I love seeing various 90s versions of New York on screen (Party Girl, The Daytrippers, City Hall, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Hal Hartley’s Amateur are among my favourites) as it is somewhat less documented and romanticised than the darker 70s and 80s iterations.
He’s also parrying the pleas of his heavily pregnant wife to take a job at the New York Sentinel (an obvious Times stand-in), where he has an interview later – monologist Spalding Gray hams it up as an editor at the august paper.
At some point in the mid-90s I remember hearing the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole on the radio: he had taken on a role as a theatre critic for the New York Daily News and was talking about US events and giving a flavour of life at the tabloid.
And probably few of his devoted fans count The Paper, the director’s 1994 comedy-drama about a day in the life of a New York tabloid, among their favourites.
In Howard’s hands it has a manic screwball energy, recalling classics of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as journalists at an embattled, loss-making tabloid chase down the truth of a story that they sense stinks.
