USA,
1996, 110 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Rick Goldsmith
- prod
-
Rick Goldsmith
- scr
-
Rick Goldsmith, Sharon Wood
- cam
-
Stephen Lighthill, Will Parrinello, Witt Monts
- editor
-
Rick Goldsmith
- source
-
Goldsmith Productions
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Bay Area Documentary
- premiere
-
World Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Rick Goldsmith in person.
OTHER
The remarkable career of George Seldes, a journalist whose name is little known outside the media business today, inspired generations of activists and muckraking reporters, including I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader and Daniel Ellsberg. Many reporters go into the profession with high ideals. What was unusual about Seldes was his tenacious devotion to the truth throughout a long and frequently difficult career. While other correspondents in Italy in the 1920s were glorifying Mussolini, Seldes’s exposés earned him expulsion from that country and almost cost him his life. Eventually Seldes started his own muckraking weekly, In fact, to tell the stories the mainstream press would not, such as the deadly effects of tobacco on human health—a story he reported decades before the rest of the press. Seldes became a constant thorn in the side of the mainstream press as he exposed the tremendous influence advertisers had over what was printed. At the heart of the film are interviews with Seldes himself, who was still the iconoclast at age 98 (he died since being filmed) and dramatic readings from his works performed by Edward Asner. Susan Sarandon narrates, and interviews with Nader, Ellsberg, Nation editor Victor Navasky and others provide perspective on Seldes’s lasting impact on progressive politics and media in this country.
—Eileen Ecklund
FACTOID #219
Daniel Talbot, editor of Film: An Anthology , was the first recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award in 1988. Later he cofounded New Yorker Films, a distribution company that introduced many foreign language films to North American audiences. The Mel Novikoff Award, named after the pioneering San Francisco exhibitor, is given to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema.
