An Unusual Place To Be

Much as we may try to do something about it at times, we are who we are. Just as the people in James L. Brooks films are all exactly who they are the first time we see them. And so much of the time they’re trying to be something more than that. They have no choice but to deal with the world, after all, which doesn’t always know what to make of them. His characters are messy, which they need to be in that world, and the way he freely examines who they are through all that messiness makes it clear that he has an undeniable love for almost all of them, no matter how desperate and screwed up they seem to be. Maybe they’re all just lonely, no matter how many other people surround them. They’re always very much his creation but the best examples feel real, as real as the busy newsroom of BROADCAST NEWS still feels. Through the way he portrays these people and that world it feels clear that he knows who they are, even if he hasn’t figured out all the answers that they’re looking for any more than they have, any more than we have. Because the thing is, we want things to be the way we want them to be. And that’s not the way it is right now. Maybe the best we can hope for is progress as we find our way through and try to make any changes happen, overcoming some of those obstacles we place in our own way and try not to get too bogged down in things like fear and regret. Maybe I’m better now than I was a few years or a decade ago, even as there’s still so much to worry about. I’m still trying to be better. I still sometimes need to convince myself to believe in the possibility of good things happening if I help make them happen.

As for the film that is BROADCAST NEWS, as far as I’m concerned this is the one that Brooks got right more than any of the others. Even if we don’t know all the mechanics of the news world these people work in, we understand who they are and it all feels totally genuine. I’ve wondered if part of the incentive of making the film was to explore the world of television journalism in a way that was believable unlike THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW which Brooks was one of the main creative forces of and which, great as it still might be, never managed to seem like an actual newsroom. Not that anyone ever cared. Of course, for all I know it’s exactly what putting on a local Midwest news show in the ‘70s was like but I doubt it. So BROADCAST NEWS, released at Christmas 1987, was an attempt to actually explore these people who interested Brooks so much at that moment in time, when few things in journalism felt as prestigious as the network evening news and something like CNN was there but hadn’t yet taken over the way it would or even when a network news show was actually about news and not something like a promo for a film being released by the same corporation or a weekly murder show. Those things can be compulsively watchable but, of course, the character of Aaron Altman would hate me for saying that. Please don’t tell him.

When local news anchorman Tom Grunick (William Hurt) meets network news producer Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) after she gives a speech at a seminar they’re immediately attracted to each other but when he comes clean to her about how little he really knows about the news he reports on she becomes cold towards him, only to learn shortly after that he’s accepted a position as correspondent with the Washington bureau she works at. Jane’s best friend is network correspondent Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) who is extremely intelligent but also pines for her even as their relationship seems so easy. When Tom starts work his lack of intellect means that he doesn’t exactly fit in but his ease on air and the way he delivers the news makes him increasingly popular with the network and as his position continues to grow Jane becomes more conflicted about her own attraction to him while Aaron, learning about possibly budget cuts to come, starts to become worried about losing both his job and Jane all at once.

Still rewatchable, still close to perfect, BROADCAST NEWS is like a warm bath to return to no matter how many times you’ve seen it and yet what the film is warning about makes it all feel darker and sadder today than it ever has. If it ever seemed too mild a portrayal of the media, a calmer younger sibling to NETWORK, it doesn’t anymore. It does what only the best films do. It grows. It changes. It changes as we change and grow older, seeing the characters for all their flaws making them less likable than we thought at first until we circle back around and finally understand how much we really are like some of them. It’s a film where you wake up one day and realize how much of it is true. I still feel this, no matter how many times I watch it. After all these years, it’s clear that BROADCAST NEWS remains the best James L. Brooks film as well as one of the best films of the late ‘80s, the purest expression by the writer-director (along with his collaborators; certainly Polly Platt’s name in the credits jumps out now) of what he wants to say about people and the world they want to be a part of with seemingly unlimited pages of the best dialogue ever. The film was immediately, obviously great when it first opened. It’s gotten better as the years have passed. It’s funnier. It’s sadder. The characters seem deeper, richer, the message feels sharper as it feels more desperate to be watching it right now with everything around us. What the film does in showing them who they are deep down makes it about people fighting with their intelligence to fit with what the world wants them to be and the actors are fully a part of this, giving some of their best performances while living up to the exacting quality of the material which is all in the service of asking the key question of how important it is to have someone whose main talent is being good on television with no other significant qualities. And how that affects our own perception of what it causes to happen.

Brooks is exploring the idea of what television represents and how we respond to it but opening the film with a look at the main characters as kids makes it clear how much it’s really about them, allowing for a few broad laughs but it also makes the point in showing what they always were and where they were going to end up, that it was all inevitable and they’re not going to change who they are. The way they clash and sometimes even make sense together helps to make them more believable as they face off and challenge each other to decide who is more wrong than the other. All this makes BROADCAST NEWS one of the best romantic comedies ever as well as containing the best characters in a romantic comedy ever, always unique, always aware of their shortcomings, knowing that none of these stories can possibly end just because the lead couple make up, kiss and the credits roll. The film always knows that these people are just trying their best even at their worst and Brooks clearly loves how flawed they are along with how they question themselves. The only person who doesn’t question himself is the one in charge of the whole news bureau, the one who only seems to care that being a good boss is about intimidation. He’s the worst person in the film and when he can’t intimidate someone anymore, he’s powerless. Just as it should be. Just like we should remember sometimes.

Brooks is so clearly fascinated by the minutiae of all this, even as he keeps the focus on the people and why they’re this way, why they’re attracted to this world of journalism, which goes beyond politics and the simple reporting of the news. It’s what sets Tom Grunick apart from them at first but it’s also what sets him on the road to success beyond what any of them have been able to achieve. He’s a journalist who’s not really a journalist, let alone one who knows anything about ethics and if he doesn’t know how the profession really operates, he clearly knows how the world works and what it really cares about. He believes in what it can all be, just in his own way, knowing how to play the moment in a way that also helps him in the long game. Maybe the people already there at the Washington bureau think they know how things work but he always seems to know what he’s doing and how that affects others. It’s all about the performance to him and what he knows is to make the story he’s reporting on about him and the emotion he's feeling where he’s always the main character.

Sensing what Tom might represent almost from the start, Aaron Altman is defensive about it and he can’t seem to be anything else, as if he started off thinking that being the smartest one in the room was all you ever needed and even as he knows the truth can’t entirely walk away from that idea because if his intelligence doesn’t matter then nothing does. The basic Albert Brooks character, so perfect in the films he directs himself, now plays as a little abrasive in what is a softer story but even this makes sense, less likable than he should be just as the more likable Tom is ruthless at what he wants but knows to smile the whole time he does it. Aaron doesn’t have the X factor of camera presence that his rival does and even when he mocks Tom’s use of alliteration at one point it’s hard not to think that even the alliteration in his own name always sounds slightly awkward no matter how many times you hear it. Great for reporting the news but just not great for television, he’ll always feel like he needs to prove himself and the way he tries to do this with no one else in the room while the special report is going on without him is just about my favorite moment in the whole film. Tom is the one who correctly believes that what makes him successful is making news he reports on not about the information but the performance, it’s the only way to get people to care about whatever it is, making the story he reports on a tale of pure emotion where he’s the lead character. Through this, it feels like people in the media took Aaron’s sarcastic “Let’s never forget, we’re the real story” to heart in subsequent years and simply followed Tom’s lead.

Caught between them without realizing it, Jane is the beating brain of the film, always wanting to make the rules for the room and setting her own schedule down to the microsecond, including her ritual of crying in the morning when no one is around. Jane always wants to be the one in control and all those details make her what may be Brooks’s best creation ever in how she’s written, how she reacts to people, never wanting to let them off the hook if they’re not following the rules that she’s laid down in her own head. Her relationship with Aaron is like a double act, everyone in the office probably knows about them, and it’s almost like the romance part of what they have isn’t necessary. But of course it is. She gets her pleasure from the job along with her gleeful geekiness in things like noticing the ‘wrong missile graphic’ in a competitor’s report and she knows that there’s nothing she could ever be as good at which makes her unable to do the math at how much she’s drawn to someone who doesn’t live by any of it.

But to go along with the screwball feeling that comes out of these personalities, the film never loses sight of the fact that it is a comedy, not even when all this causes pain. The best moments, particularly the race to finish that piece at the last minute, provide the rush of what this job can be, as if to Jane and Aaron if there isn’t that stress, it can’t really be news. From the famous Joan Cusack run to get the tape to the control room which is a tremendous display of physical brilliance to the sheer interplay between the various characters trying to figure out just what Jane’s relationship with Tom really is and the highlight of Aaron’s disastrous night as anchor is the best possible payoff to what he wants. It’s all a joy, with the rhythm of the incessantly memorable Bill Conti score always ticking away through the emotions. The depth of the film is knowing what it’s like to be inside someone’s head, be more connected to them than you ever thought possible, feeling that attraction to them while avoiding the truth that it doesn’t always go together. Brooks understands these people deep down just as he also understands what keeps them apart.

The canny structure to the script is dictated by the characters as well, wisely introducing them as adults away from what will become the main location and once the story settles down in D.C. is always about the decidedly non-tourist spots of the location shooting, not counting the glow of the Jefferson Memorial during Tom and Jane’s date, add to this, they keep away from those places and only go to where they know, the “place near the thing we went that time” as Aaron puts it in one of the films best examples of shorthand between two people. But it’s also Brooks’ direction that feels so intricate, the sort that all too often gets easily dismissed since this is merely A Film About People Talking but something like his staging of the party while moving from one point of view to another is so elegant in its clarity and how it moves from one section of the party to another is undeniable. And the long stretch detailing the special report anchored by Tom gives the film several of the best split diopter shots ever, joined together to show Tom and Jane joined together, the visual representation of the great sex Tom is talking about no even knowing about her finger hovering over the button connecting to him on the floor, practically caressing it. Brooks was the one director that year of a Best Picture nominee not to get a nomination himself, the year that THE LAST EMPEROR mostly swept things, even though cinematographer Michael Ballhaus did get a nomination and together the two make each shot of a piece with each other, all flowing together beautifully. Brooks’s plotting in his script goes perfectly with how he directs it all, confident in the staging of scenes and how he lets the pauses make the film settle down when mere behavior overtakes things and it can’t just rush through moments anymore. You feel this sense of craft through the way each of the sections of the film are willing to take their time to just have the characters exist, especially when it stops to have Glen Roven and Marc Shaiman perform the new news theme, where the film seems like it’s not doing anything but it’s really doing everything and is simply enjoying itself.

Watching the film again now, I found myself thinking about Tom more than ever, whether he’s just a nice guy with his own take on things or something worse. Back in the nineties when Entertainment Weekly ran an article with the headline, “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” it was Tom Grunick I thought of thanks to Aaron’s big speech about what he represents, very aware that each man could each be the Devil in his own specific way, even as such an idea seems so quaint now. On this viewing I found myself asking, is Tom a sociopath or is he just good on television? These days, is there a difference? If he were the former, he probably wouldn’t be so insecure around Jane at the start, even if no one believes him. When he does what he does in cutting together his date rape piece, he doesn’t know it’s anything wrong. He approaches everything he does, whether his work on air or sex after hours with the same amount of confidence and maybe gets uncertain about what he knows but the level of neurosis displayed by Jane and Aaron is something totally foreign to him. And his immediate affection for Jane feels genuine, maybe because she’s the only one who sees right through him, as if he thinks that somehow it might make him better. But it’s clear that he can never change that much. More than that it’s like he sees the way things are going and how he can be a part of it, staying likable on the surface and a total blank underneath, even if he only partly understands why. Aaron sometimes seems like he doesn’t know how to be likable but he’s smart, he gets the job done and knows how important his job is. What Tom knows is that the media reports what it wants and there’s no reason he shouldn’t be the one to deliver the message. The film isn’t about what the message is as much as it’s asking about who delivers that message, the answer of which can be turned into something insidious.

When Jane gives a speech early on it quickly turns into her trying to connect with an auditorium filled with local broadcasters who barely care warns of this and feels a little too real right now, like someone from Generation X (like myself) trying to convince someone from Generation Z even some millennials (like all those weird young people) how important the movies are. How important all sorts of things are. Trying to convince them how important those feelings are that can make such work great. Going through her notecards reading, The Danger, The Hope, The Dream, The Question. They might all mean the same thing. “THIS IS IMPORTANT TO ME!” Janes screams at Aaron, as if realizing for the first time that her feelings can’t be programmed on a schedule the way she always thought. “How do you like that. I buried the lede,” Aaron says himself when proclaiming his love. When your feelings get in the way, doing the job you’re so good at suddenly doesn’t seem as important. Writer-director Brooks understands these people are feeling deep down and what keeps them apart and it makes them so genuine right from the first instant they appear so when the layoffs come, it’s like we’re getting to see the last episode of a long-running series we just tuned in for. It feels like a film made by someone who knew that the end of a certain way of doing things in this world was coming and one thing that stood out to me on this viewing was how the word ‘layoff’ isn’t used as much as the much blunter ‘firing’ when all those people are let go from the Washington bureau. The language has changed to sell the reality just as Tom Grunick would want it to be. The technology used to produce the news has changed by now, the truth under it all hasn’t.

At the end the three main characters are the same people they always were, just older and their relationships keep spinning while everything else in the world moves on. And it’ll all keep going for as long as it goes, past the end credits, up to now when these questions are still being asked. With this film, Brooks is asking questions more important than he ever thought to ask again. Later Brooks films (specifically SPANGLISH and HOW DO YOU KNOW; as of this writing, I’m still waiting to see ELLA McCAY) are never uninteresting but feel like the work of someone who was trying to figure out what the film was about while making it and they never quite seem part of the real world. This one does, as much as their behavior becomes a specific look at it all. It’s what makes it feel true, it’s what makes it hurt. It’s what makes it this good. The technology used to deliver the message has changed by now but the truth under it all hasn’t. We’re still screwed up, after all. That was inevitable. BROADCAST NEWS ends with two of the characters agreeing to be at work together and two of them operating still as friends away from it. Which one will matter more in the long run goes unspoken.

William Hurt finds the way to play someone who isn’t smart but make people believe he is, the perfect way to trick people and pulls off the perfect balance of not revealing how much he’s working the system in all this, just about the strongest use of his leading man persona that he ever achieved. Albert Brooks is the ideal casting for this version of his own persona, at least partly himself (or, at least, who we think he is) to display all that desperate arrogance so there’s not a false note shown the whole way through, going for the abrasiveness but letting down that veil when he needs to. Holly Hunter is the one who’s the revelation, with only RAISING ARIZONA and a few others behind her at this point, and she is remarkable, putting a spin on deceptively simple lines of dialogue that you never saw coming and so much more just in her body language, the way she flinches when Aaron professes his love to her as if she’s thinking, please don’t ruin what we have that was always unspoken. Whole volumes could be written just on what she does without saying anything in this film which is always a remarkable thing to observe. It’s an excellent cast, all natural and unique like Robert Prosky and Lois Chiles plus the great Joan Cusack is especially good as Jane’s assistant, a year before her first Supporting Actress nomination for WORKING GIRL, but she deserved one for here too. Peter Hackes, who plays the network executive in charge of the bureau, was mostly a correspondent himself and here plays someone so colorless that he can’t seem to say anything in a genuine way, all done with a hollow, colorless style that makes him perfect to play such an empty person. To single someone else out, I can’t help but fixate on the presence of Frank Doubleday, best known as Romero in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, here playing the role of the mercenary interviewed by Brooks for a story and how he serves as the bridge between these two films that I love so much. And, of course, Jack Nicholson, the big star who is mostly kept off camera and usually seen on monitors, taking the moment to consider what he’s just seen after Tom’s tear but when he walks into the room to play the role of the big star finally all too happy to meet the man he can tell will be his successor one day.

Once a long time ago I asked a friend who worked at News 4 New York about the big plot turn in BROADCAST NEWS involving that extra camera angle to catch Tom’s tear rolling down his face. Was it something he was surprised by? He replied that he caught the use of another camera angle in Tom Grunick’s date rape story but didn’t think of it as a plot point so much as just one of those movie things that brushes past a small inaccuracy. This could open up the question of why Holly Hunter’s character didn’t catch it at first herself but never mind. I’m sure that there are any number of things in BROADCAST NEWS that don’t have much to do with the reality of a DC news office in the ‘80s but so much of it feels right that it doesn’t matter either. The ‘seven years later’ epilogue makes me think that when Tom walks away at the end he’s heading off to anchor network coverage of the O.J. Bronco chase. That was the future, after all, just as much as he was. Looking to the future to fix what isn’t broken is maybe the only thing that changes. Not us. We’re already set. Thinking about it now, I can’t help but imagine that the Washington media was flattered by this portrayal of how clever they are but didn’t pay attention to any of the warnings. And over the years it’s become even clearer that they still won’t, no matter how often they set aside some time to cry in the morning.