WHEN my wife asked me why I'd been out past midnight the other night on skid row, I told her, "I needed to raise my spirits."
The news has been bleak in the newspaper business lately, and my newspaper was no exception. In the last week we ran a lengthy retraction about a story involving an assault on Tupac Shakur that turned out to be based on fabricated FBI documents, and there were stories about our new owner, Sam Zell, that said our company's finances were deteriorating so badly that it faced a real risk of credit default in the next year or so.
Having just read a long list of e-mail goodbyes from staffers who'd taken a recent round of buyouts, I needed cheering up. There, on Winston Street, at the edge of downtown's skid row, was a giant Hollywood film crew, two movie stars and a director whose last film had been an Oscar best picture nominee. They were all working on a film celebrating idealism, moral courage and redemption, whose hero was -- sigh -- a newspaper columnist.
Our columnist, Steve Lopez.
Called "The Soloist" and based on a series of columns that ran in The Times in 2005, the film stars Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez, who discovers a onetime music prodigy living on the streets, playing Beethoven on his violin in the 2nd Street Tunnel. Jamie Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers, a musician bedeviled by schizophrenia who is slowly putting his life back together, encouraged by a friendship with the newspaper columnist.
Written by Susannah Grant ("Erin Brockovich") and directed by Joe Wright ("Atonement"), the movie wrestles with a number of complex issues, from the treatment of mental health to the dispiriting fact that Los Angeles remains the homeless capital of the nation. But what struck home for me was that at a time when newspapers are under the guillotine, losing readers and influence, Hollywood was using its formidable image-shaping power to celebrate a newspaperman who makes a difference in people's lives.
"After I read the packet of Steve's columns that [DreamWorks chief] Stacey Snider sent me, I just prayed that anyone else that might be up for the job would be busy doing something else," recalls Grant. "Journalists like Steve make a difference, but they're losing the economic support system that allows them to flourish. We're a society with a free press, yet we're throwing it away. I hoped that telling an honest, human story would be a great way to wake people up."
--
