel and had the same feeling in the movie. It was funny, poignant and thrilling to watch a dramatization of the by–the–seat–of–our–pants approach to space travel that was taken by people who really had no idea how to do what they were doing.

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The risks were many, and the rewards, by comparison, were few.

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Girl at Pancho's (O–Lan Jones): I just noticed that a fancy pilot like Slick over there doesn't have his picture on your wall. What do you have to do to get your picture up there anyway?

Pancho Barnes (Kim Stanley): You have to die, sweetie.

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