cycle repeats every day for a month. Foster and director Phillip Borsos spent time studying the way people worked in the Herald. Borsos said, “I wanted to know what goes on at 3 p.m., at 5 p.m. There's a wonderful flow of traffic at different times of the day. Gradually, the room fills up. Later, there's a ferocious attack at the computer terminals. A lot of newspaper movies have 10 people in the background, or 50, but there's always the same level of action. If the script said 3:10 p.m., and the first edition was an hour off the streets, I wanted to know what would be happening.” Coincidentally, when Borsos and his crew arrived at the Herald offices in April 1984, Christopher Bernard Wilder, a man suspected of kidnapping and killing several young women, shot himself in a confrontation with the police at a gas station in New Hampshire. Borsos remembers “it seemed as though there were about 500 reporters in the office, and everybody was going insane.” In order to prepare for the role, Kurt Russell followed around veteran Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan and photographer Tim Chapman. At first, he couldn’t figure out "how they justify what they do. But I found out that these are very caring people. They may be callous about how they do their jobs, but they're not callous about people. That allowed me, from a reporter's point of view, to have the truth of why Malcolm was able to press on when some people thought he shouldn't." Richard Masur prepared for his role as an editor by spending several days at the Herald’s city desk. In order to achieve accuracy for the scenes that take place in the busy newsroom, Borsos used Herald reporters as on-set consultants and extras. Katzenbach told Foster, “that if he made a film about newspapers it was extremely important not to cut corners when presenting the journalistic aspects.” To that end, the production shot in the actual Herald newsroom between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. as opposed to recreating it on a soundstage. None of the actual clutter and look of the place was changed for the film. Foster said, “I don't think we could have had the aroma, the feel we had at the Herald. It had a tone, that city room. I had no idea news reporters were that sloppy.” However, Borsos