In the grisly crime thriller Nightcrawler, now on Netflix, journalism is a blood sport

polygon.com:

A man with a camera lurks in the bushes outside a lush home in Granada Hills. A grisly triple-homicide has just been committed here. He waits for the perpetrators to escape before skulking in after them. Roaming through the house with his camera, he stops over a dying man, lying prone in a pool of his own blood as he faintly gasps for air. But this man is not here to help. He’s here to get footage, and make a quick buck off the carnage.

In Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s neo-noir thriller now on Netflix, that man is Louis “Lou” Bloom, the protagonist played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Bloom is an ambitious, fast-talking con man who rattles off faux-motivational talking points about entrepreneurial grit and anecdotal statistics like a robot whose approximate knowledge of human speech comes from a Tony Robbins self-help book. After witnessing a freelance camera crew filming the scene of a car crash, Lou is inspired to become a stringer himself, driving around late at night in Los Angeles to record violent crimes and accidents and sell the footage to local news stations.

After selling his first recording (a bloodied man being resuscitated) to Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the morning news director at a local television station, Lou hangs on her every word. He’s eager to learn and even more eager to please. Nina stresses she’s interested in crime, though not all crime. “We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs,” she says. “What that means is a victim, or victims, preferably well-off and white, injured at the hands of the poor or a minority.” But above all, what Nina wants — and what Lou needs to succeed — are incidents of graphic violence that will shock her station’s audiences, play on their fears,