What The Hell America!

Near the beginning of Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines, Stanley (Lewis J. Stadlen), the head of the advertising department, barges into an editorial meeting and delivers the bad news: “We’re going to have to cut some of your copy this week.” Nearly everyone who has held a freelance or staff position at a publication has heard something similar.

I have mostly done freelance writing on the side of a more stable job that pays my rent, but I did work as a contracted writer at a few places. Those contracts ended abruptly and without any notice and after they let me go, it was almost like I didn’t exist to a single one of the people that had taken such an intimate interest in my writing. The competitive pressures that drive newspapers, journals, and magazines out of business also have less direct secondary effects — they create hostile relationships between writers.

Screenwriter Fred Barron based the story for Between the Lines on his experience working as a reporter at the Phoenix and the Real Paper, two Boston-based publications. Silver meanwhile took on Barron’s script after a long stint at the Village Voice, the first alt-weekly in American history, based in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. Its bylines hosted names as well-respected as J. Hoberman, Norman Mailer (a cofounder), Robert Christgau, Thulani Davis, and Ann Powers.

Between the Lines is chock-full of searing and sad insights into the world of journalism delivered with the soft but tenacious honesty that Barron and Silver experienced. Their film not only recounts the slow demise of an alt-weekly, but the feelings, emotions, and relationships of the people who put made sacrifices to keep their publication running.

You might not be surprised to hear that the Village Voice is a shell of what it once was, and much of it has been reduced to a zombie husk regurgitating AI-slop. The Real Paper, which serves as the primary influence for the fictional paper in the film; the Back Bay Mainline, was bought by John Rockefeller Jr, who also shut it down; financial losses during the pandemic forced the Phoenix to close shop.

Silver has a keen sense for the power that management and bosses have over magazines. Some of the higher-ups, like Frank the editor in chief of the paper who believes in the work and his people, are reasonable enough. Others, like advertising head Stanley, are ripe and justifiable targets. Stanley is portrayed as a meek, nerdy individual with a sense of self-importance despite often revealing that he has no real power; he looks forward to the possibility that more stern and strict ownership could take over the magazine. He’s also sleazy, makes unwanted sexual advances toward Mainline’s secretary, Lynn (Jill Eikenberry), and uses the salesman Ahmed, played by Joe Morton.

The main driver of Silver’s film is a decision made by the advertising department to increase the space dedicated to ads, at the expense of that allotted to on-the-ground reporting. The result is a newsroom that has to take it on the chin and make hard decisions about what they want to cover. The writing is on the wall, and jaded senior reporter Harry Lucas, played by John Heard, sees it clearer than anyone.

His conversations are tinged with a level of regret, doom, and surliness that turns his fellow writers, especially his coworkers and romantic interests — Abbie (Lindsay Crouse) and Laura (Gwen Welles) — off quite a bit. They still have hope, but more than that, they take comfort in the camaraderie their colleagues provide. The writers congregate often, in their newsroom offices and at bars and clubs, to discuss the state of affairs, and Harry always seems to be the one ready to give everything up. It’s certainly not an unrelatable point of view.

There are many instances where I, as a freelance writer, have questioned whether I want to keep doing this. But every time I put words to a white sheet, be it with my pen or clacking on a laptop, I feel a sense of freedom being able to say what I want to say and write about movies I really enjoy rather than ones I’m obligated to for clicks. What makes it difficult, however, is what Harry describes at a staff writer’s gathering as “rich assholes who buy up papers and. . . .” The “and. . .” at the end of Harry’s declaration that gets cut off with a rabble of argumentation is being realized before us now.

From places like Deadspin to A.V. Club to Pitchfork, the private equity firms want to buy up publications to slowly bleed them for an extra dollar and leave the dried-up corpses behind. Freelance budgets are either the first to go, or the only thing that’s left; contractors are easier to turn over than hired staff, and also a more straightforward way to still have writers without having to guarantee any benefits like health care. The writers at the gathering soon learn that an investor named Roy Walsh is seriously threatening to purchase the Back Bay Mainline.

During an evening get-together, Abbie and Laura lament the decline of their profession. Pressure from their publisher means that they no longer have the freedom to choose the kinds of stories they want to write. For working people, the prospect of job instability seeps into every aspect of life and becomes draining. Silver expresses this in the film through the casual conversations and hangouts many of the writers have with each other in private spaces.

Jeff Goldblum, the film’s most recognizable cast member, plays Max Arloft, a music critic who continually repeats to everyone he talks to how his $75-a-week wage is simply not enough for him to get by. He sells many of his records off at the pawn shop and hosts seminars just to pay his rent and be able to eat. He can sustain this slacker lifestyle at the Mainline because, like most of his fellow reporters, he gets to write stories he wants to write and his job doesn’t take over his entire life.

If this seems to you like it goes against everything that makes the American mindset, than you’d be right. Max puts little stock in his “work ethic” and cares a great deal about his own pleasure. That the Mainline can be an island of subversion within a sea of cut-throat capitalism is what makes it so special.

Community, more so than the work, is the most important thing connecting people in Between the Lines. In one scene, Harry and Laura, two of the longest-tenured reporters at the Mainline when it was still a fledgling, almost guerrilla, operation, reminisce about the old days when cops used to bust the staff for peddling news without a proper license. They mention covering the Kent State massacre — and looking at the state of newsrooms today, one can imagine a small independent paper being the only news source capable of delivering truth on the side of the students who suffer state brutality.

It’s such a beautiful scene, getting at the heart of how labor involves a shared history and struggle between workers that makes it worth the fight to defend what they built. This is the polar opposite of a magazine culture dependent on the endowments, trusts funds, and family loans of the wealthy.

Lynn is a unique character in that she’s the only one out of the main group who isn’t part of the editorial team. She feels strongly committed to the paper, despite thinking that she doesn’t contribute anything valuable because she doesn’t write, take photos, or edit. But she comes to learn from her coworkers that she contributes an air of kindness and friendship that is vital to the way the workplace functions and how everyone gets along and feels about working at the paper.

The death of journalism is a slow train. The massive changes to once-storied papers that are now being eviscerated and transformed to fluff the hubris of the billionaires who are sinking their claws into them is sadly a time-honored tradition. The only difference today is how accelerated and brazen this process becoming. So many of the issues raised in Silver’s film are evergreen because they speak to the common crisis that spreads from paper to paper, journal to journal, website to website throughout the last fifty years. Perhaps that’s the saddest thing about Between the Lines. It feels new. It feels like it could be made right now and you wouldn’t need to change a thing.