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Newspaperman, playwright, and screenwriter Ben Hecht confessed that, while working as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal, he’d fabricated a story about an earthquake ripping the Windy City, even going so far as to dig a fissure in Lincoln Park to corroborate his account. Alas . . . those days of rogue newspapering are gone forever. Now papers actually try to get the story right (or at least not tell preposterous lies), which makes them far less fun as subject matter for movies, as 1994’s The Paper plainly shows. Director Ron Howard, one of the few Hollywood big names actually interested in the real working world, tries manfully to resurrect the vanished, once-staple genre of the newspaper picture, but the script, by David and Stephen Koepp, packs in so many plots and subplots that Howard has to work harder than a one-armed juggler to keep them straight. As metro editor of a New York tabloid, Michael Keaton tries to get a big story right while also dealing with a job offer from a bigger paper, a pregnant wife who’s near hysterics (Marisa Tomei), an executive editor with prostate cancer (Robert Duvall), and a managing editor who’s a shrew (Glenn Close), not to mention his own perpetual shortage of change for the Coke machine. And that’s all in one day! The Paper just isn’t worth subscribing to.