Near the beginning of Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines, Stanley (Lewis J. Stadlen), the head of the advertising department, barges into an editorial meeting and delivers the bad news: “We’re going to have to cut some of your copy this week.” Nearly everyone who has held a freelance or staff position at a publication has heard something similar.
I have mostly done freelance writing on the side of a more stable job that pays my rent, but I did work as a contracted writer at a few places. Those contracts ended abruptly and without any notice and after they let me go, it was almost like I didn’t exist to a single one of the people that had taken such an intimate interest in my writing. The competitive pressures that drive newspapers, journals, and magazines out of business also have less direct secondary effects — they create hostile relationships between writers.
Screenwriter Fred Barron based the story for Between the Lines on his experience working as a reporter at the Phoenix and the Real Paper, two Boston-based publications. Silver meanwhile took on Barron’s script after a long stint at the Village Voice, the first alt-weekly in American history, based in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. Its bylines hosted names as well-respected as J. Hoberman, Norman Mailer (a cofounder), Robert Christgau, Thulani Davis, and Ann Powers.
Between the Lines is chock-full of searing and sad insights into the world of journalism delivered with the soft but tenacious honesty that Barron and Silver experienced. Their film not only recounts the slow demise of an alt-weekly, but the feelings, emotions, and relationships of the people who put made sacrifices to keep their publication running.
You might not be surprised to hear that the Village Voice is a shell of what it once was, and much of it has been reduced to a zombie husk regurgitating AI-slop. The Real Paper, which serves as the primary influence for the fictional paper…
Auteur: Soham Gadre
