Media in the Movies: a journalism series presented by VTIFF and Seven Days in celebration of Seven Days’ 30th anniversary

Introduced by Dan Bolles, Seven Days culture coeditor

From director Joan Micklin Silver, featuring an all-star cast at the beginning of their careers, Between the Lines spotlights the offices of a Boston alternative newspaper, The Back Bay Mainline, where the staff members enjoy a positive and open-minded work environment.

Music critic Max (Jeff Goldblum) uses his influence to score dates, while news reporter Harry (John Heard) is dating the lovely Abbie (Lindsay Crouse), the publication’s lead photographer. However, it seems as though their relatively carefree days are numbered when the owner of a major publishing company buys the paper.

The paper is supposedly based on Boston’s Phoenix, where screenwriter Fred Barron worked. Micklin Silver also did her time in the print world, writing for The Village Voice in New York.

This wasn’t Jeff Goldblum’s first role (it was, in fact, his ninth), but it was his first substantial part. The movie was the first gig for a number of actors, including John Heard (Cutter’s Way), Joe Morton (The Brother from Another Planet), and Marilu Henner (Perfect).

The Guardian called the film “a fond but not uncritical portrait of the disaffected staff at a formerly radical, fictional alt-weekly Boston newspaper, from the street-corner hawker all the way up to accounts, editorial and the much-despised incoming corporate boss…Silver’s sympathy for radicalism and her deft cutting between different pockets of action unfolding in the same space, lend the film an Altmanesque feel.”