Friday, January 09, 2009

The magic of movies


Have you seen "Citizen Kane"? It's a good movie. In this scene, newspaper publisher Charles Foster Kane has lost an election. Kane's newspaper staff has two front pages prepared -- one for a win, one for a loss. The movie was made in 1941.

3 comments:

Mark Simonson said...

I used to work for Metropolis, an erstwhile weekly newspaper in Minneapolis (1976-77). The paper came out on Wednesdays and election day is on Tuesdays. In the race for president between Ford and Carter, they pasted up and made plates ahead of time for both possible outcomes. On the night of the election, as soon as enough results were in, they phoned the printer to go to press with the Carter cover. Given that it was a weekly paper, people were surprised to see the winner on the cover the morning after the election.

David Steinlicht said...

Metropolis was a great paper. I was a subscriber for a while ('til they went under).

Lucky for you guys you weren't preparing for the outcome of the Coleman/Franken election.

I remember a cover of the Village Voice that ran the day after an election. They took another path. The main headline read "Good Morning, Mr. President." And the stories were all about the challenges the new guy was facing. They didn't name the winner at all.

Mark Simonson said...

Mad magazine ran two covers for the 1960 election on the same issue, one on one side with Kennedy and one on the other side with Nixon. The issue was printed before the election, but arrived at newsstands just after. Sellers just put it on the rack with the Kennedy cover showing. Or, if they wanted to be funny, with the Nixon cover showing.