CANADA
The Globe and Mail
SIMON HOUPT
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Sep. 10, 2015
Talk about kicking folks when they’re down. For the past decade or so, reporters and their ever-suffering bosses have had to come to terms with the fact that most people don’t seem to want to pay for journalism. And now comes word that people don’t even want to pay for movies about journalism.
In an interview at the Venice Film Festival last weekend, where Spotlight, his thrilling new film about The Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, had its world premiere prior to a bow at TIFF next Monday, director Tom McCarthy told the trade paper Variety that the film “kept falling apart,” as the producers tried to raise funds. “It was brutal,” he said. “It was dead three times.”
Through all the tumult of the Great Disruption that has laid waste to North America’s newsrooms, journalists have been able at least to draw some succour from movies that celebrated our life’s work, that made us out to be the heroes we are in our own minds: say, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon; or last year’s well-received Rosewater, about the Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. But, like newsrooms themselves, newsroom dramas rarely make money. If the genre dries up, how will we make ourselves feel better? Is there really that much Scotch in the world?
Spotlight is one of two American indie films about the news trade, both based on a true story, that are appearing at this year’s TIFF. The other, called simply Truth, is about television news rather than my ink-stained colleagues in the newspaper biz, and is therefore far more glamorous. Premiering Saturday afternoon, Truth stars Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, the 60 Minutes producer who steered that program’s ill-fated 2004 report about George W. Bush’s questionable Vietnam War-era National Guard service. Robert Redford, who played Bob Woodward in the ur-journo-drama All the President’s Men, is Dan Rather, the veteran CBS Evening News anchor who retired in early 2005 amid a tsunami of criticism over the Bush report.
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