Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [214]
“He was a great editor, but he was eighty,” Pauline said to a crowd of advertisers at one of The New Yorker’s promotional luncheons at the Beverly Hills Hotel in May 1987. She went on to assure them that “with Bob Gottlieb replacing Bill Shawn at The New Yorker, the magazine still will hold on to the values you like, and, if anything, it’ll be more readable.” Late in 1987, however, she was happy to write a letter of support for Shawn, who was eager to take on some challenging retirement projects and had applied to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a fellowship. Pauline’s letter hailed him as “an amazing man—dedicated to what he believes to be the best writing,” and urged the MacArthur Foundation to give him the fellowship because it would “constitute a vote of confidence in an eighty-year-old man of letters. It would be a beautiful gesture.”
Readers who were anticipating a difficult adjustment to a new editor were surprised by how little the scope of the magazine changed once Gottlieb assumed control. Like Shawn, he was very much a hands-on editor, and there was still frequent coverage of subjects that might not be done in depth elsewhere. Pauline was scarcely affected; she was still allowed a generous amount of space, although she wasn’t always writing as long as she had in the past—partly because of a certain diminishing of her energy, but also because it was getting harder for her to justify spending so much time on inferior films.
At year’s end she was once again able to praise John Huston, who, at eighty and struggling with emphysema, had directed a screen version of James Joyce’s “The Dead”—a detailed account of an annual party and supper given by a pair of spinster music teachers on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1904 Dublin, thought by many to be the finest short story in the English language. Huston had, in Pauline’s words, “never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically,” as he had in these “funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range.” (Huston had actually spent twenty years living in Galway.) He had done what Pauline thought every great artist needed to do: He had enlarged his vision as he aged. Huston died shortly after completing the filming in the summer of 1987.
Broadcast News, another year-end release in 1987, was a much more penetrating look at the world of television news than the grandiose and pretentious Network, and it became a big hit with audiences, grossing more than $50 million on its release. Directed, produced, and scripted by James L. Brooks, Broadcast News was the story of a changing TV news industry. The traditional, hard-research-and-reporting route is represented by the driven, brainy producer Jane (Holly Hunter) and solid, reliable newsman Aaron (Albert Brooks), who dreams of having a shot at anchoring the news. The increasingly popular news-as-entertainment route is represented by the vapid, poorly informed, but charismatic and audience-savvy reporter Tom (William Hurt). The following exchange typified the movie’s essential conflict:
TOM: I don’t write. But that didn’t stop me from sending my audition tapes to the bigger stations and the networks.
JANE: It’s hard for me to advise you, since you personify something that I truly think is dangerous.
As a news junkie, Pauline had watched the content of network news being debased for years, and her years of watching brilliantly informed her review of the picture:
Basically, what the movie is saying is that beautiful, assured people have an edge over the rest of us, no matter how high our I.Q.s are. But, by applying this specifically to the age of television, Jim Brooks used it as the basis for a satirical critique of what