(1994) "Stop the presses!" A story that begins inside the offices of the New York Sun, directed by Ron Howard, from David and Stephen Koepp's dramatic screenplay, with score by Randy Newman, concludes in the emergency room of a hospital with a baby and a bullet wound. Both the press room and the hospital's operating theater are depicted in realistic detail.

Managing editor Alicia Clark (Glenn Close) confronts senior editor Bernie White (Robert Duvall) with a request for additional funds, which he for budgetary reasons has to deny along with a threat to reveal her affair if she follows through on looking elsewhere for employment. The father of a daughter - "I don't know you enough to hate you" - who's not on speaking terms (not even letting him know of her wedding and birth of a child), Bernie, who's been through two wives, needs to begin radiation treatments for prostate cancer.

Metro editor Harvey Hatchett (Michael Keaton) has an appointment with The New York Sentinal's editor Paul Bladden (Spalding Gray) - "We cover the world" - for a job with regular and fewer hours and better pay, which his pregnant wife Marty (Marisa Tomei), a reporter on maternity leave, expects him to land.

As the editors argue over front-page coverage, elsewhere air-conditioning repairs, office-space allocations, love affairs, and furniture are also up for grabs. Sleeping on a couch in Harvey's office, columnist ("I don't read this newspaper") Dan "Mac" McDougal (Randy Quaid) is packing a pistol because Marion Sandusky (Jason Alexander), a city employee with the parking division, wants a piece of him for a front-page exposé of the city's parking problems.

Meanwhile, two innocent black teenagers in Williamsburg have been arrested as suspects in the murder of two Sedona, Arizona, savings-and-loan businessmen, with racial epithets scrawled across their car; city officials fear rioting.

Before a knock-down-drag-out fight with Harvey, Alicia tells him: "We only have to be right for a day." After Mac's car gets towed again and Alicia offers him a ride for a drink in a bar, he says: "We never knowingly got a story wrong until tonight."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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