Broadcast News (1987)
Directed by James L. Brooks
A high-strung news producer finds herself in a love triangle between a talented but self-doubting reporter and a charming news anchor who embodies the growing trivialization of news that she is determined to fight against.
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The soul of the network, and the sanity of Beale, who is quickly made the centerpiece of an indescribably gaudy revamp of the news, are batted back and forth between these and several other players over the course of two hours, during which Chayefsky gives voice to some of the most acrid, cynical satire that has ever been filmed: nobody in the film comes off as a remotely decent human being besides Schumacher's dumped-on wife (Straight), with even the weary truth-telling that Schumacher indulges in feeling more like resentful sniping and unimaginative defensiveness than Albert Brooks in Broadcast News -style moral wisdom.
It's not a scathing satire like "Network," nor is it to broadcast journalism what "All the President's Men" was to print.
That idea carries over beautifully into Broadcast News, especially as a follow-up to Brooks’s Oscar-winning feature debut Terms of Endearment (1983), which focused entirely on traditional familial dynamics.
In his first film since his Oscar-winning ''Terms of Endearment,'' Mr. Brooks goes inside the offices and studios of the Washington bureau of a national television network to show us how things work.
After sweeping the Oscars with his popular mother-daughter melodrama, “Terms of Endearment,” producer-writer-director James L. Brooks made a better, more poignant film, “Broadcast News,” an inside chronicle of TV news and its changing mores in the 1980s.
Like " Terms of Endearment ," the previous film by James L. Brooks, it does not see relationships as a matter of meeting someone you like and falling in love.
But Brooks' ambitions for his second film -- his first was "Terms of Endearment" -- appear to have been far less exalted.