If you’ve ever paid attention to old movies (1930s-1950s), occasionally there will be a newspaper shown with a headline that ties in to the story. Also, if you freeze it, there will be some other articles, and one of the most common says “Limited Farm Bill Favored.” The first place I noticed it was in a Flash Gordon serial, and I’ve seen it numerous times since in other movies. I saw another one this past weekend. It shows up in “When Worlds Collide” (1951). The other articles on the page vary from one movie to the next, but the “Farm Bill” article is pretty common.
That’s all. Once you’ve seen it, you keep looking for it whenever they show a newspaper headline.
“New Petitions Against Tax” and “Building Code Under Fire” are the two I remember. I always laugh when the giant headline is something like, “ALIENS VOW TO DESTORY EARTH!” but below that is someone bitching about the building code. You know, the important stuff.
IIRC, in the ‘80s I read a book from the ‘70s that said, if the scene is shot such that you must show a headline — you know, the leading man just sort of sits down on a bench and picks up a discarded newspaper and holds it up as if he’s intently reading a Page Five story, but he really just wants to briefly hide his face, or whatever — you’d want to avoid anything that would later date it; instead, go with something that could always be up to the minute.
That’s amazing. If I ever get to work on a movie with a CNN-ish news report, the crawl at the bottom will be New Tax Bill May Be Needed and Limited Farm Bill Favored over and over again.
And somehow, it’s never, e.g., “ ‘WE’LL CRUSH ALL PUNY HUMANS!’ ” in huge type with “Aliens Vow to Destroy Earth” in slightly smaller type immediately below it. Newspaper headline writers in movies must be the most literal-minded people in the world.
In real life, newspapers featuring banner headline accounts of major news/disasters often had above-the-fold stories that seem pitifully trivial in comparison. The day after Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929), the New York Times ran a story right next to its Wall St. crash coverage about a 4’10" man who supposedly was the smallest to serve in the A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Forces of WWI).
And Variety’s story “Wall Street Lays An Egg” ran along with one headlined “Homely Women Scarce; Can’t Earn Over $25”.
When I interned at an NPR station in the 1970s, our news director told us whenever we ran short of news for our long, long newscasts, we could simply pick up the “There’s more trouble in Northern Ireland” from the NPR feed and we’d be good for at least two minutes.
The most famous movie newspaper prop is the generic, reusable one from Earl Hays Press, a Los Angeles company creating fake media since 1915 to avoid IP issues, with its standard inside pages appearing in countless films and shows, becoming the “Wilhelm Scream of props” for its ubiquity in the background. Prop houses like Earl Hays provide customizable blank fronts with pre-printed filler text and images, allowing for quick scene dressing across genres.
WKRP in Cincinnati used a gag like that when Dr. Johnny Fever was reading a newscast: “In the USSR…[turns over page and realizes the other side is blank]…people remain poorly dressed and rather hard-headed.”
