The newspaper industry is laying off thousands, with scarcely a peep from the public, even as reporters are playing heroes in a spate of new movies.
The latest is The Soloist, starring Robert Downey as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who befriends a homeless man he encounters one day, after watching the man try to render Tchaikovsky on a two-stringed violin.
Lopez wrote about his relationship with Nathaniel Ayers, a classically trained musician brought low by schizophrenia, in a series of columns and a book, which inspired the movie starring Downey, Jamie Foxx and Catherine Keener.
But the movie explores a loss beyond that of schizophrenia - that of a newspaper industry in a downward, perhaps deadly, slide.
Even as the film plays with the iconic image of tens of thousands of papers rolling off the presses, it situates itself clearly in the present with the onscreen Lopez bemoaning his colleagues’ buyouts.
“As I watched the movie, the newspaper element of it is bittersweet for me,” Lopez told McClatchy Newspapers. “I find (the film) to be both a celebration and a lament.”
Filming parts of the movie at the Los Angeles Times, whose parent company is in bankruptcy proceedings and which has laid off dozens of reporters and editors, was a learning process, said the film’s British director, Joe Wright.
“Spending time and walking around there, there are floors of that building that are being vacated,” Wright said. “You can’t ignore it, really - it’s what life is offering us as filmmakers.”
Other recent movies revolving around the news business are State of Play, in which Russell Crowe plays a grizzled newspaperman investigating the death of a lawmaker’s mistress.
In All About Steve, due out this fall, Bradley Cooper plays a CNN cameraman who catches the eye of an eccentric crossword fan (Sandra Bullock) who follows him around the globe to convince him they were meant to be.
And Marley & Me, which came out late last year, explored the relationship between a yellow Labrador retriever and the family of newsman John Grogan. a former columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, based on Grogan’s memoir of the same titie.
In The Soloist, at least, there is a sort of individual redemption in the face of loss. As Lopez helps to guide Ayers off the street, he rediscovers his own passion for writing through Ayers’ experience of music.
“I began to think of him as a lucky guy,” Lopez told Reuters. “Because so few people find their purpose in life, find what it’s all about and live their life with a purpose and passion like he does.”
He said he was also proud of what his columns did to focus attention on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. “I think it’s a celebration of news operations that have the resources to stick with a story,” he said.
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