Filmswelike

“Inside” is a word cherished by the media. It holds the promise of being taken behind the velvet curtain and ushered into a secret world—a celebrity life, a political campaign or a war. Now two compelling backstage documentaries take us inside the media itself: Page One: Inside the New York Times explores the embattled newsroom of America’s most august newspaper, while Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop tracks an angst-ridden comedy tour by a defrocked talk show host. Both are tales of old school underdogs struggling to reinvent themselves in a media landscape where they’ve become an endangered species.

Page One is the more complex and ambitious picture. Director Andrew Rossi spent 14 months shooting in the newsroom of the Grey Lady (whose walls are now lipstick red), “embedded” at the paper’s media desk. The result is a kind of meta-documentary: it tells the story of the Times fighting to survive the social media revolution through the prism of the paper’s own coverage of it. The narrative covers an epic sweep of events, from dire predictions in 2009 that the Times could go bankrupt to its unholy alliance with WikiLeaks and the dawn of the iPad—two game-changing events that promised to render old media obsolete, yet ended up creating rich new opportunities for the newspaper.

A documentary is only as good as its characters, and Page One enlivens its heavy agenda with a diverting ensemble of personalities, led by pugnacious Times media columnist David Carr—a former crack addict whose own survival is as miraculous as that of the paper itself. The film, in fact, originated when director Andrew Rossi interviewed Carr for a documentary he planned to do on Internet entrepreneurs. “The lightbulb went off in my head,” Rossi told Maclean’s. “I said to David, ‘What about doing a movie about you, looking over your shoulder as you report on disruptions in the media landscape?’ He said, ‘You’ll have to speak to my bosses’—assuming that would lead to a big fat no.” But after months of discussions, Bill Keller, then editor of the Times, gave Rossi unprecedented access.

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