Breslin And Hamill: Deadline Artists: How Breslin And Hamill Blazed A Trail To Newspaper Glory

Robert Rorke at the New York Post offers a piece on an HBO documentary about New York newspaper columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.

The boozy, brawling days of New York tabloids are vividly evoked in the documentary “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” a portrait of columnists Jimmy Breslin, who died in 2017 at age 88, and Pete Hamill, 83. They wrote for the New York Daily News and the New York Post. They were both Irish kids, one from Queens (Breslin), the other Brooklyn (Hamill), who transcended their extremely humble beginnings to become masters of their craft and celebrities in their own right. As co-director Jonathan Alter puts it, “They were there for every big story of the second half of the 20th century, between 1950 and 2001.” That included assassinations (the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X), crime figures (Son of Sam, Bernhard Goetz), urban horrors (AIDS, the Crown Heights riots) and terrorist attacks (9/11).

…  How did Breslin and Hamill change journalism?

They personified an era when print journalists could be swashbuckling figures. It’s unimaginable now. Could you imagine a print journalist (Hamill) dating the most famous woman in the world (Jackie Onassis) and a top Hollywood star (Shirley MacLaine) at the same time? Or hosting “Saturday Night Live” (Breslin)? Before Woodward and Bernstein, Jimmy was the most famous journalist in America. He showed that you could write novelistically in a newspaper using facts. Breslin’s column, “A Death in Emergency Room One,” about the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, blew the doors off journalism.

You can read Robert Rorke’s interview with Jonathan Alter via the below link:

https://nypost.com/2019/01/25/how-breslin-and-hamill-blazed-a-trail-to-newspaper-glory/   

Note: Although I disagreed with Jimmy Breslin’s worldview, I enjoyed his comic gangster novels, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and I Don’t Want To Go To Jail.  

Best Of Breslin: Meyer Lansky Didn't Know How To Behave

The Daily Beast is offering Jimmy Breslin's old columns on their website. I don't subscribe to Breslin's worldview, but I enjoyed reading his columns (as well as his comic crime novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight). 

In today's Daily Beast Breslin's column covers the late crime lord Meyer Lansky.

He was a man who loved Israel, but not enough to behave in it.

There was this time a few years back when Meyer Lansky, living in Florida, decided that a prosecutor’s questions could best be answered with movement, and Meyer left the United States, went to Israel, and asked for asylum. Which he received for a while, and Meyer could be found in the Dan Restaurant, Ben Yehuda Street, in Tel Aviv. He ordered the food for those who sat with him, and if somebody ever tried to order on his own, Meyer would frown. The waiter would inform the guest that the whole restaurant would be happier if people ate exactly what Meyer Lansky ordered. 

Then the Israeli government announced one day that they were sending Lansky back to Florida, the rumor was that the United States was holding up an order of Phantom jets until Israel shipped Lansky back. But then one day I was at the bar of a place called Fink’s in Jerusalem and I asked the guy from the Israeli government about this and he said, “Please, we sent him away because he doesn’t believe in laws. He was causing trouble with taxicab fleets and nightclubs and women. Prostitutes. We don’t need him.”     

You can read the rest of the column via the below link: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/15/best-of-breslin-meyer-lansky-didn-t-know-how-to-behave.html 

Strutting Down Broadway: Happy Birthday To Damon Runyon

 

Happy Birthday to Damon Runyon. The late newspaperman and short story writer was born on this day in 1880 and he died on December 10, 1946.

Jimmy Breslin, himself a newspaperman and writer, wrote a biography of Damon Runyon in 1991. John Schulian reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times.

When you look at the gray tapioca that American newspapers have become, it's hard to believe they ever spawned Damon Runyon, who covered his first hanging at 11 and grew up to create Broadway by populating it with Nicely-Nicely and Harry the Horse, Madame La Gimp, Nathan Detroit and Little Miss Marker.

But Runyon lived in an age when a reporter could drink with a ballplayer named Bugs one day and go to the track with Pancho Villa the next. He set the standard for courtroom coverage at the Lindbergh kidnaping trial, he was there when Arnold Rothstein, the gambler, got whacked, and he fixed things so Al Capone could step up and conduct Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." And that's not the half of it.

You can read the rest of the review via th below link:

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-09-29/books/bk-4663_1_damon-runyon

In addition to the Broadway musical and film Guys and Dolls, a number of films have been made from Runyon's stories. My favorites are Robert Capra's Pocketful of Miracles and Bob Hope's The Lemon Drop Kid.

Below is a link to a piece on Pocketful of Miracles that appeared on TCM's web site:

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/35396%7C0/Pocketful-of-Miracles.html

Below is a piece on The Lemon Drop Kid that appeared on TCM's web site:

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/81186/The-Lemon-Drop-Kid/