Josh Bell
By the time I started working full-time at an alt-weekly (Las Vegas Weekly, in 2002), Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines was already more than 25 years old, but its depiction of the workplace culture at a fictional Boston-based alternative weekly newspaper still resonates strongly with my own experience. Even as alt-weeklies have become scarcer and scarcer, the 1977 film’s story about scrappy counterculture journalists facing the specter of incoming corporate ownership is just as relevant, given the ongoing takeovers of once-vibrant digital media outlets.
My Las Vegas Weekly workplace was never quite as freewheeling as The Back Bay Mainline, where the newspaper distributor known only as the Hawker (Michael J. Pollard) takes a nap under the shared pinball machine, and an aggressive performance artist (Raymond J. Barry) shows up to destroy office equipment and demand an interview. But there’s a clear lineage from early real-life alt-weeklies like The Village Voice (where Silver began her career) and the Boston Phoenix (where co-writer Fred Barron worked) to the Mainline and then to places like Las Vegas Weekly. The founders of the venerable alt-weekly The Austin Chronicle were directly inspired by Between the Lines to start their publication.
It’s easy to see why someone would want to work at a place like the Mainline, which is a model of creativity and solidarity even in what appear to be its declining years. The revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, which led to the creation of the Mainline in 1970, has been fading, and for modern viewers, the greed-is-good 1980s can be seen looming on the horizon. “It’s over,” writer Harry (John Heard) says of the paper, and he’s not the only disillusioned member of the staff. He’s been the Mainline’s star writer since its inception, but his brand of rabble-rousing investigative reporting has fallen out of favor, especially with the prospect of new ownership.
Harry alternates between rebellion and despondency over the course of the movie, which is an accurate reflection of the writer’s life. Fellow ambitious writer Michael (Stephen Collins), who quit the Mainline to work on a book, is less conflicted and more self-aggrandizing. While both of them often embody literary toxic masculinity, only Harry seems open to change. Between the Lines is as much about the personal lives of the Mainline staffers as it is about their professional struggles, charting Harry’s romance with photographer Abbie (Lindsay Crouse) and Michael’s strained relationship with writer Laura (Gwen Welles). The personal and the professional freely intermingle for these people whose identities are tied so closely to their work.
Their passion is different from the passion typically depicted in movies about crusading reporters at daily newspapers or TV stations. Harry reminisces about a major exposé he wrote on abuses at nursing homes, but alt-weekly reporting is fundamentally different from mainstream news reporting, and the writers are encouraged or even ordered to get personally involved. Harry’s advice to earnest young reporter David (Bruno Kirby) about writing an article on environmentalism from the perspective of a whale sounds absurd, but it’s exactly the kind of formal experimentation that made alt-weeklies great during their heyday.
Subsidized by classifieds and weird personal ads like the ones that David is forced to take over the phone, they were able to document the underground life of a city — which included the content of those adult-oriented ads. When Harry takes Abbie along for his profile of a stripper (Marilu Henner), he acts like a jerk about her insightful interjections into his interview, but he also cares about the subject in his own slightly brutish way. One of my earliest assignments as Las Vegas Weekly’s equivalent of David was to fill in for the strip-club columnist while he was away, and I gave it the same consideration as the movie reviews I hoped to make my main beat.
That’s not to say that what I or any alt-weekly journalist wrote about those topics was always exceptional, and Between the Lines makes plenty of room to poke fun at its self-consciously hip characters. Music critic Max (Jeff Goldblum) has legitimate complaints about his astonishingly low salary, and any arts critic watching the movie will identify with his trip to a used record store to sell his promo copies (“I can’t eat records,” he accurately observes). But he’s also not above using his position to score free drinks or hit on women. In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, he gives a lecture titled “Whither Rock n’ Roll” to a group of female college students, and he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Eventually he drops the pretense and just gives them his phone number.
Between the Lines is as much celebration as elegy, and while the Mainline is irrevocably changed by the end, and many of the characters have moved on, the paper’s spirit isn’t entirely diminished. Much of the personal drama comes to a head at a party headlined by rock band Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, the kind of raucous event full of proto-influencers, slumming intellectuals, and various hangers-on that alt-weeklies were great at throwing.
Silver and the talented cast (including Heard, Henner and Joe Morton in their screen debuts) give the characters full inner lives, making their niche interests and romantic travails feel universal. Making general audiences care about idiosyncratic topics is what alt-weeklies have always done best, and Between the Lines achieves that same effect. I feel lucky to have caught that afterglow even decades later, and Between the Lines offers viewers a chance to witness its full glory at any time.
“Between the Lines” is streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of the “Directed by Joan Micklin Silver” collection.
