Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists

Year 15, Day 101 - 4/11/23 - Movie #4,402

BEFORE: This will be a shorter version of my Doc Block than usual, last year's Block was 46 films long (total includes two fiction films needed to make the connections) and stretched from June 24 to August 13.  But just 25 films in this year's plan (total includes one fiction film needed to make the connections) because Mother's Day is coming up, and I'll have to wrap up in time to set that holiday up.  Still, there's a lot of overlap because once I get on a topic like politics or sports, the films tend to interview the same people over and over, or the same figures pop up in archive footage - Presidents, a-level athletes, newscasters, and for some reason, Spike Lee.  He's always down for an interview, must have a lot of time on his hands. So there were many different ways I could organize these 25 films, it's not a big circle like last year's chain, but still, there were lots of possibilities. I've found an order that suits me, and I'm going to try to resist the temptation to mess around with it, because it's going to get me where I need to be, and that's the most important thing. 

Robert De Niro carries over from "Val". 

THE PLOT: The story of New York City journalists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, lauded in their time as the voice of New York. 

AFTER: Either one of tonight's subjects probably warranted a documentary of his own, but combining them into one is not only a study in contrasts, it's symbolic of the city of New York, which always presents you with a choice.  Do you follow the Yankees or the Mets?  The Knicks or the Nets?  Giants or Jets?  And do you read the Daily News or the NY Post?  (Oh, right, there's also the NY Times, but come on, it's no fun except for the crossword puzzle.). When I came to college in NYC in 1986, I had to start making some choices, and I went with the Daily News because it had the best comics section - and I used to get my paper for free just by  finding one on top of the subway trash each morning. (I stopped that practice when I got a paper full of actual crap one day, and kept buying the Daily News only on Sundays for the comics and crossword.)

Along the same demographic lines, perhaps, people tended to follow either Breslin or Hamill, again based on which paper they bought, although both men bounced around a bit, Hamill ran the Daily News for a while, Breslin stayed mostly at the post until he was asked to leave for his racist comments. For a brief time both men worked for the SAME newspaper, and then a lot of people didn't know what to do, you just can't root for both the Yankees and the Mets, it's not natural. 

The two men had similar roots, Irish-Catholic and working class families.  Both started as beat reporters with ink running in their veins, and both lived a good long time, which meant that they both experienced great loss, Breslin outlived his wife and two daughters, Hamill divorced one wife and then dated celebrities like Jackie Onassis and Shirley MacLaine before getting married again.  Both men were present the night that Robert Kennedy got shot, Hamill had a hand in convincing RFK to run for President, and then of course regretted that decision to some degree. Hamill was also one of the men who disarmed the assassin, then Breslin sat on him to hold him down. Breslin also ran for office, on a semi-serious NYC Mayor & City Council President ticket with Norman Mailer, before going on to semi-fame in commercials for Piels beer. ("It's a good drinkin' beer!")

There's not enough time to cover every relevant news story that these reporters, umm, reported on - so they had to just hit the highlights.  Like that time that real-estate mogul Donald Trump weighed in on the Central Park jogger rape case by taking out full page ads in the newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in NYC so it could be retroactively applied to the five suspects. Yeah, that one got nasty REAL fast.  And then it turned out, years later, that it was a big mix-up, the five arrested suspects were innocent, and they only lost decades of their life to incarceration, what a mistake it would have been to listen to Donald Trump.  Well, we all had a good laugh over that one, and I wonder what ever became of that Trump guy.  

Another case highlighted here was a female police officer who broke through the glass ceiling in the NYPD, only to have someone discover nude photos of her, taken before joining the force, that were printed in an X-rated magazine.  She got fired for "conduct unbecoming an officer" even though the pics were from years before, and Jimmy Breslin championed her case in the press, arguing that posing for nudie pics wouldn't preclude someone from becoming a good officer.  It just seemed to be a subject that Breslin knew a lot about, that's all - he probably had a copy of the magazine in his collection.  Oh, that Jimmy Breslin...

Breslin was also intimately involved in the cases of Bernhard Goetz, the subway shooter, and David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer.  Both were media circuses with Breslin at the center, and the issues raised by Goetz, as a vigilante, were complex.  Most people supported Goetz in theory at first, because he was defending himself during a robbery, but when it was discovered that he shot the suspects in the back, and hated the world in general, public support slowly turned against him, with Breslin leading the charge.  And questions were raised about whether Breslin's contact with Berkowitz maybe encouraged him to kill again and again, after he had a reporter to send messages to. The film then winds it way through the AIDS crisis of the 1980's, the Crown Heights riot of 1991, and of course the horrific events of 9/11/01. 

The truth is that newspaper journalism was much healthier back in the days of Breslin and Hamill - the Daily News used to have a staff of 400 reporters and editors, and these days it's more like 40.  (And once A.I. starts writing the columns, it's going to be down to zero, maybe real soon.) These were the days before the internet, mind you, so every city had to have their own staff of reporters, you couldn't share an article instantly over the web.  And back in those days nobody had a cell phone with a news app, so if you wanted the latest information, it came in paper form.  We're saving trees now, but what have we lost along the way?  Typesetters, copy boys, beat reporters, local movie reviewers, they've all gone the way of the dinosaur. Now everybody who's anybody has a YouTube channel or a podcast, it's just not the same. 

You can also thank Jimmy Breslin (along with sportscaster Jimmy the Greek) for creating "cancel culture", or actually for making racist comments to co-workers and creating the NEED for cancel culture, because shortly after Breslin's tirade toward an Asian-American co-worker who said that one of his columns was sexist and also wasn't very good, people got together and decided that overtly racist people everywhere should not be allowed to keep their jobs and make a living, and if they did then right-thinking people would get together and boycott that newspaper or TV show or restaurant or whatever. Jimmy lost his job, the liberal snowflakes won their first battle and cancel culture just kind of ballooned from there. 

The joint interview with Breslin and Hamill was recorded in 2015, but Breslin died in 2017 and for many times in this movie, his words are read aloud by actor Michael Rispoli, who has a similar accent. (A weird carry-over from yesterday's film, where Val Kilmer's son read so many of his father's words...). I know this is a somewhat controversial practice, the filmmakers on the Anthony Bourdain doc got into some trouble for using a computer to simulate Bourdain's voice on ONE line, and if you follow this technique to its illogical conclusion, you could make a doc where anyone is made to say anything, like someone could manufacture a clip where their political opponent says, "I admire Hitler" or something equally as damaging. 

But that's the chance you take when you set out to make a documentary, you pick a subject who's had a long and storied career, and you cross your fingers, hoping that they'll stay alive long enough for you to finish recording their side of their story.  "Deadline Artists" premiered at the DOC NYC Festival in November, 2018, and then Pete Hamill died in 2020 at the age of 85. Well, at least he lived long enough to see the movie about him.  We're not going to see people like these men again - can you imagine 50 years from now someone making a documentary about the great influencers on Instagram and TikTok from the year 2023?  Not gonna happen. 

Also starring Pete Hamill (last seen in "The Paper"), Harvey Araton, John Avlon, Mike Barnicle, Dan Barry, Tony Bennett (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Cibella Borges, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Driven"), Earl Caldwell, Charlie Carillo, Bill Clark, Richard Cohen, Gail Collins, Andrew Cuomo (last heard in "Alone Together"), Maria Cuomo, Matilda Cuomo, Michael Daly, James Duff, Tony Dunne, Jim Dwyer, Ronnie Eldridge, Richard Esposito, Kathy Hamill Fischetti, Brooke Gladstone, Brian Hamill, Denis Hamill, Fukiki Aoki Hamill, Jim Hennesey, Bill Hoffman, Johnnie Jones, Edward Kosner, Robert Krulwich, Spike Lee (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Mike Lupica, Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Les Payne, Nicholas Pileggi, Colin Quinn (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Sam Roberts, Shane Smith, Gloria Steinem (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Gay Talese (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Garry Trudeau, Richard Ward, Tom Wolfe (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Ji-Yeon Yuh and the voice of Michael Rispoli (last seen in "Empire State")

with archive footage of Jimmy Breslin (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Spiro Agnew, David Berkowitz, Charles Bronson (last seen in "Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Bob Costas (last seen in "Here Today"), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom"), Mario Cuomo (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Alfonse D'Amato, Phil Donahue (last seen in "Julia"), Bernhard Goetz, Abe HIrschfeld, Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Robert Kennedy (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Martin Luther King (ditto), Malcolm X (ditto), Gene Krupa, Norman Mailer, Richard Nixon (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (also last seen in "Julia"), Jackie Robinson (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Linda Ronstadt (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Mike Royko, Curtis Sliwa, Lionel Stander, Donald Trump (last seen in "Running With Beto")

RATING: 7 out of 10 broken fingers (after investigating the Mafia)