Hard hacks to follow

To celebrate the release of 'How To Lose Friends and Alienate People', Time Out pick some of the toughest journalistic gigs in cinema

Apocalypse Now (1979)
Publication: Unknown
Mission: Photograph last days of a pretentious poet-warlord
Location: Cambodia
When Marlon Brando disappears into the Cambodian jungle to amass a guerilla army dedicated to ending the Vietnam War at any cost, nightly ritualistic slaughter and Edwardian poetry, there’s only one name on the Rolodex when you want someone to nip over and take a few snaps. Hard to know whether it’s a plum assignment or as punishment for some heinous misdeeds, but seeing as the photojournalist in question is Dennis Hopper, we’re going to assume it’s the latter. Soon won over by Brando’s baffling, discontinuous drivel, Hopper makes the cosmic revelation that he doesn’t even have any film in his camera. Whether his editor appreciated this sly allegory of Brando’s mental and spiritual decay is not disclosed.

The Ring (1998)
Publication: The Tokyo Bugle
Mission: The mysterious background to a killer (literally) VHS
Location: Various in Japan
Kids, eh? When they’re not sneaking off to out-of-town log cabins for uncomplicated sexual jiggery pokery and the chance to bung a load of chalk up their collective snozz, then they’re usually passing around cursed VHS tapes where the chance of death upon viewing is 110 per cent. After a string of incidents in which a bunch of teeny boppers have been ‘killed to death’ by said tape, intrepid newspaper reporter and winsome divorcee Reiko (Nanako Matsushima) goes on a mission to find out the real cause of all these deaths – and no, it’s not because the tape contained some old episodes of ‘Big Break’ on there… A tough gig made even tougher due to the fact that she unwittingly leaves it in the VHS player and – mistaking it for Disney’s ‘Mulan’ – her young son watches it, giving the nipper a week to live.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2005)
Publication: N/A – a freelance piece
Mission: A profile of manic-depressive oceanographer, Steve Zissou
Location: The big blue
In Wes Anderson’s delightfully eccentric 2005 seafaring yarn ‘The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou’, the ever-reliable Cate Blanchett plays safari-suit wearing posho reporter, Jane Winslett-Richardson, plundering the high seas alongside a crew of spotty interns and Bill Murray’s eponymous curmudgeon at the helm. Though the initial mission is to write a profile of Zissou, and find out why his sealife documentaries are not as popular as they used to be, a wild goose chase ensues, as the half-crazed cap’n wants to locate the enigmatic Jaguar shark who ate his best friend Esteban. Obstacles include pirates with automatic weapons and Jeff Goldblum in a white mink scarf.

The Mean Season (1985)
Publication: Miami Herald
Mission: String along a serial killer to boost circulation
Location: Storm-tossed Florida
Journalistic balance is at the crux of this overlooked gem, which stretches the line between detached reporting and pernicious news-mongering to breaking point. Labouring under the misapprehension that donning a pair of outsize specs will make him appear bookish, Kurt Russell plays a frazzled Miami reporter with a hotline to the serial killer that’s terrorizing the Sunshine State. The hurricane season swings into town while the tension mounts, the body count soars and Kurt’s journalistic integrity takes as much as a buffeting as his big, beautiful barnet.

The Styrofoam Incident (1970)
Publication: The London Herald Examiner
Mission: Get the old career back on track
Location: Haiti
Perennial second-stringer Rampton Caine applies his patented brand of world-weary misogyny to the role of Archie Croft, a washed up Fleet Street hack who gets wind of a once-in-a-lifetime story brewing in the backwaters of Haiti. Trading his jumbo expense account for a chartered Hercules to Port-au-Prince, he is soon embroiled in some ecological derring-do, plentiful bouts of world-class racism and a short-sleeved safari suit that would overwhelm a lesser man. When he discovers that a rapacious American company is dumping industrial by-product into the island’s rivers, Croft has his exclusive, but will he live long enough to file it???

LA Confidential (1997)
Publication: Hush-Hush Magazine
Mission: Sleaze, gossip and general venality
Location: Hollywood
LA in the ’50s was neither the time or the place to be reporting much of the truth, let alone printing juicy whoppers about the great and the not so good. Danny DeVito plays Sid Hudgens, a grubby little slander-monkey who’s never happier than when he’s ruining lives and reputations with scurrilous gossip or framing starstruck adolescents for illegal sexual shenanigans. Sid becomes unstuck when one of his clammy scams disturbs the delicate yet extremely violent balance between the LAPD and the Mob and finds his own name spread all over the obituary columns.

---