The Chicago Newsroom in Never Been Kissed (1999) is Incredibly Unprofessional

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Never Been Kissed was released just before the new millennium began. Which is fitting, I think, given that it relies heavily on attitudes and practices that we largely left in the 20th century. Things such as the ubiquity of newspapers or adults being openly attracted to underage people.¹ But this newsletter isn’t particularly suited to an investigation of the latter, so we’ll be sticking to the former.

I’ve always had a soft spot for journalism movies. I’m an English major. I worked for the student newspaper all four years of college (culminating with a year as editor-in-chief, a position that no one else applied for that year). And thanks to a valuable recommendation from a top editor, I began freelancing for The Birmingham News a couple weeks before my 20th birthday. Before I fell ass backwards into an advertising gig, I kinda thought I’d wind up in a newsroom. So journalism movies have always given me a brief glimpse into an alternate career timeline.

Unless it’s the newsroom in Never Been Kissed. Because those “journalists” are incredibly unprofessional.

The film follows a group of editors and reporters and other newspeople who work for the Chicago Sun-Times, which is a real newspaper that probably should’ve sued this production for an inaccurate representation of their services. On an individual level, most of the characters seem to be fairly true to their roles. Sure, Josie (played by Drew Barrymore) is the most pedantic copy editor you’ve ever met, but we’ve all known (and possibly worked with) people like that. And she’s flanked by colleagues—played by Molly Shannon, John C. Reilly, even a young Octavia Spencer—who seem to take their jobs seriously at first.²

And then there’s the editor-in-chief, James Rigfort, played by actor/director Garry Marshall.³ He’s pretty much the worst boss you can imagine: an incompetent doofus that also has the power to fire his staffers over silly and petty reasons (which he does). He also happens to be the catalyst of the plot here.

As Rigfort tells us, the inspiration for the paper’s big undercover features comes from his personal life. In this instance, he just learned of his youngest son’s peanut allergy when the boy started choking at dinner. Unfortunately, Rigfort’s discovery turned into an epiphany: He has no clue what young people are like. Never mind that this has always been true of every adult person throughout the annals of modern civilization.⁴ He’s convinced that there’s a story here, folks. A story called “My semester in high school.” Because how else will adults understand and connect with the younger generation?

Of course, this isn’t any ordinary story. It has to be an undercover exposé written by Josie (who is being randomly thrust into her first real assignment). She’s going to shake the foundations of society with this groundbreaking debut feature. Even for a film that doesn’t take itself very seriously, it’s a pretty wobbly narrative foundation.⁵

Thankfully, it only gets worse from there. Because Rigfort isn’t kidding. This is a story that’s going to take months to finish for some reason.

Let’s break it down, because my brain won’t allow me not to. According to Google, a copy editor at a major newspaper in 1999 made somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000. Even if Josie is on the lower end of that range because of her age and lack of experience, you’re looking at $10,000 or more for an incredibly vague feature story about the daily life of teenagers. And since Josie starts attending high school classes full time, she can’t do her regular job either. Did the Chicago Sun-Times hire another copy editor to fill that void? Or did they just make all the other editors’ lives worse by giving them Josie’s assignments?

But the egregious misallocation of funds doesn’t stop there. For some reason, the newspaper believes they need to assign a video surveillance person to monitor Josie while she’s undercover at the high school. We’re talking a months-long daily stakeout here. Woodward & Bernstein didn’t have these kinds of resources. To make matters worse, this man is broadcasting his surveillance feed to the newsroom where a dozen or so employees are watching it around the clock like it’s reality TV. It’s as if the entire newspaper operation is on hold so that a cub reporter can go back to school. Don’t these people have jobs? Don’t these people have lives?

We might as well be critical of Josie too. Because she’s a smart woman by all accounts, but she’s clearly in over her head with this assignment. There’s not a shred of objectivity left by the time prom rolls around. She has a crush on a teacher and a classmate. She wants to impress the popular girls and befriend the smart kids. The central charm of the film is that a high school loser gets to relive her would-be glory days, and while that makes her a winsome protagonist, it also makes her a terrible reporter.

And the worst part about all of this? It actually works.

Josie runs her story as the school year winds down and it’s a huge hit. Every human being in Chicago is reading the newspaper just for this. Her feature is so omnipresent that she’s able to call her own shot: She confesses her love for her teacher (Michael Vartan, who I’m told is very hot) and asks him to meet her on the baseball diamond before the school’s big playoff game so they can share a first kiss.

And the scene itself works pretty well too. The music swells and the onlookers cheer and it goes on for way longer than it would in real life, but it works. You could even call it a classic romcom moment. (If you ignore the part where this teacher had feelings for a student, of course. But that’s for another day and another newsletter.)

Never Been Kissed is now streaming on Disney+, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. I say “people” instead of “girls” because, although there are three men catching feelings for high school girls in this film, Drew Barrymore’s character also catches feelings for a male “classmate.” It’s really…something.

2. Do you ever think about how long Octavia Spencer put in her dues? She has maybe three lines in this film, which was released more than a decade before her breakthrough role in The Help. I’ll never forget her role as a murdered nurse in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.

3. I treat Garry Marshall as a faux punching bag every time I write a New Year’s Eve recap for this newsletter, but he’s done some good work. And he fits nicely into this stacked cast.

4. It is largely true of me and I’m not even 40. It’s probably true of you too, reader.

5. My editor John pointed out that this film is actually inspired by a real series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle. However, their undercover reporter was investigating “the adverse impact of California’s school funding cuts that resulted from the state’s Proposition 13 property tax reduction.” Which is…much more specific.