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.

A Libeled Lady Is Like a Woman Scorned

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"You can't build a life on hate or a marriage on spite. Marriage is too important. Mine only lasted an hour, but I know."

Connie (Myrna Loy)

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Since I worked for newspapers for many years, I have a residual fondness for movies about newspapers and newspaper people — as long as the stories are reasonably plausible.

And the story in "Libeled Lady," which premiered on this day in 1936, was plausible. Reasonably so, anyway.

It is important to remember that it was a screwball comedy, a genre that was at its peak in the '30s and '40s. That raised the bar for the quality of the movie. And it didn't tell a true story, which freed it to tell wildly exaggerated jokes without having to be accountable to the harsh truths of the business. Screwball comedies existed to entertain, not enlighten.

It is also important to remember how serious the issue of libel is. At the larger newspapers, entire legal departments are maintained on the premises almost entirely to deal with the subject of libel, how to avoid it, what to do when faced with legal action and so on. When I was in college, nearly all of my journalism classes had sections devoted to the subject of libel. I can't claim to know what it is like in journalism classes at four–year schools these days, but I don't think it was possible to graduate with a degree in journalism when I was in school if one did not have at least some comprehension of the subject of libel.

Screwball comedies were like the forerunners to Saturday Night Live, I suppose. They could take something serious like libel and turn it into a joke that kept feeding on itself. The story of "Libeled Lady" really was ridiculous, silly, but it was built on a deadly serious theme.

The movie was good enough that it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. It lost to "The Great Ziegfeld."

I believe it deserved the nomination, but what was it about the movie that merited a Best Picture nomination? Most of the time you can get an idea from the other nominations the movie received. Was it the acting? The directing? The film editing? The music? The story? What was it?

Well, you can't tell from the Oscar nominations because "Libeled Lady" received no other nominations. By modern standards, though, a Best Picture nomination for a comedy — especially a screwball comedy — is a considerable achievement by itself.

The Oscars tend to look down on comedies today even though the number of permissible Best Picture nominations has been 10 — the same as in the '30s — for several years. In the years when only five movies could be nominated for Best Picture, comedies were rarely among the nominees. These days stars tend to get pigeonholed as comedic or dramatic actors, and there is little crossover.

But in the '30s, everyone did screwball comedies — even (or perhaps that should be especially) if they also did dramatic movies. Screwball comedies were popular escapism in the Depression. They were money in the bank.

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And "Libeled Lady" heavily promoted the fact that it had four bankable stars — William Powell, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow.

Harlow and Powell were a couple off the screen, and Harlow wanted a particular role so that she and Powell would end up together. But the studio wanted to pair Powell with Loy to capitalize on the popularity of their Thin Man movies, the second of which premiered on Christmas Day 1936, and several other movies they made together, including "The Great Ziegfeld." (It was probably a prudent decision. Powell and Loy made more than a dozen movies together.)

Even so, in the role she played, Harlow did get to play a wedding scene with Powell. Considering that Harlow died before she and Powell could marry in real life, that was probably a fitting consolation prize.

Screwball comedies often have elements of film noir, but they are frequently comparable to some of the great stage comedies of all time as well. Some people may see elements of "Lysistrata" or "The Importance of Being Earnest" when they watch a screwball comedy. I usually see elements of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" or "Much Ado About Nothing."

And, for me, "Libeled Lady" has always had a distinctly Shakespearean feeling to it.

Tracy played a newspaper editor whose newspaper had published a libelous story about an heiress (Loy), claiming that she broke up a marriage. The editor wanted to set her up so she would have to drop the lawsuit she had filed against him. He recruited a former reporter (Powell) to try to maneuver Loy into a situation where they were alone together and could be confronted by Powell's wife — and the press conveniently on hand to document it all. That would establish her track record as a home wrecker.

The problem was that Powell's character wasn't married.

No problem. Tracy volunteered his girlfriend (Harlow) to marry Powell — over her very vocal objections — and then play the aggrieved spouse.

Trouble was, Powell and Loy's characters really did fall in love. And Harlow came to conclude that she preferred being married to Powell to waiting for a newspaperman who had been stringing her along for years. When she confronted Powell and Loy, she really was aggrieved.

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Powell and Loy persuaded Harlow that she was really in love with Tracy, so all was well that ended well.

To borrow a phrase.

Little Reporters Have Big Ears

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I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that first aired 50 years ago tonight, "Opie's Newspaper."

I'm sure that the fact that journalism has played such a significant role in my life has a lot to do with it. But there is more to it than that. It was a matter of — for me, at least — art imitating life. Or maybe, since the episode aired long before I was first hired by a newspaper, it was a case of art foretelling life.

Anyway ...

Opie did something that I did for awhile when I was a boy. He tried to put out his own newspaper. Some kids have lemonade stands to make pocket change; Opie and I put out our own newspapers, and he learned the same lesson I did. It isn't easy to put out a newspaper — even for adults who have all sorts of advantages that children do not have.

Of course, Barney (Don Knotts) always had the answers — or thought he did. Opie (Ron Howard) was having trouble selling his newspaper, which was almost exclusively dedicated to the goings on in his grade school. Barney thought he wasn't getting the right copy ("Copy — that's newspaper talk," he told Opie), and he advised Opie to widen his scope.

But, while Barney and Andy were trying to be helpful, the message that Opie got was that their paper had to be more like the local newspaper so he and his pal Howie went through the latest copy of the Mayberry newspaper looking for inspiration, and they found it in a gossip column, "Mayberry After Midnight."

And they agreed that they needed to do the same thing that was done in "Mayberry After Midnight" so they went about eavesdropping on conversations around town.

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They overheard Barney saying that the young wife of an older man was a "blonde out of a bottle."

They overheard Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) criticizing the food that was served at a luncheon and describing it as "wallpaper paste."

And they overheard Andy describing the local minister's sermons as "dry as dust."

And they put it in the paper, which Andy and Barney and Aunt Bee discovered to their chagrin. See, Opie and Howie were giving away the first edition of their new newspaper as a get–acquainted special, and they had distributed copies all over town. They had put them in mailboxes and under windshield wipers. In some cases, they hand–delivered them to people.

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Andy, Barney and Aunt Bee fanned out over Mayberry seeking to retrieve the copies of the paper — and each one ran into the person of whom he/she had spoken so poorly, which was a bit of a lesson in itself. Be careful what you say. You never know who might be listening.

Of course, as Andy pointed out, just because somebody said something does not mean it should be printed up and circulated. It isn't surprising that Opie and Howie failed to grasp the concept. Sadly, there are a lot of adults who struggle with the same issue.

Andy was trying to explain to Opie and Howie why they shouldn't print stories like that. "You don't circulate stories that are mean and unkind about people," he said. "There are too many other stories to put in. Nice stories."

"But, Pa," Opie protested. "When we put in the nice kind of stories, nobody wanted to buy the paper." There is the conundrum.

It's been many years since I worked for a newspaper, but I have had that discussion so many times that I know every angle by heart. People who aren't in the news business always criticize newspapers and news broadcasts for focusing on the negative. But that's what readers want. Nobody wants to read about who sold the most Girl Scout cookies — except maybe the Girl Scout and her family.

The truth is, newspapers can't afford to be crusaders all the time. They have to give the readers what they want part of the time — or else they would go out of business. Quite often, that means providing the tawdry and sensational at the expense of things that may be more uplifting.

It's a complex thing, really. The nature of news is to be negative — wars, natural disasters, economic collapses — and human nature often veers to the negative. Many people — not all but many — are greedy and selfish. It isn't news when people are civilized with each other because that is what is expected. It is news when they are uncivilized with each other.

Or, as we are frequently told in journalism school, it isn't news if a dog bites a man. But it is news if a man bites a dog.

There was a valuable lesson in the episode, which was articulated best by Aunt Bee. When she, Andy and Barney concluded they had retrieved all the copies of the paper, and Andy said he hoped Opie and Howie had learned from the experience, she observed that perhaps the adults could learn something from it, too.

"We're responsible for all this loose talk going around town," she said. "If we want the boys to behave better, we'd better set them a better example."

That's good advice, and it would have been quite effective — if Opie hadn't mentioned that he and Howie had had so much material that they had printed up the next week's edition in advance. He assured them that all those copies had been taken to the dump so no one would ever read them.

Except for Aunt Bee, Andy and Barney who went to the dump on a late–night expedition to find the papers and read what other gossip the boys had picked up.