[for Friday, Oct. 19]
(Why do I suddenly feel like John Ritter really missed a career opportunity here?)
The movie people weren’t all up in the newsroom yesterday like they were Thursday. Which was a relief for my workplace ADD. Instead, they were all up in the editor’s office filming Angela Bassett-as-editor scenes. They moved our editor’s manly leather couch out and replaced it with a more “feminine” couch so as to be believable. (I dunno, they both look like regular ugly fucking couches to me.) And yet this is the newspaper that is going to bring down the White House.
I’ve been playing a pretentious fun little game, trying to count the typefaces on that front page. (This pic shows the bottom half of the page, where there are no less than four typefaces alone.) Including the nameplate type, we’ve got at least six. I suspect there may be as many as eight or ten. (Play along! Eurostile, Futura, Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc.!)
Sorry for the snark, but yeesh.
It’s truly odd how the attention to detail on the set is so rigorous — the fake cubes are just full of neat little knick-knacks (fake photographs, tape dispensers, mini cassette tapes [which KHall pointed out aren’t really used anymore in favor of digital recorders] deadline schedules, news clippings, post-its, leather-bound journals, meaty works of fiction, Washington Redskins crap, crumpled granola-bar wrappers) added by set designers — and yet the actual product the movie revolves around — the newspaper — is so … whatevs.
In other words, Hollywood, I WORK CHEAP. Resumé available upon request.
This movie sounds unbelievably lame. You would think Rod Lurie would know a thing or two about journalism, considering the fact that he was an entertainment journalist before he made the career jump to hard-boiled political thrillers.