I don't share Joe Lamantia's concerns with Bernard Shaw playing
himself as a newscaster in The Lost World.  Certainly, fiction films
have long used the device of showing newspaper headlines or articles,
radio news broadcasts or television news stories to communicate
narrative information (often it is a clumsy or hokey device).
The issue seems to be whether using an actual
reporter to play the role is somehow compromising or blurs the
entertainment/information line.  I think that line is very blurred,
but for other reasons (the ratings preoccupation of television news;
the skewing of tv news to emphasize items with visual impact, etc).
This sort of cameo seems harmless to me.
 
As for other examples of news figures portraying themselves, I know
there are many, but I can't recall specifics (I know that Entertainment
Tonight and its reporters often appear in films).
 Connie Chung played herself on an episode of Murphy Brown,
 which certainly provided interesting interpenetrations of fictional
 and real journalists.
 
On another note, I was surprised by how bad The Lost World was--not
even up to the highly commercial standards of Jurassic Park.  The
Lost World seems very poorly plotted (Goldblum's character's daughter
is entirely wasted, for example; Postlethwaite disappears for the
final sequence where he might have been useful (great white hunter
saves San Diego?); the mass of characters on the island provides an
excess of victims and a shortage of developed characters; the
cliffhanger scene is excruciatingly long).  What a mess!  And
from Spielberg who generally has extraordinary narrative gifts.
 
Chris Ames
Dept. of English
Agnes Scott College
141 East College Ave
Decatur, GA  30030
[log in to unmask]
 
----
Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite 
http://www.sa.ua.edu/screensite