The Soloist – A Documentary on the Death of Newspapers

Emmy for best documentary?

Flying trans-Atlantic once a week gives you two things:

-Lots of frequent flyer miles

-A chance to see just about every movie there is.

Virgin Atlantic offers a wide range of films, and being captive for 6 or 7 hours at a stretch (plus the fantastic hi-end headphones you get), means you can watch movies you would never go to the theater to see. Like Two Lovers with Joaquim Phonenix, which I watched yesterday… very good; or Young Victoria, or The Soloist, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx.

The Soloist is ostensibly a true story about LA Times reporter Steve Lopez and writing relationship with homeless Juliard grad Nathaniel Ayers.

What the movie actually turns out to be, strangely, is a documenary on why newspapers are going broke.

The movie opens when Lopez is riding his bike in LA, falls down and is taken to the hospital.  While there he starts scribbling his insights into the hospital ER on a slip of paper.

Any good journalist, any web-savvy journalist today would be busy twittering his experiences in real time, not jotting notes on a piece of paper.  (The very fact that the film opens with a minor bike accident as the killer shot already told me that this was going to be a long movie).

When Lopez goes back to work at the paper, the film is loaded with those classic shots of newsprint flying through the presses and that pounding sound of the presses at work.  The shots are supposed to be ‘action filled’ I suppose (I mean even the pounding of keyboards has been replaced by the silence of word processing). The film was also shot, so I understand, in the real newsroom of the LA Times.

It looks more like an insurance actuarial office than anything else.

But it was the image of the newspaper that struck me the most in the film.

So old.

So tired.

And it takes sooooo long to get from movie real-time event to something in print, and then to an event that is a response to the printed article.

And even the articles take soooo long to crank out, an even then, there is only one of them, on one day, in one corner of the paper.

Well, that is how newspapers work.

But that is not how the world works. Not anymore.

Things happen fast now.

And where is the video?

Lopez has to write the article, generate interest, (this goes on like forever) and finally he arranges a small concert for Ayers to play the cello.  (I won’t give away the story, not that there is much of a secret – it’s already been a book and a movie).

Man… this takes forever!

I cannot help but think, why doesn’t Lopez have a flipcam with him when he first encounters Ayers?

What kind of reporter is he?

What kind of news website it this?

As a journalist, Lopez is mesmerized by Ayer’s musical abilities. By what he plays. And supposedly this is all a true story.

So why doesn’t Lopez just whip out his flipcamp, record a few minutes of Ayer’s fantastic playing and post it on the LA Times website?

That would, of course, get us to the point immediately (which would shave about 1 hour off the film), but it’s also my immediate reaction as I am watching this painful attempt to capture what is a real, physical event and transpose it into printed words. Why?

Let the music and the talent speak for itself!

But the reporter and the paper don’t do that.

Instead the plot drags on tortuous event by tortuous event while journalist Steve Lopez grinds out a few column inches for the paper in text.

Man.

If anything ever showed what the LA Times is and what it could be, if it could embrace these new technologies – twitter, webcams, flipcams, Mogulus… and marry them to the talents of its reporters to dig up interesting storis – this film was it.

The problem with newspapers is clearly not the journalists and not the news, it’s the paper.

It’s the fixation on a medium that limits the power of the journalist to tell a story, to capture a moment, to convey an emotion.

So yeah. The Soloist as a movie doesn’t really work.

But neither does The LA Times.

Unfortunately.