Ron Howard names his career’s most unappreciated movie: “It never got a foothold”
By 1994, Ron Howard was coasting on a run of big earners, the sort of films that had Hollywood execs sleeping easy at night. Howard had gone from child star to one of the industry’s most reliable safe bets, the bloke you handed a project to when you wanted steady hands at the wheel.
After hanging up his Richie Cunningham days, Howard had already hopped about genres with ease. He had a bit of fantasy (Willow), family laughs (Parenthood), sweaty thrillers (Backdraft), and even a western (Far and Away). So when he came knocking with a passion project in a field most had already written off as dead, you’d expect a few raised eyebrows. Instead, thanks to the goodwill he’d banked, the suits barely blinked before giving him the nod.
Howard had always been fascinated by the inner workings of daily newspapers, and in the early ‘90s, he was particularly intrigued by the tabloids, which had a reputation for muckraking and salacious storytelling. He felt this would be a good avenue to pursue in making his own newspaper movie, which could follow in the footsteps of greats like His Girl Friday and All the President’s Men. Luckily, a pair of screenwriting brothers, Stephen and David Keopp, were also thinking along the same lines, and none other than Steven Spielberg put them in touch with Howard.
At that time, Stephen was working as a senior editor at Time magazine, so he had the experience of working in a hectic, fast-paced newsroom environment. His brother David was already a successful screenwriter, having penned Death Becomes Her and Carlito’s Way, not to mention co-writing a little film you may have heard of named Jurassic Park.
Together, they created The Paper, a comedy-drama about 24 hours at the fictional New York Sun newspaper, as the staff uncover a police cover-up in the deaths of two businessmen, while simultaneously dealing with the everyday stresses of their jobs, editorial in-fighting, office romances, and fractured home lives.
To research the movie, Howard visited the New York Post and Daily News offices, soaking up as much of the coffee-stained, smoke-filled atmosphere as he could. “You’d hear stuff from columnists and reporters about some jerk they’d worked with,” Howard laughed, before revealing he also heard about a female reporter who threw hot coffee in a co-worker’s lap when she found out he was fooling around with someone else.”
Fascinatingly, most of the journalists Howard encountered claimed they didn’t feel embarrassed about working for a tabloid, and that ‘classier’ papers like The New York Times or The Washington Post held little appeal to them. “They kept saying they loved the environment, the style of journalism,” he marvelled, and that even stretched to the celebrity gossip tales many reporters would turn their noses up at.
“I could see they would gleefully glom onto a story that would be very humiliating for someone,” Howard revealed. “They didn’t care about that. If they believed their source, they would go with it happily.”
Thanks to the strength of the script, Howard was able to assemble a powerhouse cast for his film, including his Night Shift star Michael Keaton as metro editor Henry Hackett, Robert Duvall as his mentor and editor-in-chief Bernie White, and Glenn Close as Hackett’s fearless office nemesis Alicia Clark. Somehow, the movie pulled off a magic trick, being a fairly realistic insight into a newsroom, a genuinely funny comedy, and a sobering drama about the importance of journalism all at once. In an age in which print media and journalistic integrity were already under fire, Howard even managed to impress his toughest audience: real-life journalists, who were exceedingly positive about the film.
To Howard’s chagrin, though, the movie went largely unappreciated upon release, aside from in places that still had thriving major newspapers. In 2025, he grumbled to Vulture, “It never got a foothold outside of six or seven cities”, and added, “Small towns had lost their papers and so forth.”
It left him in a strange situation where his film played like gangbusters in cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco, but was a complete “disaster” everywhere else.
