Newsies: A Movie Made by Guys Working Hard

Thirty years ago last month Newsies—the historical-musical about the 1899 New York newsboys strike starring Christian Bale—was released on home video. I suppose the more notable date in this movie’s history is its theatrical release, which occurred earlier in the year, but in fact Newsies was a box office bomb, and is only relevant today insofar as it was ever released on home media. So that seems modestly more poignant, or at least more consequential.

Newsies is a fantastic movie, but, like its Disney cousin Hocus Pocus before it, it is one of those fantastic movies with the lamentable distinction of being a “cult film,” as if watching it were some sort of arcane Druid ritual instead of the most normal thing in the world. Most people do actually seem to treat it as the former rather than the latter: Ask any 30- or 40-something about Newsies and they’ll tell you how much they love it, how it’s one of their favorite movies, how they’ve seen it a dozen times—but always with this ironic sort of gleam in their eyes and a quiet undertone of giggling, as if they’re slightly embarrassed and want you to know that they know it’s all sort of silly.

But Newsies isn’t silly. It’s a production firmly of the old style of movies, that which predominated popular cinema prior to about 2009 or so—a product of what I like to call the “Guys Working Hard” school of filmmaking, a film that was plainly accomplished by heavy, backbreaking hours on crowded sets and even longer time spent in darkened editing suites. Did you ever notice most popular movies today look and feel like they were slapped together in about six weeks, as if nobody really cared what the final product looked or played like? Every scene is about 90 seconds long, every shot lasts about two seconds, heavy emphasis is placed on deadpan one-liners and Very Important Dialogue meant to play well on power-user social media feeds; character development is at a bare minimum if it exists at all; character motivations are bizarre at best and inscrutable at worst, while exchanges between characters are more or less meaningless and do nothing to advance the plot. In contrast to the obvious influence of guys working hard, these movies are plainly the product of lazy filmmaking; we might call it 1pm cinema, as in every crew member puts in a scant five-hour shift and leaves the set at 1pm every day.

Nobody left this movie set at 1pm. Newsies was both directed and choreographed by Kenny Ortega, one of the most fearsomely demanding stage directors in musical cinema history. The man leaves no hair or fiber out of place in a sea of pageboy caps and woolen suspenders; years later he would bring that relentlessly perfectionist vision to the High School Musical series, which was so well-done that it somehow made Zac Efron into an international celebrity it-boy.

Mainstream cinema really didn’t used to be like this, and Newsies—which is firmly in the mainstream, even if most people were and are bizarrely incapable of recognizing it—is a prime example. For such a poorly regarded film it has a truly blockbuster lineup: Christian Bale, of course, who is perfectly cast in an era before he became kind of unbearably serious, but also Bill Pullman, Robert Duvall, Ann-Margaret, a maleficently nasally performance by Michael Lerner, the glowering Biff-style villainy of Kevin Tighe. Jeff DeMunn somehow wanders in there for a moment at one point, and the great cop actor William Boyett makes a brief but fantastic appearance as a mutton-chop’d magistrate whose court is mocked mercilessly by the Newsie boys during a raucous misdemeanor trial. The secondary newsies themselves are all sort of archetypal personality backdrops, but they are rendered earnestly and sweetly enough that it’s all pretty believable. This is the kind of casting that helps make a movie truly great—the talent that pops out at you unexpectedly from the firmament, like bits of caramelized guanciale in a carbonara sauce.

Newsies is a very simple movie—there are good guys in it, and bad guys, and the lines are very clear, and in the end the good guys win and the bad guys lose—but the themes and motifs it deals with are deeply complex and resonant across the lifespan: Class, power, powerlessness, work, family, friends, responsibility, fear, bravery, abandonment, redemption. Its ultimate message is that it’s quite possible for ordinary people to change the world if they are willing to do so and they work hard at it. That may sound thoroughly modern, very Occupy Wall Street if anyone can remember that thing, but it’s worth underscoring that the catalyst for action in Newsies is not really that the newsboys in question want to overhaul society and impose some radical new socio-economic order on things; it’s that they want to pay 1/10th a penny less for the papers they’re hawking for a rich tycoon. In that respect their desires are altogether pedestrian and anodyne; this is not droits de l'homme so much as it is, in effect, a bunch of people who are righteously angry for a pretty decent reason. David Jacobs at one point claims that Joseph Pulitzer must respect the “rights” of the Newsies, but who has the right to 1/10th a penny less per paper? The issue is broader and more common than that: They have a demand, they have a reasonable expectation to it, and they go about getting it in clever and compelling ways. The struggle here is more more universal, and thus more captivating, than you might initially think.

Just the same, Newsies intersects with themes of power and authority in ways that kind of belie its rather simplistic subject matter; in the end a gang of what Pulitzer calls “illiterate guttersnipes” chastens and breaks one of the most powerful men in the country. They do this in part because they ultimately have the numbers to do so, but more so because they utilize a sheer act of will coupled with a street rat’s canny understanding of the stakes (“better to die than to crawl,” they intone at one point). Jack Kelly correctly deduces at one point that Pulitzer’s unwillingness to cave is a matter of ego, not economics: “If Joe gives into nobodies like us, that means we got the power,” he remarks. “He can't do that no matter what it costs.” Joe eventually does give in, of course, but actually it ultimately costs him very little: The guttersnipes go back to the streets, he goes back to sleep with his three satin pillows, and really nothing at all changes, they’re still bums and he’s still an absolute kingmaker and a titan of the nation. Most of the newsies cheering in the streets when Pulitzer backs down presumably go on to live out their lives precisely as they would have if none of it had ever happened—solitarily, poorly, nastily, brutishly, and quickly. So what was the point of it all, really?

Only this: You can do stuff. You can choose to do stuff. You do not merely have to accept what is given. You do not have to live your life meekly and cowed. You can, in fact, change things: Your world, certainly, and maybe even the world. This may sound like the stuff of corny self-help gurus and motivational speakers, but it’s actually an incredibly radical principle that most people either fail to recognize or reject out of hand altogether.

There’s no example more close at hand, of course, than the last two years of COVID-19 hysteria, in which maybe 99% of the world population simply acquiesced to pretty much everything they were told about their entire lives: What they could do, who they could see, where they could go, how they could breathe, when they could resume their normal lives. It didn’t take much, did it? Indeed, the broke, uneducated, powerless newsies were more protective of their own well-being and their own self-interests than we ultimately proved to be. They went to war with one of the most fearsome men of a fearsome age over “one lousy tenth of a cent.” Yet an army of impotent Harvard graduates shut down our economy and sent us to the brink of a recession and consigned our grandmothers to lonely deaths and kneecapped our children’s educations and drove millions upon millions of people into hypochondriac paranoia…and we pretty much did nothing.

We could take a lesson from Newsies, if we cared to; we could do worse than to take our cues from “street rats with no brains.” We missed our chance two years ago, but that doesn’t mean something else won’t arise, some other affront to your dignity, yet another encroachment upon things you hold precious and dear. It might be entirely personal or it might be broad and societal or it might be something in between. But your life is your own; you are not required to outsource your own decision-making to someone else. It’s rare to find that in most movies, rarer still in a 30-year-old movie from Walt Disney Studios, even more rarely from the 19th-century newsboys who inspired the film in the first place. You could do worse than to emulate them; and you can absolutely watch many worse movies than Newsies, and arguably few better.