The New York Times is asking, “Why?” Hollywood is asking, “Why not?”
As is usual with this kind of in-the-news scandal, you can bet that the Hollywood suits are collectively scratching their hair plugs as they stand on their office porches overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures and wonder what to make of Jayson Blair. Or, rather, how to make money on The Blair Switch Project.[Full disclosure: This bon mot was ripped off from a recentNewsweek column, thus saving me from having to think of an original play-on-words based on a very obvious movie title].
Clearly this is going to be another ka-ching, ka-ching.Before we ponder what is sure to happen to Blair’s story, let’s examine how Hollywood has treated journalism’s other fab fabricators.
Right now, big fat liar Stephen Glass has a work of fiction in stores called The Fabulist courtesy of Simon & Schuster, which is run by Jonathan Dolgen, Viacom's Hollywood executive in charge of Paramount. Glass actually had the chutzpah this week to send out an e-mail to pals plugging his year and a half of work. “I know it’s really crass to ask you to buy the book, but I would love it if you would.” [Lifted from a memo on the Poynter Institute’s Media News Web site, which I check an average of 70 times a day hoping to suss out job openings amid all the comings and goings of journalists I don’t know.]
In the book, the protagonist’s former editor says, “In all of my years of journalism I’ve never known someone as greedy as Stephen Glass. You watch, somehow he’ll turn his disgrace into a windfall.” [Plucked from Glass’ roman à clef byThe Philadelphia Inquirer, thus ensuring I didn’t have to actually buy and then consume his piece of crap.]
But it doesn’t stop there. Glass is soon to be the subject of a major motion picture from Paramount-based C/W Productions, which is Tom Cruise’s company, and Baumgarten Merims Productions, whose principal, Craig Baumgarten, knows a lot about personal scandal since, years ago, he was a fast-rising studio executive when word slipped out that he had appeared in a porn movie.
Baumgarten got the Glass project off the ground the usual way: by sitting on his blue-jeaned ass and reading Buzz Bissinger’s article in the September 1998 Vanity Fair. [This nugget unearthed from theYahoo! Movies Web site, which saves me from having to take Scientology courses before I dare talk to Cruise’s production office.] The project was originally intended for HBO, but Cruise’s company picked it up.
Shattered Glass will be platformed by distributor Lions Gate Films starting October 24 in Los Angeles and New York.
Only in Hollywood can Jewish nebbishes get played by WASP hotties: Star Wars hunk Hayden Christensen has been cast as Glass and dishy Chloë Sevigny as Glass’ New Republic colleague Hanna Rosin. Even so, Glass refused to cooperate with the film, which is based instead on published reports and interviews with the people involved. Charles Lane, then The New Republic editor who fired Glass for fabrications in what was ultimately 27 of 41 stories for the magazine, helped vet the script. [That’s from the Washington Post’s Howie Kurtz, thus ensuring that I didn’t have to take time out from my romance-novel proposal-writing to file an expense report for a D.C. phone call.]
Still, New York Daily News film critic Jack Mathews recently accused filmmakers of glossing over Glass’ lies as “harmless romanticism.”
In fact, Hollywood has never been too sure how to treat journalists, portraying them as either heroic or contemptible, either utterly decent and selfless or recklessly ambitious and backstabbing. But one movie project, a drama about disgraced Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who had to give back her 1981 Pulitzer Prize, was seeking to redefine the worlds of journalists as more ambiguous and morally complex. [Such highfalutin descriptions and deal details come word for word fromThe New York Times, thus making me look as if I’m a deep thinker about my profession, instead of a pop-culture addict who on weekend mornings watches90210 reruns.]
Hollywood studios fell all over themselves trying to buy the rights to the 12,000-word article about Cooke written by Mike Sager, a former boyfriend and Post colleague, for the June 1996 issue of GQ magazine. Cooke openly discussed her past in the article, which dealt with Cooke’s humiliation after the hoax, as well as her exile to Paris for a decade, and her later attempt to live on minimum wage in flyover country (sob, sob).
Eventually a deal was made by TriStar Pictures to buy the 30,000-word draft of Sager’s article for $750,000 and pay another $850,000 if the movie is made. Sager was to receive 45 percent of the sale, Cooke 55 percent as well as serve as a consultant. Cooke said the money from Hollywood would allow her to start writing magazine articles about U.S. social conditions — even though that’s exactly what got her in trouble in the first place.
