Washington Post writer R. B. Brenner describes his thrilling adventures serving as a technical consultant on State of Play. The movie which stars Russell Crowe as bearish investigative reporter employed by "the Washington Globe, a down-on-its-luck 'second buy' in town, recently taken over by a media conglomerate," where he has Helen Mirren for a boss and Rachel McAdams as a blog-savvy novice to goggle with admiration over his death-defying journaistic feats and to tsk-tsk over his ethical lapses. Once upon a time, this was a 2003 British miniseries of the same title, which "portrays a Fleet Street world of newspapering that, though rollicking fun, is an ethical nightmare by American standards. Its ace reporter pays sources for information (an absolute no-no in the United States), surreptitiously videotapes a source in a hotel room (a firing offense, and a felony in several states) and generally behaves like a walking conflict of interest (and in a bedroom scene with the politician's wife, he does more than walk)." Brenner saw it as his job to guide the filmmaking team, which included Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland), in adapting the specifics to the American journalism milieu without costing the story any juice.

Towards this end, Brenner set about trying to make sure that Crowe's character was a respectable beacon of his profession, even though part of the character's scruffy charm is clearly meant to be that he's one of those rule-bending, amoral dudes whose first responsibility is to the story and who, compared to the people Brenner probably views as being at the height of the profession--i.e., the ones who get invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows and, well, get hired as technical consultants on major Hollywood productions--aren't completely respectable. Brenner objected to the fact that Crowe's character repeatedly pays informants for information, which Brenner says could never happen here, by which he presumably means that if a real reporter got caught doing it, there would be howls of outrage and affronted op-ed pieces for a week and then the reporter would either be suspended or get fired and go to work for Fox News. "Twice, the director agreed to work-arounds. The third time? The good news is, Crowe's reporter never pays a dime, which Macdonald sees as accommodating me. The bad news is, one brief scene could lead the audience to think otherwise."

This was not the only occasion when "my crusade for authenticity bumped into unyielding walls at times. When I repeatedly objected to the illicit-videotaping scene, Macdonald politely made clear that in the end, plot rules. He was trying to tell a dramatic story, a political whodunit, and didn't want the audience bogged down in a journalism ethics lesson. I kept arguing that if he aspired to elevate the film above mere thriller, then accurately portraying my profession's code of conduct should matter more." On the other hand, he describes a scene during filming when Mirren's editor asked Crowe if he could be "objective" about a story in which he had a personal stake and Crowe ad-libbed, "Absolutely not." "Those words," writes Brenner, "didn't make it into the film, much to my relief." Too bad; it's not only a funny line, but it reveals the reporter as an honest man.

Reviewing a 1974 film version of The Front Page, Pauline Kael captured the enduring appeal of the play's view of Chicago journalism circa the early twentieth century by quoting a reporter named Sherman Reilly Duffy: "Socially a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender, but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round." By his own account, Brennan is a representative of the current state of big-time journalism, which is willing to consider the possibility that the world is round if that's what the experts say, but mostly knows where its next meal is coming from. The Hollywood State of Play is itself a throwback to the 1970s, when movies like All the President's Men and The Parallax View (and TV shows like Lou Grant and The Night Stalker, in which Darren McGavin got to the bottom of this whole zombie problem plaguing Chicago) portrayed investigative reporters as the new hard-boiled detective heroes and our last defense against some all-enveloping conspiracy whose jaws where always just about to snap shut. It's a romantic idea that may still have some fantasy appeal, but it doesn't seem very timely, considering that most of the journalistic scandals of the last twenty years have been the result not of overreaching by unshaven, hard-drinking reporters fighting to get to the truth but by well-manicured establishment reporters meekly taking dictation from whatever powerful figure deigned to use them as a P.R. service. (When The New York Times's Judith Miller was criticized for shoveling anything she was told by Ahmad Chalabi into the paper, she indignantly replied that her critics clearly didn't understand what her job was, the implication being that if Chalabi had passed his press kit along to some reporter who'd bothered to check to see whether any of what he'd been told was true or even remotely plausible, that reporter would not have been doing his job right.)

The idea that what's really killing American journalism is the closeness between journalists, who aspire to becoming TV bloviators and beltway celebrities, with the celebrities they cover, is not one that Brennan was likely to push the State of Play crew towards; by his own telling, he was too star-struck from being around real celebrities that he had to summon up all his courage to tell the movie star Crowe that if his character had real reason to believe that somebody was likely to get killed, he would probably go to the cops. The movie may do a little better by the other thing that is killing the newspaper business, which is new technology and the threat of obsolescence. Crowe's old-school ink-stained wretch vents his resentment of McAdams's flavor of the month by sneering, "I've been here 15 years, I've got a 16-year-old computer. She's been here 15 minutes and she's got enough gear to launch a fucking satellite." Another good line. Turns out that it, too, was ad-libbed, on-camera, by Crowe. Maybe, instead of bothering to write scripts, they should just hand Crowe a character and have him live in full costume for a few months, following him around and recording his movements until he gets off enough zingers to add up to a movie.