Director Andrew Rossi couldn’t predict what he would capture when he was allowed inside the glossy interior of The New York Times building in Manhattan.
“I did know I wanted to be at the right place at the right time,” Rossi says.
As luck would have it, one of the biggest stories in recent memory exploded while his camera was on, one that commandeered the news cycle while underlining the point of his project.
“Page One: Inside the New York Times,” takes audience into the heart of the storied newspaper at a critical time in its existence. Ad revenues are plummeting. Layoffs are bludgeoning the newspaper’s staff. And, all around them, well established competitors are printing their final editions.
“It’s the meta arc of what’s happening at The New York Times,” says Rossi, whose film captures the angst surrounding the Gray Lady’s survival in this digitally driven age. If newspapers like The New York Times go the way of the eight-track tape, where will people get their news?
During his 14 months “Inside,” Rossi watched reporters pounce on the WikiLeaks video dump of a U.S. military helicopter opening fire on a crowd including citizens and two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. We see a Times reporter grill WikiLeaks guru Julian Assange on his role in modern journalism.
It’s a behind-the-scenes peek into a major metropolitan daily, and Rossi had carte blanche to capture it all.
“The Times had zero editorial control over the movie,“ says Rossi, whose film also touches on the fallout from the Jayson Blair scandal which rocked the paper‘s credibility. “They weren’t able to veto its contents.“
That doesn’t mean getting access to the storied news outlet was a breeze. Rossi met with the paper’s representatives over a six-month span to discuss the filming process and, more importantly, ensure the paper’s sources wouldn’t be compromised.
He did the rest more or less on his own.
“I shot all by myself. No one was there with lights. There was no sound person,” he says. “I had a very small footprint.”
That helped him win the trust of his subjects.
“It’s true that journalists can be a little skeptical, but because the subject of the film was their beat itself they empathized with me as a fellow storyteller,” he says, adding the reporters became “very candid and transparent” once a comfort level settled in.
“Page One” doesn’t get its hands dirty with a common complaint conservatives lob against the newspaper – liberal bias.
Rossi contends that by focusing primarily on Carr and the media desk he didn’t explore the newspaper’s liberal opinion page. He says there’s a “firm and high wall” between op-eds and hard news, and his cameras didn’t capture examples where the former bled into the latter.
And while liberal darling Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation fame is one of many talking heads here, the film doesn’t go out of its way to incite its conservative critics.
David Carr, the newspaper’s irascible media scribe, provided what Rossi calls the “secret sauce” for making “Page One” transcend its insular nature.
“From a filmmaker’s perspective he’s a gift,“ Rossi says of Carr, a former drug addict who turned his life around and serves as the newspaper’s most ardent defender in the film.
“Too much sausage making can be boring,” he adds.
Rossi contends his film doesn’t simply dwell on the future of news consumption. Technology is changing the way the country does business across the board.
“It’s not just about newspapers, and not just about The New York Times,” he says. “[Carr] really taps into a general sense of anxiety found in Detroit and other industries … what the potential victims could be in the digital age.“
Rossi wasn’t sure what kind of material he’d collect while spending more than a year filming the inner workings of the newspaper. But he says he doesn’t digest news the same way since leaving the Times’ Manhattan haunts.
“I emerge from the process of making the film feeling a new found respect for the resources required to produce original reporting, and a new insight into how editors and writers collaborate to create the daily miracle of the daily newspaper,” he says. “Carr says journalism is created in the space between people. I think that’s what you see in this film.”