Seventy-five years after its release, Billy Wilder’s melodramatic satire on celebrity culture and faded stardom – starring Gloria Swanson as its grotesque heroine – retains its tragic grandeur, writes Xan Brooks

He is the prickly, hotheaded journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and torture at Abu Ghraib prison. Finishing Cover-Up, a film about his astonishing life and countless scoops, was never going to be easy

One morning last month, Seymour Hersh set off to buy a newspaper. The reporter walked for 30 minutes, covered six blocks of his neighbourhood, Georgetown in Washington DC, and didn’t see a single sign of life. No newsstands on street corners selling the glossies and the dailies. No self-service kiosk where you can slide in a dollar and pull out a paper. “Finally, I found a drugstore that had two copies of the New York Times in the back,” Hersh recalls. He bought one for himself. He can’t help but wonder whether anybody bought the second.

Hersh was born in Chicago in 1937, the year the Hindenburg airship blew up and the aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. That makes him a man of hot metal, the media’s ancient mariner, with metaphorical newsprint on his fingers and a cuttings file that reads like an index of American misadventure. Hersh has been a staff writer at the New York Times and the New Yorker. He’s broken stories on Vietnam, Watergate, Gaza and Ukraine. But the free press is in crisis, newspapers are in flux and investigative journalism may be facing a deadline of its own. “I don’t think I could do now what I did 30, 40, 50 years ago,” says the now 88-year-old. “The outlets aren’t there. The money’s not there. So I don’t know where we all are right now.”