HIT TIME

Joe’s, or Garland’s, second case for Chicago TV reporter Georgia Barnett (Details at Ten, 2000) begins with the discovery of an unidentified gunshot victim in Lake Michigan. Recognizing a pair of waterlogged custom-made shoes, Georgia uses her TV status like a shoehorn to make the cobbler identify the corpse as entrepreneur Fab Weaver. When she next bullies Weaver’s maid, Angelina Rossini, into giving her an interview, she notices gold records lining the walls. It seems that Weaver made his fortune on Chicago’s Record Row, a local music business that once rivaled Motown. Georgia’s twin sister Peaches, who runs a blues club in town, introduces Georgia to some R&B old-timers who have a lot to say about Weaver, none of it good. Weaver’s Big Time Records, they agree, viciously exploited its artists. And according to Weaver’s lawyer and partner, Horace Hightower, blues guitarist Jimmy Flamingo, an old Barnett family friend whose comeback Peaches is engineering, recently threatened Weaver’s life. In addition, the maid, the cobbler, and the lawyer all agree that Weaver’s son, Guy, an ex-drug addict, hated his father’s guts. Georgia pushes her way into a rehab clinic, a rental car agency, a gambling den, and an undercover showdown to uncover the villain on the five o'clock news.

Snappy dialogue and interesting R&B history aside, Joe, herself a TV newswriter, offers a devastating exposé of broadcast news. Georgia blithely interferes with police investigations, callously retails people’s private lives, and irresponsibly airs dangerous half-truths, all for the sake of film at eleven.