I love movies and being a great big nerd, I really love newspaper movies.
There have been a few good ones. Citizen Kane pops to mind as a movie with a strong "newspaper" plot. So does the wonderful His Girl Friday, Deadline USA and The Paper - with Michael Keaton, Glenn Close and others - and likely my favorite.
My other nerdy habit is that I "collect" quotes. Nothing to me is better than memorable quotes from newspaper movies - the ultimate nerd festival! Here are a few of my favorites:
From "The Paper" - and yes, I'm only reprinting the clean quotes.
- You wanna cover Brooklyn, then cover Brooklyn! But let me tell you something, it's a little tough to do from a barstool in Manhattan.
- If we get art on the two kids at the walk of shame, it's "Gotcha!".
- Deadline: Date or time before which something must be done.
- We run stupid headlines because we think they're funny. We run maimings on the front page because we got good art. And I spend three weeks complaining about my car because it sells papers. But at least it's the truth. As far as I can remeber we never ever, ever knowingly got a story wrong, until tonight.
And a couple of quotes from Citizen Kane:
- It's also my pleasure to see to it that decent, hard-working people in this community aren't robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates, just because they haven't had anybody to look after their interests...
- If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property...and that would be too bad!
- I run a couple of newspapers. What do you do?
And finally, my all time favorite newspaper quote, taken from the movie Deadline USA, spoken by Humphrey Bogart at the end:
- That's the press, baby. The press! And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing!