As I’ve been mentioning, there are new revelations in the Washington Post about Jackie and the origin of the Rolling Stone fraternity gang rape tale. A friend called to point out that young WaPo reporter T. Rees Shapiro did a superb job of getting the facts but his story is written in such a way that you have to assemble the pieces yourself to figure out what happened. It’s like a kit from Radio Shack that you need a soldering iron to assemble.

Commenter George Glass points out this Brady Bunch episode as sounding kind of like our current understanding of Jackie’s initial brainstorm. Here’s the same scene remade in the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEw7dN28nrU

And the Source Jackie-Reporter Sabrina dynamic reminds me of an early screwball comedy: 1937’s Nothing Sacred starring Frederic March as an ambitious reporter from the big city and Carole Lombard as a small town girl with a little secret. From Wikipedia:

New York newspaper reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) tries to pass off an ordinary African-American (Troy Brown) as an African nobleman hosting a charity event. Cook is demoted to writing obituaries. He begs his boss Oliver Stone (Walter Connolly) for another chance. Wally is sent to the (fictional) town of Warsaw, Vermont, to interview Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard), a woman supposedly dying of radium poisoning. Cook finally locates Hazel, who is crying because her doctor has told her that she is not dying.

IMDB explains this bit of the plot better than Wikipedia:

Hazel Flagg of Warsaw, Vermont receives the news that her terminal case of radium poisoning from a workplace incident was a complete misdiagnosis with mixed emotions. She is happy not to be dying, but she, who has never traveled the world, was going to use the money paid to her by her factory to go to New York in style.

Wikipedia continues:

Unaware of this, he invites her to New York as the guest of the Morning Star newspaper. The newspaper uses her story to increase its circulation. She receives a ticker tape parade and the key to the city, and becomes an inspiration to many. In addition, she and Wally fall in love. When it is finally discovered that Hazel is not really dying, city officials decide that it would be better to avoid embarrassment by having it seem that she committed suicide. Hazel and Wally get married and quietly set sail for the tropics.

I haven’t seen this movie but you can watch it online for free because it fell out of copyright. It sounds a little overstuffed with talent:

Nothing Sacred is a 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy film made by Selznick International Pictures and distributed by United Artists. It was directed by William A. Wellman and produced by David O. Selznick, from a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street. Other writers, including Ring Lardner Jr., Budd Schulberg, Dorothy Parker, Sidney Howard, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman and Robert Carson also made uncredited contributions to the screenplay.

That’s quite a lineup of screenwriters. It can be a good thing to have human waves of comedy writers work on a screenplay (e.g., Tootsie), but it can also denote trouble. Here’s the trailer, which doesn’t have much of the plot in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbV83kwJZ68