Bygone journalists can — and should— inspire
HBO’s ‘Breslin and Hamill’ a feast of stories
typewriter-wielding superheroes.
You can, of course, judge for yourself, but you’ll hear praise for the two men from handful of journalists who knew and worked with them. You’ll hear too from some celebrities who admired them, people such as Robert De Niro, Gloria Steinem, the late Tom Wolfe and Spike Lee, who says, “They were superstars. They were able to connect.”
That is in part because they came from the same place as most of their readers. Breslin was originally from Queens and Hamill from Brooklyn. Neither attended college (Hamill dropped out of high school), let alone a journalism school and both wrote, Hamill arguably more stylishly, in a street-corner prose accessible to the masses, those so-called ordinary people.
Breslin was rougher around the edges than Hamill but both men felt deeply. Sons of sad alcoholic fathers, they both knew the seductive power of saloons. Hamill famously quit drinking in 1972 and wrote about it movingly in the 1995 bestseller “A Drinking Life.” (Though into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. ‘Polly, could you please be here by eleven o'clock this morning?’ Kawalchik asked. ‘I guess you know what it's for.’ Pollard did.
He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
One of the joys of this film is that it is peppered with passages from the men’s columns. Hamill reads his own work and actor Michael Rispoli reads Breslin’s. Both men could dip into the sentimental or provincial but they were never less than fascinating.
I have read most everything they wrote and knew them both a bit.
Hamill I met when I interviewed him at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in 2011. He was on the road promoting his then-latest novel, “Tabloid City” and we talked then and later of his career.
I knew Breslin mostly over the phone, for he would call with some frequency to inquire about the health of Royko and Ann Landers (Eppie Lederer) when both were ill and on their way to death, in 1997 and 2002 respectively. Having lost a wife and two adult daughters, Breslin knew about death and he also sensed the passing of his breed of newspaper folk.
“Deadline Artists” is, on its surface, a movie about two men. But it is also about the times in which they lived, about New York City, journalism and writing. It shows us how the times were right for these columnists to emerge and thrive. But it does so in a way that is bracingly romantic without being slickly nostalgic. The men are respected and not worshiped.
The film is not a lament but rather a celebration of the way things used to be, capturing the fun that once coursed through newsrooms. And it strikes an almost hopeful note.
There may not be another Breslin or Hamill sitting across the room from me but, as Alter said in a phone conversation over the weekend, “There are a lot of great young journalists working today and I hope this film can inspire them to get out of the office and tell real stories. There are gripping stories just down the block, stories of the people in the community that need to be told.”
In that sense, “Deadline Artists” is a road map. It’s also a terrific ride.