"Page One" Documentary: The NY Times as a Stoppard Play CORRECTED

Stoppard.jpg

You couldn't have had a more rapt audience for a movie filmed largely inside the NY Times' newsroom than the attendees at the recent Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Orlando, with whom I got an advance look last week at Page One, Andrew Rossi's inside-baseball documentary (opening today) about the goings-on, over the course of a year, within a few marginal cubicles that constitute the Times' Media Desk.

As I watched these Timesmen (emphasis on men) engage in the navel-gazing pursuit of reporting the news about their own industry, I kept thinking of Tom Stoppard's 1966 play (which I saw in New York in 1968), "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead." Stoppard hilariously brings to the fore the trivial trials and tribulations of those two minor characters in "Hamlet," who are largely oblivious of the truly momentous events in Shakespeare's drama, unfolding around them. (One of these bit players decides to become a major character: Tim Arango elects to take an assignment in Iraq.)

Just a few feet away from the absurdist antics of the movie's chief protagonists---reporter David Carr and his merry band of media mavens---sat the true royalty of the Times, its investigative reporting team. The filmmakers never spoke with them.

And then there's the paucity of women. Early in the film, when some historic black-and-white photos inside the Times newsroom flashed on the screen, Diana Henriques (a senior financial writer for the Times, of my women's-lib vintage) and I turned to each other simultaneously and exclaimed, "No women!"

Little did we then know that the same charge could also be leveled at the film. While you did see females in the crowd shots and in the editorial meetings (where the incoming executive editor, Jill Abramson, was a presence but not much of a voice), you would hardly know that women play important roles in the newsroom. (Henriques, by the way, shared some great tips, at the conference's book-writing panel, on how to create the kind of riveting narrative that enlivened her definitive book on the Madoff scandals.)

After someone complained that it appeared women were going to be short-shrifted in the documentary, the filmmakers called upon Susan Chira, the Foreign Desk editor, to be a talking head. Otherwise, the most prominent women in the movie are middle-aged and teary-eyed: They are vacating their desks, as victims of the staff's finance-driven downsizing. (Come to think of it, why don't we see any men being shown the door?)

The climax of the film was not executive editor Bill Keller's congratulations, in a packed newsroom, for the latest crop of Pulitzer Prize winners (whose names we never learn). It's the publication (on the eponymous "Page One" of the movie's title) of Carr's Oct. 5 exposé of dysfunctionality at the NY Times' competitor, the LA Times.

That piece led off by focusing on the sexual pecadillos of the financially bankrupt newpaper's executives. (I'm not sure why, but having written a couple of Op-Eds for the LA Times, for which I was paid in full, I keep getting the notices that they send to creditors.) [CORRECTION: The LA Times' owner, the Chicago-based Tribune Co., not the newspaper itself, declared bankruptcy and the executives whose behavior was described by Carr came to the paper from Tribune Co.]

In one if its many fly-on-the-wall moments, the movie shows us part of the telephone conversation between Carr and someone at the LA Times, wherein he gives the rival paper a heads-up about the salacious details that he's about to reveal. It was admittedly a story worth telling. But does it exemplify the NY Times at its finest?

At least the Pulitzer announcement gives us a chance, art-lings, to get a good look at the Times' Renzo Piano-designed newsroom:

TimesNewsrm3.jpg
Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

My biggest problem with the film was its relentless focus on the eccentric, wryly amusing but often irritating Carr. We get to encounter his droopy dog, his elderly dad and his pajamas. As Michael Kinsley said in his review of the film today in the NY Times, Carr, a recovered crack addict (as he repeatedly reminds us), is an "unlikely hero." Personally, I'd rather be a fly on the wall in Keller's office (or even Chira's), but that probably wasn't an option (and they're probably not as colorful as Carr).

The film I'd really like to see is the documentary about Roberta Smith!

Of course, I did find it fascinating to penetrate the inner sanctum. And as someone who used to meet with editors in the old grungy newsroom, back in the day, I was startled and amused to see how streamlined and spiffy this new one is.

Nevertheless, I doubt that general audiences are going to care as much about second-tier reporters and their habitats as did the scribe tribe in Orlando. I actually got a kick out of the sight of reporters typing. I'm not sure anyone else will.

Here's the trailer. Judge for yourself:
June 17, 2011 2:25 PM | |

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LEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by CultureGrrl published on June 17, 2011 2:25 PM.

Alice Walton’s "World-Class Museum": Does NY Times Know Something We Don’t about Crystal Bridges? was the previous entry in this blog.

Chunk of the "Hunk": Andersons’ Collection Bypasses SFMOMA for Stanford is the next entry in this blog.

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