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Palm Beach Post reporter Barbara Marshall

At least Rachel McAdams never had to go out to the parking lot, shake a drunk technician awake and get him to turn on the TV station’s transmitter.

That’s what I did regularly in my first TV job, broadcasting the morning news cut-ins at a tiny Fort Pierce TV station.

In Morning Glory, a new movie about a failing network morning news show, McAdams plays Becky Fuller, an incandescently perky executive producer determined to boost the ratings of a show anchored by a former beauty queen, played by Diane Keaton, and Harrison Ford’s cranky and pompous newsroom legend who refuses to do – or even say the word – fluffy.

Fuller tries to persuade her anchors to engage in increasingly crazy stunts which probably seemed comically harebrained to the film’s writers. But when Keaton sumo-wrestles in a fat suit and the weather guy does his forecast from a roller coaster, I shrugged.

That’s only slightly more preposterous than the stories any TV reporter can tell. I spent 12 years in television journalism, as both a reporter and anchor at stations in Cincinnati and Miami. In TV, wacky is a fallback position when all else fails, and sometimes, just because it’s fun and you have a really expensive camera to play with.

In TV news, someone will inevitably make you wear the equivalent of a sumo suit (or in my case, a Day-Glo -orange blazer that was one station’s trademark and which we wore every day) or persuade you to do something as absurd as fly a plane without lessons.

The latter actually happened when one producer in Miami decided I should reenact a story about a woman who landed a small plane after her pilot husband collapsed beside her. I had a pilot next to me giving instructions but who, taking his assignment a little too literally, refused to touch the controls, even when the terrified cameraman and soundman in the back seat begged him to save their lives. (He did grab the controls when the first landing bounce went a little high.)

Cincinnati Channel 9's Barbara Marshall, Tom Sinkovitz and Jon Esther in a 1982 Cincinnati Post photo.

For a story on port pilots, someone else decided it would be fun if I climbed a rope ladder on the side of an oil tanker, at the sea buoy at Port Everglades, 1 mile out in the ocean (wearing heels) on a windy day.

I crashed through crack houses with a SWAT team at seven months pregnant (OK, not wacky, just crazy), climbed a 6-foot-tall pile of pot for a stand-up and spent an afternoon trying to keep the Goodyear Blimp aloft over Broward County (the blimp pilot was on board).

For 12 years, I thought it was the most fun you could have and still call it work.

Sometimes, wacky was the ticket to a promotion. Katie Couric was briefly my co-worker at a Miami station, where the news director said she wasn’t anchor material. So she dressed like a bag lady and spent the night on the streets of Miami for a heart-tugging story that helped catapult her to NBC and eventually the Today show. (In the movie, McAdams has the plucky perkiness of about 10 Courics.)

But there are few Mike Pomeroys, the crusty old-school news legend played by Harrison Ford, left in TV newsrooms. Once, every station had a guy like Pomeroy and the networks had handfuls – mossy silverbacks with stentorian deliveries who had started in newspapers and radio, then went on to invent TV news. Morley Safer and Bob Schieffer are two of the last, and they actually appear as themselves in one of the movie’s scenes.

My Pomeroys were Al Schottelkotte in Cincinnati and Ralph Renick in Miami who became legends in the industry. Once, an intruder burst into the studio while Schottelkotte was on the air. He punched the man with one hand while covering his mic with the other, but never stopped reading.

Could Glenn Beck do that? Anderson Cooper certainly has the “guns,” but does he have the guts?

Like Pomeroy in Morning Glory, these guys didn’t do banter and sometimes had difficulty adjusting to changes in the newsroom, like the rise of feature stories and female reporters.

Once, coming out of a story about dolls, Schottelkotte tossed it to me with a ham-handed, “and now to our own living doll”

These days, infotainment is so ingrained in both TV newscasts and newspapers as well that when Fuller yells at Pomeroy in the movie, “we’ve been debating news vs. entertainment for years and your side lost!”, it’s old news.

More telling for me was when Pomeroy warns Fuller that the most absorbing job is no substitute for a personal life.

“Let me tell you how it turns out,” he growls. “You’re left with nothing.”

Which is why I eventually fell out of love with the business. The job spawned too many divorces and I’d overhead too many women begging their nannies to “just stay four more hours until my live shot at 11.”

But it was fun while it lasted.

~ barbara_marshall@pbpost.com