Hollywood loves the newsroom. Well, the romanticized version we’re familiar with, at least.
In movies like Morning Glory, the TV news station is an incubator of drama — a hothouse of barely organized chaos, where potential on-air disasters meet nick-of-time judgments that usually conclude with a collective exhale by everyone off-camera.
In this latest fairy tale, Rachel McAdams (Wedding Crashers) stars as Becky Fuller, a TV news producer who winds up a salary casualty at her New Jersey station. Determined to hold on to her dream, Becky eagerly takes a salary cut and accepts a producer job in New York City with a national morning program floundering in last place. Its newsroom really does look like the home of one sorry-ass team — door knobs routinely fall off, the walls are chintzy and covered in grime, and the staffers talk over one another during their meetings.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2010.