This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The veteran newspaper reporter tells the rookie photographer his philosophy of journalism: "Bad news sells best, 'cause good news is no news."
The reporter, Charles Tatum (played by Kirk Douglas), puts that philosophy to work in one of the most caustic movies ever made about journalism, Billy Wilder's 1951 drama "Ace in the Hole." The movie bombed when it was released (even after Wilder tried to slap a new title on it, "The Big Carnival"), but this summer is getting a fresh look - thanks to a pristine DVD release from the Criterion Collection last month, and because of the movie's parallels to what's been happening near Huntington, Utah, the past two weeks.
Tatum is a big-city reporter stuck in what he thinks is hell: covering small-town news in Albuquerque, N.M. On the way to another dull assignment, Tatum and his young photographer Herbie Cook (Bob Arthur) come upon a roadside curio stand whose owner, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), has become trapped in a nearby cave-in.
Smelling a chance to move back into the big time, Tatum writes up the story - and even starts manipulating the locals, from the corrupt sheriff (Ray Teal) to Minosa's less-than-sympathetic wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), to milk the story for as much ink as possible.
Things quickly spiral out of control. Other reporters flock to get a piece of the story. Tourists show up by car, RV and train to see the cave entrance. Lorraine cashes in on the crowds, charging admission to the cave grounds and eventually bringing in carnival rides. Leo's plight becomes literally a "media circus," decades before the phrase became part of our language.
It's the sort of circus we're not seeing around the Crandall Canyon mine, where six miners were trapped after a collapse on Aug. 6, and where a secondary cave-in Thursday killed three rescuers and injured six.
"It wasn't the media circus I expected it to be," a Salt Lake Tribune colleague who was covering the rescue effort told me. Reporters are, by and large, behaving themselves and being polite to the locals. If there has been a media circus on the ground in Huntington, it was in the form of mine owner Robert Murray, whose blustering performance at the first day's news conference became a national punchline.
But in an age of 24-hour news cycles and instant Internet access, media circuses are no longer bound by geography. Today, a media circus is global and instantaneous.
In "Ace in the Hole," nearly everyone arriving in the New Mexico town wants to turn the tragedy to their advantage. Roadside vendors sell trinkets. A tourist gets on the radio and tries to hawk his insurance business. A country band writes a song about Leo, selling copies of the sheet music for 25 cents apiece.
As events have unfolded at the Crandall Canyon mine, people have tried to use those events to further their own agendas:
* Salt Lake City TV stations trotted out their "first inside the mine" promos to goose ratings.
* The Rev. Fred Phelps, who mounts his cruel "God Hates Fags" protests at military funerals and other events like a postmortem ambulance chaser, and his Westboro Baptist Church issued a "Thank God for the Utah Mine Disaster" press release last weekend.
* On her blog in The Huffington Post, progressive commentator Arianna Huffington decried the mainstream media for not investigating Murray's mine-safety record more closely. (Huffington did compliment The Salt Lake Tribune's coverage, though mostly using my paper as a club to beat The New York Times over the head.)
But if today's media circuses are instantly created, they are just as quickly disbanded. At the end of "Ace in the Hole," Tatum tells the crowd, "the circus is over," and everyone gets in their cars and heads to the next distraction. Today, a few button-pushes on the remote or clicks of the mouse can take voyeuristic viewers from a Crandall Canyon news briefing on CNN to a Britney Spears update on E! to the deer-in-the-headlights looks on the faces of would-be pedophiles nabbed on "Dateline NBC" - and then back to Crandall Canyon when new tragedy strikes, as it did Thursday.
Among all the cynical commentary in "Ace in the Hole" (even the title is a grim joke), the most cutting observations may be against the audience - rubberneckers like us who stop at the roadside to catch a glimpse of the action. Today, though, we can watch anywhere and any time, so that every person is ringmaster of his or her own media circus.