-30- (film)

-30- is a 1959 film directed by Jack Webb and starring Webb and William Conrad as night managing editor and night city editor, respectively, of a fictional Los Angeles newspaper, loosely based on the real-life Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
The title is a reference to -30-, a notation used in journalism to indicate the end of a story or article.

Plot

Managing editor Sam Gatlin and his staff assemble the early edition of the Examiner, a morning newspaper in Los Angeles. During a particularly active news night, Gatlin and his wife Peggy disagree about adopting a child, as Peggy is infertile. Gatlin is hesitant to adopt because his young son from his first marriage had been killed several years before by a drunk driver.
Longtime reporter Lady Wilson's grandson pilots a military bomber from Honolulu to New York, intending to set a speed record. A child is lost and feared drowned in the L.A. sewers during a torrential rainstorm, and Gatlin composes a provocative headline for the news story. Copy boy Earl Collins considers quitting after failing to place a $1 bet for city editor Jim Bathgate about how many babies a pregnant Italian actress will birth. Bathgate would have won $50, so he demands an IOU from Collins but then tears it into pieces, smiling to himself on his way out of the newsroom.

Reception

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson wrote: "he picture sorely lacks the pounding, graphic drive of Mr. Webb's previous directional efforts. Even worse, about 80 per cent of the dialogue is a wearying exchange of stale wise-cracking—the kind of sophomoric newspaper lingo that went out with prohibition. It is Mr. Webb who outcracks everyone. And somehow, with all the crass yammering, a paper actually emerges, headlining a child's rescue from a sewer.... Mr. Webb has used for his title the traditional newsman's sign-off symbol. But his picture, crammed with so much smart-alec nonsense, is rarely as authentic."