The scene opens to a man with a cranky expression sitting at his desk with a pair of reading glasses on, typing on a typewriter in a cluttered 1930's-style home office with the two-fingered "hunt & peck method". He goes over the text with absent-minded concentration, chewing over the words, then looks up with a glare at the camera

"What the hell are you staring at?" he asks over his typewriter, without moving. . . . . waiting for an answer from the audience sitting in the theater that will never come

"Are you looking for a job? What, at the newspaper?" Well, that's not my department. Go talk to old 'Ham Owens, who has no more principle in him than a privy rat, if you ask me"

H.L. Mencken goes back to typing but then glowers up after a few seconds with a note of preposterousness lighting across his sour features

"I can't CONCENTRATE with your 'greenie' animal magnetism looking in my direction like that. What do you think, I'm made of stone? Baaahhh! 9/10th's of you never come back after I tell you what I'm about to tell you about the newspaper business, hence life. Wouldn't you believe that everything these days is full of soothing horseshit, trying to tell you how the world never was? Never forget the sternness, harshness, cruelty, and bitterness of things. . . . . instead of moonlighting like a flapper who thinks that Douglass Fairbanks may fall in love her with some star-struck chance encounter!"

Cut to shot of man in a gray suit and hat sitting in a chair with his hands over his face, as if flinching from "the brutal facts"

"What the hell is your problem? You want the straight dope, or don't you?"

The "greenie" is question now gestures with his arms in front of his face as if he's about to get run over with an 18-wheeler

"The truth that survives in letters is the one that is pleasanter to believe", Mencken chuckles irately. "Thank god there's film!"

Cut to shot of the movie "Bambi", happy woodland creatures skittering about in a Walt Disney frolic

"But I remember simpler days when men were men. You want to know how I became a newspaper man?"

Silence

"I said, do you want to know I became a newspaper man?"

More silence

"Nah, you deaf-mute", he snarls. "Next thing you know, you'll have a sign-language interpreter up here, making movements with their fingers like a monkey. . . . ."

Cut to shot of politically-correct presentation at the Smithsonian IMAX theater, a man in khakis before the audience announcing where the exits are in a loud, deliberate voice that anyone can understand as a woman gestures in sign language. This is the stuff of Evian bottled water & NPR & $5 Moccichono drinks at Starbucks, the whole of politically-correct "enlightenment"-- everything that H.L. Mencken would despise in modern America

"This is how I got started. . . . . through the triumph of the will!"

The scene changes to a pair of skinny legs trudging through the blizzard, the howl of existential emptiness, a young man no more than 18 stopping at the door of the Baltimore Herald. It is set up in the middle of a turn-of-the-century city, snow drifts piled on the streets fifteen feet high. He climbs the steps and finds himself talking to the night editor, a man with a wax handle-bar mustache studying over "copy" and scribbling with intentness. The young H.L. Mencken asks for a job with his Derby in his hand and the editor asks him the obvious questions, like if he has any newspaper experience-- chewing over a sandwich at his pathetic, unsure answers as a guileless youth with little or no hope who is being handled with "kid gloves". Finally he tells him that he has no openings available, but to come back again some other night because there was always that rare chance something might turn up.

"Keep your day job", he calls out as the young H.L. Mencken leaves.

A page is ripped off the calendar and arrives on Tuesday, January18tth, 1899

The young H.L. Mencken climbs the steps again (-- the feeling is of heavy laboriousness, a superhuman effort where most would turn away)

This time the night editor is chewing out an office boy and waves the young newspaper aspirant away

Another page is ripped out of the calendar

The young H.L. Mencken tramps up the steps once more (-- truly this is futile!)

The night editor shakes his head, busy with five things going on at once

More and more pages are torn out of the calendar, mixed with a shot of the young aspiring journalist once more climbing the steps, locked in his compulsive fixation on getting a job in newspapers. Finally the calendar stops on Thursday, February 23rd, 1899.

The night editor is focusing intently down on copy. Then he looks up and sees young H.L. Mencken standing there expectantly. "If you want to make yourself useful", he growls, "go out to Govanstown, and see if anything is happening there. We're supposed to have a Govanstown correspondent, but he hasn't been heard from for six days, out on a whiskey binge evidently"

The young H.L. Mencken goes out into the howling blizzard, all bundled up against the bone-chilling cold. What is captured is the futility, the hopelessness, of a heat-seeking missile sent out in a cold, indifferent world without a real target. He struggles through the streets, falls down. And finally makes it to the outlying town, a camera shot of the sleepy place over his shoulder blooming before him like a dimly-lit "news hole" where not much is happening

Back to the Herald newspaper office where it's late and the night is winding down. The editor is tiredly looking over copy, then he hears "tromping" up the stairs. The young H.L. Mencken stands before him, gasping and shivering, and announces a rumor of horse thievery

"Horse thievery?!", the editor exclaims. "That's almost worse than nothing, but what you'll learn in this business, boy, is that a paragraph is worth a hell of a lot more than blank space. Write it up, and guess at the salient details. You know, estimate. Use 'rules of thumb' like a man of the world"

The editor points him down to a desk, where the young H.L. Mencken starts writing it up, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them to keep them warm. (The sound of a scratching pen)

The scene changes to the classic motif of a spinning newspaper. It lands flat on the screen, then is flipped open several pages, one after another, where this tiny little article is presented: