Film has always looked to the newsroom for its stories. Some of America’s greatest movies were about newspapers.  Citizen Kane immediately comes to mind. And the multi Academy Award winning All the Presidents Men showed how two Washington Post reporters exposed and brought down the Nixon regime. A few years ago the Oscar for best picture went to Spotlight, a movie about how the Boston Globe went after sexual abuse in the church. Even Superman started in a newsroom.

While the newspaper industry is quite clearly in decline, it continues to inspire filmmakers. These two examples aired at the recent Montclair Film Festival.

Kill. Bury. Print.

A movie about some of things we’re losing in 21st Century America: local news, family-owned businesses and good documentaries. This is Trumpworld in micro. Publisher vs. Sheriff. And when the publisher prints stuff the sheriff doesn’t like he tries to silence them on false accusations.

The setting is Idabel, Okla. The paper is the McCurtain County Gazette. It is quite literally a mom and pop. Bruce Willingham is the publisher. His wife keeps the books. His son, Chris, is the reporter on the police beat and his daughter-in-law is the copy editor. The sheriff is Kevin Clardy. He mumbles so badly the director had to add subtitles so we could figure out what he’s saying.

After Chris Willingham publishes a series of stories about corruption, drugs and failures in the sheriff’s office, Clardy and his lover/deputy Alyssa Manning defend themselves by going after Chris. Bad enough that they conjure up a story linking him to a previously convicted sex offender, but the Willinghams actually come up with a recording in which Clardy talks about hiring hit men to wipe out the newspaper family. Yeah, pretty shocking.

Chris and his family end up heading out of town to protect their two kids. But Bruce Willingham is no Jeff Bezos. He doesn’t cave, he doubles down and continues to expose Clardy.

All of which, of course, shows the value of the local newspaper. How else do corrupt officials like this get exposed. Sadly there are fewer and fewer McCurtain County Gazettes. The movie leaves more than a couple loose ends. But overall, it’s uplifting to see these guys fight the good fight. Oh how we could use more Bruce Willinghams.

(Available to stream on Peacock)

Ink

It’s the 1960s. Rupert Murdoch buys a moribund London daily, the Sun, and hires Larry Lamb as editor. This is a fictional account of how Lamb embarks on the process of progressively lowering the bar on low-brow journalism until the Sun tops the circulation charts.

From their perspective, what they did was shake up the London news establishment by focusing on what the British commoner really cares about. There’s an early brainstorming meeting in which they identify that: footie, telly, crime, women, weather and sex (not necessarily in that order).

At one point in the movie a couple of sleazy bunglers kidnap a Sun exec’s wife, thinking they were snagging Murdoch’s wife. The Sun, controversially and against police advice, publishes a ransom note she is forced to write. She dies in captivity and, click, the movie switches to Lamb interviewing a girl to pose naked in the paper. Odd movie editing? Or an example of the newspaper’s character.

It is interesting to see the portrayal of Murdoch. Each time Lamb achieves a new level of trashiness, Murdoch is there to air his disapproval. Then new and improved circulation numbers come in. End of discussion.

For Americans the movie is going to raise questions about how the Sun was positioned and how that relates to Murdoch’s later acquisition of Fox TV News and the New York Post. Can we relate the Post’s page six gossip to the Sun’s bare-breasted page three models? And what does Murdoch really think of Trump and the sycophants his TV station airs? Apparently he mostly just thinks about money. We’ve got a lot of them around these days.