Frank Capra Directed so many outstanding Films,
"It's a Wonderful Life", "It
Happened One Night", "Meet John Doe", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington",
"State
of the Union", "Arsenic and Old Lace", "Here Comes the Groom", "Platinum
Blonde", etc...
"Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film", written
by
Joe Saltzman, focuses on Capra's concern of unscrupulous journalists,
and
fear of the conglomerate control of the Media, which both the author
and
reviewer feel were foretelling.
[RAA NOTE: I see it not so much as foretelling, but also reflective
of those times,
with the problem becoming much worse because of the more powerful influence
of the Media, (with the advent of Radio, TV, Internet), and the ensuing
consolidation.]
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PRESCIENT FRANK CAPRA SAVED THE BLACK HATS FOR MEDIA TYCOONS
Howard Rosenberg
Los Angeles Times
April 19 2002
Director Frank Capra, who died in 1991, was not known as a futurist,
but he
was one.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is his best-known work. Yet in thumbing through
a
dandy new book that recalls an area of his moviemaking not often cited,
I've
been noting how prophetic he and his writers were when creating crises
and
conflicts for their many media characters.
The book is "Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American
Film."
On the cover, in the 1934 movie "It Happened One Night," is Clark Gable
as
hard-boiled New York Mail reporter Pete Warne ("Hey, listen, monkey
face;
when you fired me, you fired the best newshound your filthy scandal
sheet
ever had"). Yeah, that's the way we all talk. The author is Joe Saltzman,
a
first-rate news documentarian and a professor and associate dean in
USC's
Annenberg School for Communication.
Although his focus is Capra's screen work, Saltzman at one point widens
his
commentary to images of journalists in all movies, including a category
of
jerk with whom some of you may be familiar.
"Critics," writes Saltzman about movie portrayals of these heartless
newspaper cads, "often write columns as well as reviews, and many are
cold-blooded, unscrupulous journalists who use their power to get what
they
want when they want it and collect their pound of flesh whenever they
feel
like it."
And that's bad?
The drama critic in Capra's 1944 adaptation of "Arsenic and Old Lace"
would
be insufferable "if he wasn't played so ingratiatingly by Cary Grant,"
notes
Saltzman in his book (which can be purchased through the Web site www.ijpc
.org).
But no Capra journalists are gleaming heroes, which Saltzman believes
may be
a genesis of today's broad mistrust of media. It's not such a wonderful
life
for his newshounds. They're flawed, from Stew Smith (Robert Williams),
who
drinks too much in "Platinum Blonde" (1931), to Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell),
who drinks too much in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), to columnist
Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), who doesn't drink too much in "Meet
John
Doe" (1941). All she does is fabricate a story.
"Capra's editors and reporters may do terrible things, but they're really
nice guys," Saltzman said this week. The Big Nasties lurk elsewhere.
One
reason Saltzman chose Capra as a subject "was that he was so ahead
of his
time in realizing who the real villains of journalism were." And? "All
of the
vicious villains in Capra films were tycoons," Saltzman said. "What
Capra and
Robert Riskin [the writer who was his primary collaborator] predicted
is how
the media would be controlled by them."
He's speaking now of today's sprawling archipelagos of media interests.
The
gargantuan ones are AOL Time Warner, Viacom Inc., Walt Disney Co. and
Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp., each having potential, through their splayed
radii of
communications, to manipulate the information we receive and control
what we
think and think about. On a smaller scale, but right there with them,
is this
paper's media-conglomerate owner, Tribune Co.
As media critic Mark Crispin Miller has written:
"The true cause of the enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans--the
universal sleaze and 'dumbing down,' the flood-tide of corporate propaganda,
the terminal insanity of United States politics--has risen not from
any grand
decline in national character ... but from the inevitable toxic influence
of
those few corporations that have monopolized our culture."
Speaking as a monopolizer, I plead guilty. Even if Miller is overstating
a
bit, though, the trend of growing influence by a few corporations--that
own
movies, book publishing, magazines, newspapers, over-the-air television,
cable and you name it--is extremely troubling.
What would Capra do about it if he were making movies today? "He'd go
after
AOL Time Warner, Disney and all the rest," Saltzman said. "He'd probably
make
a movie with a TV reporter, someone at a local station, showing how
people
there were fighting against a takeover."
In other words, Capra opposed centering media control in fewer and fewer
hands, which at once widens the reach of the messenger and narrows
and
homogenizes the message. "That attitude was a key part of his thinking
in the
'30s and '40s," Saltzman said. "He was afraid of this control of the
media."
Even though the vast bulk of Capra's films were made before the TV era,
and
his journalists largely mirrored newspaper cliches of the time, their
reflections of expanding power in media boardrooms apply more than
ever.
Released in 1948 and based on a stage play, for example, "State of the
Union"
has Spencer Tracy as a presidential candidate who makes compromises
and
alters his values to accommodate the ambitions of a ruthless newspaper
publisher (Angela Lansbury) and political boss (Adolphe Menjou).
Saltzman finds the 1941 tycoon in "Meet John Doe" even more wicked.
Facing
dismissal from her job, it's Stanwyck's Mitchell who does the unthinkable
by
inventing in her newspaper column a letter from a John Doe who vows
to commit
suicide on Christmas Eve to protest the misery, corruption and hypocrisy
suffocating him. It's despotic new publisher D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold),
however, who is Capra's epic scoundrel here, because Mitchell would
not be
writing her dishonest column of protest had he not bought the paper
and given
her and her colleagues pink slips in pursuit of his dream: a fascist
U.S.
It's not fascism that dominates today's headlines. If Capra were alive
and
active today, would he want to make a movie showing reporters covering
combat
in Afghanistan or the Middle East instead of filming their combat with
editors and moguls? Only one Capra film, "Here Comes the Groom" in
1951,
includes a foreign correspondent (played by, uh, Bing Crosby). "He
stayed
away from foreign correspondents," Saltzman said.
Instead, Capra quit Hollywood during World War II and made seven
documentaries for the War Department. So Saltzman thinks Capra would
now be
offering his services to the government, this time to again make
documentaries "about why we fight."
Not only terrorism, but the narrowing of media diversity.
*
Howard Rosenberg's column appears Mondays and Fridays.
He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.
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