If they do allow themselves to enter into a personal relationship, they will have to find if they can overcome Jane's issues of what Tom represents professionally in the business she loves, and if they can relate to each other beyond their work. Also adding some complexity to their situation is Aaron, who sees Tom as competition both professionally and personally for what little personal time Jane has. Sign In. Edit Broadcast News Jump to: Summaries 3 Synopsis 1.
The synopsis below may give away important plot points. Getting Started Contributor Zone ». Edit page. Top Gap. Of the many subtle moments crafted by Brooks and his crew of experts and advisers, there are two mirrored scenes with Jane that feel especially true, and they both show the influence of Platt, who knew how much details matter, and Zirinsky, who knew how much journalism matters.
In the first, Jane helps Aaron pick his outfit for his night as weekend anchor while she is getting ready for her first — and only — real date with Tom. At the end of the movie, when it becomes clear that nothing can happen between her and Tom, Jane confronts him and refuses to get on a plane with him for a week away. Getting into a cab, she sits there, not quite crying, unable to let the driver go without making sure she tells him the best route to get home, holding her hand to her mouth.
What that is, and how much she needs it, is not the point — the point is watching Jane be alone in her rightness, her certainty, her successes that are not wins and her losses the conclusion of her own choices. There are, at any given moment, approximately one hundred million movies about writers to watch.
Many of them share qualities with backstage movies, offering viewers the chance to see how our stories really get made. In both of my interviews with Brooks and Zirinsky, I tried to get them to agree with me that Broadcast News is the best movie about journalism, but they gracefully deflected. Brooks is steadfast in his belief that Network could be the best movie ever made, and certainly the best movie about journalism. Broadcast News is not a satire, although it is sometimes labeled as such.
It is too warm, and too concerned with showing something true. The only thing that might function as satire is that, contrary to their depiction in movies and television shows, most writers do not know just what to say exactly when they need to say it. But most writers know how to go home and turn the experience over and over in their mind until they find the perfect response. They know enough to get into screenwriting, or other forms of fiction.
They know how to tell stories in which they get to say now what they should have said then. When the film was released, parsing its realism for reality became a minor sport among print publications. Journalists, well versed in turning any screen into a mirror, watched Broadcast News and looked for their own reflection. If the field of journalism has one easily identified and frequently fictionalized problem, it is one of proportions. The people who care deeply about journalism, whether as an art form or a necessity, are too often also the same people who make it.
This often creates an effect that is less of an overlap and more of an eclipse — journalists making art about why journalism is worth caring about. To look at it without being blinded requires the remove of allegory, and the protection of comedy. He does not just represent the increasing prioritization of celebrity over achievement, one that was evident in the newscasters of , and is seen today in everything from the cynical opportunism of right-wing news anchors who become morning talk-show hosts, to the glib posturing of contrarian op-ed columnists, and to the emotional manipulations of magazine profiles attempting to humanize hate.
Tom is gloss over substance, theater over fact. As characters who are white and middle-class, this seems to be the first time any of them have thought closely about the dangers that come with giving people access and status simply because they look the part. The past weeks since the first Harvey Weinstein story was published have been just such a crisis: As publications report on abuses of power, more and more stories about journalists abusing their own power in their own workplaces have required no less than a total reckoning — who can we trust, and under what standards have we determined what that trust is worth?
Meanwhile, billionaires looking to diversify their investments buy publications as vanity projects — like Joe Ricketts, who founded DNAInfo and bought Gothamist and then shut them down, admitting to The New York Times it was motivated by a desire to union-bust.
The business of news runs on heavily inflated budgets and periodic cullings, and cruel injustices are found everywhere but remain hidden behind nondisclosure and nondisparagement severance agreements. Distrustful bitterness becomes both a posture and a form of protection. Thirty years after its release, it is an essential movie about journalism because it gives the field the allowance to be everything: deserving of every critique, and of the Vaseline-lensed romanticization it gets from the people who love it.
There are heroic reporters all over the place, at a time when the whole profession is being drained. He wanted me to know he thought the interview with New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, in particular, was extraordinary. Brooks has spoken about his failed attempt to shoot a more traditionally romantic ending, telling The Atlantic that he told Hunter they were doing reshoots, and had prepped Hurt on jumping into her cab before she leaves the airport—so that they would be left presumably happily ever after, in a more cinematically traditional manner.
When a crew member accidentally greeted Hurt on set, the surprise was blown, and Brooks, who had never really felt there was a clear choice as to who Jane should end up with, decided not to choose at all. Aaron, he reminded me, calls Tom the devil, and makes a persuasive case for this characterization. Hunter has the same issue that Jane does: As an actress, she naturally comes across as the smartest person onscreen, and in Broadcast News , also the most fearless.
I love every single two-shot in which the petite Hunter has to crane her neck to look up at Hurt or Joan Cusack, who plays one of her colleagues, and is completely undaunted by the height differential. His breakthrough moment at the network is a piece about date rape in which Tom tears up while interviewing a victim.
Aaron dismisses the entire story as unworthy of the news, as hard to believe as that sounds in metoo But every woman in the newsroom — including Jane, who ordinarily would cringe at the sight of a reporter so blatantly emoting — is moved by it. Unlike Aaron, her best friend and her journalism soul mate, she sees some value in covering sexual assault as a real issue and showing some humanity while doing it.
At least she does until Aaron points out that Tom could not possibly have cried in real time during his reaction shots because the crew only had one camera. From her expressions, you know the relationship is over before the breakup fight at the airport even starts. Tom does two things that Jane cannot abide. Brooks ' screenplay that makes it so special - is that all three characters have a tendency to grow emotionally absent-minded when it's a choice between romance and work.
Frankly, they'd rather work. After Hunter whispers into Hurt's earpiece to talk him through a crucial live report on a Middle East crisis, he kneels at her feet and says it was like sex, having her voice inside his head. He never gets that excited about sex. Neither does she. Much of the plot of "Broadcast News" centers around a piece that Hurt reports about "date rape. It means a great deal to Hunter whether that tear is real or faked.
Experienced TV people will question why Hunter, a veteran producer, didn't immediately notice the detail that bothers her so much later on. But in a way, "Broadcast News" is not about details, but about the larger question of whether TV news is becoming show business.
Jack Nicholson has an unbilled supporting role in the movie as the network's senior anchorman, an irascible man who has high standards himself, but is not above seeing his ratings assisted by coverage that may be questionable. The implication is that the next anchor will be a William Hurt type, great on camera, but incapable of discerning authenticity from fakery. Meanwhile, the Albert Brooks types will end up doing superior journalism in smaller "markets" the TV word for "cities" , and the Holly Hunter types will keep on fighting all the old deadlines, plus a new one: the biological clock.
But the thing it does best is look into a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of relationship. Like " Terms of Endearment ," the previous film by James L. Brooks, it does not see relationships as a matter of meeting someone you like and falling in love.
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