‘Nothing’s happening anymore. It’s not exciting. It’s over.’

The craft of the journalism movie

The action-packed poster illustration for ‘Between the Lines.’

Discussed: Between the Lines, journalism on film, Spotlight, She Said, All the President’s Men, Shrill, The Newsroom, journalism as a profession, scoops.

Is there any other line of work whose practitioners love seeing themselves in movies more than journalism? I ask this sincerely. I’ve worked as a journalist my entire adult life and I’ve never spent more than a month in a newsroom without overhearing (or starting) a conversation about our big screen mirrors. I’m sure there are bankers and surgeons and firefighters who get a thrill out of seeing their work on film, but the ones I know are quick to point out everything the movies get wrong. “That’s not the kind of clamp they would use,” and whatnot. 

With journalism, movies tend to do us favors. An accurate journalism movie would be slow cinema—hours of static shots of someone looking at a computer screen while waiting for a source to call them back. The job is long stretches of inactivity punctuated by an awkward interview or an argument over the placement of a comma. The only unforgivable error in a journalism movie is when a reporter sleeps with a source. 

You can tell a lot about a journalist by their favorite journalism movie. The mission-minded, serious practitioners lean toward All the President’s Men, Spotlight, Good Night and Good Luck, and She Said—process movies that show how crucial the process is for the public good. The realists favor movies like Shattered Glass or Broadcast News, which explore the tension between mission and vanity inherent to a job done in public. Cynics prefer The Parallax View and Network. Promising amateurs love Almost Famous. The unconventional choose Zodiac, Reds, or another epic where journalism isn’t the focus, but journalists are the heroes. 

My favorite tends to change based on my mood. Lately, it’s been Between the Lines, Joan Micklin Silver’s under-the-radar 1977 comedy about the staff of the fictional Boston alternative newspaper, The Back Bay Mainline. Even though it’s nearly fifty years old and is set in a type of publication that has largely vanished, Between the Lines plays well in today’s era of layoffs and big-money buyouts. The staff is young-ish and the business is stagnant. The movie is about the malaise of people who have gotten where they are based on talent and now have to choose between ambition, comfort, and principles, while the businessmen in the publisher’s office are ready to make the decision for them. 

Silver and screenwriters Fred Barron and David M. Halpern Jr. each worked at alternative newspapers, and the movie captures the characters who haunted these offices. These are personalities who pop up across all kinds of newsrooms, but gravitated towards the alternative press, where there was less pressure to temper their crusading or countercultural tendencies.

An editorial meeting at The Back Bay Mainline.

At the Mainline, we meet the archetypes, each played by actors who were just about to hit their prime. Bored ace reporter Harry (John Heard in his film debut) is constantly thinking of quitting. Rock critic Max (a young Jeff Goldblum) is more interested in free records and drinks than he is in shaping the public taste. Idealistic photographer Abbie (Lindsay Crouse) looks up to writer Laura (Gwen Welles), who has seemingly hitched her future to her boyfriend Michael (Stephen Collins), a pretentious Mainline staffer who wants to give it all up to write books. Young reporter David (Bruno Kirby) dreams of being like the others, but he can’t find a mentor, let alone an editor, who takes him seriously. 

We get the impression everyone except David is good at their jobs, but they don’t see much of a point in doing them. The rebellious spirit of the Mainline has faded in its maturity. So, too, has theirs. Nobody wants to grow up because growing up means leaving the paper. Nobody wants to stay because staying means being bored. 

“All of us on this paper are either on our way up or on our way down. That’s the nature of the paper. We’re all just passing through,” the editor Frank (Jon Korkes) tells the weasel of an advertising salesman Stanley (Lewis J. Stadlen) in an opening scene. Stanley understands this, and he thinks his colleagues are on the way down. He teases them with the prospect of a corporate buyout—with the idea that all the words they write are just backing for the real appeal of the paper: the ads. The way up, for the editorial staff, is to move to New York and risk failure. The reporters like being big fish in a small pond. But if they looked around, they’d see the pond is being drained by people who don’t even notice them.

There’s not much of a plot to Between the Lines. The buyout looms and David pursues a big scoop, but for the most part, everyone just hangs out. On the few occasions when we see characters writing, they’re miserable. Laura types out a last page late at night while the custodian empties the trash. Michael sighs at every word he puts on the page. Max turns to his typewriter only when his paycheck is at risk and he’s run out of records to sell. “You don’t want to write, you want to find an excuse not to,” Laura tells Michael. As much as it might hurt to admit, this is true to my journalistic experience. Sure we want to do good work—to break stories, publish thought-provoking columns, and do all those other heroic tasks in service of Informing The Public. But writing is hard and the opportunity to shoot the breeze with our fellow freaks feels like a fair exchange for dragging our brains over a keyboard. There’s certainly not a monetary reward for it.

All the bull sessions and loafing aren’t just putting off work—they’re delaying the inevitable, whether that’s a buyout or another job. It’s jarring how relevant the conversations in Between the Lines still are. The edge is gone from the field. There’s no more room for the weirdos and dreamers. You’ve got to sell out to survive. The counterculture didn’t die a natural death, Max says. “It was done in by enemies from within.” 

We can blame the internet for killing the alternative weekly, but there was no murder. The web absorbed and diluted the alternative press attitude; there’s some kind of path from the columns of The Village Voice or The Boston Phoenix through The Awl, Gawker, and Vice, and into the few mainstream publications that survive today. But the internet couldn’t do what alternative papers were able to do with this attitude for a surprisingly long time—monetize it. Now, the misfits have to straighten up, go broke, or find another line of work¹.

The facts the journalists in Between the Lines won’t face are the ones about their industry and the way its power is fading. At one point, we see Harry contemplating an act of violence, but even in his fantasy, his weapon turns out to be a toy. “Nothing’s happening anymore. It’s not exciting. It’s over,” he says when Abbie asks if he’s really going to quit. Even a story he’s proud of, uncovering a nursing home scandal, didn’t have any results. “We really shook things up, you know? We didn’t change anything.” The work is all they have, and it only matters to them and a slim section of people who still bother to read. Harry’s line stings to hear, especially now.

Journalism is an insular profession. For years, most of my friends were journalists. When we got together outside of work, we talked about journalism—the stories we broke and the stories we wished we had broken. We had a great time listening to ourselves and each other. Good luck with that banter around anyone who has the misfortune of doing something else for a living. Even if they find the job of a journalist intriguing, their eyes drift toward the window as the conversation gets into the details of the work. In their face, you can see the downward trend of pageviews, subscribers, newsroom revenue.

No wonder it’s an insular profession. And no wonder so many journalism movies make the outsiders into side characters. The only speaking roles for non-journalists in Between the Lines are reserved for creeps and marks.

What do these outsiders get from a journalism movie, then? Why do they keep watching? The movies don’t typically make the job look glamorous. There’s an exhaustion that hangs around reporters on film—the result of being on the wrong end of hung-up phones and slammed doors. On screen, there’s usually a payoff; powerful people are punished. The journalism movies that win over audiences treat journalists as people who aren’t much different from the viewer. They show reporters going down dead ends and the scripts are free of the lofty speeches and rock-ribbed patriotism of a show like Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. They make the work relatable and, often, they make the work meaningful.

The closest Between the Lines comes to presenting any kind of journalistic payoff is with cub reporter David. He chases a big scoop to an exciting conclusion. But we don’t see the story go to print. Instead, it’s an anecdote he tells a college student. This is why I love Between the Lines right now. No matter how dire the state of the industry, no matter how futile the work can seem, there’s still someone who cares, even if they’re another journalist, or even if they’re a person watching a movie. 

At the top of this piece, I asked whether there’s any other line of work that so enjoys seeing itself on the big screen. Despite all the downers I’ve put between that line and this one, I still have to ask myself another question about journalism. Is there any other line of work?

1.  The Hulu show Shrill, based on the work and experience of Lindy West, is also set at an alt weekly, and it captures the vibe well, too.