Broadcast News (1987)

 

Broadcast News

News media is a long-time favourite topic of Hollywood. There seems to be a connection as if producing news is, somehow, closely related to producing movies, and journalists, anchors and editors are the heroes of that battle to keep us informed and entertained and most importantly, keep the news media afloat. “Broadcast News” may have a different angle than “Network”, but much is the same.

Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) is a producer at an (unnamed, but big) network. We learn that she early on excelled at managing chaos to the level of micromanagement, but also that she is a social wreck, likely for the same reason. Her friend at the network is Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a journalist with very high standards. They collaborate like a well-oiled machine and off work they use each other to off-load their personal anxieties. The problem here is that Aaron is secretly madly in love with Jane.

Tom Grunick (William Hurt) is a TV face from a local station who is so well liked by viewers that the big network has hired him. Tom is painfully aware that his journalistic credentials are almost non-existent and that he is hopelessly inexperienced. He adores Jane for her skill (and to some extent Aaron too), but Jane has fallen head over heels in love with Tom. Aaron, however, sees Tom both a rival to Jane, but also as an insult to the journalistic quality he represents.

The three work at the hectic network and juggle reports, dinners and jostling for positions. Tom has success as an anchor, but only because he is carefully fed by Jane and Aaron. Aaron gets his chance at anchoring but despite being trained by Tom, fails dismally due to excessive sweating. When the network goes through a restructuring (read: massive layoffs), Jane is promoted, Tom sent to London and Aaron quits and so they all disperse.

The thing that bothered me watching “Broadcast News” was the classic problem of the producers/director/scriptwriter not believing in the core idea of the story and so insisting to fill in a human element (a triangle drama) that ends up taking over the movie, sidelining what was supposed to make the movie special. In the case of this movie there are two interesting themes: News as information versus news as entertainment and Finding your right shelf. Both are interesting, and strong enough to carry the story (at least for me), but instead we get this triangle drama with a lot of shouting that is both enormously trivial and irrelevant to the core themes. Do not get me wrong, they are going about this triangle adventure nicely enough, it is just a very different movie and, myself, I was much more interested in the other themes.

Tom represents the news as entertainment side. He is selling news, he is attracting viewers to the network who are interesting in him personally, more than in the news themselves. For the network it is a commercial arrangement and he brings in viewers. Aaron and to some extent Jane represent the quality of the news, the credibility and relevance of what is presented and in their optic the network serves a public service function, where they as providers of quality news stories are the best qualified to produce that. That of course begs the question, what is quality news? Is it what people wants to see or is it what people should be watching and who decides what that is in the first place? “Broadcast News” opens that discussion but it fizzles and it remains only as identifiers of Tom and Aaron.

Instead, this discussion morphs into the other theme, which seems to say that everybody has their key competence and if you accept and embrace it, you will be happier for it. The network too. When the three of them accept their roles, they can produce quality news that sells and all is good.

“Broadcast News” does carry the label “Romantic comedy-drama”, but whether this is the intent, in which case the triangle drama takes centre stage, or it is a result of what it became, I do not know.

I did enjoy watching the three of them act it out, but for a long time I was confused about what I was looking at, where this was going. It landed, and I suppose it landed okay, but it felt a bit like an emergency landing.

Hunter, Brooks and Hurt are all good. This was an early appearance for Joan Cusack and Jack Nicholson has a small part as well, so, I guess it was a bit of a Hollywood all-stars event.

“Network News” is okay. It is an eighties movie so already there it is a win, but I felt it could have been a lot more.