Journalist in Silent Film 35 The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890 to 1929: Part One 1890 to 1919 Joe Saltzman Professor of Journalism Director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) A Project of the Norman Lear Center Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA [email protected] with Liz Mitchell Senior Research Associate Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA [email protected] Introduction This is the first installment in the landmark study of “The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890 to 1929.” It covers 1,948 films from 1890 to 1919. Part Two will cover the years from 1920 to the beginning of recorded sound in 1929. This is the first comprehensive study of the beginning of cinema’s earliest depictions of the journalist, mostly newspaper reporters, editors, and publishers. Newspaper fiction flourished at a time when journalism “was a revolutionary force, tearing up traditions, redefining public morality, and lending voice and encouragement to the disenfranchised. It reflected currents sweeping through every phase of American life. The skyrocketing circulations, the manic search for exclusive news, the sensational headlines, and the concentration of newspaper ownership were signs of an America changing from a rural society to an urban and industrial one. Since journalism so clearly mirrored and so loudly supported the new order, it became the preeminent symbol for the mechanization, standardization, democratization, and vulgarization of culture.”1 Historian Howard Good points out that the 1890s “represented a watershed not only in American journalism but also in American history. The decade saw the passing of the Old West, the shift of economic and political power from the countryside to the city, and the shattering Journalist in Silent Film 36 impact of a torrent of immigration on traditional values and institutes.”2 From 1890 to 1930, America was “transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. The great potential wealth of the country dazzled the mind, capital, labor, natural resources, and inventiveness were in plentiful supply.”3 All of the journalist stereotypes commonplace in the 20th century began in the silent film era, with many derived from the novels of the 19th century. Silent films adopted unchanged the formulas that the novels originated and because of this “cross-breeding, the same stereotypes and story patterns appear in all the art forms.”4 Good, one of the first to study the image of the journalist in novels and films, points out that newspaper fiction helped to shape the public’s image of the press, and now gives historians insights into the journalism of 1890 to 1930 and how those who reported the news felt about their work and journalism in general.5 Young men and women read these novels, fell in love with the newsroom, and aspired to journalism careers.6 However, no matter how popular newspaper novels were, newspaper fiction as a whole never “attracted the mass audience the newspaper film did. The movies took common clay and breathed new life into it. Brought to the big screen, the image of the journalist was magnified and put in noisy and anarchic motion…the characters and settings readers once had to piece together in their own imaginations were immediately and volubly present to moviegoers.”7 On the big screen, the image of the journalist was magnified and put into motion. The journalists were defined on screen by brashness and cunning. They were creatures of the city familiar with its fast pace, crowds, and opportunities to get ahead. They reflected the American audience’s preference for action and accomplishment rather than ideology, and they embodied the myth of the self-reliant individual who pits nerves and resourcefulness against an unfair society. By the 1890s, the “big-city newspaperman, who, supplied with a wad of copy paper, a stubby pencil and a nose for news,” had become “an unmistakable figure on the American scene.”8 These early images of journalists include reporters, editors, columnists, cub reporters and newsboys, war and foreign correspondents, magazine writers, pamphlet and book writers, newsreel camerapersons, photojournalists, and publishers. “The roots of today’s popular image of the journalist can be found in hundreds of novels and silent films dating back more than a century, when a host of characters emerged: the energetic, opportunistic newshound who would do anything for a scoop; the tough, sarcastic female reporter trying desperately to outdo her male competition; the enthusiastic ‘cub’ who wants more than anything else to be a bylined reporter; the big-city newspaper editor committed to getting the story first at any cost; and the ruthless media tycoon using the power of the press for his or her own selfish ends. Those archetypes carried over with relatively little variation into portrayals of radio and television newspeople and later of cyberjournalists. Such images—at once repellent and romantic, villainous and heroic— hint at a complex, contradictory relationship between the press and the public.”9 As Good writes, “Hollywood has given us reporters corrupted by cynicism, ambition and drink, careless of others’ lives and reputations, and ever reluctant to let the truth stand in the way of a good story.”10 In addition, as journalism film historian Richard R. Ness, whose groundbreaking research in the image of the journalist in silent film sparked this study, points out, “The public’s love/hate relationship with the fourth estate was in evidence on the screen almost from the beginning of cinema. While many of the early films presented journalists as crusaders who helped to right social wrongs, it was not uncommon also to find them portrayed as unscrupulous or Journalist in Silent Film 37 manipulative.”11 Good points out that the public “basically got the kind of portrayal of the press it demanded. Confused and threatened by the pace and direction of social change, people needed both a savior and a scapegoat and the journalist, a leading actor in the drama of the modern world, could be made to fill either role”―“a messiah who appeared out of nowhere to solve problems a community was incapable of solving for itself” but more often, “a frustrated hack with indecent and unnatural ideas in his head, whisky on his breath, no money in his pocket, and the gutter before him.”12 Adds Good, “The mania to be the fastest to gather the news and the first to report it is enshrined in fiction…there are virtually no limits to what fictional journalists will do to run down their quarry and score a scoop.”13 An advertisement for the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial in 1912 with the headline “SCOOPS!” showed how much the public had become familiar with the word “scoop” and its value: “In the newspaper world, a ‘scoop’ or a ‘beat’ means putting it over on the other fellow. It means that certain exclusive and important information has been obtained and circulated through energy and enterprise. When a ‘scoop’ is recorded the office force from printer’s devil to editor-in-chief wear broad smiles. It is a season for mutual congratulations― and then everybody resolves to go forth and do it all over again. Some are born with ‘scoops.’ Some achieve ‘scoops,’ and others have ‘scoops’ thrust upon them―and it may be herewith stated that the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial ‘scoops’ are achieved.”14 A newsroom is always filled with fast-talking, bright people whose main work is to speak to strangers, investigate a situation, get answers, develop a story. Since reporters are always finding out something about someone, they create countless stories with good beginnings, middles, and endings. The newspaper gave the moviemaker an endless flow of story possibilities in an atmosphere that soon became so familiar to movie audiences that journalists could be thrown into a film without the scriptwriter having to worry about motivation or plot. “No other profession could match journalism for the variety and intensity of experience it offered.”15 By the early 1920s, audiences already knew that reporters were always involved in some kind of story, no matter how bizarre or melodramatic. They accepted it as a matter of course. In the, they got not only large doses of entertainment but also a series of lasting impressions about the news media that has stayed in the public mind. Silent films became “the most powerful medium of communication in the world―a universal language.”16 Some historians, including Good, believe that the period from 1890 to 1930 was a golden age of journalism, the years when young people went to college to learn journalism―necessitating the creation of journalism textbooks―and journalists themselves began to take their profession seriously by creating press clubs and publishing trade journals.17 But it was also the age of yellow journalism (a name derived from a newspaper comic character called the Yellow Kid), which was in full swing. From the 1890s, yellow journalism had, in the words of one historian, “choked up the news channels on which the common people depended with a shrieking, gaudy, sensation- loving, devil-may-care kind of journalism,” twisting stories into the “form best suited for sales by the howling newsboy.”18 The people loved it. Even conservative newspapers were forced to take on a yellow hue to sell their products. Early filmmakers often took their ideas for the movies from newspapers, adapting current events to their scripts. “Many workers, illiterate and foreign-born, read no newspapers, Journalist in Silent Film 38 and the nickelodeon was thus a source of astonishment.