Public Eye

When a newspaper guy goes to see a newspaper movie, from "The Front Page" to "All the President's Men" to this spring's "State of Play," it's as much about watching for the things the filmmakers get right and wrong about this business as it is about the flick.

Flick was pretty good, in some ways. Too condensed from the British mini-series that was its origin to make much sense. Acting uniformly fine -- stellar even -- which is easier when you've got Helen Mirren, a better-than-usual Ben Affleck, Russell Crowe (why'd he think he had to put on 40 pounds just to play a newsroom schlub? plenty of skinny schlubs around here), Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright Penn, Jeff Daniels and Jason Bateman up on the screen.

But here's what they get wrong about papers:

The Mirren character, editor of a fictional, apparently mid-sized D.C. daily, gets all out of sorts with her staff for reasons of revenue when she's worried that they'll miss a story one day and so not sell enough papers. It's a standard misapprehension about what makes money for newspapers -- which is advertising, not one day's circulation. Let's say you had an unbelievably catchy screaming headline and so sold 10,000 more papers on the street that day -- that's all of $5,000 in revenue. One time. Sell a single full-page ad and you've done better than that.

Late at night in the movie's newsroom, but not that late -- 10 p.m. -- there's no one around but a couple of reporters and the editor in chief. That's actually one of the busiest times in a newsroom. Who do the filmmakers think design, headline and copy-edit stories at that hour, as the paper is about to go to press? (Wait, don't answer that; certainly fewer folks than a couple of years ago in these laid-off times.) But as the Russell Crowe character is banging out the paper's hottest story in years, there's cub reporter McAdams and honcha MIrren over his shoulder -- and no one else around. When he's done -- after, absurdly, writing his own headline (sometimes reporters put "hed suggestions" at the top of stories but that's it) -- his colleagues ask him if he isn't going to press the "send" button. He lets one of them do it instead, but no one bothers to read the thing for typos or libel or anything else. The movie pretends that ya just hit "send" and the story puts itself on the page.

In "Play," anyone can just barge into the newsroom (or the Capitol and a congressman's office, for that matter) in the middle of the night and start rapping with the editor in her second-floor office. There's no lobby, no security, no nothing. Weird.

Otherwise, it's nice to know studios still think a paper makes good copy ... er, story. Not that it's doing so grandly at the box office. Friday night at the Paseo, the theater was pretty full, though ...