By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
From Premiere Trenches, Valiant Carr Takes Up Battle for Journalists' Honor
Following up on The Reeler’s indignance at the journalistic indiscretions splattered all over Woody Allen’s Scoop, David Carr today has a more comprehensive look at the cinematic trend pegging us reporters as “tarts, drunks or crooks.” Clearly not as optimistic about this portrayal as The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi was two weeks ago, the Father of The Reeler took his outrage a step further than my recent grilling of Scarlett Johansson: He went straight for the money man and demanded answers, just like they taught us in J-school:
At (Scoop)’s New York premiere last month, I buttonholed James Schamus of Focus Features, which distributed the film, and asked him why journalists generally ended up cast in movies as tarts, drunks or crooks. He slowly backed away from me, smiling all the while, saying that the film “had a good heart.”
Easy for him to say. Movie producers are generally cast by their own industry as philistines or cokeheads — usually both — but they are compensated by all that glamour and, well, all that money.
For decades, journalists, whose pay is generally as low as the regard they are held in, have been largely depicted as moral and ethical eunuchs.
Ouch! But if you think that is bad, wait until the spectrum of pajamas and pasty, unwashed flesh that will attend the first wave of blogger films. If mainstream journalists are eunuchs, then we new media types must be rocking an extra chromosome and a monthly bus pass. Where is Alan Pakula when we need him?