Start the Presses!

The presses were rolling again at the Herald-Examiner in recent days, but it was just background for director Bobby Roth, who’s shooting a bloody and climactic sequence for “Rainbow Drive,” an action-suspense yarn for ITC/Showtime. The film--inspired by the drug murders that involved the late porn star John Holmes--wraps this weekend, as star Peter Weller, playing a stubborn detective, tracks down the chief villains to the bowels of the venerable newspaper building that closed with the demise of the Her-Ex last year.

The climactic sequence, Roth says, began dramatically on the rooftop, ending with “a pretty exciting death scene in which one of the main characters is thrown into the (rolling) presses.”

The movie, based on a novel by Roderick Thorpe, was originally to conclude in a subway, with the Her-Ex used for squad-room scenes. But Roth says “the scope of the presses was so impressive” that the script was rewritten to accommodate them. A newspaper publisher now figures heavily in the plot.

The second floor Her-Ex editorial rooms remain a bit eery, says producer John Veitch.

“It looks like everyone left all of a sudden, as if all activity suddenly halted, with letters, books and what-have-you still scattered around.”