\u201cNightcrawler\u201d is a newly released movie written and directed by Dan Gilroy. At the moment, it is receiving mostly positive reviews from film critics such as Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal and A. O. Scott of The New York Times. The first three reviews quote a line the movie, which evolves around the tabloid TV. The line is spoken by a TV news producer played by Renee Russo. This is from Turan\u2019s review:<\/p>\n
“I want something people can’t turn away from,” she says. The key word is not bloody but “graphic,” the victims should be well-off and white. “Think of our newscast,” she concludes, “as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”<\/p>\n
Here is a passage from Ben Hecht\u2019s autobiography, \u201cA Child of the Century\u201d published published 60 years ago (page 144, Simon & Schuster, 1954, first edition): Hecht writes of Sherman Duffy, a Chicago newspaperman whom he\u00a0idolized. Hecht is writing about the time between 1910 and 1917.<\/p>\n
\u201cGreat wits crossed swords with my champion (Duffy). There was Arthur James Pegler, the salty and verbally crackling father of Westbrook, the mighty\u00a0columnist-to-be. Pegler, p\u00e8re, was the inventor of the blood-and-thunder rhetoric which became known as the Hearst newswriting style. He wrote once, in a magazine tale, a description of the thing he had helped create:<\/p>\n
” \u2018A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Hecht was a Chicago reporter during the golden days newspapering. He famously co-wrote the play \u201cThe Front Page,\u201d which was made into three movies,* all of which are well worth watching.*<\/p>\n
He later became novelist, playwright and most of all a Hollywood script writer and dubbed the Shakespeare of Hollywood.<\/p>\n
Gilroy, the writer of \u201cNightcrawler,\u201d would have done well to attribute the slit throat quote to Pegler, if not by name then to at least indicate it did not originate with him via the Russo character.<\/p>\n
* Adolphe Menjou and Pat O\u2019Brien\u00a0played in the first version(1931), Matheau and Lemmon in the remake (1974) and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell\u00a0gave it a twist\u00a0(1940) and was\u00a0titled, \u201cHis Girl Friday.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cNightcrawler\u201d is a newly released movie written and directed by Dan Gilroy. At the moment, it is receiving mostly positive reviews from film critics such as Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal and A. O. Scott of The New York Times. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,18],"tags":[263,265,264,268,266,267,217],"class_list":["post-1902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-people-people","tag-nightcrawler-movie","tag-a-o-scott","tag-dan-gilroy","tag-joe-morgenstern","tag-kenneth-turan","tag-the-front-page","tag-the-wall-street-journal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1902"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1907,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1902\/revisions\/1907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}