‘TROUBLE’ MAKER : Julia Roberts Fights to Get Her Name in the Papers

Julia Roberts may have spent much of her adult life fleeing from the intense scrutiny of the media but, nowadays, she is quite literally up to her aquiline neck in the frenetic and often cluttered trappings of the newspaper world.

In Touchstone’s summer release “I Love Trouble,” Roberts plays an aspiring reporter competing against a star newspaper columnist (played by Nick Nolte) for the ultimate front page story. Striving to create the proper journalistic atmosphere, producer Nancy Meyers and director Charles Shyer, a husband-and-wife team who also co-wrote the screenplay, have gone to great lengths to re-create an accurate yet decidedly opulent series of rival newspaper sets for the film, which wraps in mid-February.

“We wanted the sets to symbolize the great newspaper traditions in movies as well as in life,” explains Meyers. “Newspapers in old movies were such major sets. They were exciting places . . . the sort of place that you wanted to work when you grew up. It was terribly glamorous.”

Rather than use existing sets, or the long-vacant Los Angeles Herald Examiner building that has often been used in films about newspapers, the couple opted to build two lavish newsrooms and offices for the comedy. “The sets were important in helping to establish Nick and Julia’s characters,” Meyers adds.

In the film, Nolte works for Chicago’s leading newspaper, the Chicago Chronicle. Roberts’ character works for the underdog paper, the Chicago Globe. Reading from the script on the “I Love Trouble” set, Meyers narrates: “The Chronicle is a block-long and is a been-there-forever, don’t-mess-with-it kind of building. The Chronicle is the No. 1 newspaper in the Midwest and has the newsroom to prove it.”

To execute their grandiose vision, the couple hired Academy Award-winning production designer Dean Tavoularis. “The biggest challenge was in taking an enormous amount of space and turning it into something interesting visually,” Tavoularis says. “We needed to capture the power of the Chronicle, and contrast it with the Globe, which has seen better days.”

To achieve the sleek and sophisticated look for the interior of the Chronicle, Tavoularis, overseeing a production staff of 80, created a 36,000-square-foot newsroom with adjoining editor and staff offices, installing 200 desks, 120 working on-line computers and 15 tons of prop paperwork (research files, newspaper articles, photographs) to place on the desks. The sheer size of the Chronicle set allowed the director much more latitude when shooting than the smaller Globe set. “The Chronicle is a much larger space so we were able to use a lot of steady cam and do things with the shots,” Shyer explains. “Julia’s paper was more cramped and limited in space. It was a throwback to the old newspapers.”

Roberts’ work environment is decidedly more downscale, in keeping with her underdog role as a cub reporter for the struggling paper. “We wanted her paper to look like the newsroom in ‘His Girl Friday,’ ” Meyers says. The interior Globe set covers 9,100 square feet. The computers were from the ‘70s, to help achieve an antiquated look. “The two stars are only seen in their own respective newspapers,” Shyer adds. “They never enter the other’s domain.”

For the Chronicle, replicas of journalism awards, including the H. L. Mencken Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, were purchased to go in the offices of both Nolte and his editor.

Not far from Roberts’ desk at the fictional Globe is a small poster that screams its own tabloid headline: “IT’S ALL MY FAULT--I’M FROM THE MEDIA!” Perhaps the press-shy actress lent the design team a helping hand.