November 21, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Glass House
SHATTERED GLASS
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
I'm not a journalist; I'm not even really a writer (more like a guy exploiting a movie mania in order to see free films, like a cut-rate version of Bogdanovich or Tarantino in their early days). But I've worked at a lot of papers and seen journalists in action.
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They tend to be a mixture of sagacity and stuffiness. Despite their reputations for roguishness, I've never met a more prudish lot. They tend to be conventionally minded middlebrows. They all dress the same (khaki trousers, blue shirts, brown corduroy jackets), and they hate getting ideas for stories from the public. Never sidle up to a reporter at a party and say, "Have I got a story for you!" or call a newspaper with a passionate plea that a certain subject should be covered. They don't care and they don't listen. They assume you have an "agendum" (because they have agenda, too). They prefer to "stumble" onto their stories themselves. They are often like the Susan Orlean character portrayed in ADAPTATION. They rarely have a continuing interest in one particular story. They cover a matter, and then move on, and can be irked when people keep seeking them out to get them back on a topic they abandoned mentally last week in favor of their current deadline. They like to get excited about issues, especially issues pertaining to the ethics of journalism itself, and they love to be in meetings batting their ideas back and forth (editors do, anyway).
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There aren't that many great journalism movies. I can think of a few, such as BETWEEN THE LINES, which gives a pretty good picture of what a small newspaper is like (the power plays, the hypochondriacs, the hustlers). There's DEADLINE U.S.A, there's CALL NORTHSIDE 777. Lots of people like THE FRONT PAGE and HIS GIRL FRIDAY, made back when reporters were staples of comedies because ex-reporters wrote most comedy scripts. SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is probably the greatest.
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It's difficult to portray people thinking and composing on screen. The action of the hunt takes precedence over the cogitation of structuring a story. Still, I remember being inspired, like thousands of other tykes, by ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. Journalism could actually be an exciting job. The film begins with a white screen, and then suddenly a typewriter keypunches a letter. Everyone in the theater jumped. But it was a perfect analog of what journalists at their best could do: make you stand at attention through the power of their instruments. Because journalism is mostly process (researching, interviewing, writing, editing, re-writing, copy-editing, lawyer vetting, and so on), journalists themselves love to ponder the process, note where it goes wrong, and cackle with glee when another paper fucks up royally.
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The worst thing about writing journalism is that not only do you have to have the facts straight and get the names right, but also on top of that you have to be a lively writer, a Mini Me James Wolcott or Anthony Lane. In fact, it's harder to do the lively writing part than the traditional who-what-when-where-why of straight journalism. That constant demand for high performance is a real brain crusher, requiring a huge vocabulary and a natural facility with the language. In the old days, someone didn't actually need to be a good writer to be a journalist. Today, in order to get ahead in a tight competitive field you have to be a master prose stylist as well as a digger. Formerly sober publications now encourage the kinds of "fun" stories that require prose pyrotechnics. That's how Stephen Glass got into trouble.
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An associate editor at the Washington, D.C. headquartered NEW REPUBLIC, Glass specialized in comic feature pieces for the traditionally policy wonkish weekly. As portrayed in the film SHATTERED GLASS, Stephen Glass was one of the most neurotic reporters in the history of newsrooms, yet still a familiar type to anyone who has spent time in one.
Glass seemed needy. He brought out the maternal instinct in hot young copyeditor chicks. If someone challenged him on a story his first response was, "Are you mad at me?" Yet behind the guise of the fresh-faced kid just out of J-school there is a mercenary hustler. HARPER'S, POLICY REVIEW, and other mags have a tendency to call him while he is at the office. When people asked him (a bit too often for my taste) "When did you start talking to HARPER'S?" he pooh poohs the notion that he might be attempting to suck up to other publications (the real Glass seems to have made no secret of his freelancing, appearing in ROLLING STONE and elsewhere).
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SHATTERED GLASS is of course the story of a scam artist. For an industry depended on the trust of the reader for the accuracy of the text in the paper, it sure attracts a lot of bunko artists. From Janet Cooke to Jayson Blair, and including Rex Reed and the guy that owned a lot of Colorado papers who pretended to be a war vet (he wore his "uniform to public functions), a lot of these people want the fame of writing without doing all the work. Philip Nobile is good at unearthing writing scams, and the writer to exposed Glass was Adam Penenberg. Like Blair, Glass labored as much at hiding his scams as he would have simply writing straight stories in the first place.
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But why did he do it? Why did the young lad from Highland Park conjure up some 27 of his 40+ bylined stories from whole cloth? The movie seems to make the claim that Glass was an uncertain, self-deprecating sort who didn't have the confidence to pursue stories and so made them up as he went along. But the film also shows him to be a cunning manipulator who never stops avoiding the truth. He seems to have demanded sympathy over everything, and didn't even mind getting caught as long as you weren't mad at him.
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Glass later went on to write a roman a clef about his NEW REPUBLIC years. The film gives a much less self-justifying account, based on a story by Buzz Bissinger that appeared in the September 1998 VANITY FAIR. Billy Ray's movie, which he both wrote and directed, follows the Bissinger story closely. It's all there: the "screamingly funny" story pitches, the slow unraveling that begins when a story about a hotel room of cruel conservatives at a convention is tripped up by a reference to a non-existent mini-fridge. The temporary reprieve when the magazine changes editors. Then the story "Hack Heaven" about a hacker hired by the tech company he hacked into, done while he attended a convention (Glass liked conventions). The challenges raised by a reporter for the digital on-line version of FORBES, who, in retracing the steps of "Hack Heaven," came to the conclusion that the story had been fabricated.
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SHATTERED GLASS starts out a little shaky (all those repetitious bits of Iagoian flattery and "When did you start talking to HARPER'S?"), but quickly becomes engrossing; in part for the questions it fails to answer as much for the story it tells. It's cleverly written, with a punch-line set up in the first few minutes that don't meet its payoff until the last few. The conflict between different editors is well handled, and the loyalty they engender in the staff seems accurate. The film is framed by a talk that Glass is giving to a class taught by his former teacher, and in the end it serves a good purpose, luring the viewer into the same kind of charming scam that Glass tantalized his editors with.
It's also wonderfully acted all around, especially by Hank Azaria, as the late Michael Kelly, Glass's first editor, and by Peter Sarsgaard, as his successor Charles Lane. Azaria's character is admirable, and Lane's slow burn is comical in its own horrified way.
I'm also growing fond of Chloe Sevigny. I've been seeing her in movies since KIDS, of course, but lately she seems to have really grown into her parts. Both here and in DEMONLOVER, she's really good at righteous anger, at telling people off when she's had it up to here. But equally great are Rosario Dawson in a bit part, Steve Zahn as always but not doing his slacker routine, and Canadian film director Ted Kotcheff as the owner of the NEW REPUBLIC.
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If the film stumbles, it is only in the clumsiness of its opening scene setting, and in exploring Glass's motivation. I can imagine another way of structuring the story, by concentrating on Penenberg researching the story and realizing to his horror that indeed "Hack Heaven" is faked, and then in a part two show the NEW REPUBLIC culture out of which the fraud grew. Or the filmmakers could have pulled a CITIZEN KANE, and followed Bissinger as he retraced Glass's steps and interviewed all the participants, who tell their stories in chronological flashbacks.
And I'm not sure what to think of STAR WARS refugee Hayden Christensen as Glass. I don't know if it is intentional or not for his character, but he kind of talks funny. If unintentional it's one of the great bad voices of cinema, like Stephen Boyd in THE OSCAR. He's be perfect if anyone ever wanted to do the remake of THE OTHER SISTER.
By the way, Tom Cruise's company produced SHATTERED GLASS. His partner Paula Wagner is the specified producer, so I don't know how much Cruise had to do with the film, but I can understand why the subject matter might have some interest for the actor, who has his own agendum against reckless newspaper coverage.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Six
KILL BILL VOL. 1
I was sitting around with my Thursday night group of film geeks and movie writers, and the subject of KILL BILL came up again, as it usually does, along with LOTR: TROTK, Chud.com, and whatever big DVD is coming out next week that everyone wants. Someone asked, "How many times have you seen it?" One fellow said twice. I said three times. Another colleague said five times. And so on.
It's that kind of movie. You want to see it again and again. You return to it like comfort food during a cinematic wasteland. We all made plans to see it together once KILL BILL hits one of those beer and pizza theaters so prominent in my home town.
The storyboard reproduced above comes from the November 2003 issue of the British men's magazine ARENA. It has a cover story on Uma Thurman (see below) in the movie, but also goes into some detail about how it was made and what to expect in the second part. The storyboards recount a sequence in part two that readers of the screenplay know about, and which is derived from a similar scene in the Chuck Norris movie, LONE WOLF MCQUADE, which turns this paragraph into another annotation.
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