Newsroom and The West Wing

The Main Cast of The Newsroom HBO

Several years ago, not sure how many--maybe it was 1999 when my niece began boarding at Choate Rosemary Hall and would stay with me during some of her holidays in our family apartment in New York on 145th Street in Harlem (the apartment that the celebrated jazz singer Dinah Washington owned and which my Mom Faith Ringgold now owns).  We had three televisions, all with cable--of which I was enormously proud. The West Wing by Aaron Sorkin (1998-2006), which I had never heard of or seen, was running simultaneously on re-runs on a dizzying variety of stations, and it appeared to my addled almost fifty year old brain that it was pretty continuously on the air at all times. Yet what I saw over her shoulder as her eyes would wander back to the screen was not the mixture of violence, melodrama and sex that I had learned to expect from highly re-run shows. Rather what even I could see despite all endeavors to ignore it was well suited people (by which I am referring to their clothing) walking up and down hallways, in what I later found out was the West Wing, frantically and heatedly debating a variety of subjects, none of which made any sense to me at the time.  The main thing was that this show was political--it wasn't quite the fashion that it has become--it starred Martin Sheen who I consider to be a serious person who only gets involved in serious projects, and I had previously had a lot of respect for my niece's cinematic taste.  Afterall I had been watching art films and third world films with subtitles with her since she was knee high to a grasshopper.  So what was this West Wing?

Of course, I fell deeply in love with West Wing, and continue to miss that level of engagement on television.  Not Scandal nor any of the rich BBC fare can begin to equal it for intensity and excitement from an intellectual standpoint.  It was my primer for awhile on presidential politics.  I used it to educate myself about what went on in the executive branch.

Now we have Newsroom produced by HBO also written by Aaron Sorkin.  Again we are looking at something that is heavily scripted except this time the target is life at a cable news outfit.  Again we encounter people who live for their job because they are smart and dedicated and young, and most importantly their jobs seem desperately important. That job is to figure out what the story is, to distinguish the truth from what might be most convenient for ratings and advertising, which is more of a problem than one might have imagined.  Perhaps more of a problem than when the news was something broadcast on television one hour in the evening on three networks--the anchors were white, the news was in black and white, and there were all sorts of subject matter having to do with sex and race and culture and class that were totally off limits--making it I think a simpler if not kinder job.

On the other hand, Newsroom which has recently concluded its second season, is dealing with a news environment complicated by the internet, cell phones, tweets, texts, and facebook, as well as a news and entertainment media horribly split between far too many masters and concerns.  How does it make this happen? It sticks with stories that are several years old--stories for which we know more or less some of the outcomes and a little bit about what turned out to be true--and then it presents the tensions and pressures on the media to report the lies.

As is typical with Sorkin as well, the music is fantastic.  This was true on West Wing too.  Will never forget the episode of Martin Sheen in the situation room in some awful star wars scenario in which there was no right and no wrong, and everything was wrong.  They played it against a magnificent song I discovered is included in the satellite capsule to tell the world who and what we were a thousands years from now. Blind Lemon Johnson, an extraordinary artist who sang gospel with the damnest blues flair that could be mustered.  In this case, this is a song that was so well known at the time that instead of singing it, he hummed it.  And he nailed it.  It is the saddest most beautiful sound ever recorded almost, apart from some rare African music I have heard. 

The scenario in Episode 3 of the First Season culminates in the shooting of Congressman Cathy Gifford.  As is typical with high profile shootings, the pressure is on to pronounce her dead on the air and the Newsroom crew withstand the pressure to establish the facts, which is, as we all know now, she isn't dead.

In the scene, one of the upstairs money-types comes running onto the floor of the newsroom demanding to know why the host hasn't called her as dead:

The suit from upstairs (the son of the owner, which is Jane Fonda, by the way) says, "Every second you are not current, a thousand people are changing the channel to the guy who is. That's the business you're in.  "MSNBC, CBS And FOX NPR have all said she is dead. Don tell him" (he shouts to the guy he expects to side with him).

Don says, gravely,  "It's a person.  A doctor pronounces her dead, not the news," with fabulous intense music in the background.  It's special. We care. Meanwhile evil corporate interests continue to finangle and pull strings to prevent the American people from coming within a thousand miles of the news they need to conduct their lives. 

Showboat directed by James Whale. Universal Pictures 1936

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     Based on the novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat was turned into a successful and innovative Broadway show by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II in 1927.  In 1928 Paul Robeson was offered the role of Joe in which he performed “Ole Man River,” a song that would become his signature piece as the years went by.  In 1936 director James Whale wanted Paul Robeson, who was then living in England, to perform the role for the film version, and offered Effie and Paul Robeson, despite their reluctance, too much money to turn it down ($40,000).

    With a story that draws attention to the rapid evolution of stage performance in the United States, most of the activity revolves around the emerging obsolescence of a showboat company of actors and singers on a showboat on the Mississippi River from its heyday in the 1880s through the beginning of the 1920s.  There are three loosely interconnected plots.  The first deals with the fate of Julie, who at the beginning of the film is the star of the company until a disgruntled lover reports her to the authorities in Mississippi for having black blood and therefore committing the sin of “miscegenation” with a racially mixed cast.  Her leading man, her white husband dramatically cuts her finger and drinks her blood as the sheriff arrives to close the company down.  But now the husband is black too in the state of Mississippi by virtue of the “one drop” rule of racial identity. 

   The second, larger plot has to do with the romance of the company director’s daughter (played by Irene Dunne), who becomes the next leading lady, and her romance with a handsome young gambler who becomes her leading man.  

     Meanwhile, Robeson figures in the third entirely subsidiary plot around his role as Joe, the lazy husband of the company cook (Hattie McDaniels).  The well known stereotype of the comically trifling black husband and his overbearing and not pretty wife is filled out more tastefully than usual with Robeson’s excellent immaculate rendition of his songs, eliciting from Daniels (who will subsequently win a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in Gone With The Wind) both obvious delight at finally having such a wonderful leading man together with one of the best performances she ever gave on film. 

     Despite the fact that this film is rife with every stereotype in the book of Hollywood, Whale seems to weave it all together with a surprisingly light and deeply engrossing sense of the fun of it all, which figures into a lesser trend plainly visible in some of Hollywood’s output during the 30s that there were some constituencies in Hollywood and on Broadway who were beginning to regard African American culture and black face as fodder for camping it up.  Although there are tangible no breakthroughs from a contemporary Civil Rights (meaning as envisioned by a Walter White or a W.E.B. Du Bois) standpoint, there is already the sense that racial views are not so seriously regarded as they once were.   It is hard to imagine, for instance, how Southern distributors could have excised all signs of race from this film—given that the African American presence was evenly distributed in almost every frame of the film with a bevy of black men and women singing and dancing in the background.   Even Clarence Muse’s small but dignified performance as a janitor near the end of the movie hints of the coming of a new age in black Hollywood.

     The particular disappointments here from a racial standpoint is to remind us that this film is made in what is still  1930s  U.S.A. in which Jim Crow is in full effect: the role of Julie, the mulatto, was not given to the fair skinned, strikingly beautiful, green-eyed Fredi Washington who had already made an impression as the mulatto lead in Imitation of Life (1934), but instead to a white actress (Helen Morgan); and one of Irene Dunne’s largest production numbers is performed entirely in full black face get-up including wigs and large painted white lips.   She is nonetheless a delight to watch in every frame throughout, highlighting the increasingly campy aspects of blackface performances during the period, or in other words the manner in which blackface, if it is done right usually involves a send up of gender stereotypes, as well as race.