Tales from The Warner Archives #11: "-30-" (Jack Webb, 1959)

In my heed­less youth, with my slov­enly wannabe-hippie atti­tude and all, I was nev­er much of a Jack Webb fan, so I was­n’t even aware of his film ‑30- until I read this evoc­at­ive writeup of it in Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, pub­lished in 1983 (the year I turned 24): “Another Thursday night shift at the Los Angeles Banner. Jack Webb arrives late from his weekly vis­it to the graves of his wife and son to settle in with city edit­or William Conrad for eight hours of cigar­ettes and stale cof­fee. David Nelson and friends relax with ‘Copy Boy’ for voice and bon­gos, while assor­ted news­room types await pro­gress reports on a 5‑year-old girl lost in the city’s storm-drain sys­tem. Cannon and Friday’s backups include Richard Bakalayan, Joe Flynn of McHale’s Navy, and Hazel’s Whitney Blake.” (The writeup itself was not by Weldon but by his col­lab­or­at­or Charles Beesley, a very cool and tacit­urn customer—he looked a bit like DeNiro’s Johnny Boy, without the stu­pid hats—who was some­times seen in the com­pany of Hoboken’s most enig­mat­ic music­al luminar­ies, and who appears to have dis­ap­peared from the face of the earth. But that’s anoth­er story.)

The film soun­ded like a little slice of heav­en to a guy who still had­n’t much of a clue as to what life after the col­lege paper was going to hold for him. Cigarettes and stale cof­fee was my idea of some kind of break­fast of cham­pi­ons. Of course the film, like so many in Weldon’s book at the time, seemed almost impossible to see at the time, and even when I became friendly with Weldon shortly after the book appeared, I nev­er asked him if he had a copy I could bor­row (Psychotronic pic­tures were often passed around like VHS or Beta sam­izdat by like-minded cinephiles). Maybe I was afraid the real­ity of the pic­ture would dis­ap­point me. Having now finally seen the movie via a recent DVD from the Warner Archive, I can report the film does not dis­ap­point at all, although Beesley’s writeup makes it sound a little more impres­sion­ist­ic and aim­less than it actu­ally is. 

For this IS a Jack Webb pic­ture, after all, and Jack Webb pictures—not to gen­er­al­ize over­much, but still—are about reg­u­lar Joes doing really import­ant things. And get­ting the morn­ing paper out is an import­ant thing, in spite of it all. The “it all” part does involve tedi­um and flim-flammers and edit­ors head­ing up nonex­ist­ent depart­ments, but ‑30- hardly takes as cyn­ic­al a view of the old-school news-gathering pro­cess as does, say, The Front Page, or Front Page co-author Ben Hecht’s account of his early days in news­pa­per­ing in his auto­bi­o­graphy A Child Of The Century, which it so hap­pens I’m read­ing now. (See here.) Hecht’s faux-pokerfaced recount­ings of his exploits as a “picture-chaser,” going to almost any lengths (includ­ing sim­u­lat­ing a house fire to make a fam­ily flee, the bet­ter for Hecht to break in and ran­sack the photo albums) to acquire per­tin­ent pho­to­graphs of vic­tims of crime and nat­ur­al dis­asters and such, are enough to make any con­tem­por­ary ombuds­man’s blood run cold. In -30-, with respect to the photo of the afore­men­tioned 5‑year-old-girl stuck in the city’s storm-drain sys­tem, well, at one con­fer­ence an anonym­ous edit­or allows that the pic­ture the Banner is going to run was “hustled off a next-door neigh­bor.” Well, all right then. 

While main­tain­ing an admir­able unity of space of the sort that some crit­ics like to cite in sup­port of a claim of “form­al rigor”—that is, the cam­era nev­er leaves the news­room dur­ing the entirety of its nearly 97-minute run­ning time—the pic­ture juggles mul­tiple storylines and what they now call char­ac­ter arcs. The will-the-5-year-old-girl-make-it? ques­tion is of course para­mount, but there’s also the dilemma of the lovely female obit writer who wants a crack at a real story, but is afraid of get­ting it because she’s the daugh­ter of the paper­’s own­er; the pride and anti­cip­a­tion of anoth­er female staffer, a long­time report­er, whose son grand­son the rest of the staff nev­er even knew she had is mak­ing a dar­ing cross-country flight; the frus­tra­tion of the copy run­ner stuck in a go-nowhere job, or so he thinks; and oth­er such stuff. All of which is both driv­en and punc­tu­ated by lots of  news­pa­per­ing nuts-and-bolts jar­gon, as wit­ness this exchange between Webb’s M.E. Sam Gatlin and Conrad’s Jim Bathgate:

Gatlin: Jim—this shot of the catch basin, let’s run it same size…across pages two and three.

Bathgate: Across both pages, 16 columns?

Gatlin: That’s right.

Bathgate: No can do. 

Gatlin: Oh, can do. We’ll run two eight column cuts with a gut­ter down the middle. Now run a type over­lay, white on black, across both pages. Use 72-point Bodoni caps…“Danger, Kids: Stay Out Of These.” Exclaimer. Then in lower case: “One little girl didn’t.”

Yeah, this Gatlin fel­la’s got it all—the sizzle, the steak, and a great big heart that’s been broken bad once and does­n’t wanna get broken again. Which leads to his mule-headed res­ist­ance to his new wife’s scheme to adopt a little tyke. You can likely see where all this is going, right? 

Which hardly detracts from the pleas­ure of it all; in fact I dare say it adds to it. In any event, when Conrad’s had enough of the grip­ing from those damn copy run­ners and launches into his grand, “Why sure, it’s just a news­pa­per” speech, you may well be har­umph­ing right along with him. -30- is as affec­tion­ate as Fuller’s great Park Row, while being infin­itely more mushy, and mushy-headed. But if you’re one of the increas­ingly rare breed who still has a bit of print­er­’s ink in his or her blood, it may well be just your pre­ferred vari­ety of mush. Now where’s a DVD of Webb’s next col­lab­or­a­tion with screen­writer William Bowers, the inef­fable The Last Time I Saw Archie?