The rival 'nightcrawlers' of Chicago TV violence are having a moment in the light

Covering overnight violence for Chicago’s TV news might seem far from glamorous, but a handful of recent articles inspired by the Jake Gyllenhaal movie “Nightcrawler” are trying to convince you otherwise.

And the most recent example — this sprawling 4,500 word account of freelance cameraman Pauley LaPointe’s life in Chicago magazine — adds to the spice by revealing an Anchorman-esque rivalry between two of the city’s top graveyard shift competitors.

Between them, LaPointe and his rival Ken Herzlich have been to thousands of murder scenes and covered some of the city’s biggest stories. But they simply don’t get along, Bryan Smith reports:

Pauley LaPointe | (facebook)

While Gyllenhaal’s character in “Nightcrawlers” takes competition to dangerous extremes — sabotaging a rival’s van and causing an accident — LaPointe and Herzlich seem content to trade insults.

But while Herzlich gets the better of one battle with LaPointe in the Chicago magazine article, he has been compared to Gyllenhaal’s character, too.

Ken Herzlich | (Thomas Yau/Facebook)

In this Moviepilot article, he describes how he’s been caught in the middle of gunfire, how the biggest threat to his safety might be the drunk drivers who fill the streets at 3 a.m., and the shocking images that stay with him long after he’d finished another graveyard shift:

And in a memorable line from a 2004 Chicago Tribune article by Rick Kogan, Herzlich, who has been chasing violence on Chicago’s streets for more than two decades, described a key skill of his job:

LaPointe, for his part, featured on Newshour this week (scroll to 3:30):